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A nonprofit organization created by the California State Library to improve childhood literacy has spent more than $1 million in taxpayer money but has yet to put a single book in the hands of a child.

Lawmakers grilled State Librarian Greg Lucas and other officials about the organization’s spending in , with one lawmaker saying it raises “serious questions.”

Lucas, however, blamed the shortcomings on the fact that legislators themselves pulled the organization’s funding prematurely. After the hearing, he told CalMatters in a statement that “every taxpayer dollar spent on this program is fully accounted for.”

In total, lawmakers allocated $70 million in 2022 to improve children’s love of reading with the intent of giving some of the money to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and some of it to a local organization.

The California-based Strong Reader Partnership was formed by the state library as the local partner, and it was originally set to receive $19 million. But in 2024, with very little of the money spent, lawmakers redirected the money to the Dollywood Foundation, which oversees Parton’s Imagination Library. Ultimately, the project has been able to meet many of its goals, the Dollywood Foundation this year. In all, it has served more than 160,000 children in California and distributed  nearly 3 million books. The foundation is administering the program but not donating any money toward the project.

Although the $1 million spent by the Strong Reader Partnership is small, relative to the total project budget, Sen. , a Pasadena Democrat, and Sen. , a Bakersfield Republican, said in the hearing that it’s their job to ensure it was still spent correctly, especially since the money was designated for children.

In the hearing, Pérez and Grove questioned the Strong Reader Partnership’s finances, repeatedly stating that its accounting practices and business activities were ineffective, negligent or potentially in violation of its state contract. Grove pressed Lucas about why he created a separate nonprofit instead of giving the money directly to the Dollywood Foundation, even though she herself required the state library to do so.

In 2022 Grove authored that created the program. The bill required “the State Librarian to coordinate with a nonprofit entity, as specified, that is organized solely to promote and encourage reading by the children of the state.” The Dollywood Foundation, which is national and based in Tennessee, was not eligible to be that nonprofit entity.

When CalMatters asked Grove why she is criticizing the state library’s formation of a nonprofit when her bill required it, she responded by email but didn’t answer the question. Instead, she reiterated her criticisms of the Strong Reader Partnership, saying that its money was “squandered away without putting books in kids’ hands.”

Letters to lawmakers

State lawmakers first questioned the Imagination Library project in 2024, when budget officials, faced with closing a nearly $50 billion , told lawmakers that most of the money for the program remained unspent nearly two years after its launch. That year, the governor keeping the money intact but requiring 90% of it go directly to the Dollywood Foundation instead of the Strong Reader Partnership or any local nonprofit. The foundation did not respond to CalMatters’ questions about its relationship with the Strong Reader Partnership.

Sonya Harris, executive director of the Strong Reader Partnership at the time, that 2024 bill and said she sent letters to legislators opposing it.

Lawmakers said speaking about the bill was a violation of her contract. “You’re attempting to influence legislation when it’s explicitly stated that you are not supposed to use state taxpayer dollars to do so. Do you agree?” asked Pérez during the April 7 hearing. Harris didn’t answer the question.

Also during the hearing, Pérez repeatedly questioned the organization’s financial management, referencing instances when checks bounced, reports were not completed or documents arrived months after lawmakers had requested them. “As far as I can see here, there (were) no local partnerships that you all established in order to facilitate this program over a two-year period,” she said. “We are not able to understand what you did with these dollars and that’s the whole purpose of this hearing.”

Contracting with nonprofits comes with risks

The roughly $1 million in state funds that went to the Strong Reader Partnership is  less than a thousandth of 1% of the state’s  total spending, but that’s not the point, Pérez said

“Comments have been made about the amount of money that this is, and that it might be small relative to the budget,” she said before closing out the hearing. “But for me, as a public servant, I take this very seriously. We need to ensure that when we’re making a commitment to provide something as simple as books to children, that we’re actually delivering on that commitment.”

State and local lawmakers routinely sign contracts and grant money to businesses, including many nonprofit organizations, to enact public services or programs. In the process, taxpayers “lose transparency,” said Susan Shelley, vice president of communications for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association, a group that opposes higher taxes. “Why is the state government or the local government turning them over to nonprofits instead of having their massive bureaucracies handle these things where someone is accountable?”

Shelley said the responsibility lies both with the nonprofits and the Legislature, especially in this instance, because Grove’s bill required the California State Library to work with a local nonprofit.

Normally, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association is strongly aligned with Grove. Last year, the organization gave her based on her voting record on tax-related issues.

This article was and was republished under the license.

It started 12 years ago when Emily Angiletta, Stephanie Timek and Emily Silluzio were first time teachers at the Meriden, Connecticut school, staying late to plan lessons — long after the custodians shuttered the building. 

The teachers were hired under the leadership of a new principal with a new vision of what student success would look like in a low-income school. The three educators were in their 20s, fresh out of college and trying to figure out what it meant to be effective in the classroom.

More than a decade later, their friendship is like a sisterhood or a sports team: They call each other only by their last names and can practically finish each other’s sentences with a smirk and a head nod that says “yeah, that’s what I was going to say.” 

Together, they’ve experienced getting married, losing a parent and having children. They have  also lived through the highs and lows of the classroom – some years “soaring through expectations” and others questioning if their teaching had worsened. 

“We were all learning together, struggling together, learning from our mistakes, growing together,” Silluzio said, “and I think that’s a huge part of what led to our unity. We were in the same boat.”

The Barry teachers’ close relationships show not only what a culture shift in one school has done for staff, but also students. The friendship and strong working collaboration are the results of a bold plan set in motion by their former principal Dan Crispino, who helped transform the school from 5% proficiency to a in 2019. 

Now, Crispino has been tasked with scaling Barry’s academic success across the district. 

The Meriden school district, in many ways, is similar to Angilleta, Timek and Silluzio – learning, struggling and growing together. 

An almost decade-long overhaul of the district has been a systematic transformation – rooted in consistency across classrooms and campuses, accountability, hands-on oversight, relationship and trust.

It’s about finding ways to put their students “in a position to do things that people don’t believe are possible,” said Crispino, now the district’s director of school leadership. “Their backgrounds – all these things – are tough and you can’t control everything. But, what you can control is when they’re ours and that we’re giving them every single freaking thing possible to help them be successful and to get ahead of whatever challenges.”

While there’s often an expectation that students in urban districts won’t perform well because of , which affect school funding levels and supporting high student needs, Meriden is Connecticut’s and is beating the odds in how successful it’s been at teaching kids to read.

Despite being made up of nearly – more than three quarters of whom are from low-income families –  kids in seven of the district’s eight elementary schools are reading at higher levels than expected, according to a data project focused on Bright Spot schools launched by The 74.

