AGAINST THE BACKDROP of the pandemic learning slump – which brought a further slide in already anemic reading proficiency rates for Massachusetts 3rd graders – advocates are redoubling their efforts behind legislation that would require all school districts in the state to use “evidence-based” literacy instruction in teaching early elementary grade students. 

As part of a new push for the reading legislation, which was first introduced last session, a coalition of Massachusetts groups is bringing in one of the national leaders of the campaign to get districts and states to adopt a literacy curriculum based on the so-called “science of reading.” Kareem Weaver, a former Oakland, California, educator and NAACP leader who now heads a national nonprofit focused on literacy, will speak at a State House briefing on Wednesday organized by the Mass. Reads Coalition, a group of more than a dozen organizations backing the literacy bill. 

“Literacy is our greatest civil right. If you can’t read, you can’t access anything in our society,” Weaver said in a 2023 documentary, “Right to Read,” that he co-produced on the literacy crisis and the fight to get schools to use more effective reading curricula. 

When it comes to Massachusetts 3rd graders, an astonishing number can’t read. 

Just 42 percent of 3rd grade students were proficient in English on the 2024 MCAS. The numbers are far worse for student groups on the bottom end of the state’s yawning achievement gap. Only 24 percent of low-income 3rd graders are proficient in reading, and only 27 percent of Black students and 22 percent of Latinos are reading at grade level. 

In Boston, the numbers are even worse, with just 20 percent of Black students and 19 percent of Latino students proficient in reading. Put differently, that means 80 percent of these students in the state’s largest school district – where they account for three-quarters of the student population – are not reading at grade level, an ominous indicator for their long-term success in K-12 schooling and beyond. 

“We have a system now that is clearly failing students,” said state Rep. Danillo Sena, a co-sponsor of the legislation mandating that school districts employ evidence-based literacy instruction. 

The bill would have Massachusetts join 42 other states that have adopted some form of required literacy instruction. 

At the heart of the legislative push is a battle that raged in education circles over the best way to teach children to read. 

Under one approach, known as whole language or balanced literacy, students might be encouraged to guess at unfamiliar words from the context of a sentence or pictures. That method, however, has increasingly been discredited in favor of an approach known as phonics, which involves much more explicit instruction to young children on letter sounds and how to combine them to form words. 

A wealth of research evidence shows that this approach, combined with rich content knowledge, is a more effective way to teach children to read. The state education department strongly encourages districts to use this approach, and it has set expectations for teacher licensing programs to use this in their training as well. 

But after years in which many schools employed the whole language approach, changing district practices, teacher training, and curriculum materials isn’t proving to be easy or without controversy. The Globe reported in 2023 that nearly half of Massachusetts districts were not using evidence-based reading curriculum. 

Gov. Maura Healey has made early literacy a priority, making available $20 million in federal grant money to districts to purchase literacy curriculum materials aligned with evidence-based practices. Healey is looking to bolster the literacy initiative with $25 million more that she’s proposed in her 2026 budget along with $25 million to support high-dose tutoring aimed at helping early elementary grade readers. 

The legislation, filed in the House by Sena, together with fellow Acton Democrat Simon Cataldo, and in the Senate by Sal DiDomenico of Everett, would go beyond the state grant programs that districts can tap by mandating that all schools use an evidence-based curriculum that adheres to the principles of the “science of reading.” 

That has generated opposition, including from the state’s largest teachers’ union, which objects to the state directing an approach to instruction. “Massachusetts has in place a process that allows our expert educators and other stakeholders to design reading programs that best meet the needs of their students,” said Massachusetts Teachers Association president Max Page and MTA vice president Deb McCarthy in a statement. “Legislating narrow curriculum from the state is a deeply flawed approach to addressing the literacy needs of students and could hamper educators’ ability to best serve students.” 

The Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents has applauded Healey’s literacy initiative, but opposed the bill mandating evidence-based reading instruction last session, arguing that it did not give districts enough flexibility.  

Mary Tamer, executive director of MassPotential, a nonprofit focused on K-12 education, and a leader of the Mass. Reads Coalition, said the bill offers districts lots of leeway to use a curriculum that suits their students and their needs – as long as it uses the approach backed by research evidence. 

“There’s nothing in the bill that says you have to use this one [curriculum], or have to use one of these five,” she said. “We’re just saying it has to be high quality and research-based under the state guidelines. There’s so much latitude here.”

