Colleges and Universities Fall Short of Teaching New "Science of Reading" Approach Coming to State School Districts

Wednesday, September 27th, 2023 -- 8:04 AM

(By Corrinne Hess, Wisconsin Public Radio) By next year, Wisconsin schools will have to change the way they’re teaching children to learn to read.  

According to Corrinne Hess with Wisconsin Public Radio, a sweeping bipartisan bill signed into law this summer will shift schools from what has been known as "balanced literacy" to the "science of reading" approach.

But data shows that most teacher education programs at colleges and universities are still not fully teaching the science of reading. Instead of learning how to read through pictures, word cues and memorization, children will be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on sounding out letters and phrases, with the hope of addressing the state’s lagging reading scores.

Wisconsin’s new reading law doesn’t explicitly tell the universities how to teach. But it will prohibit the Department of Public Instruction from approving teacher education programs unless they include science-based early literacy instruction and do not incorporate three-cueing, a model that emphasizes that skilled reading should include using meaning and sentence structure cues to read new words.

Wisconsin teachers who do not receive this training will not be eligible for a license beginning July 1, 2026. "I do believe that the universities have been one of the major causes of the problems we see in reading," said State Rep. Joel Kitchens, R- Sturgeon Bay, one of the lead authors on the reading legislation. "They now seem to be moving in the right direction, but change is hard."

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