The turnaround was a long slog, requiring a heavy hand from the state to win buy-in for a wholesale transformation of curricula, teaching methods, accountability, and more. Former state education chief Carey Wright called it the “Mississippi Marathon.” One of the biggest questions in public education now is whether the southern surge can spread nationwide, turning millions of struggling students into proficient readers with a brighter future.
But such a top-down approach is running into resistance, particularly in blue states such as New York and Illinois, where strong teachers unions have fought to preserve local control over schools. And nowhere is the political battle over who runs the classroom more pronounced than in Massachusetts, which has long boasted the nation’s best public schools.
Massachusetts’s governor is expected to sign a literacy bill in the coming months, making it one of about a dozen states to mandate adoption of curricula based on the science of reading in elementary grades. Laws in another 30 states merely encourage its use. Although these laws suggest a big step forward for the nation, Massachusetts illustrates the challenges ahead in some states—many of the educators responsible for implementing the mandated reforms see them as an affront to local control of classrooms.
The pushback in Massachusetts raises concerns among advocates about whether the reforms, especially the evidence-based curriculum and teacher training, will be fully implemented across the state. ExcelinEd, an advocacy group chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has identified many science of reading policies, big and small, that have helped states boost literacy rates. The group’s research found that the difference between states with the biggest reading gains and those that foundered boils down to how thoroughly they implemented most of the reforms.
State Versus Local Control
In the United States, most school districts call the shots regarding the curriculum—the crucial teaching materials that determine how kids are taught. Although research shows that the quality of curricula makes a big difference in whether Johnny and Jill learn to read, this area of public education remains largely unregulated by most states, leaving 13,000 districts to pick instructional materials based on convenience, corporate marketing, or price if not quality. And nobody knows what curricula most districts use since only six states require such disclosure, according to Karen Vaites of the Curriculum Insight Project.Science of reading advocates say local control over curricula isn’t working. Consider fourth graders, at about the age when children’s reading skills strongly predict their future academic success or failure. In 2024, 40 percent of fourth graders across the nation scored below the “Basic” level, up from 34 percent in 2019 and nearly matching levels in 1992, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the gold standard in testing. These students have trouble reading aloud, recognizing and decoding many grade-level words, and thus comprehending the meaning of text. They will struggle in all their classes through high school if they aren’t reading well in elementary school.
States such as Massachusetts are responding with mandates that require districts to pick from a menu of approved curricula backed by research showing their effectiveness. The Massachusetts Teachers Association doesn’t dispute that there’s a literacy crisis. But the union opposed the mandate, casting it as a form of government overreach in complex curricular matters best left to trained educators.
“Our members have opposed legislated curriculum mandates for literacy education because they know losing flexibility to do their jobs and restricting their professional judgement inevitably means some students will continue to struggle with learning to read and write,” MTA President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy said in a statement to RealClearInvestigations (RCI). “The law in Massachusetts will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, and that money would be better spent on hiring staff and increasing professional development opportunities for educators.”
Failed Reform Efforts
Balanced literacy emerged during the “reading wars” of the 1990s in an attempt to address the nation’s literacy decline. At the time, the prominent approach to instruction, called whole language, required students to learn words and sentences by looking at simple picture books as they were read aloud, and if needed, guess at pronunciation and meaning by the story’s context and images. Experts hoped that this loosely structured method would inspire a love of reading.While it worked for some students, critics said the lack of any explicit instruction in methods to decode words left many students struggling. Balanced literacy came about as a compromise, adding a dash of phonics to help these students sound out words while keeping the fundamentals of the whole language strategy.
De’Shawn Washington, winner of the 2024 Teacher of the Year award in Massachusetts, saw the damage done to his elementary students from balanced literacy’s Units of Study. In his Boston and Lexington classrooms, students who were already proficient readers advanced at a fast clip. But most students, who were one or two grade levels behind because they didn’t have exposure to reading at home or suffered from disabilities, learned at a much slower pace, if at all. A few of his third graders were unable to read books for kindergarteners or write their names. Washington did his best to supplement Units of Study with more phonics, but it wasn’t much help.
“The struggling readers tended to get left behind, and the disparity between them and the proficient readers widened,” said Washington, whose experience turned him into an advocate of Massachusetts’s mandate.
Burns says many of the gatekeepers of instructional materials, such as assistant superintendents and directors of curriculum, were trained to use balanced literacy and remain wedded to it like a religion. Teachers like its unscripted approach, giving them more freedom. Burns predicts they will try to skirt the mandate rather than support it.
