Teachers Unions Challenge Reintroduction of Tried-and-True Phonics Method
25th March 2025
For decades, K-12 schools have wandered away from a time-tested, research-based method of teaching reading: Phonics. Student scores have plunged to historic lows, but some states are turning back to the practice of teaching letter sounds—if teacher unions do not spoil the efforts first.
Phonics instructs children to identify letters and their pronunciation to construct words, supplying the tools needed to tackle combinations of letters. “Cueing” and its related methods, such as “look-say” and “whole word,” show children a picture with a word beneath it (such as a picture of a dog with the letters “d-o-g” beneath). Students are supposed to connect the visual with the word below. American Public Media reporter and podcaster Emily Hanford has documented the widespread failure of cueing that has haunted schools and students nationwide for generations.
In addition to Hanford’s crucial work, research finds that part of cueing’s problem is that the teacher guides given to instructors to help teach cueing do not train teachers to regularly correct students when they misidentify a word. In fact, cueing allows for students to be “close enough” sometimes—say, using “wolf” for a picture of a dog, even if the letters do not spell wolf. This imprecision is not the only problem, but researchers have identified this tendency for years, which means the technique helps explain the low scores today.