Is Your Child Being Taught to Read With Phonics? A Parent's Checklist

Quick quiz. Your six-year-old is stuck on a word in a picture book. The teacher's prompt is, "Look at the picture and think about what would make sense." The word is horse. The picture shows a pony. Your child says "pony," gets praised for good thinking, and moves on. Congratulations: she has just been taught to read the way a detective solves a crime, by looking at everything except the evidence.

I say that with a smile, because the folks who designed this approach were sincere. But reading is a code, and the evidence is the letters. Here is how you find out, in one afternoon and without a degree in education, whether your child's school teaches that code directly.

This is a playbook, so the steps are plain and numbered. I keep the sermon to the opening and the close.

First, what you are looking for

Two terms will do most of the work.

• Systematic phonics teaches the relationships between letters (and letter groups) and sounds in a planned order, from simple to complex, with practice at each step. Children learn to sound out and blend words, and then to read them.
• Three-cueing (also called MSV, for meaning, structure and visual cues) is the older habit of prompting a child who is stuck to use context, sentence structure and the first letter, rather than the whole word, to guess. The prompts sound like: "What would make sense?" "Look at the picture." "What word would fit here?" The letters become the third thing a child checks rather than the first.

For the history of how these approaches fought, and who has been winning the argument lately, see The Reading Wars, How Whole Language Lost a Generation and Phonics Won Back. For the research summary that anchors the case for phonics, look up the report of the National Reading Panel, a group Congress called for in the late 1990s that reported in 2000. Its findings are commonly summarized, including in the federal Put Reading First guide, as five areas of effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Systematic phonics instruction was one of them.

That is enough theory. Now to work.

The ten steps

Take them in order. Each one builds on the last.

Step 1: Find out the name of the core reading program

Every school has a main reading program, sometimes called a core or basal program, along with any supplements. Ask the teacher or the principal, in an email: "What is the name and publisher of the core reading program used in my child's grade, and is there a separate phonics component?" Write down the exact name and edition.

Why this first? Because everything else depends on it. You cannot evaluate "the way they teach reading." You can evaluate a named product, and the publisher's own materials will tell you what it does. If the answer is vague, or if the school says that teachers choose their own materials, that is information too.

Step 2: Read what the program's publisher says about its method

With the program's name, go to the publisher's website. Look for the scope and sequence, a chart showing which letter-sound patterns are taught, in what order, in which grade. A systematic program shows a clear, cumulative sequence: single letters and sounds first, then short vowels, blends, digraphs, long-vowel patterns, and so on, with the next skill built on the last.

Warning signs are the absence of such a chart, or a program that organizes instruction mainly around themes and "strategies" rather than letter-sound patterns. A program built around themes is not necessarily wrong, but it should still contain a distinct phonics component, taught on a schedule, with practice.

Step 3: Look for three-cueing prompts

Ask to see the prompts that teachers are trained to use with students who are stuck. Look at the teacher's guide or the classroom prompt cards, or the bookmarks that some schools hand out. If the prompts tell a child to guess from the picture, to skip the word and come back, or to ask what makes sense before looking at the letters, you are looking at three-cueing.

A good prompt, by contrast, sends the child to the letters: "Look at the word. Say each sound. Blend them." That is the difference. One approach treats the print as the problem to be got around; the other treats it as the thing to be read.

You can listen for this at home, too. When your child reads aloud to you and stumbles, notice what the teacher has taught her to do. Does she look at the first letter and guess? Does she look at the picture? Does she start sounding out? Your ears will tell you more than a brochure.

Step 4: Ask about universal screening

Many states require that schools screen young children for reading difficulties early, typically in kindergarten through third grade, with a short, standardized assessment given to every child several times a year. A good screener checks things like knowledge of letter sounds and the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words.

Ask the principal these three questions in writing:

1. Which screening assessment is given in my child's grade, and how many times a year?
2. At what point are results reported to parents?
3. What happens when a child scores below the benchmark, and how soon?

"Universal" matters. A screener given to every child finds the quiet ones, the children who are struggling but not causing trouble. A referral system finds the children whose parents ask. If your state has a law on this, your school should be able to cite it.

Step 5: Ask what your state's law says about dyslexia screening

Many states have passed laws about screening and support for students at risk of dyslexia, and the details differ widely: which grades are screened, which tool is used, what intervention follows, and who pays. I cannot summarize all fifty, and the laws change. Find yours at your state legislature's website by searching for "dyslexia" or "early literacy" in the education code, or ask the school district's curriculum office to cite the statute and the board policy that implement it.

Two cautions. First, a screener is not a diagnosis; it flags risk, and a diagnosis is a matter for qualified professionals. Second, I am not giving you advice about your own child's learning needs. If you have a concern about your own child, the person to ask is a qualified evaluator, and the school's special-education office can explain the evaluation process and your rights.

Step 6: Request your child's own screener results

You have a legal right, under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, to inspect and review your child's education records, which include assessment results. The regulations give a school up to 45 days to respond to a request to inspect, though most schools should respond far sooner. Put the request in writing and name what you want: "all reading screening and benchmark results for my child, with the benchmark or cut score for each, and any intervention plan." How to Request Records From Your School District and Actually Get Them walks through the process.

