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Reason and Romanticism

October 8, 2025
in Local Stories
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by Joe Miller

Aleysha Ortiz recently completed her freshman year at the University of Connecticut at Hartford. She graduated with honors from her Hartford high school and received a scholarship to attend university. Earlier this year, Ortiz sued the Hartford Board of Education for negligence.

Ortiz attended Hartford schools for 12 years and graduated (with honors!) despite being unable to read. 

Ortiz reports that she used assistive technology that translates text to speech (and vice versa) in order to complete her assignments and write her essays. Her grades on those assignments were good enough to earn her admission to college, and since UConn-Hartford does not require SAT scores for admission, the university was unaware of Ortiz’s illiteracy. 

Obviously, Ortiz is not a typical case. Most high school graduates are at least somewhat literate.

But, as I discussed last week, student literacy scores have been getting worse for about a decade—a trend that was worsened by school closures during the Covid pandemic. Nationwide, literacy rates among both 4th and 8th graders declined by around 5 percentage points between 2019 and 2023, with the largest declines occurring in states with longer closures. 

That said, Covid is unlikely to be the full story. Student scores began to decline four years before the pandemic. 

Perhaps a bigger culprit is that many schools no longer assign books.

A 2022 position statement from the National Council of Teachers of English says that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Instead, the organization encourages the use of “images and multimedia” in the expression of ideas.

We’ve swapped memes for “Macbeth,” Powerpoint for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

I’m aware this sounds a little “Old Man Yells at Clouds.” I swear I’m not Luddite, though. I earn my living helping researchers and policymakers build large, public-facing websites. I published a book in hypertext – using formatting that is not possible in print – and one of its central arguments is that hypertext opens up an entirely new and great way of thinking.

That said, the websites I work on house 50,000-word reports. And exploring ideas via hypertext requires the ability to follow arguments across multiple items.

You don’t get the skills you need to engage with complex ideas by learning how to make reels or upload podcasts. You get them from reading books.

Unfortunately, abandoning books is not the first misstep in teaching kids to read.

For years, education schools – the institutions that train new teachers – pushed a reading methodology known as three-cueing. The idea is that readers encountering an unfamiliar word should first ask themselves what word makes sense in context. Next, they should ask whether the grammar works. Only at the end should readers look at the letters and attempt to sound out the word.

Three cueing relegates phonics to a last resort whose main function is confirming the other cues. Many implementations of three cueing systems dropped phonics instruction entirely.

The three cueing approach assumes that humans approach words as ideograms – as complete entities rather than as collections of letters.

That hypothesis sounded plausible in the 1960s. But we’ve since developed new technologies (e.g., eye tracking and brain scans) that show pretty conclusively that good readers process words one letter at a time.

That’s how phonics teaches kids to read. 

But it’s not how most kids were being taught. As recently as 2019, 72% of American teachers reported using a form of three cueing in teaching reading.

Today, phonics is on the rise again. Forty-four states plus Washington, DC have now passed laws mandating science-based reading curricula, most of which include early phonics instruction.

States have taken up the mantle of education reform just as the federal government has stepped back. In 2001, the second Bush administration championed a suite of reforms that became the controversial No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

NCLB established federal standards for student success in math and reading, mandated standardized testing to measure student performance and established accountability provisions for schools whose students consistently failed to reach proficiency.

In 2015, Congress replaced NCLB with the Every Child Succeeds Act, which allowed states to set their own metrics for student success and removed most of the provisions for holding failing schools accountable.

Interestingly, 2015 was the high-water mark for reading scores.

Opponents of NCLB will (rightly) point out that correlation is not causation. After all, reading scores were already improving before NCLB passed. By the same token, it’s tricky to blame cue-based instruction for declining reading scores given that the methodology has been widespread since the 1980s, and reading scores continued to improve for most of that time. 

But clearly something happened to students around 2015. Odds are you have that something in your pocket right now.

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