The data analysis highlighted schools that were among the top 5% of their state in outscoring their expected reading proficiency based on the percentage of children who qualified for free or reduced priced lunch. 

Connecticut was home to 25 exceptional schools. And of the state’s top five Bright Spot schools – three were in Meriden, including its highest need campus, Pulaski Elementary School, which has a poverty rate of 87.7% and expected just 16.4% of students reading on grade level but instead had nearly 54%.

In the last seven years, the school system has reworked its master schedule and implemented a rigorously supervised accountability model from district and school leaders who are in classrooms daily. Staff across the district have meticulously tracked student progress and have improved collaboration to make data more accessible among one another. 

The district has also incorporated instructional coaches, who are assigned by grade and travel between campuses. Their role, beyond meeting with educators several times a week, is bearing the weight of lesson planning every unit by outlining curriculum and other resources. 

The initiatives are part of an underlying mission: Alignment. 

No matter the school building or the classroom, all third grade classes across the district are learning the same material on the same schedule – even if it looks a little different teacher by teacher. They’re meeting with the same coaches and district leadership. 

System alignment through relationship building

Whether it’s children who have lost a parent, are experiencing homelessness, learning English or have a disability, Meriden staff have successfully worked with many such students — including Enzo, a third grade student at Pulaski Elementary School.

He doesn’t know what he wants to be once he gets older, but he knows he enjoys math and science. Enzo knows all about the Fibonacci Sequence, he said, explaining how “one plus one is two, and two plus one is three, and three plus two is five, and five plus three is eight,” going all the way up to 13 plus eight.

He admitted he thought reading was boring, but he couldn’t sit still when he talked about a book he’s reading at home.

“It’s called ‘What Cats Want,’” said Enzo, 8. “I’m on page 102.”

He’s more than halfway through the book and he likes to read “two or four” pages before he goes to sleep. His favorite tidbit of information from the book is to be careful when you let your cat outside.

“Number one, they can get run over. Number two, they can get lost. And number three, a stranger cat can attack them,” Enzo said, holding up three green marker stained fingers. But, “I remember [everything] from page one.”

Earlier this school year, Enzo lost his father. But through services at his school, including an individualized schedule that allows him to work for 30 minutes, then take a two minute break, he’s been able to stay on track in the classroom.

But before a student like Enzo can be successful, the needs of educators must be met.

Before taking on his central office job in 2020, Crispino spent more than 20 years as a first grade teacher and as a principal at Barry for a handful of years. When he began working as a district administrator, and was asked to mirror his success at Barry across campuses, union relationships were among his top priorities.

“I would never ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t do or have done myself,” Crispino said. “You don’t want surprises. They’re your human resource. They’re delivering what you’re trying to put forth. If you don’t have their support, then it’s never gonna work.”

Time and expectations were the biggest concerns from educators, both in Meriden and across the country, with surveys showing staff often feel like they’re in a school day.

Step one, in Meriden, was overhauling its master schedule, which originally “was not, physically, mathematically, possible,” Crispino said. Teachers were being asked to start reading at 12:30, the same time recess was supposed to end, so everyone’s transitional time looked different and there was no uniformity when students were actually supposed to be back in the classroom and at work. 

“That had to go away,” Crispino said. 

Though it seemed simple, just taking the first step in building in five minute transitions made the schedule “viable, conducive and real,” Crispino said, which helped align schools and teachers on expectations. They also built in a reteach day at the end of every unit for concepts that had students struggling.

Next was making oversight a norm. 

Crispino and his building principals spend most of their time in classrooms, at least four times a day. It began as a practice that at first “wasn’t pretty,” Crispino said, with many complaints from union leaders who said administrators spent too much time in the classroom, but has since shifted to educators stopping them when they walk by to see if they want to check their recent data collection.

“We’re not there to get you, there’s a difference,” Crispino said. “For support and accountability, we’re going to be there.”

Coaches that changed, and streamlined, the game

With administrators who better understand what’s going on in the classroom, it means resources can be allocated better. In Meriden, Crispino has spearheaded bringing in instructional coaches who are assigned by grade levels and rotate among campuses.

“When I was a first year teacher, … I had to go home and write all my little lessons. I had no one to help me. I was on my own. Your admin would come in doing observations and you’d either have it or you don’t,” Crispino said, “and that’s different now.”

Veronica Germe recalled being a teacher in the state capital’s public school system. In Hartford, a district home to more than 15,000 students, she remembered how she only saw her principal in her kindergarten classroom once during the entire school year and how “visibility is the biggest difference” between the two districts.

Germe, now a K-3 grade English language arts and math coach in Meriden, is part of a team of about a dozen other elementary instructional coaches who are responsible for supporting both new and veteran teachers by managing lesson planning and acting as a resource for implementation.

“We’ve almost become a catch all in the district for all the questions K-5,” she said. 

In many districts, instructional coaches may be brushed off by educators, but in Meriden, the group has worked hard to develop a relationship where they’re “almost like a teammate,” Germe said. “We’re not evaluating them. We’re there in it with them. We’re helping and we want to get to know the students too. … Their scores are our scores.”

The coaches organize curriculum into bite-sized emails that are delivered before a unit. The emails give an overview of the lessons for that unit, with breakdowns of assessments, test questions to pay attention to, review slides, videos and pacing guides. The emails also explicitly outline state standards, which allows teachers to better target their instruction.

They meet with teachers every week for at least one planning session for upcoming lessons, and observe and offer advice during classroom time. The group of coaches are also able to provide pacing calendars and resources to help teachers differentiate instruction based on class needs.

Last year, Connecticut implemented a that limited the curricula elementary schools could use to teach reading. When the district fully shifted its K-3 curriculum, it was painless – “phenomenal”even – Crispino said, thanks to a rollout supported by union leaders and the instructional coaches that gave educators “everything they would need.”

Despite budget constraints, the district has committed to leaving their elementary instructional coaches untouched, and funded by Title I, a federal grant for schools with high-concentrations of low-income students.

Investing in these coaches for early grades gives all teachers and children “equal footing,” Crispino said, where everyone gets the same emails and meetings, then gets to decide what they’re doing with the resources. 

In mid-March, if you walked into Meriden’s Pulaski, Nathan Hale, or Thomas Hooker elementary schools during its rotational reading blocks, you would’ve seen almost the same snapshot in the three campuses.

While teachers have autonomy on the use of laptops, printed worksheets or using dry erase boards, the 60-minute period across a dozen classrooms generally looked the same.

During the reading rotation block, a small group of students, usually six or less, would be sitting in one corner of the room working on answering questions about a text with their teacher. In another corner, you’d see a paraeducator, tutor or reading coach with another small group.

