A group of bipartisan Georgia lawmakers — led by a freshman state senator and former high school principal— introduced a bill to ban the three-cueing system, a method of teaching reading where students decipher words based on meaning, context, grammatical structure and visual cues.
This method, otherwise known as MSV, involves first asking students to decipher words based on their possible meaning in the context of the sentence and the grammatical structure and syntax of the sentence overall. Then, the students rely on graphophonic cues, or looking at the letters in the word and sounding them out.
Senate Bill 93 would prohibit public schools and local school systems from using “any model of teaching students to read based on meaning, structure and syntax, and visual cues” as “a basis for teaching word reading.”
State Sen. RaShaun Kemp, a Democrat who introduced the bill, said the three-cueing method provides a “crutch” for students by making them reliant on context clues, such as illustrations in books, rather than preparing them to read more difficult material in the future.
“Those students are being set up for failure if they’re having to rely on a method that is teaching them to guess based upon a picture or based upon the context,” he told WABE. “We need students to be able to apply this throughout the rest of their educational career.”
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During his time as a high school principal in Ohio, he said reading levels lagged due to the three-cueing method.
“We would get a lot of kids that would come in at the high school level that were still reading at elementary level,” he said. “I believe that that was due in part to the fact that when three-cueing just relies on students to guess or use context or to look at pictures, as you grow older, those pictures become less and less, and it gives you less of those context clues to try to figure out words.”
Ohio is now one of 11 states that have now banned the practice.
Kemp said a ban is necessary because the three-cueing method undermines “the science of reading,” or a multidisciplinary body of research on the best ways for children to learn reading.
Georgia lawmakers passed a bill in 2023 requiring schools to incorporate “structured literacy,” which stems from the science of reading and emphasizes systematic word-identification strategies. Kemp said his bill will “ensure that we have fidelity” to the push toward structured literacy and the science of reading.
“Ultimately it’s just making sure that all schools are aligned in terms of teaching the science of reading and not relying on a flawed method of preparing kids and teaching kids to read,” he said.
Kemp’s 10 co-sponsors of SB 93 include three Republicans and several members of the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate, including the minority leader, minority whip, minority caucus chair and minority caucus vice chair.