Why the benchmark? A score without a cut score is a number without a meaning. You want to know whether your child is above or below the line, and by how much.

Step 7: Compare with what you see on the page

Take the numbers you have received and the observations from Step 3, and put them side by side. Is your child's screener score consistent with what you hear at the kitchen table? A child who can recite a memorized book but cannot read a new simple word, such as mat, jump or stamp, may be relying on memory and picture clues. Gently try a few new, simple words on a card, or ask the teacher what the child can do with unfamiliar words.

You are not testing your child, and you should never make a young reader feel judged. You are gathering information the way you would before any other important decision.

Step 8: Use decodable books at home

If your child needs practice, buy or borrow decodable books: short books written so that almost every word uses the letter-sound patterns the child has already learned, so the child can read them by sounding out rather than guessing. Many are inexpensive, and many publishers sell sets in order of difficulty. Pair them with a few minutes a day of looking at the letters in each word and saying the sounds.

Keep it short and warm, five to ten minutes. Read to your child, too, from books far above her reading level, for vocabulary and for love of stories. Both matter. Decoding teaches her to read the words; being read to teaches her why it is worth it.

Step 9: Raise it, in order, with the right people

If you have found a gap, escalate in a sequence that gives everyone a chance to fix it.

1. The teacher. Start here, in a friendly tone, with your questions in hand. Most teachers want children to succeed, and many were trained in methods they did not choose. Ask what the teacher recommends and what support is available.
2. The principal. If the teacher cannot answer, or says it is the school's program, send your questions and the records you have gathered.
3. The district curriculum office. The person in charge of literacy for the district chooses or approves the core program. Ask what the district's reading plan is and when the program was last reviewed.
4. The school board. The board adopts the curriculum and the budget. Speak during public comment, for the three minutes you are given. Keep it specific: name the program, cite the state's screening law, and ask for a review of the program's phonics component. Who Actually Runs Your School District, Board, Superintendent or State explains who has authority over what.

Step 10: Keep the receipts and know your options

Keep a folder with your emails, the records you have received, and the program name. If the school's answers are unsatisfying, you have choices: supplemental tutoring in systematic phonics, a different school within the district, or, depending on your state, a charter school, an open-enrollment transfer or a choice scholarship. A family that decides to teach reading at home has plenty of programs to choose from, and Your First Year of Homeschooling, a Practical Playbook for Parents is a place to start. These are family decisions, and I am not telling you which one fits your child.

If you want to see the larger picture of how well American students read, What the Nation's Report Card Measures and What Proficient Really Means explains the national assessment and its labels.

What good looks like in a classroom

Before you decide anything, it helps to know what a strong early reading lesson sounds like, so you can recognize it if you are ever invited in, or if your child describes it at dinner.

In a good kindergarten or first-grade phonics lesson, the teacher introduces one new letter-sound pattern, say the sound for sh, and has the children say it, hear it in words, and write it. Then they read a few words containing it, then a short sentence made entirely of words they can decode, with a handful of common "heart words" that break the rules taught in advance. The lesson is brisk. Every child responds, often aloud and together. The teacher listens for errors and corrects them on the spot by pointing back to the letters. Nobody is told to guess. At the end, the children have read something real, and they know they can.

Notice how different that is from a lesson in which the class reads a story, the teacher asks what the pictures suggest, and the child who stumbles is rescued by a neighbor. Neither classroom is full of villains. One simply teaches the code, and the other hopes it will be picked up along the way. Some children do pick it up, which is the reason the second approach survived so long; the ones who do not are the ones who matter.

Teachers deserve a fair word here. Many were taught to teach reading with methods their own training programs promoted, and they work hard within what they were given. If you find a problem, assume a gap in training and materials before you assume bad faith. That is both kinder and more likely to be true, and it makes the principal far more willing to listen.

A short checklist to print

• I know the name and publisher of the core reading program.
• I have seen its scope and sequence and confirmed a distinct, ordered phonics component.
• I have looked for three-cueing prompts in teacher materials and classroom practice.
• I know which screener my child takes and when.
• I have my child's results and the benchmark.
• I know what my state's law says about early reading and dyslexia screening.
• I have a decodable book and ten minutes a day.
• I have spoken to the teacher, and if needed, to the principal and the board.

Why this is a conservative cause

It may seem odd to find a reading checklist on a conservative site. It is not. A child who cannot read cannot read the Constitution, a contract, a Bible or a ballot measure. Literacy is the first freedom, the one on which the rest depend. Parents who insist that a school teach children to decode are doing what citizens in a self-governing republic are supposed to do: checking the work of the institutions they fund. The Northwest Ordinance said that schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. It did not say that parents may not ask what is being taught.

The case in brief

1. Reading is a code, and children should be taught the code directly through systematic phonics, not prompted to guess from pictures and context.
2. An afternoon of work tells you what program your school uses, whether its phonics sequence is explicit, and whether teachers use three-cueing prompts.
3. Universal screening and your own child's records show where she stands, and federal law gives you the right to see them.
4. Decodable books at home, a few minutes a day, support what the school does or fills the gap.
5. Escalate in order, teacher, principal, district, board, and keep a paper trail.

What you can do: send the principal one email this week asking for the name of the core reading program and the screening tool, and the dates they are given.