Scattered across the classroom, students would be working alone with a loose leaf piece of paper, called “evidence paper” and taking notes and analyzing stories about komodragons, the galaxy or Harriet Tubman. Pairs also worked on poster boards or white boards figuring out vocabulary, grammar, main ideas or comparing and contrasting two texts.

After 20 minutes, it was time to rotate, and every student knew what to do without being asked twice.

The scenes were a direct mirror of how everyone’s “speaking the same language,” as Crispino would say, in every elementary building across the district. 

“The coaching, the admin, the feedback, the curriculum that’s easily accessible, these emails, … eliminated a lot of excuses, and when we did that, we created this high standard of excellence,” Crispino said. The alignment “built independence. It built accountability. It built engagement. It built a vibrant learning environment.”

Innovation and scalability

Last year, Angilleta, Timek and Silluzio came into a meeting with administrators rehearsed and prepared to propose a departmentalized approach to third grade, where every student would rotate among the three educators for different subjects, similar to a middle and high school model. 

The presentation wasn’t even needed, Crispino and the school’s principal Kimberly Goldbach said, laughing. It was an automatic yes.

“Part of me was like ‘You’d be an idiot to change what’s working,’ but then I said, ‘You’d be an idiot to not be innovative and creative enough to know when there’s a time to think outside the box,’” Crispino said. 

It’s paying off. Their third grade class “had the highest scores they ever had,” Crispino said. “I think our scores are going to get even better because we’re being creative and innovative at the elementary level with departmentalizing.”

Beyond the academic piece, Timek also said she’s hopeful the approach will give children, particularly those with high-needs, more resources.

“It gives these kids another chance to have a teacher that they’re not stuck with all day long. You might have a closer relationship with one kid versus the other, but the other kid can go to another class and be closer with that teacher,” she said. “They have more adults in their corner that they trust and they know that’s providing them a good education and that they can go to if they have a problem.”

The district is working to add nearly two dozen more educators into the departmentalized approach.

When asked about the scalability of Meriden’s success in other schools across the state and country, Crispino, the district superintendent Mark Benigni and various principals said it was possible, but with a few caveats.

“Can districts have a schedule like we do? Yes, but you have to make sure you’re consistent with it. Can you have instructional coaches do the work we’re doing? Yes. Should admin be in rooms? Yes. Should the central office support and understand the work happening in the trenches? Yes,” Crispino said. “You have to push [your staff and kids] to an uncomfortable place, … to challenge each other, have professional dialog and have high expectations, but then give them the resources to be successful.”

Experts have raised a variety of factors contributing to this reality: learning loss due to the pandemic, increased screen time, the dissolution of long-form reading and teacher burnout. While each of these points are critical, there’s an even deeper, more fundamental issue facing students that a flurry of educational reforms haven’t fixed and may have worsened:

They are simply not spending enough time actually reading in school.

Practice makes perfect, but without the reps, there’s no room for growth. Research kids should have at least 15 to 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading time a day. The reality? Much worse. On average, middle school and high school kids are getting about, if that.

This poses an even greater challenge for students in poverty. Kids who have little to no reading opportunities at home depend on school to fill the gaps. When reading minutes are reduced, they’re hit the hardest.

So how do educators fix it?

It turns out, they already have the answers. Here’s what the research tells us.

First, schools must protect uninterrupted reading time — and make it non-negotiable.

Right now in school, kids are bombarded with interruptions: digital devices, announcements, visual distractions, visitors. In fact, a recent of the Providence Public School District revealed that classrooms are interrupted more than 2,000 times a year, resulting in the loss of between 10 and 20 days of instructional time. What’s more, administrators often underestimate or misperceive how these interruptions might be disrupting the learning process.

Students need to be given the space to focus. If educators want to make changes, they need to get intentional about providing stronger opportunities for kids to focus in school: rethink the physical environment to reduce visual noise, streamline communications for students and build in time for cognitive processing.

That means giving students the time and space to get their reading reps in.

Second, teachers must make the time kids are spending in school worthwhile.

Giving kids the time and space they need to read, requires that they know how to do it. And there needs to be accountability and checks that tell us the practice is worthwhile. That’s where a strong curriculum comes in.

Educators need to be asking ourselves whether the work we’re asking students to do is worthy of their time and intelligence. If our kids are spending 15,000 hours in school across K-12, it’s on us to ensure they’re getting out what they’re putting in. It starts with providing high-quality instructional materials that are comprehensive, coherent, evidence-based, knowledge-rich, and grade-appropriate.

shows students learning under a coherent curriculum gain an average of 1.3 months of additional learning — 1.8 months for struggling students. With the right instruction, kids who are hit the hardest finally have the opportunity to catch up.

Unfortunately, TNTP’s 2018 multi-system study,, and its subsequent study revealed that students are rarely taught grade-level work, and they’ve often seen the materials that are being covered in a previous class. As a result, while kids are getting As and Bs, they’re demonstrating mastery of grade-level standards just 17% of the time.

Bottom line? Kids are doing the work, but they aren’t being appropriately challenged. They’re caught in an incoherent moshpit of disconnected academic programming. Schools are underestimating students’ potential, and it’s backfiring on their ability to learn to read.

Schools need to prioritize a curriculum that is cohesive, knowledge-rich, and grade-appropriate to support true learning. If we’re going to ask kids for their time, let’s make it count.

Finally, schools need to be clear-eyed about how they are measuring success.

Today, the domain of English Language Arts is made up of three key areas that are interconnected: reading, writing and oral language. these areas work hand in hand to help students build their skills; writing improves reading comprehension, while oral language supports both reading and writing.

The problem? Most testing tools that are used for instructional decision-making focus on a small slice of what it means to be proficient in the higher order skills of ELA. They rely on limited data sets like from to draw conclusions around proficiency across the whole domain, sometimes with big consequences for kids and teachers and instructional programming. Often, these tests don’t measure grade-level proficiency, they measure recall. That’s why our children can get As and still not be proficient readers.

If schools want our kids to succeed in literacy — an imperative in the age of AI — there has to be a more advanced discussion about assessment. Schools need to adopt an assessment system that aligns with the domain of English Language Arts. That means moving away from single-point-in-time multiple choice testing strategies and adopting assessment practices that hold the bar for higher order reading, critical analysis, writing, speaking, communicating and collaborating.

Solving the literacy gap doesn’t require an overhaul of our education system or an innovation that is smarter than all humans combined. As educators, we can teach children to read who attend school for 15,000 hours. We need a collaborative, aligned effort to challenge the status quo. We need leaders who are willing to pull on the right levers for change: protect reading time, provide high-quality, grade-level materials and measure what actually matters

In early 2026, a small group of first-grade students at Lucy Wortham James Elementary School in St. James, Missouri, sat together sounding out words.

Kim Williams, the school’s principal, watched as they worked through the lesson. One young boy caught her attention.

