by Steven Yoder, The Hechinger Report
March 29, 2026
In April 2024, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul made a bold promise: The state would revamp its approach to literacy and boost state reading scores by double digits. “We’re turning the page on how we teach students how to read,” she said in front of a first grade class in Albany. The state would raise the share of third graders reading proficiently from 45 percent to 60 percent or higher, she said.
She’d just signed budget legislation, branded “Back to Basics,” that was supposed to ensure that every school district adopts a strategy of teaching dubbed the “science of reading.” The approach reflects decades of research showing that, among other things, children learn best when they’re explicitly taught phonics: the relationship between letters and the sounds they make.
The law set aside $10 million to retrain 20,000 teachers on that evidence-based instruction and gave the money to the main state teachers union, New York State United Teachers, to use in developing the course. Last September, the union launched it.
But the course doesn’t reflect the latest research and in fact promotes a teaching strategy that’s been found ineffective and could actually impede students’ progress, literacy experts say. Those reviewers say the course contains far too much material from the now outdated reading method that Hochul said she wanted to see replaced.
That assessment comes as reading scores in New York are falling while those of a few states that have invested heavily in evidence-based literacy instruction are rising.
“There are just lots of inaccuracies and very old citations,” said Susan Neuman, a New York University professor who specializes in early literacy development, after viewing a sample of 18 slides from the course. “We’ve spent $10 million on this? Can I get a refund?”
That questionable teaching strategy, known as “balanced literacy,” is out of step with the science of reading. Balanced literacy presents phonics as just one strategy for identifying words; students are also taught to recognize words using clues like the context or grammar of a sentence, the word’s visual appearance and accompanying pictures. This approach is called “three-cueing,” which some researchers liken to guessing.
A review last year of 68 studies pitted the results of balanced literacy against a science of reading-based approach called “structured literacy.” The results provide “strong evidence that [structured literacy] programs are more effective than [balanced literacy] programs in improving a range of literacy skills,” the researchers concluded.
The governor’s plan promised to eliminate balanced literacy. “With this budget, we’re throwing out debunked reading instruction practices and getting back to basics, using phonics, reading comprehension and other effective techniques to set our kids up for success,” Hochul said in a press release.
Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.
A key part of the plan is the union’s course, intended to equip teachers with evidence-based methods. But literacy advocates who took it, and national and state literacy experts who reviewed parts of it, say the course may push the state backward because it promotes balanced literacy and sometimes distorts what the research shows about how children learn to read.
This criticism is landing at a time when more than one in five school districts in the state still use a balanced literacy or other non-evidence-based curriculum, according to new data. Meanwhile, the state remains behind most others in shifting to evidence-based instruction, according to groups that monitor state literacy policies.
A growing share of New York’s children struggle to read. In 2009, 29 percent of its fourth grade students scored at the lowest level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card — meaning they didn’t exhibit even partial mastery of grade-level reading skills. By 2019, the figure had grown to 34 percent and by 2024, 41 percent. Those results are ominous, research shows: Children who have trouble reading by third grade are unlikely to ever read proficiently and four times less likely to finish high school.
New York’s scores are going in the opposite direction of those in states like Mississippi and Louisiana that have adopted more measures that further the science of reading, according to a 2025 analysis of state reading policies by ExcelinEd, an education early literacy advocacy group. Those measures include ongoing science of reading training for teachers, district adoption of instructional materials based on reading research and more. The analysis concluded that New York had put in place just two of 18 policies it judges essential to a comprehensive early literacy strategy, tied for last with Maine and Illinois.
The teachers’ union training, offered since September 18, is supposed to help remedy that. One of the first people to take it was Lori Govenettio, a professional development specialist for the Syracuse-based Reading League, which promotes evidence-based reading instruction. She wanted to see if it could be a resource for teachers she works with.
But when she logged on to the first session in October, she was surprised that the course instructor didn’t seem to know much about the science of reading. The instructor read from a script. She hadn’t heard of a well-known controversy in literacy circles over the effectiveness of teaching children sounds without showing their corresponding letters. Later, the trainer displayed a slide on how to use a balanced literacy tool called a “running record” to assess how well children can read. But under Hochul’s Back to Basics plan, the state rejects that tool as inconsistent with the science of reading.
Small details were also off. The instructor shared a video, produced by a Taiwan-based company, designed to show students learning to read the correspondence between letters and sounds. In it, some sounds are pronounced incorrectly — for example, “m” is pronounced as “muh” when it should be “mmm.”
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On the opposite end of the state, literacy advocates were hearing similar feedback. Deborah Aiello, founding member of the Long Island Literacy Coalition, which promotes evidence-based reading instruction, said teachers reported that the union’s instructors seemed new to the science and promoted balanced literacy tools in the course.
National literacy experts with whom The Hechinger Report shared excerpts from the course also criticized its content.
One slide, citing the work of literacy researcher Isabel Beck and two colleagues, differentiates types of words. It defines “precision words” as those used more in written than spoken language — “cite” and “evaluate,” for example — noting that those don’t “usually require explicit instruction.” Beck said that slide renders her work backward: What it calls precision words do indeed require explicit instruction, one of three substantive errors on that slide alone, she said. “I don’t want my name on this,” she added.
Tim Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and former chair of two federal literacy panels, took issue with five slides. One notes that high-frequency words “can easily be decoded,” a statement that isn’t true, he said: Many of the highest-frequency words derive from the Anglo-Saxon spelling tradition and are irregular. “I think that would be a slide I’d say, ‘Get rid of that or rewrite it dramatically,’ ” he said.
