The switch away from teaching phonics, and the consequent drop in literacy, is real.

It is not particularly something that was pushed by teacher unions.

The "three cueing model" was being pushed for some time as being more effective due to widely-promoted misunderstanding and misinformation by one guy whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten (I was reading about this a few months ago, and don't have the references to hand). It correctly recognizes that highly adept readers do not mentally sound out every word, but rather recognize known words very quickly from a few individual aspects of the word. However, this skill absolutely 100% requires having first learned the fundamentals of reading through phonics, and its proponents thought they could skip that step.

I'd like to read your sources on that, because from what I checked in the meantime it looks like it's more of a “culture war” thing that a real thing. See: https://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/great_plummet.pdf which provides figures for tests results between 1984 and 1990 showing no such decline over that period.

Also, the PDF I quoted is from 2002, 10 years after California had legislated in favor of phonics in 1992 (which had never stopped to be used no matter what the urban legend says).

Er...what?

The change I'm talking about happened in the mid-to-late 2000s. Nothing from the periods you cite are relevant.

Here's one of the articles that's been written about the three-cueing model: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

If you want more, you have the search terms.

You realize that your link talks about the same time period as mine, and not about something that allegedly happened in the “mid to late 2000”?

> Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America.