“This student had struggled significantly the year before and often avoided reading tasks,” she said. “This time, I watched him carefully tap out each phoneme, blend the sounds and read a multi-syllable word independently.”

What stood out wasn’t just that he read the word correctly – it was how he approached it.

“He didn’t guess. He didn’t look to the teacher for the answer. He applied a strategy he had been explicitly taught,” Williams said.

She has observed several meaningful changes in students over the past year.

“Students are approaching unfamiliar words with greater confidence,” she said. “Instead of guessing, they are using strategies and applying phonics patterns they’ve been explicitly taught. You can hear the difference – they are sounding out words more accurately and blending more smoothly.”

The breakthrough she observed is part of a broader effort across rural central Missouri. Through the Rural Schools Early Literacy Collaborative, literacy coaches from the national nonprofit TNTP work directly with teachers in Phelps County schools, helping them implement structured reading instruction grounded in the science of reading.

Coordinated locally through the Phelps County Community Foundation, coaches visit classrooms regularly throughout the school year. They observe instruction, model lessons and provide feedback, strengthening foundational reading instruction for kindergarten and early elementary students.

The effort is taking place at a time when reading proficiency remains a challenge across Missouri and the nation. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card, only 27 percent of Missouri fourth-grade students scored at or above the proficient reading level, while 42 percent scored below the basic level.

Education leaders say improving early literacy is critical because reading proficiency by the end of third grade is closely linked to long-term academic success.

Before the collaborative began, the biggest challenges for K–1 teachers in St. James R-I centered on consistency, skill gaps and limited structured support.

“Teachers were using a variety of reading strategies, programs and materials,” Williams said. “While many approaches had strengths, there was not a cohesive, research-aligned framework guiding K–1 reading instruction across classrooms. This sometimes led to uneven student outcomes and confusion when students moved between grades.”

Some students entered kindergarten with limited literacy exposure, and teachers needed clearer tools to systematically build phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding skills. Identifying and addressing skill gaps early was challenging without a unified approach.

“From my perspective as principal, the most significant change since TNTP coaches began working with our teachers has been the shift to consistently structured, research-based literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading,” she said.

Instead of learning strategies in isolation, teachers now receive feedback tied directly to classroom instruction. Coaching conversations are specific, practical and immediately applicable, accelerating growth in instructional practice.

“I have seen a significant shift in teacher confidence, collaboration and mindset around early literacy instruction,” Williams said. “Teachers understand how students learn to read, have a stronger grasp of foundational skills — especially phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding – and can clearly articulate the ‘why’ behind their decisions.”

That clarity has reduced uncertainty and increased instructional precision.

“Early literacy is no longer just an initiative,” she said. “It’s a unified commitment supported by knowledge, collaboration and confidence.”

A first-year teacher finds support

For Ashley Wood, a second-year kindergarten teacher in Newburg, the coaching model provided unexpected support.

“You see so many posts online telling new teachers to run from the profession,” she said. “But when you have a support system – coaching, small groups, someone to talk through what’s working and what’s not – it makes you want to stay. It takes away that feeling that if a student struggles, it’s all your fault.”

Wood said the approach reduces “teacher guilt” – the feeling that struggling students are solely the teacher’s responsibility.

Her literacy coach, Kelly, follows a predictable rhythm each month: a Zoom planning meeting before a visit, in-person classroom observation, immediate feedback afterward and ongoing email check-ins.

“It definitely makes you feel like you are not alone,” Wood said. “As a new teacher, there are so many moments where you wonder if you’re doing it right. Having someone come in, observe and then talk it through with you – it changes everything.”

At the beginning of the year, some students did not yet recognize their starter letters – A, M, S and T – or the sounds they make.

“Now almost every single one of them knows capital, lowercase and sound,” she said. “That growth has been huge. Kindergarten is such a growth year. They come in barely recognizing letters, and by the end they’re reading.”

Wood admitted feeling nervous before Christmas break, wondering whether students would retain their skills.

“I sent home decodable passages because I thought, ‘They’re going to forget everything.’ But they came back after break and every single one of them just took off. It was like something clicked,” she said.

The improvements teachers are seeing in classrooms are reflected in early assessment data from participating districts.

In Rolla Public Schools, more than 94 percent of first-grade students demonstrated year-long growth in reading after coaching support began. In Dent-Phelps R-III School District, the share of first graders reading at grade level increased from 25.5 percent in the fall to 89.4 percent by the spring.

At Newburg Elementary School, 100 percent of kindergarten and first-grade students demonstrated growth in reading assessments, with gains that more than doubled typical annual progress.

From classroom change to district strategy

For April Williams, assistant superintendent in the St. James R-I School District, the impact is most visible during classroom visits.

“As an administrative team, we met every Wednesday morning and did literacy walks,” she said. “We wanted to be grounded in the work, too – not just supporting teachers but really understanding what effective literacy instruction should look like.”

Those visits give district leaders a firsthand view of how instruction – and students – are changing.

“Just last week I was in a kindergarten classroom, and the words students were decoding and understanding – for February – I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Seeing that difference in students’ abilities has been incredible.”

What began as a local effort in rural Phelps County is now expanding across Missouri.

Through the state’s Comprehensive Literacy State Development (CLSD) grant, the coaching model is being implemented in 60 schools statewide, including 40 K–5 schools and 20 middle and high schools. Literacy coaches trained in the same model used in Phelps County now support teachers across multiple regions of the state.

Education leaders say the expansion reflects growing recognition that improving reading outcomes requires not only strong curriculum but also sustained coaching and support for teachers.

For Williams, the goal is simple: ensure the work continues long after the original grant funding ends.

“Probably what changed the most is we renewed our commitment to literacy district-wide,” she said. “It wasn’t just something happening in elementary anymore – we started asking how the entire district supports literacy and keeps it at the forefront of everything we do.”

She added: “The goal is for this model to live beyond the grant — and beyond all of us. So that it simply becomes what we do.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

Lawmakers in Lansing are moving aggressively to address Michigan’s K-12 literacy crisis with multiple pieces of legislation that target training for teachers, retention for struggling third graders, and consequences for teacher preparation programs.

The legislative action comes as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made addressing literacy a priority for 2026, her last year in office. During her State of the State address last month, Whitmer detailed steps already underway to improve literacy and recommendations in her budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. Among them is additional money she wants to invest in high-impact literacy tutoring, high-quality curriculum, literacy training for teachers, and hiring of literacy coaches.

“This is a serious problem,” Whitmer said in the address. “Our kids deserve better.”

Just 38.9% of third graders were proficient on the English language arts portion of the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress last year. It was the lowest performance of third graders in the exam’s 11-year history, Chalkbeat and Bridge Michigan reported.

