The state of Indiana is bucking a nationwide decline in literacy after spending heavily to train and support teachers in phonics-based reading curriculum. The state recently released results showing Indiana was sixth in the nation in reading scores in 2024. Such statistics seem to back the assessment that the reading models grounded in leftist philosophy used for decades may have overcomplicated learning to read for millions of children.
In 2022, 130 million adults in the United States — approximately half the adult population — read below a sixth-grade level. That means they can’t get through the Harry Potter series. Data from the National Literacy Institute revealed that 21 percent of adults in the United States are functionally illiterate, or are unable to read road signs and menus.
The Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) told The Federalist that “recent data show that Indiana’s strategic, intentional investments in literacy are working.” It attributed the success in part to requiring second grade students to participate in IREAD, an assessment of students’ foundational literacy skills and readiness to read by third grade, allowing teachers to identify and help students who cannot pass in second grade.
The IDOE also credited the Indiana Literacy cadre, a partnership between the state, the University of Indianapolis’s Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning (CELL) and Marian University’s Center for Vibrant Schools. It “provides early elementary teachers with embedded instructional coaching and support aligned with science of reading,” the IDOE said.
Indiana’s foundational literacy rates leaped nearly five percentage points from the 2023-2024 school year to the most recent 2024-2025 data after the state directed more than $170 million toward what’s called the “science of reading” in 2022 and 2023 — it’s largest financial investment in literacy to date according to the IDOE. Approximately half that total, up to $85 million, came from the private Lilly Endowment. The state legislature dedicated a total of $86 million to the effort in 2022 and 2023 after seeing the toll the state’s school lockdowns took on student abilities.
India Williams, a literacy cadre coach from one of the state’s largest school districts, boiled down the strategy to this: “we explicitly taught the research-based stuff, and cut the fluff.”
“Science of reading” describes a body of interdisciplinary research that indicates the most effective tactics for reading instruction. Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension form the basis of the strategy. Science of reading is not synonymous with phonics, but consistently incorporates significant phonics instruction.
Indiana banned the widely-criticized three-cueing model, in which students guess what a word is based on what surrounds it, such as the context of the sentence or a picture associated with the word, before decoding it using phonics. It teaches new readers to look for semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonic context clues to identify a word. One of the developers of the theory defined reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game.”
A survey from Education Week revealed that in 2019, 75% of K-2 and elementary special education teachers used three-cueing methods when teaching kids to read, and 65% of higher education professors taught the method for reading instruction. The IDOE told the Federalist that before the bill’s passage in 2023, three-cueing was commonly used in the state, especially within “balanced literacy,” that attempts to blend strategies like three-cueing with phonics curriculum.
The dispute over these fundamentally different tactics is at the heart of the long-fought “reading wars.” On one side, the whole-language model assumes that learning to read is as natural a process as learning to talk, and prompts children to see and memorize words in context. Phonics-based education argues that reading is a skill to be learned, and that initially breaking words down into their parts and sounds will allow children to read proficiently.
Several other states, including Arkansas, Florida, and Louisiana, have adopted three-cueing bans. Packaged with Indiana’s ban were requirement for some incoming teachers to receive training in science of reading methods to obtain their licenses.
Does Science of Reading Actually Work?
Lisa Wurtz taught elementary students in New York metro “posh private schools” using the guided reading method. This prompts children to use strategies such as looking at the first and last letter of a word, a picture associated with it, and context clues to deduce what word would make sense in the sentence, much like three-cueing.
This may look like it works early on, Wurtz said, but when students start reading more advanced material with no simple context clues or pictures, these methods leave students handicapped and unable to understand more complicated reading.
Wurtz’s children also started with guided reading and fell behind. They enrolled in a Thales Academy private school in North Carolina that employed science of reading strategies, and their reading proficiency shot up quickly. Thales uses Direct Instruction, an education strategy that places students based on their skill level and teaches through repetition, memorization, and mastery. Wurtz explained that science of reading goes hand-in-hand with the Direct Instruction model.
“I couldn’t deny the success … it really challenged my ideas about what it meant to teach children well,” Wurtz said. “And I basically started banging on the doors of the school saying, ‘I have to work here. I have to see how the sausage is made.'” Wurtz taught at Thales Academy from 2022-2023 before transitioning to a position at Thales College in the summer of 2023.
Thales Academy divides students into three reading proficiency levels per grade. Wurtz taught a group of 28 students in the lowest level using science of reading methods, all of whom passed at mastery level, 85 percent or higher.
Wurtz said Direct Instruction is an equalizer for the “disadvantages” that some blame for keeping children from success in school: “It crosses socioeconomic barriers. It crosses racial barriers. You give me just about any kid anywhere, and teach them using Direct Instruction, and they’re going to know how to read, and they’re going to read really well. It’s so beautiful.”
Wurtz dismissed the fears of those who believe students will lose confidence if they’re placed at the level that matches their actual ability. “What makes them confident is when they can read really well, and that’s only going to happen if they’re receiving exactly what it is that they need,” she said. Direct Instruction through science of reading allows students who start at a lower level to have the focused instruction they need to actually catch up, instead of spending all of their school years behind their peers.
Why Do Schools Keep Using Failing Methods?
Wurtz explained that a “progressive,” or “constructivist,” model of education assumes that there is an “inherent knowledge” already inside a child, and that the teacher’s goal is to draw that out of them. Direct Instruction assumes no such thing when teaching children to read. “The student doesn’t actually know anything yet, and it’s your job as the teacher to provide very specific information to them that they memorize, they synthesize, you repeat it, and you build to the next thing when they’re ready,” Wurtz said.
Many of the textbooks at her children’s school are 20 years old — they aren’t “updating” a formula that is serving students well. “It’s extremely threatening to industries that want to be the authority and who want you to come to them to learn how to do something that they’re making increasingly complex, when actually we’ve had the answer all the time,” Wurtz explained. “I don’t think that’s fair, because I think these kids need to learn how to read, and that’s all I care about.”
Connor Harris, writing for City Journal, says phonics-based learning is one of many sound teaching strategies that struggles to prevail against the leftist education model that dominates public education today. Ideas going back to Rousseau, like only introducing material based on the self-perceived readiness or desire of the student, still shape the way that mainstream education operates, Harris argued.
Professor of psychology at University of Virginia Daniel Willingham told The Federalist that it’s difficult to know precisely how many schools and educators are sticking to three-cueing. Still, he noted that it can be difficult for teachers to change the methods they were taught and learn something new.
It may also be hard for some teachers to recognize just how ineffective some methods are, because some children still learn to read even with subpar education. Willingham added that “researchers are not famous for changing their minds in the face of new evidence.”
Still, after a decades-long battle against leftist and poorly supported methods, science of reading seems to be making a comeback. As of 2024, approximately 40 states passed legislation promoting “evidenced-based” methods of teaching reading, though they vary greatly in their strategy, and not all states directly ban three-cueing. With many of these laws passed only in the last few years, and Covid-era education failures clouding the statistics, it remains to be seen whether such legislation will see success like Indiana’s in growing literacy in state’s across the nation.