Another slide portrays a “debate” between the “phonics approach” and the “whole language approach,” whose ideas were incorporated into the later balanced literacy framework. Both “aim to enhance students’ reading skills and comprehension through different methods,” the slide notes. But the scientific literature “really contradicts” the whole language approach, said Mark Seidenberg, a professor emeritus and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It has been abandoned in many parts of the country.”
The New York State Department of Education refused to answer questions about these criticisms, who reviewed the course, the qualifications of instructors or the course content suggesting that balanced literacy is compatible with the science of reading. Instead, the department referred all questions to New York State United Teachers and the governor. The union didn’t respond to repeated inquiries.
In addition to those questions, The Hechinger Report asked Gov. Hochul whether she had considered using an existing high-quality science-of-reading training — such as an introductory course for New York City teachers showcased to a National Governors Association delegation in 2025 — rather than allocate money for a new course.
Emma Wallner, a Hochul spokesperson, replied by email that the state education department and the union continue to refine the training and that the governor’s office “remains engaged in supporting the rollout of the Science of Reading” to ensure that the governor’s plan “is successfully implemented in classrooms statewide.”
Literacy activists said the course’s content reflects the persistence of balanced literacy across the state.
The governor’s 2024 plan requires districts to submit a form each year attesting that they use curricula and instructional practices aligned with the science of reading. But state law gives local districts control over curricula and instructional methods. So the final determination about whether their teaching methods are aligned is made by individual districts, not the state, according to a state guidance document.
Many districts that say they’re aligned are actually blending balanced literacy and the science of reading, said Jeff Smink of EdTrust-New York, a nonprofit that launched a 2024 campaign to address the state’s “literacy crisis.” As of last December, 147 districts — about 21 percent of the total — were still using non-evidence-based or balanced literacy curricula, according to a response to a freedom of information request the organization filed with the state department of education.
Related: Many students can’t read, even in high school. Is the solution teaching reading in every class?
There’s little research on the effects of combining approaches, but researchers doubt it can work. Shanahan said balanced literacy programs often suffer from problems that can’t be remedied by grafting in phonics, so it’s “hard to imagine that it would be a sufficient response.” Neuman, the early literacy professor, was more critical: “When you take two systems that are so diametrically opposed, what you’re doing is adding to children’s cognitive load in a very dramatic manner,” she said.
One family says a balanced literacy curriculum blocked their children’s efforts to read. The Indian River Central School District sits outside the town of Philadelphia in north-central New York. Anne, who asked to use her middle name because the family fears retaliation, lives there with her husband and their second- and third grade children.
The parents read to their children every night, but both have struggled since kindergarten. When Anne and her husband looked at their second grader’s oral reading quizzes, the student appeared to have guessed at words instead of sounding them out — for example, reading the word “the” as “a,” “a” as “my” and “the” as “my.” Tests the child had passed included pictures to give students clues to words. But when Anne later printed the text and covered up the pictures, the child couldn’t read it.
Frustrated and worried, last May the couple hired outside tutors who use a structured-literacy approach grounded in the science of reading, and since then both children have made more progress than in the prior three years, said Anne. In late January she saw her older child read a new book for the first time on his own. “He was so excited,” she said. “It was like a lightbulb moment.”
Still, tutoring costs $330 a week. They’re burning through their savings and aren’t sure they can continue, Anne said.
Tanya Roy, a literacy coach in the Indian River district, responded that all students from kindergarten to third grade have been getting at least 20 to 30 minutes of daily phonics instruction since 2016.
But the district also uses the cueing system, including having students identify words by using accompanying pictures, she said. Words that are irregular — like “the” — have to be memorized because they can’t be sounded out, said Roy. That contradicts two science of reading tenets: that even irregular words can be sounded out by memorizing only the part of the word that’s irregular, and that whole-word memorization interferes with students’ ability to learn letter-sound connections.
State data show how many of the district’s students struggle to read: 56 percent of its fourth graders score below proficient in English, compared with 46 percent statewide.
Frustrated with districts’ resistance to abandoning balanced literacy, two Democrats in the state legislature introduced bills last year that would require the state education department to compile a list of evidence-based reading curricula, as several other states have done, and give districts grants to buy them. All teachers would have to complete 35 to 50 hours of training on using an approved curriculum to teach reading, and both bills would ban cueing.
But those measures are stuck in committee, and an unnamed state education department spokesperson expressed opposition last October. “A one-size-fits-all mandate is not the answer,” that person told the New York Post.
Assembly bill sponsor Robert Carroll said parents and education administrators should have a say in how their schools are run. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make sure that schools and teachers are providing the best practices and best instruction,” he told The Hechinger Report.
At the federal level, a bill moving through Congress would redefine allowable literacy instruction, effectively barring the use of approaches like three-cueing in programs that receive federal funds to support how reading is taught.
Until about three years ago, New York was doing “absolutely nothing” on the science of reading, said EdTrust’s Smink. It’s since made progress, ”but a lot more work needs to be done to catch up with the rest of the country.”
Contact editor Meredith Kolodner at 212-870-1063 or kolodner@hechingerreport.orgor on Signal at merkolodner.04.
This story about phonics and the science of readingwas produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our weekly newsletter on K-12 education.
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