On the national front, just 24% of Michigan fourth graders were proficient in 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, an exam known as the “nation’s report card.” That compares to 30% being proficient nationally. Michigan students’ performance has been stagnant and declining even as other states that have invested heavily in early literacy have improved. Michigan now ranks 44th in the nation for fourth-grade reading on the NAEP.

This isn’t the first time Michigan lawmakers have taken aim at the state’s challenges with literacy. In 2016, fueled by similarly troubling test results in reading, lawmakers passed a Read by Grade 3 law that required early intervention, the hiring of literacy coaches, and the retention of third graders struggling to reade. The retention rule has since been rescinded. Ten years since that broad effort, Michigan’s student literacy problem continues.

Here are the literacy initiatives being considered in Michigan

would require that by the 2031-32 school year, all K-5 educators who provide, support, or oversee instruction, including in literacy, must have been , which refers to a body of knowledge that emphasizes phonics along with building vocabulary and background knowledge. The bill doesn’t specify a specific training program, but says the current training being encouraged for Michigan teachers — Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS — meets the requirements of the legislation.

would require that, beginning Sept. 30, 2027, an individual seeking a teaching certificate in Michigan must have completed a teacher preparation program that included training in the science of reading.

would bring back the third-grade retention policy Michigan previously had in place. The bill would require struggling third graders, who would be identified based on their state test scores, repeat the grade. There would be some “good cause” exemptions, such as for students with disabilities whose educational plan team leader exempts them from the requirement. Michigan’s previous third-grade retention law, which went into effect during the 2020-21 school year, was rescinded in 2023 when Democrats controlled the legislature and the governor’s office. They argued the law was punitive and wasn’t working.

During a Wednesday hearing of the House Education and Workforce committee, Rep. Nancy DeBoer, a Republican from Holland who chairs the committee, said reading gives children the independence to pick up a book and go anywhere.

“Unless you’re in the state of Michigan and you’re three-quarters of the students in eighth grade who can’t read or do math in a competent manner,” she said. “That is a tragedy we are responsible for.”

DeBoer introduced the bipartisan bill that would make training in the science of reading a requirement for K-5 teachers.

The state has funded LETRS training, but thus far hasn’t made it a requirement. In September, the State Board of Education urged that it become a mandate for all K-5 teachers, saying the lack of one “has led to inconsistent participation of Michigan educators and inconsistent access to instruction based on the science of reading for Michigan’s students.”

The science of reading also figures prominently in a bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Tim Kelly, a Republican from Saginaw Township. He described the bill as “a long overdue rescue mission for the next generation of Michigan’s workers, citizens, and leaders.”

Kelly said Wednesday that teacher preparation programs that don’t equip teachers with the tools needed to teach children to read have forfeited their right to operate in Michigan.

“We must stop subsidizing failure,” Kelly said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Everywhere House Speaker Kyle Hilbert goes, the topic of childhood literacy follows.

Hilbert, R-Bristow, said improving Oklahoma’s elementary reading scores is “top of the agenda for me,” and he’s been telling everyone who will listen.

“Every single event that I’m asked to go to or every single question that I’m asked where it’s economic development, tourist-related, you name it, I talk about reading because it applies to everything,” he told news reporters last month.

Early literacy has risen to the top of state lawmakers’ priorities for their 2026 legislative session, generating discussions and disagreement across the state about what policy changes and resources are necessary to improve children’s reading levels.

Only 27% of Oklahoma public school students scored at their grade level or higher on state reading tests last school year. A ranking of drew widespread public attention to Oklahoma’s ongoing struggles.

Legislators have discussed in literacy programs, but the single most dramatic change — and the most concrete reading policy idea that has emerged at the state Capitol — would be retaining struggling readers in third grade.

Republican leaders have pointed to third-grade retention as a clear solution for Oklahoma’s , but educators and parents said they’re less convinced.

Hilbert’s legislation would require students who score below a basic level in reading to repeat third grade. It also would promote earlier interventions, like summer tutoring, small-group lessons and optional retention in younger grades.

“We know if we pass this bill we will have better education outcomes,” Hilbert told a House education subcommittee in February. “That is a fact. It’s backed by science. It’s backed by data. It’s backed by research. It’s backed by evidence of what other states have done. We know what will happen if we pass this. We just have to have courage to do that.”

Research indicates retaining a student in elementary school leads to a , but retained students face a and .

Parents voice concerns over retention policy

Republican lawmakers and have pointed to Mississippi, with its strict retention requirement and improved reading scores, as a success story to emulate.

Mississippi has surpassed the national average in fourth-grade reading proficiency after on literacy initiatives and reading coaches, along with retaining its lowest-performing third-grade readers.

Oklahoma implemented similar third-grade requirements in the 2013-14 school year and by 2015-16 among early elementary grades.

School districts at the time said the retentions were necessary to prepare students for the high-stakes third-grade reading test.

The policy became unpopular among parents and educators, who complained the state placed far too much consequence on the results of one annual reading test. Lawmakers progressively for children to avoid being held back. They altogether in 2024.

Parents don’t want to return to high-stakes testing, said Wendy Hardwick, president of the Oklahoma Parent Teacher Association.

Hardwick’s twin daughters were in third grade when Oklahoma last had strict retention laws. They had already repeated first grade, and two years later, their reading skills were strong, she said. That didn’t stop them from feeling “scared to death” that a poor testing performance would hold them back again in third grade, she said.

Hardwick, who worked in public schools as a long-term substitute and later in special education, recalled the school environment was “stressful and palpable” during state testing time.

“What (students) understand is that they’re going to take this test, and if they don’t pass it, they’re going to have to take third grade again,” she said. “It’s hard to see kids of that age being put under that type of pressure.”

Senate Minority Leader Julia Kirt, D-Oklahoma City, had similar worries for her son, who was in pre-K when the retention law first passed.

Like Hardwick’s children, Kirt’s son repeated first grade. It worked out well, she said, but she feared a poor standardized test result would hold him back a second, more damaging time.

“I was pretty nervous about it, and knowing my educators didn’t have much say in it concerned me,” she said. “Our classroom educator the year my son was in third grade said, ‘I know he can read. I’ve talked to him about it. I watch him read. He tells me he knows. We have no idea if he will show that on a standardized test.’”

Broken Arrow parent Kristine Chambers said her daughter in second grade already reads above her grade level and tests well. An extra reading curriculum her daughter received in pre-K through Broken Arrow Public Schools set her up for success today, Chambers said.

Boosting early literacy instruction should be lawmakers’ focus, she said, rather than having students repeat a grade.

“I think that instead of focusing so hard on this retention, maybe put that focus into funding for new programs, new ideas for early childhood literacy, so that we have that good base,” Chambers said. “Obviously, there’s going to be students that learn at different speeds, but I think that if we have a really good, strong reading support and intervention early, we can not have the retention possibility at third grade.”

