Missouri’s shift to phonics-based reading instruction worries some teachers

It is no secret that Missouri struggles to achieve proficiency in reading.

In 2024, 42% of Missouri’s fourth grade students scored below basic, meaning they did not meet the lowest performance standard of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, according to the Nation’s Report Card.

To combat the low scores, recent literacy mandates require evidence-based instruction and curricula. That means teachers are now being asked to use phonics-based education, aligning with the Missouri Read, Lead, Exceed initiative by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Policies shaping this initiative were set out in Senate Bill 681, passed in 2022, which expanded reading instruction requirements, and SB 68, passed in 2025. The legislation included education reforms such as using phonics-based instruction, focusing on the sounds of words, and it restricted the use of the “three-cueing” method, which is an instructional tool for literacy teaching that traditionally uses meaning, structure and a visual.

Around the 2010s, students in Missouri were taught to read primarily using balanced literacy strategies, focusing on five pillars of reading that are elements used in both teaching styles:

• Phonemic awareness: The oral sounds of the language
• Phonics: The sounds of words, matching the letters in the alphabet to the sounds it makes
• Fluency: Phrasing of language, ensuring that a child is not just focused on sounds
• Vocabulary: Increasing the understanding and the number of words used in a language
• Comprehension: Overall understanding, focusing on both written and spoken
• Critics say the new guidance focuses too heavily on phonics and limits the ways teachers can teach.

Professional development cutback

Trudy Puckett is a veteran reading teacher in the Willard Public School District.

For much of her 25-year career, she has taught students through a balanced reading-based curriculum.

Puckett was so successful as a Reading Recovery teacher that she began training other teachers in college courses.

But that work is about to stop.

While a proposal in the legislature that would’ve banned the three-cueing method did not pass before the session ended in May, some school districts such as Puckett’s had already made changes.

Reading Recovery is a program specifically for first graders, with teachers meeting with four students one-on-one for 12 to 20 weeks to target their specific needs. Puckett worked one-on-one with two students for 12 to 20 weeks, in addition to providing professional development for the Reading Recovery teachers she oversees.

As a Reading Recovery leader, Puckett also trains other teachers and provides professional development opportunities.

The other half of her day is spent as a Title I reading interventionist, a specialized educator who is funded by federal grants to provide specific literacy support to students falling below grade-level standards. Willard Public Schools is shifting Puckett to the Title I reading interventionist full time, stepping away from the Reading Recovery program preemptively.

She was required to have six professional development sessions throughout the school year with her trained Reading Recovery teachers. When she trained new teachers, they would meet once a week throughout the year, typically for three hours. But all of this is changing for the next school year, as she will no longer be a literacy coach.

“One of the good designs of Reading Recovery, specifically teacher leaders, is you are still practicing your craft,” Puckett said.

Losing balance

Puckett fears that focusing too much on phonics and ignoring other parts of reading education could harm students in terms of having fluency and loving to read.

“I hope that we can see that if we focus too much in one direction, and specifically phonics, what I am personally seeing is the outcome of kids sounding words out and being able to solve that word, but not necessarily having the fluency and the love of reading to go with it,” she said.

In her experience, Puckett has seen a switch flip in the way reading education is addressed. When she first started teaching, educators were moving toward a balanced literacy approach, focusing on learning the word as a whole.

“The pendulum currently has swung the other direction to more of a science of reading approach,” Puckett said.

Angie Zapata, language and literacy teacher educator and researcher, specializes in language and literacy education and has also seen similar patterns.

“We have a long history of those pendulum swings in initiatives for reading in particular,” Zapata said.

Currently, there is a focus on how to support readers and teachers, but there is also a conflation surrounding reading and literacy, Zapata said. Literacy surrounds the broader language arts, including reading, writing, speaking and listening, but is often only seen as reading.

Zapata discussed the biggest differences between the two extremes, one side hoping to immerse readers in text so they read naturally, and the other being very focused on skills.

