kids being taught to read in the early 2000s and on were increasingly taught with three cueing alone I think you might have misread the wiki article, three-cueing stopped being taught exclusively in 2000. By the 1990s and early 2000s, research began to conclude that phonics was the necessary method of teaching reading to children, with an American congressional panel in 2000 concluding that the essential components of reading instruction were “vocabulary, comprehension and phonics”. Programs began to re-incorporate phonics around this time, although three cueing remained a part of curriculums in the approaches of balanced literacy and whole language.