The U.S. Congress has gotten into the reading business before. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a lot of federal legislation aimed at improving American literacy, including the Reading Excellence Act, elements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and Striving Readers. Despite rising reading achievement during those years, the enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 largely left instructional decisionmaking up to state and local educators.
Now, Congress is taking on reading again. It is exploring legislation aimed at “strengthen[ing] literacy outcomes for all students, and [ensuring] Federal accountability and investment in research, teacher preparation, and evidence-based instruction aligned with the science of reading.”
As a longtime reading researcher whose work influenced the earlier era of bills (and onetime director of reading for the Chicago public schools), that sounds great to me. The federal government should play a role in making sure we have the literacy levels needed for our democracy, a healthy economy, and the nation’s security.
But that doesn’t mean I want Congress blundering around our classrooms, tipping over desks and spilling the inkwells. No good in that.
Which brings me to the Science of Reading Act of 2026 (H.R. 7890) that has just been passed by the House of Representatives. The bill now goes to the Senate, where similar proposed legislation, the READ Act (S. 4689), passed out of committee in July. Much of what the proposals want to do is fine.
Unfortunately, some parts of the House’s Science of Reading Act are ignorant or badly misinformed about evidence-based teaching and the science of reading. This bill gets to a level of detail that is dangerous ground for Congress—it could end up prohibiting what legislators hope to promote.
That’s why when Congress funds a bridge or supports a medical initiative, it legislates in broad strokes, avoiding detailed prescriptions for engineers or physicians. That keeps bridges from collapsing and patients from the wrong treatments.
Here, if the House’s bill is approved as written, we’ll have members of Congress telling us which reading skills to teach and which to avoid, no matter the children before us. I don’t know if our representatives will be available when students fail to respond to the lessons they envision, but we’re sure to need help because of their intrusive specificity. Many legislators have pledged to respect “local control” in education. Now, “local” seems to mean within the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.
Some may belittle my criticism as a vestige of the so-called reading wars, picturing me as defending “balanced literacy” practices. Nothing could be further from the truth. My pro-phonics credentials are strong—as a teacher, school district administrator, professor, and research synthesizer for the federal government.
The problem with the House bill is it gives with one hand (championing evidence-based teaching) and takes away with the other (it might be seen to ban essential teaching that fits those “science of reading” criteria to a T).
Certainly, a major advance in reading science over the past couple decades is the growing body of research showing the value of morphology instruction. Morphology refers to the structure of words. Studies show that teaching students about word structure—prefixes, suffixes, combining forms, syllabication, grammatical shifts—enhances word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension. This evidence has led to significant adjustments in scientific theories of word recognition.
Turning good intentions into sound legislative language is challenging.
The House bill bans three-cueing instruction, an approach that I’m no fan of. Nevertheless, it’s a complicated issue. Defining three-cueing in the way this legislation does—using the word “structure” without specification of sentence—and then banning it could seem to put Congress on record as opposing word-structure instruction.
The bill’s language is so sloppy it even appears to ban phonics. It prohibits teaching kids to use visual cues to figure out words. Legislators may not know, but teachers do: In a three-cueing program, “visual cues” refer to a word’s letters (as well as the patterns the letters make). I have almost 60 years of experience in education, but I can’t figure out how kids are supposed to decode words without relying on the letters.
Three-cueing describes what young children do when first trying to read. They try to figure out words any way they can. They use letters and sounds as much as they know them, but they also make guesses based on pictures and context. As they gain proficiency, their guessing declines in favor of relying more on letters and sounds, spelling patterns, and pronunciations.
The mistake that some educators made was to teach three-cueing. It makes no sense to teach these reading workarounds that students come by on their own—guessing at words rather than really reading them. It is better to focus instruction on how to read or decode the words.
I suspect the House of Representatives believes that’s what it is promoting.
But then, there are nuances and subtleties that their legislative language upends.
Word recognition is a two-step process. Readers must do more than just decode combinations of letters. Once they’ve taken a stab at decoding a word, they must evaluate the outcome and decide whether to try again—not guessing but considering alternative pronunciation possibilities. English spelling is complex, and there are often multiple options for reading a word.
If that evaluation step wasn’t necessary, Congress would be on stronger ground. Keeping three-cueing out of the first step is a good idea, prohibiting it from the second is a disaster. Deciding whether decoding has worked requires readers to use meaning and syntax: “Is that a word? Is that the word? Does it make sense?”
The bill says, in effect, “We don’t want kids learning to use meaning as part of the word-recognition process.” Not a good idea.
The measure makes another big mistake. It prohibits having kids memorize words “as the primary basis for word recognition.” Again, it makes sense to support explicit decoding instruction, but banning memorization goes far beyond scientific knowledge or practical experience.
I see the attraction this has for lawmakers. They see something wrong—teaching three-cueing makes little sense—and they want to use their power to redress the problem. But turning good intentions into sound legislative language is challenging. Here the level of technical specificity in these bills would render the law counterproductive and perhaps even damaging to children’s literacy learning.
I hope Congress goes forward with its support for reading. But it would be better if they ditched these attempts at dictating the specifics of classroom instruction. It’s beyond their expertise and is fraught with unintentionally damaging implications.