Concerns have also been raised that the bill would represent an unfunded mandate on districts to buy new curriculum materials and carry out costly teacher training. Tamer pointed to state grant money available for professional development and said the state education department has a full evidence-based early elementary literacy curriculum available at no cost to districts.

DiDomenico said the governor’s effort to spotlight the importance of the issue is giving the effort added momentum. “We feel confident we are going to see some movement with it this session,” he said. “What we’re doing right now is inadequate.” 

But whether lawmakers will have an appetite for shaking up the status quo is unclear. The chaos and uncertainty generated by the Trump administration, including threats to funding streams that find their way to schools, are adding to the resistance to pursuing changes like the call for a statewide overhaul of the approach to reading instruction.

Cataldo said the whole language and balanced literacy approaches have been “thoroughly debunked” by overwhelming evidence. “I appreciate the benefits of local control,” he said. “But that only goes so far when it comes to ensuring something so fundamental as learning how to read, which tracks so closely with success in our society,” he said. “I think it would be irresponsible of our state education system and our local districts not to give serious consideration to creating the framework and the safeguards that the bill proposes.”

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A HIGH-DOSAGE tutoring program in Fall River is helping first graders who started the year behind in their reading skills get on track. Without this tutoring intervention, students may not catch up to a point where they are capable, independent readers set up for success in second grade and beyond.

The program is a game changer in Fall River and other communities where it’s being piloted and could dramatically improve student literacy in Massachusetts if access is expanded. A proposal from Gov. Healey to allocate $25 million for early literacy high dosage tutoring would make it available to 10,000 students.

Massachusetts has an early literacy crisis. Just 42 percent of the Commonwealth’s third graders met or exceeded expectations in reading on the 2024 MCAS exams. Results for some student subgroups were even more startling: 76 percent of low-income students, 73 percent of Black students, 78 percent of Latino students, and 86 percent of children with disabilities didn’t meet expectations.

Not all of this can be attributed to setbacks from the pandemic. Massachusetts reading proficiency rates on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were stagnant, hovering around 50 percent, between 2011 and 2017 even before the pandemic, and since then have plummeted.

Reading by third grade is a pivotal benchmark. Students who don’t learn to read by third grade can’t read to learn, thus compromising all of a child’s learning in future grades and creating an unmeetable set of demands for educators across all content areas. Getting students reading at grade level is one of our state’s most urgent educational challenges.

To help support the literacy development of young readers, we need innovative new approaches that complement the work of our dedicated teachers, school, and district leaders who are adopting science-based reading curricula and doubling down on professional development for teachers.

In Fall River, we have done this work, adopting strong instructional materials and making sure that our teachers have training on how to use them. Yet for some of our learners this is not enough; data show up to 60 percent of students need more intensive instruction and frequent repetition of targeted practice to learn foundational reading skills.

The high-dosage tutoring model in Fall River provides exactly that. Students in the program, which is run by Ignite Reading, meet one-on-one virtually every school day for 15 minutes with the same highly trained tutor who provides targeted, data-driven instruction that helps students master foundational literacy skills – letter sounds, common letter patterns, sight word recognition, and more. The results are impressive.

A Johns Hopkins University evaluation of the impact of this first-grade tutoring program, funded by the One8 Foundation in 13 public school districts across the state last school year, shows tutored students grew substantially more than expected as compared to national norms, achieving 5.4 months of additional learning over the course of the year.

Last year, 16 percent of first-grade students in the program scored at or above the beginning-of-year grade-level composite benchmark on DIBELS, an assessment of basic literacy skills, compared to 50 percent meeting or exceeding the end-of-year benchmark. These results are remarkable, particularly given that the program intentionally serves students who have gaps in their learning and are often furthest behind, and that the composite benchmark is a moving target that sets higher expectations as the year progresses.

The program is strongly supported by teachers and literacy specialists who, despite their very best efforts and training, simply do not have enough time in the day to provide this kind of one-on-one instruction for students. Yet, the program design promotes deep collaboration between tutors and teachers, who meet regularly to review data and discuss what’s working and what’s not for individual students. Our classroom teachers and tutors from Ignite are working together to meet the unique needs of every student.

This program is also scalable, as the research demonstrates. Because the tutoring is delivered virtually, tutors can work from home and can be recruited from all over the country. Tutors are paid an hourly wage that makes this work desirable.