The state’s poor reading scores demonstrate not enough schools are intervening sufficiently when young readers are struggling, Hilbert said.

That’s why his would require schools to offer summer tutoring, small-group instruction and other services. Mandatory retention “forces that accountability” for schools to take action and communicate with parents earlier, he said.

Teaching quality comes to forefront

Public school teachers have voiced disagreements, not with the concept of retention, but with doing so in third grade.

Students learn the foundations of reading in earlier grades, so the sooner a student is retained, the better, if it’s absolutely necessary, said Cari Elledge, the president of the Oklahoma Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union.

“If you wait until third grade, it might be too late,” said Elledge, a former elementary teacher. “That’s really what we’re hearing from our educators across the state, is we do support this, but if there was any way that we could shift it back a little bit to pre-K, kindergarten, first grade, that would be more beneficial.”

Republican legislators and business leaders have framed backing off of tough retention laws as the start of Oklahoma’s downturn in education rankings. But, other key factors have impacted public schools since that time.

Oklahoma experienced some of the and an . Public schools in Oklahoma now employ and over 800 uncertified adjunct instructors, both of which used to be a rarity in the state.

“When we talk about watering down things, we’ve also watered down certification and licensure, and that has been a dramatic change to public education in the state of Oklahoma,” Elledge said.

The state Legislature has steadily increased public school funding since then, though Oklahoma in per-pupil spending.

Sen. Adam Pugh, who leads the Senate Education Committee, said as lawmakers invest more dollars in public schools, they’re aware Oklahoma’s teacher workforce is now younger, less experienced and more reliant on emergency certified educators.

That’s why measures to recruit and retain more teachers, including raising teacher salaries by $2,500, doubling college scholarship funds for aspiring educators, growing a statewide team of reading coaches and adding millions of dollars to support literacy instruction in public schools.

“I also think when it comes down to it, it’s not about the curriculum,” said Pugh, R-Edmond. “It’s about the individual that’s in front of the classroom every day, and so preparing that individual to go teach kids to learn how to read, I think, is really important.”

Oklahoma City schools show improvement in early readers

Test scores were already on the decline when disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic . Scores then from 2022 to 2024.

As districts seek to claw their way back up, Oklahoma City Public Schools has found a reason for optimism this school year. Winter benchmark testing showed nearly a quarter of the district’s first graders had more than a full academic year of growth in a semester of learning.

If more first graders show accelerated growth now, more will be on track to read proficiently by fourth grade, Oklahoma City Superintendent Jamie Polk said.

A major factor in that growth has been the addition of an extra reading curriculum on top of the district’s core literacy instruction, district leaders said in a March school board meeting. The extra curriculum more explicitly covers phonics and phonemic awareness, two concepts that are essential to sounding out words.

Classrooms that showed the most growth had another key element, Polk told Oklahoma Voice. They had teachers who were trained through content-specific professional development.

“What we have found that works more than anything is … teacher clarity — teachers understanding exactly this is what the students need to know and be able to do, but also when our students can articulate what they need to know and be able to do,” Polk said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

“It’s something that the students are very, very proud of,” said librarian Annelise Rodriguez, who created and manages the Millionaires Club. “We’ve had kids come in when they take tours and say, ‘I’m going to be up there some day.’ Some kids get it in 45 books, and for others, it’s taken 360 books.”

The project was created three years ago to motivate and recognize young avid readers in the of roughly 600 students. Just a few weeks ago, a grandmother who didn’t speak English bowed her head to thank Rodriguez after her grandchild’s photo finally made the display. 

Last year, Windsor Park students read 400 million words as part of the Millionaires Club. They are on track to beat that record, with over 315 million words read by the end of February. It’s one of the ways the school has attained its high reading proficiency rates, an achievement that earned its ranking on The 74’s Bright Spots list. The highlighted schools have third grade literacy scores that are much higher than might be expected, based on the schools’ poverty rates. 

With its 29% poverty level, nearly two-thirds of Windsor Park third graders were projected to be proficient in reading in 2024, but its actual score was 96%. That rate jumped to 99% last year. Nearly 50% of students are Hispanic, 29% are white and 15% are Asian. 

Windsor Park is a magnet school for gifted and talented children. Texas schools to screen their students, and all children in the Corpus Christi Independent School District who score in the top 3% receive an invitation to transfer to Windsor Park, said Principal Kimberly Bissell. Transportation is provided. 

The consists of multiple tests that grade students’ achievement in reading and math, as well as problem-solving and critical thinking abilities. Students can transfer in any grade to Corpus Christi’s gifted and talented schools.  

Windsor Park is also the district’s only elementary school. The worldwide educational program allows teachers to write their own curriculum and offer rigorous instruction along with inquiry-based learning.

“We have kids who are in first grade reading at a middle school or high school level,” Bissell said. “Those things have always been true, but the initiative behind their personal achievement has certainly ramped up in the last few years with our new approaches.”

The Millionaires Club, which is expanding to other schools in the 33,000-student district, is one of them. The number of words children read are tracked through Accelerated Reader, an online program that records finished books and comprehension. 

Windsor Park also recently launched a called “thinking classrooms.” Originally created for math education, it students working in small groups, solving problems while standing up at whiteboards and building on pieces of knowledge as they go. But Bissell said Windsor Park implemented this approach across all its classes. 

It especially improved students’ writing skills because the children use the whiteboards to organize text and story structure, she said. 

In Hanna Patton-Elliott’s third grade classroom on a recent morning, students became “doctors,” pulling on blue medical gloves before separating into groups of two or three. Each group had to assess a passage of text on a whiteboard — the “patient” — by finding the main idea. The children then diagnosed their “patients” by writing a conclusion for what the passage was about.

Patton-Elliott said that at the end of the class, students rotate and evaluate one another’s work as “attending doctors” — the staff who oversee the work of a medical team. 

“I’m going to give them an opportunity to write the conclusions for other people’s work, but then also go back and look at it as the first attending doctor,” she said. “So we’ve got lots of things going on. We’ve got some reading skills, we’ve got the main idea, we’ve got organization, but then also we’ve got some creative writing, too. The metaphor seems to be working for breaking this down and organizing it.”

The activity is part of the curricular materials written by Windsor Park teachers under the International Baccalaureate program. Teachers create their grade-level curriculum together to ensure that the same lessons — such as finding the main idea of a story — are taught in each classroom, even if the activities may be different. Because Windsor Park classes are interdisciplinary, teachers try to connect the same ideas in all academic subjects, so what the children learn in reading, for example, is referenced in math class.

Much of Windsor Park’s instruction uses standards from the Texas Education Agency, but infuses it with student-led learning and group collaboration. The curriculum also allows children to make decisions and manage their own instruction, such as choosing the grading rubrics for an activity. 

