The battle over how to teach reading has landed in court.

The battle over how to teach reading has landed in court. With momentum shifting in favor of research-backed strategies, known as the “science of reading,” states and some school districts have been ditching once popular programs, amid concerns that they aren’t effective. A legal fight in Ohio centers on a state ban of material that uses a common technique called three-cueing. It involves encouraging students to draw on meaning, sentence structure and visual clues to identify words, asking questions like: “What is going to happen next?,” “What is the first letter of the word?” or “What clues do the pictures offer?” The technique is a key part of the Reading Recovery program used in more than 2,400 U.S. elementary schools. The Reading Recovery Council of North America filed a lawsuit earlier this month, saying lawmakers infringed on the powers of state and local education boards by using a budget bill to ban three-cueing. Gov., DeWine blasts the lawsuit, calling evidence in favor of the science of reading “abundantly clear.” Proponents of the science of reading argue students need detailed instruction on the building blocks of reading.