Making this program work at scale will also require dedicated staffing at the state level to manage tutoring vendors with an eye toward quality control, oversight, and consistent implementation across districts, replicating the conditions in place under the pilot. Over the course of the pilot, the One8 Foundation housed a team that was able to coordinate across the tutoring provider and the districts, monitor implementation data, set policies for the use of tutoring seats, troubleshoot when needed, and facilitate the sharing of best practices across schools. This type of program coordination is critical to maintaining the quality of results. 

This new, research-backed tutoring model is the intervention we need in Massachusetts to finally make significant progress on early literacy. In theory, over time, schools with strong classroom instruction and curricula who use high-dosage tutoring interventions to support students who have fallen behind could expect to see reading proficiency rates reach 70 to 80 percent compared to current third grade proficiency rates of just 42 percent.

While philanthropic funding has allowed for a strong proof-of-concept here in the Commonwealth, state funding is needed to meaningfully expand and sustain this work so that it is a predictable and coherent part of the state literacy ecosystem, available to the students who need this extra support.

Tracy Curley is superintendent of the Fall River Public Schools. Ed Lambert is executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.

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LONG OVERDUE ATTENTION to racial injustice in Massachusetts and across the US has exposed the inequities that persist in nearly every facet of our communities — from policing to health care to education. While there is no single answer for addressing these issues, we must recognize the role that literacy — and the way children are taught to read — can play in building a more just and equitable society. 

The two of us have spent a total of nearly 30 years in classrooms — teaching young children to read and teaching educators how to teach reading. Here’s what we know to be true: When reading instruction is grounded in a strong evidence base, it can be a powerful tool for equity. But when it’s not, far too many children can fall through the cracks, placed at a disadvantage before they even reach the 3rd grade. 

Consider the fact that in Massachusetts, 24 percent of black students and 25 percent of Hispanic students are reading proficiently in fourth grade, compared to 54 percent of white students. This statistic from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress does not reflect students’ effort or ability, but their opportunity and support to learn. Black and Hispanic students, like all their peers, need and deserve to be taught with the most effective evidence-based practices, in a culturally responsive and sustaining environment.  

Massachusetts must do better — and we can. With the right instruction, research shows that nearly every child can learn to read. That’s why reading instruction in pre-K through 3rd grade must be grounded in a strong evidence base. To make that the norm rather than the exception, teachers must get the evidence-based training, resources, and support they need. 

Fortunately, Massachusetts educators and administrators now have a trove of information to guide reading instruction. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education recently launched Mass Literacy, a statewide effort to promote evidence-based reading and writing instruction in pre–K to 3rd grade. We worked alongside a team of educators and researchers to shape the resources and information included in the effort. 

We were motivated to do so because, despite our many years working with children and prospective teachers, it took us both far too long to realize that there is a proven way to teach reading, validated by countless studies. We can’t let that continue for teachers and those who prepare them. 

Here’s what we now know, thanks to decades of research: To be proficient readers, students need language comprehension skills as well as word reading, or phonics, skills. Both sets of skills are essential, and both must be explicitly taught. These skills help create a critical foundation for students’ success in school and in life. 

Early in our careers, in the absence of better training and support, we simply didn’t know about the science behind reading. We weren’t bad teachers. In fact, many of our students did learn to read. But some students, particularly those struggling the most, needed more than what we were giving them. They needed to be explicitly taught the skills that research tells us are required for children to become good readers.  

Our stories are the stories of countless educators. Teachers often do not have the tools, training, or resources needed to teach reading using the strategies proven to work best for the most students. Worse, in some cases, teachers are asked to use programs and curricula grounded in flawed ideas about how children learn to read. The result is that what children are taught often strays from what research says they need most. 

And when students fall behind, they face a constant uphill battle to catch up. Many never do. We’ve seen it time and time again: the first grader who does not learn to sound out letters or identify the syllables in a word often becomes the disengaged fifth grader struggling to make sense of more challenging texts and falling further behind their peers. 

Mass Literacy is all the more urgent given the disruption to schooling caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. When students return to classrooms full-time, struggling readers will have fallen even further behind. 

We hope Massachusetts educators, principals, and administrators will evaluate their instructional practices and look for ways to adopt a more evidence-based approach. When they do, students will benefit, and we will move closer to achieving a more just and equitable future for all of our children. 

Lisa Hanifan is a first-grade teacher in the Malden Public Schools. Stephanie Grimaldi is a professor of education at Westfield State University. 

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