“We find not just for gifted learners, but as a best practice, this idea of choice and student agency really builds writing, as well as reading and everything that English Language arts envelopes,” Bissell said. “When you offer choice with expectations, they do a lot better.”

Members unanimously approved the legislation, another sign that improving reading outcomes is a goal shared by both Republicans and Democrats. 

“This is how I learned how to read in the 1960s,” said Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia. “When implemented correctly, the science of reading has been proven to help children learn to read and to write more effectively.”

The bill defines the science of reading as instruction that teaches phonics and phonemic awareness, and also builds vocabulary, fluency, comprehension and writing skills. The legislation would prohibit grantees from allowing , the practice of prompting students to identify words based on pictures or other clues in a sentence. The bill now moves to the full House.

“We should not be using federal literacy funds to promote discredited approaches to literacy,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley of California, a former Republican now running for reelection as an independent. 

The committee’s passage of the bill follows a before House appropriators in which both Democrats and Republicans the growth in reading outcomes in southern states like Mississippi and Alabama and asked experts how to spread that progress more broadly. The House proposal, however, is not the only effort underway to revamp the long-running Comprehensive Literacy Development Grant program. Some advocates say updated legislation should also require schools receiving grant funds to screen children for reading difficulties, inform parents whether their children are reading below grade level and assign reading coaches to low-performing schools.

“If we’re going to update it, let’s do it right,” said Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the National Parents Union’s Center for Policy and Action. She expects that a Senate plan would also ensure that teacher preparation programs follow the science of reading. “Let’s actually check in on whether teacher preparation programs are doing right by kids and using the most recent research.”

The nonprofit will dig further into those issues next week at on Capitol Hill featuring leaders from Tennessee and the District of Columbia, both of which have implemented reading reforms, like pointing districts to and providing to teachers on how students learn to read. 

An ‘implementation war’

Experts welcome Congress’ interest in the issue. But broad agreement that students need phonics-based instruction doesn’t mean the debate over the best way to teach reading is settled.

There’s still a reading war, but not between the phonics and whole language camps, said Karen Vaites, a literacy advocate who highlights lessons on reading reform from states that have seen growth on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

Now, she said, there’s an “implementation war.”

“Everybody agrees on phonics, but how much phonics? How much instructional time should it get?” she asked. “Do you do teacher training first or do you do curriculum paired with teacher training?”

Another proposal under consideration would require the U.S. Department of Education to reserve 10% of the grant awards for states whose fourth grade reading scores on NAEP rank in the lowest 25% for two consecutive administrations of the test. Vaites questioned whether such states would make the best use of the funds. 

“I worry a lot about throwing dollars toward the people that by demonstration have the least leadership capacity,” she said.  

, part of a 2010 federal budget agreement, was the first iteration of the state literacy grant program. , tracking awards to 11 states in 2017, found that not all states directed funds toward the highest poverty schools or used the money to buy reading programs based on research. Overall, the study found no significant differences in reading performance between schools that received the funds and those that didn’t, but there were small positive effects in Louisiana and Ohio. 

Striving Readers preceded the Comprehensive Literacy State Development grants, . But the program hasn’t been revised in a decade. Smith, with the National Parents Union, said the program should reflect the latest knowledge about what’s working in classrooms. 

“We’ve learned a ton about the science of reading,” she said.

Kari Kurto, national director of policy and partnerships for the Reading League, a national nonprofit promoting the science of reading, said the grant program is important because it’s one of the only ways state education agencies “can truly influence” what happens in classrooms. She said she appreciates that the bill includes her suggestion that instruction should also support students’ oral language skills. 

“This legislation will go a long way toward solidifying our nation’s commitment to evidence-based literacy instruction,” she said. “As a Democrat, I am so thrilled to see this movement finally receiving the bipartisan support we always dreamed of.”

Concerns over local control

While every state has taken some action to improve reading instruction, recent examples in two states show that concerns remain over one-size-fits-all approaches.

California passed a reading reform bill last year, but not before lawmakers agreed to that kept the state from mandating teacher training and state-approved curricula. The California Teachers Association said an earlier version of the bill would have interfered with local control and worried the plan overemphasized phonics at the expense of other literacy skills.

In Massachusetts, and object to portions of “that attempt to legislate the specific curriculum that schools would be expected to purchase and implement.” The is also opposed.

Any federal legislation won’t delve into specific reading programs. prohibits it, but Vaites said there are still ways to strengthen the grant program.

“I think we’re all trying to figure out the mechanism that is going to hold state leaders accountable in a way that isn’t just sprinkling dollars around,” she said. 

While working as a long-term substitute teacher in a Cheyenne high school not long ago, retired reading specialist Gay Wilson taught a junior who was reading at a second-grade level. 

The school district had identified the student for an individualized education program and had provided additional support for years, she said. Despite that, “he had just never gotten the correct reading instruction” because teachers used a recently debunked method called Balanced Literacy to teach him, she recalled.

“Here’s a kid who’s going to graduate this year, and he’s going to get a diploma, but he’s probably going to be reading at a third-grade level,” Wilson said. 

And his story? “It’s common across the state.”

Anecdotes like these motivated Wilson to trek to the Wyoming Capitol every day of this session, where she and fellow literacy advocate Kari Roden took a crash course in lobbying. They tracked down legislators, handed out data sheets, quashed rumors and bent the ear of any lawmaker who would listen. They were among a loose collection of parents, guardians and educators who, unlike the professional lobbyists crowding the halls, were not there on behalf of a client. 

“It was a battle every day,” Roden recalled.

Their work paid off Friday when Gov. Mark Gordon signed  into law. 

The bill aims to ensure that every K-12 Wyoming student develops strong language and literacy skills and that struggling readers do not fall through the cracks. It will establish an evidence-based system of instruction, intervention and professional development to provide teachers, families and students with comprehensive and effective tools for teaching reading. The bill also addresses deficiencies and aims to bring all Wyoming districts in line. 

“Reading is the foundation for every child’s success in school and in life,” Gordon said in a statement to WyoFile. “Senate File 59 keeps the focus where it should be, on Wyoming students.”

Wilson and Roden, of course, were there to see Gordon ink his name on the bill.  

“It’s just such a win for Wyoming children,” Wilson said. 

While the signing is only one action, advocates say it’s a monumental step in the effort to ensure children no longer get left behind to face the long-term uphill battles linked with low literacy skills, such as higher rates of incarceration and less economic mobility.

“It’s a historic day,” said Annie McGlothlin, whose own experience with a dyslexic grandchild led to her co-found an organization called WYO Right to Read. 

“You might think passing the law would be the end, but really it is the beginning,” McGlothlin continued. “So here we go.”

