Spelling Out A Failure

Have you noticed the K-12 student in your life isn't being taught to spell?

That might not be an accident on the part of your school board.

They may, in fact, be paying $3,300 per teacher per day to teach your child's teacher that letters are only one "cue" to read a word and students shouldn't be taught to obsess over them.

Spelling, of course, is one of those ways of "obsessively focusing" on letters.

This faulty method is called "three-cueing".

In Alberta, one of the most popular peddlers of "three-cueing" (and they are most certainly peddling for profit) is Fountas & Pinnell.

Many teachers in Alberta are still trained in this Fountas & Pinnell literacy intervention, despite it having been shown to be worse for kids than no intervention at all!

Perversely, setting kids up for no intervention at all is exactly what the next Fountas and Pinnell product does.

Starting in 2015, successive studies have found that said product - the company’s Benchmark Assessment System - is worse than flipping a coin at identifying struggling readers.

Our survey of education plans for this school year shows almost half of Alberta school boards are still paying Fountas & Pinnell $16,000 to use their Benchmark Assessment System.

That purchase puts them in a pipeline for future sales pitches for much more expensive teacher professional development and libraries.

These purchases were already difficult to justify when the provincial language arts curriculum ditched the "three-cueing" approach of Fountas & Pinnell.

Now, starting to phase in this school year, the Province is requiring better reading assessments, especially for the youngest students.

This means school boards that continue to purchase the Benchmark Assessment System are even more straightforwardly spending your money on an ideology of reading instruction that science has shown hurts kids.

We're just over a year away from school trustee elections, so now is the time to let sitting trustees know we won't settle for their excuses.

Alberta children are being taught an approach to reading that masks their reading struggles for a time, but inevitably betrays them as words and sentences get longer and the pictures go away in the texts they are expected to read.

"Three-cueing" is especially harmful to the students already most at risk to struggle with reading, while abandoning it hurts no one.

If you think it's past time to ditch this failed experiment and Help Alberta Kids Read, please sign our petition today:

Happy to Spell Things Out,

Jeff and the Alberta Parents' Union Team

P.S. Members of the Alberta Parents' Union (which anyone can become here) not only sustain our work to fight for Alberta kids, our executive director is also happy to provide you with a consultation to determine if "three-cueing" is still being used by your school authority and how to stop it.