Here’s one thing to know. Anyone depending on Three-Cueing is guaranteed to be semi-literate at best. That’s because the so-called system adds further confusion to an already confused pedagogy.
Here’s the big picture. The Three-Cueing System, used throughout K–12, is quackery as vast as Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi. Our Education Establishment has one talent: the concocting of irresponsible gimmicks pretending to be serious pedagogy.
First introduced in 1967, the Three-Cueing System has been used in the majority of American public schools. Students weren’t learning to read because they were not allowed to learn phonics. So the Three-Cueing System was presented to the public as the savior of American literacy, as if two rapacious wrongs could make a right.
The tide is now turning, but the big question will remain for years: Why was this grotesque phony accepted in the first place?
In the Three-Cueing System, students are given a list of clues — that is, tricks that would facilitate reading. For example, they are told to consider context, initial letters, words that look similar, rhyming words, and any other little hint that might contribute to guessing a word correctly. Everything turns out to be a clue that you must study carefully, never mind how long it takes.
The flaw is that three-cueing turns reading into a detective story. In other words, every sentence balloons into mysteries that have to be solved. Without phonics, students must memorize lots of sight-words, but many children top out below 500. What should baffled students do if they don’t recognize a word? It could easily take a minute, or much more, to figure out.
Look at ordinary sixth- or eighth-graders reading any age-appropriate text. Calculate how many words are read in a minute. Probably 100 to 200 words. Divide by 60, and you know how many words are read in a second. Real reading, phonetic reading, is surprisingly fast. For most people, that might be 2, 3 or 4 words in each second! Point is, if you even glance at anything else, you will be reading so slowly that you’re almost standing still.
This goofy little fraud was concocted by Professor Ken Goodman. It has been in schools for almost 60 years. It’s still praised, promoted, and protected.
If a word is not recognized, children are told to guess, skip ahead, go back, guess some more, look for more contextual clues, guess some more...in other words, let your eyes roam around the page, hoping to get lucky. That is not reading.
Goodman is the fellow who invented “the notion that reading is a psycho-linguistic guessing game.” Instead of talking about reading as the continuous unfolding activity that it is, he’s got us stumbling our way through clues, cues, guesses, and games.
Judging from circumstantial evidence, Goodman was a charlatan, a communist, a misleader of nations. But he probably made millions writing books that pleased the Education Establishment.
I often say that all of K–12 is like a magic trick. Everyone is dazzled. Then you learn the dirty little secret and you think, So that’s all there is to it? In this case, the secret is making sure you never look at the things you need to look at (individual letters with their sounds). Instead, you are kept busy looking at all the things you don’t need to look at (in this case, the clues).
Yes, that’s all there is to it. Pickpockets use this trick all day. They squeeze one arm and then take your watch from the other arm.
Recall that in 1955, Rudolf Flesch explained why we have so many millions of children who can’t read. Instead of learning phonics, they’re made to memorize sight-words. Seven years later, the Education Establishment doubled down on fake solutions. Henceforth, children would rely on sight-words plus three magical cues. Reading scores continued to decline.
K–12 is a house of cheap tricks from top to bottom. Sight-words and the Three-Cueing System are merely typical cons directed at the country’s essential skill, which is reading. The more you learn about K–12, the more you’ll think, Okay, that’s enough. Let’s put adults back in charge.
See Saving K-12 on Archive.org (a free resource everyone should check out). In particular, read Chapter 2: Reading Wars, my 16-page summation of the whole century-long mess.
Weirdly enough, PBS interviewed a professor from Harvard’s ed school, and he said our problems are caused by COVID slow-downs, not enough test-based accountability since the No Child Left Behind Act expired in 2015, the rise in social media use, absenteeism, and losses concentrated among the lower-achieving students. I’m betting he knows better.
Bruce Deitrick Price is the author of Saving K–12 and The Education Enigma. His new novel is The Boy Who Saves the World (suspense, crime, A.I., intrigue, romance). See Lit4u.com for more info on Price’s books.
Image via Pxhere.