A Missouri Senate committee is considering legislation designed to improve literacy among elementary school students. Senate Bill 1442 includes a new reading assessment that all kids in 1st through 3rd grades would have to take three times a year to measure their reading skills.
Corey Codell with the Show-Me Institute testified in favor of the bill this week.
“It is not a kindness to promote someone in early grades who can’t read. It seems like it’s our human nature to want to be kind and help them along, but that doesn’t help them,” Codell said. “The data clearly show, kind of consistent with your experience, that when we push these kids on and they can’t read, they just fall further and further behind.”
Opponents to the bill took issue with some of its provisions, including one that would scrap a reading learning method known as “three-cueing,” which involves learning to pronounce words by making guesses based on pictures and visual cues. Dava Leigh Brush is with the group Missouri Equity Education Partnership. She supports three-cueing and testified against the bill.
“It’s hard to teach kids to read. It’s almost like magic,” she said. “What we would like to see is that the three-cueing system not be completely prohibited. It’s a tool that teachers use, and all kids are different, and they learn differently.”
The Senate Education Committee has not yet voted on the bill. It’s sponsored by Sen. Brad Hudson, R-Cape Fair.
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