The Science of Reading
In 2000, a National Reading Panel of top experts was set up to distill what several hundred gold-standard studies revealed about literacy instruction. Although the panel didn’t explicitly reject balanced literacy, it found that a more structured approach to instruction in five areas was the most effective: phonemic awareness (learning word sounds), phonics (matching sounds to letters), fluency (reading aloud), vocabulary (learning word meanings), and comprehension (gleaning the meaning of text).This leaves educators in an unusual position—unlike most professionals, they are not trained in, and sometimes reject, the best practices of their trade. It’s another knock on the relevancy of higher education that Massachusetts and other states are now addressing by requiring teacher preparation to include the five pillars.
“Most teachers don’t know the science of reading—that the point of phonemic awareness is to facilitate word recognition with an alphabetic writing system, or that the primary comprehension enabler is vocabulary,” Moats said. “I don’t want my grandkids in a classroom where the teacher has the autonomy to do whatever the hell she wants, because I have seen the results of that.”
The five pillars may be on solid footing, but the curricula based on them are a work in progress. Some are comprehensive; others are too narrowly focused on the foundational skills such as phonics and don’t include enough book reading and writing; some don’t focus enough on building students’ knowledge about subjects such as history and science, which is key to reading comprehension; some haven’t been around long enough to have a proven track record.
States with new literacy laws are not all doing a good job of vetting curricula to ensure they give districts the strongest options, said Vaites of the Curriculum Insight Project. The varying quality of the curricula has given ammunition to critics of mandates, such as Superintendent Julie Hackett, whose affluent Lexington district in Massachusetts uses Units of Study.
Hackett said at an MTA event that in her district, they’ve looked into the results from districts that have adopted new curricula and haven’t seen results that would “justify” spending up to $1 million to buy new instructional materials.
Arduous Training
Southern states found that a new curriculum isn’t worth much unless teachers are trained to master it. Washington, the former teacher, said adopting a new curriculum is a lot of work, and classes and coaching give teachers more confidence about handling such a big transition, convincing them that the science of reading is not just another education fad.“The training shifts the conversation away from resistance because teachers realize they are not going into this new situation blind and that there’s a big investment being made to improve the profession,” Washington said.
In all, ExcelinEd has identified 18 reforms, including dyslexia screening and parental notification of reading problems, that the most successful states have implemented. Given the heavy lift, it’s not surprising that some states have stumbled.
Of the 15 states that adopted most of the 18 policies by 2019, 10 of them outpaced the national average in fourth-grade NAEP reading scores by 2024, with Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina far out in front, according to Hovanetz, the policy fellow. These 10 states illustrate the effectiveness of the reforms.
But test scores in four of the 15 states declined more than the nation’s did, and Michigan tied, showing the difficulty of implementing the reforms. Among the backsliding states, Hovanetz says, New Mexico didn’t train and deploy all of its reading coaches, and Oklahoma and North Carolina ended their third-grade retention policy.
“States get a whole bunch of constituent calls saying, ‘It’s not fair you’re retaining my kid.’ Then they back off of the policy and lose any momentum that they had gained,” said Hovanetz, a former Florida education official.
Minnesota illustrates how things can go wrong when districts are encouraged, rather than mandated, to adopt evidence-based curricula and teacher training.
“Some teachers took the training, not everyone did, and when they went back to their schools, teachers didn’t have the instructional materials to support what they learned in training, and they might not have had a leader at the school to support them,” Hovanetz said. “So Minnesota probably wasted a whole lot of money.”
A number of other states haven’t bothered to pass meaningful science-of-reading laws. They include both liberal states such as Washington and Illinois and conservative states such as Montana and Maine.
In Massachusetts, a conference committee is reconciling the two bills, with the rollout of reforms set for 2027. The Senate bill requires districts to regularly assess K–3 students’ reading abilities and create improvement plans for those who score significantly below grade level. It’s a measure of accountability that advocates hope will produce positive results in a state that’s moving backward in literacy on the NAEP test.
In another concession to opponents of the mandate, lawmakers gave districts a narrow escape hatch. They can apply for a waiver from the mandate if their alternative curriculum is backed by research evidence. While the waiver could open the door to the adoption of Calkins’s revised Units of Study, it will have to pass muster with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Mary Tamer, who convened the Mass Reads coalition of 40 education groups to support the legislation that she helped write, is bullish about the adoption of reforms. Despite the opposition, she says the political momentum, underscored by the unanimous votes for the literacy bills in both the House and Senate, is strong enough to compel most districts to buy in.
“Our expectation is that districts will move toward evidence-based instruction as quickly as they can because it’s proven to teach children how to read,” she said. “And that is our goal here.”
