A group of Republican lawmakers began circulating a bill today that would address literacy in Wisconsin.
“This is really a great day for Wisconsin, because our job as legislators is about the next generation. And the next generation is about education. And sad to say, over the past few decades we have been failing in teaching reading to our kids,” Say bill co-author Duey Stroebel, a Republican from Saukville.
The proposed bill would emphasize phonics, which teaches children the sounds that letters make, and how to put those together as words.
That’s in contrast to the whole language method, where educators teach children to recognize words by themselves, without breaking them down into individual letters.
A third method called balanced literacy uses a mix of both approaches. That method too has come under fire for not having outcomes superior to the other approaches.
The new bill would bar public elementary schools from using the “Three Cues” approach, which is a common way to teach whole-language reading. In three cues, children are encouraged to use context, grammar, and letters to decipher a word they are having trouble reading. The method, say critics, produces lower literacy when compared to a phonics approach.
The bill would also add a staff of 64 new literacy coaches that would circulate across state schools to help with teacher training. The bill sets aside 50 million dollars to pay for the staff. A previous bill introduced in 2021 did not include such a provision, and Governor Evers vetoed that bill. Representative Joel Kitchens, a Republican from Sturgeon Bay, says he is anticipating that this time will be different:
“This is really an exciting day. Its been sorta too long in coming, and we’ve put months of effort into this, getting everybody on board, and getting everybody to a comfortable place with it. So I believe this bill will have significant bipartisan support in the end,” Said Kitchens.
Already the bill has received pushback from the Department of Public Instruction. Currently, the proposed bill contains a provision that would prohibit schools from allowing a third-grader to graduate to fourth grade if they do not meet the required reading standards.
State Superintendent Dr. Jill Underly said in a statement today that despite working with legislators for months on the bill, she can’t support it as it currently stands. She characterized the bill as a “nonstarter” because of its third-grade retention policy, saying it would be “harmful to learners, families, and communities.”
As science emerges over how young people learn to read, some schools have returned to phonics as their primary approach. That includes the Madison metropolitan school district, who just introduced a new reading curriculum this year that moved from the balanced literacy approach more firmly into the phonics camp.
Image courtesy of Pedro Jesus on Flickr