On March 7, the Oakland Literacy Coalition held their fifth annual Literacy Justice for All Conference, bringing together literacy advocates from across the US. The conference celebrated Oakland’s leadership in the face of detrimental reading curricula, while also acknowledging that there are still many issues left to be addressed.
Starting in the 1980s, a new way of teaching kids how to read called the three-cueing method was popularized in several English-speaking countries. The reading curriculum was based on the idea that kids did not need to learn how to sound words out. Instead, they could guess unknown words based on the context. People who supported the strategy thought that reading was natural for children—like learning a language.
However, starting in the late 1980s, scientific advancements made it possible for researchers to see that learning how to read required rewiring the human brain, meaning that students needed explicit instruction on how letters relate to sounds. Researchers proved that the three-cueing method was not teaching most kids how to read; it was only giving students ways to cover up the fact that they could not.
“People are quick to blame low reading stamina on Covid and phones and screens, and it’s not to say none of that’s true, but I’m realizing how hard they are working,” said Sol House English and Ethnic Studies teacher Ms. Vaughn. “Students who are using this method must be exhausted, and they don’t know why! They’re working so much harder than I’m working when I read.”
But at that point, three-cueing was already so vastly popular that the new reading research could not stop it from continuing to expand. The method was taken for granted in most school districts, including OUSD.
In 2016, some OUSD teachers started what one of them, Sandra Prades-Bertran, called an “in-house revolution.” Their goal was to eradicate the three-cueing curriculum in place of more phonics-based lessons. OUSD selected 16 pilot schools to test a new program that used both Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words (SIPPS) to teach reading and tutors to lead small group support for struggling readers.
“There were a few educators who were like: this is not helping our kids; this is just bringing the gap between our students even farther; we know better, we can do better,” Prades-Bertran explained.
When the pandemic hit, the SIPPS curriculum had reached every elementary school in the district. Former Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Tramell started the Strong Readers Initiative, which aimed to reach an ultimate goal of literacy for all OUSD students by prioritizing one standardized curriculum, sharing reading data with parents, strengthening professional development training, and creating clear leadership structures.
“A lot of our change was actually fueled by advocacy and philanthropy,” remembered OUSD principal and admin Romy Trigg-Smith, who helped lead the effort. “It was just this convergence of all these things in 2020.”
Today, all OUSD schools have a Literacy Teacher on Special Assignment (Mr. Fraters at Oakland Tech), small group SIPPS tutoring for struggling readers, and i-Ready literacy testing. Despite these efforts, many high school students continue to struggle with literacy.
“Even if you think kids didn’t take it seriously, [43% of students at two or three grades below is] too high to say they just didn’t take it seriously,” he said. “I don’t think [i-Ready reflects] the perfect truth, but I think there is some truth here.”
These concerning results have been happening for a while and have been accompanied by patterns such as students accidentally replacing words when reading aloud, giving up when encountering unknown words, and having low reading stamina. Most of the teachers and staff at Oakland Tech did not realize that three-cueing was a large cause of the problem. In fact, it was only a couple months ago when Mr. Fraters encountered a podcast, Sold a Story by Emily Hanford, that Tech teachers learned about the harmful curriculum. It helped teachers understand that some students struggle in English classes simply because of an inability to understand new words.
“Until I learned specifically about the cueing method, I was not really taking note of the [reading] patterns at this level, and not really being able to figure out what was behind it,” Ms. Vaughn noted. “So now I’m really seeing it even more, and it’s helpful to know that.”
Helping students who have already been taught with the three-cueing method, especially those who are already in high school, is a puzzle that literacy experts are still struggling with. A big part of the problem is simply logistics.
“The older kids get, the less time they have in their school day for something like teaching them fundamental skills,” Hanford said. “Where in the school day? What are you going to take kids out of? Are they going to miss something else?”
Most high school teachers do not receive training on how to teach students to read. Even if they did have that knowledge, it is difficult to gauge which students need help and in which areas.
“Many people, as they get to middle and high school, have so many things that help them look like they can read, or they’ve figured out strategies in order to get by,” pointed out Emily Grunt, a literacy expert at the company Collaboration Classroom. “It happens more than we think.”
Teachers and literacy coordinators are not letting that stop them. Ms. Vaughn and Ms. Lopez are starting a study with UC Berkeley professors to test strategies to help struggling students. Meanwhile, Mr. Fraters and Mr. Price are hoping to include more content on increasing student literacy in PD trainings next year.
Everyone involved in the issue of literacy seemed to agree on one thing: reading is important not just for the individual’s professional success, but also to boost their ability to support justice in the US and in the world.
“We want to empower,” Trigg-Smith said. “I think if we are invested as local global citizens, if we are invested in our world, we need folks who can engage in that critical thinking, and we need folks to be able to read something and be able to question it.”