Will Johnny ever learn to read? Pushback against science of reading mandates

Half a century after the book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” sounded an alarm about the rise of illiteracy in the U.S., it has only gotten worse: A quarter of all young adults, many of them high school graduates, are now functionally illiterate. Unable to read more than basic, short sentences, their prospects in today’s information economy are bleak.

This crisis gave rise to a movement that embraced the science of reading and produced a surprising success story in the Deep South, a region dogged by the highest rates of childhood illiteracy in the nation. State leaders and education reformers in Mississippi and Louisiana led a remarkable improvement in elementary reading scores that now rank among the highest in the nation.

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 like 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’ 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 influential Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) led the campaign against the legislation, suffering a rare defeat at the statehouse. At least 300 superintendents, principals, and teachers in about 40 Massachusetts districts also signed a letter opposing the mandate, arguing that local educators know what’s best for students.

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 floundered boils down to how thoroughly they implemented most of the reforms.

“We know what works, and we have state exemplars like Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida that have actually done it,” said ExcelinEd Senior Policy Fellow Christy Hovanetz. “So unless more states are willing to do the hard work, we’re not going to see improved outcomes for our kids. And that severely impacts our economic prosperity and future. So yes, I’m concerned.”

State Versus Local Control

In the U.S., 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, about the age when a child’s reading skills strongly predict their future academic success or failure. In 2024, 40% of fourth graders across the nation scored below the Basic level, up from 34% 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 like 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. “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.”

The union says it supports the voluntary adoption of evidence-based curricula by districts, which has been spurred on by grants from programs like Literacy Launch. Advocates estimate that about half of the state’s districts are experimenting with or rolling out higher-quality curricula. The other half is still using less-effective instructional materials, including Lucy Calkin’s popular Units of Study, which is based on the principles of a teaching strategy called Balanced Literacy.

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 a disability, 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.

Calkins, a professor at Columbia, has publicly acknowledged her curriculum’s shortcomings. Yet Units of Study remains entrenched in more than two dozen districts in Massachusetts, which are part of the “widespread” resistance to literacy reforms, including in Boston Public Schools, says Darci Burns, executive director of HILL for Literacy, which trains Massachusetts teachers in evidence-based literacy practices.

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.

“These districts might adopt a reading program that’s the most aligned with Balanced Literacy,” Burns told RCI. “And then they’ll go through the motions, but they won’t really do 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 Balance 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).

The science of reading movement was built on these five pillars, with Massachusetts and other states incorporating them into legislation. Although more recent research has brought new insights – leading scholar Louisa Moats says language skills need much more emphasis in the five pillars – they remain the best approach to improved literacy.

Yet two decades after the panel’s findings, most universities still haven’t read the memo. Signaling the challenges of wholesale reform, only a quarter of teacher preparation programs cover all five pillars, denying most instructors the training they need to be effective.

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,” said Moats. “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 like phonics and don’t include enough book reading and writing; some don’t focus enough on building students’ knowledge about subjects like 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, says Vaites of the Curriculum Insight Project. The varying quality of the curricula has given ammunition to critics of mandates, like Superintendent Julie Hackett, whose affluent Lexington district in Massachusetts uses Units of Study. “We’ve done some looking into results around districts that have adopted new curricula and we are not seeing the results that would necessarily justify” spending up to $1 million to buy new instructional materials, Hackett said at an MTA event.

Vaites wrote that Hackett’s concerns are overblown. Although Massachusetts’ current list isn’t perfect, it does offer comprehensive programs covering the five pillars with an emphasis on reading books and building knowledge.

“Most of the curricula on Massachusetts’s list is pretty good, and now with the mandate, most people think that state leaders are savvy enough to make it even better,” Vaites told RCI.

Arduous Training

Southern states found that a new curriculum isn’t worth much unless teachers are trained to master it. Washington, the former teacher, says adopting a new curriculum is a lot of work, and classes and coaching gives 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.

The bills in Massachusetts offer training to all teachers rather than requiring it, as 18 other states, including Louisiana, have done, according to ExcelinEd’s literacy policy tracker. If that’s a concession to opponents, so is the decision by Massachusetts lawmakers not to adopt another reform that has proven effective in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states: retaining third graders who can’t read at or near grade level from promotion. It’s a highly controversial policy that parents almost always oppose despite the long-term literacy benefits, according to a study of Mississippi that found retention “led to substantially higher ELA scores in sixth grade.”

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,” says 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 like Washington and Illinois and conservative states like 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 backwards 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 Calkin’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.”