She has seen the extreme swings get operationalized in schools through curriculum and now in policy. However, she is excited seeing people become more involved in conversations surrounding education.

“Right now, it’s an exciting time in reading,” Zapata said. “What an opportunity in reading education, what an opportunity to once again revisit the long history of research, of what we know works in classrooms, with teachers, with students, and then also put that in conversation with the new and emerging research.”

Samantha Hayes, director of professional policy and practice for the Missouri National Education Association, said while she likes the overall concept of the direction the state is going in teaching literacy, she worries that the way the proposed legislation was structured would be too limiting.

Hayes is concerned about limiting teachers, especially as the three-cueing method was targeted in the past legislative session. She said she is concerned that policymakers will be micromanaging educators in the classroom. In SB 68, three-cueing cannot be used as the first strategy.

“You can’t use it as your first go-to because we know that if we only base literacy instruction on that strategy alone, it’s not something that leads to better literacy outcomes in the long run,” Hayes said.

The science of reading

As part of a plan that began in 2022, the Missouri Read, Lead, Exceed initiative is the state’s comprehensive plan to dedicate $25 million in state funding and approximately $35 million in federal relief funding to support student literacy.

Over 15,000 preschool through fifth grade teachers were able to receive training in Lexia’s Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS, as well as LETRS for Early Childhood Educators, according to the DESE website. The courses of study aim to give teachers and administrators the skills needed to support language and literacy in students using concepts similar to the research from the Science of Reading.

Troy Fredde is a reading specialist from the northern Kansas City area and took LETRS training around the time the state first offered scholarships for it. When he first took it, it was not required, but his district requires it now, he said.

The first year of LETRS focuses on phonemic awareness and phonics, with year two focusing on the comprehension side of things. He applied a lot of what he was writing about for the assignments with his students right away, Fredde said. He would cover what students should do with their tongue placement and how their lips should feel and move as they say sounds in isolation. On the comprehension side, Fredde said there were strategies they talked about to help kids remember what they were reading, primarily summarizing.

He emphasized the importance of having a reading curriculum on top of LETRS training, using what teachers and administrators have learned from the research that LETRS presents and using it to assist with decisions. Fredde’s biggest concern, however, is the overemphasis of phonics.

Phonics and phonemic awareness are huge parts of literacy education, but they are not the only things that are important, he said.

“With LETRS training, I think there sometimes gets to be a conflict between a district-required curriculum and that oftentimes can take decision-making out of the teacher’s hands.

“LETRS is about teaching teachers how we learn to read and what the brain research says, so we can make the best decisions for the kids,” Fredde said. “So I think when we go through LETRS training, we have to be allowed to bend and stretch the curriculum that the district is asking us to use so we can give the kids the support they need.”

Hayes also expressed concerns regarding limiting teachers on what they can do in the classroom.

“What I don’t love is that if we only do this, then we’re taking away a lot of tools from educators to be the best literacy instructors that they can be for every student that comes to them,” she said.

For Fredde, the most challenging part of the training was the morphology of the language and the nuances in how words came about in the English language, especially in terms of speech.

“In today’s classrooms, that gets lost a lot — learning parts of speech and all that,” he said.

What is really great about LETRS, Fredde said, is that it is not a curriculum. It tells teachers what works best according to the research so that teachers are able to apply what they learn and see if they are going to work for the kids.

“There’s not one curriculum that is the best fit for all students,” Fredde said.

Puckett took some of the same training that Fredde did but had a very different reaction to it, she said.

In Puckett’s perfect world, literacy education is about teaching the love of reading to kids so they can love books. Phonics is still important to learn, Puckett said, but she thinks a balance is important, too.

“We expect everyone to have a balanced diet,” Puckett said. “We expect people to have a work-life balance. In so many other aspects, we expect balance, and yet it has become very taboo to say balanced literacy.”

This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online.