A long time coming

A group encompassing teachers, lawmakers, the University of Wyoming, literacy advocacy organizations and others has worked for nearly a decade to overhaul and improve how Wyoming teaches children to read. In that time, literacy instruction has emerged as a nationwide issue as American reading scores tick down. While Wyoming continues to rank comparatively high in national testing, literacy challenges are evident.

In 2024, 36% of the state’s fourth graders and 29% of eighth graders performed at or above the proficient level in reading on national standardized NAEP tests, lower than the previous five years. (2024 is the most recent year for which NAEP data is available.) Categories include below basic, basic, proficient and advanced. 

Some 32% of Wyoming fourth graders performed below basic levels, which was a slight increase from 29% in 2022. For eighth graders, 30% scored below basic levels in 2024, up one percentage point from 2022.

As  have shifted how the literacy field views reading instruction, many states have passed legislation to ensure evidence-based learning instruction is available to all students. 

Wyoming’s version resulted largely from the work of a literacy subcommittee with input from stakeholders including parents and educators focused on better identification and treatment of conditions like dyslexia. Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder made literacy review a top priority after she was elected in 2022, creating a cabinet of 40 elementary and secondary teachers that had input on the bill draft.

The Legislature’s Joint Education Committee finalized the draft over the legislative off-season. 

Once it hit the session, . 

Citing heavy constituent concern from educators, some wondered if the implementation would pile unnecessary professional development burdens on the already heavy workload of teachers. Others made efforts to limit it to K-6 or worried it would diminish local control. 

“I don’t think anyone that is opposing this bill is saying that literacy isn’t fundamentally important,” said Casper Republican Rep. Julie Jarvis during floor debate on the third reading of the bill. “What is being said is maybe this isn’t the right way to go about it … I’m not sure that this bill does what we think it does.”

Rep. Landon Brown, R-Cheyenne, argued that the benefits of passing it far outweigh any reasons to hold off any longer. Literacy has been an interim topic for seven years, Brown noted. 

“I wholeheartedly understand the plight of the teachers,” he said. “But … ladies and gentlemen, it is about the kids.”

Improved literacy can help stanch mental health problems, avoid bad outcomes and address an issue of high school graduates ill-prepared for college or the workforce, other House proponents said. 

“We have a responsibility to make sure that when these kids are leaving our K-12 education, they are as equipped as they can possibly be to go on, if they so choose, to an institute of higher learning,” Speaker of the House Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, said. Wyoming post-secondary institutions are reporting alarming rates of incoming freshmen who need remedial education, he said, and that doesn’t speak to the students who don’t attend college. 

Cheyenne Republican Rep. Steve Johnson worked in a trade that required the ability to read and comprehend highly technical manuals, he told his fellow legislators. 

“In my trade, I found a disproportionate number of young men who had high school diplomas, who were practically functionally illiterate,” he said. “It’s very important that we provide for these older students the tools they need to propel them into a highly technical future.”

The House ultimately passed the bill, which it amended to loosen some teacher licensure requirements. Between the two chambers, SF 59 received 76 ayes and 15 nays on final readings. 

Personal stories

When 11-year-old Paul Pine died by suicide in 2023, his mother, Chandel Pine, initially resisted talking publicly about it. But Paul had severe reading difficulties, and the more she learned about literacy, she said, the more she realized that speaking out could help others.

Urged by her son’s former tutor, Pine testified to the Legislature. That led her into the literacy world, where she started  that has provided dyslexia screening and support to nearly 60 students. 

Many of her fellow advocates have personal stories that opened their eyes and led them into the work. Stories of children whose learning disabilities went undetected, of parents hiring costly tutors, switching schools and engaging in lawsuits against school districts. 

While 58 students is an achievement, she said Friday, the bill represents an opportunity for system-wide change, which will have bigger ripples.

Megan Hesser, Pine’s former tutor, wishes the bill was stronger in some areas, but said “it’s still a huge win.”

Hesser, who began lobbying in 2020, can’t help but think about the students who suffered unnecessarily in the meantime, she said. 

“How many kids have we lost and left behind in the six years it’s taken us to get here?” she asked.

This was originally published on .

���Ի徱���Բ�’s is officially on the books, pending a few final signatures.

The State Board of Education on Wednesday voted unanimously to formally adopt the new statewide model, locking in a that state officials said better reflects student progress, literacy and post-graduation readiness.

“This has been something that has been a long time coming,” said Katie Jenner, ���Ի徱���Բ�’s secretary of education. “Many, many stakeholders around Indiana weighed in.”

after Indiana dismantled its previous accountability framework and rewrote high school graduation requirements. Schools have been without a grading system in the interim while the replacement model was in development.

The rule now heads to state Attorney General Todd Rokita, who has 45 days to sign off, and then to Gov. Mike Braun for final approval.

“This model values academic outcomes as well as skills and experiences. It’s so much more than just creating a robot who can memorize things,” said Paul Ketcham, assistant secretary of education. “It is a very granular model. Every student will have the opportunity to grow, and it’s our responsibility to grow them.”

“In 49 other states, it’s an accountability rule,” Ketcham said. “In Indiana, it’s a roadmap for schools and students and families to be successful.”

A familiar framework — with a rebuild

Indiana schools will continue to receive single-letter grades — A, B, C, D or F — under the new system, but those grades will now be calculated in a fundamentally different way.

Rather than relying primarily on schoolwide averages and standardized test scores, the new framework assigns points student by student. Jenner and other education officials have described it as a model in which schools earn credit for each individual student based on a combination of academic proficiency, growth and additional “success indicators” that vary by grade span.

Those student-level scores are averaged within separate grade bands — elementary, middle and high school — and combined into one overall A-F grade for each school.

The model was intentionally designed to move beyond an “all-or-nothing” approach and incorporate multiple measures while keeping academic mastery central, particularly reading and math in the early grades, according to a .

“No longer does an indicator encourage schools to dismiss certain students that might be way behind,” said Ron Sandlin, senior director of school performance and transformation for the Indiana Department of Education. “We fundamentally flipped the paradigm. Every student in a school generates points.”

At the high school level, the model more directly ties accountability to ���Ի徱���Բ�’s newly redesigned diplomas and diploma seals.

Graduation rate and SAT performance each make up 10% of a school’s grade-12 score, alongside measures tied to coursework, credentials, work-based learning and student engagement.

“What we’ve tried to do is understand the student in their entirety,” Jenner said. “So that they don’t get washed in simple numerator-denominator math that we’ve been doing for so long.”

Multiple education groups and other board members additionally voiced support during Wednesday’s meeting.

“This framework gives teachers the tools to celebrate and support success beyond a single test score,” said Rachel Hathaway, Indiana executive director at Teach Plus, a national nonprofit focused on education policy. “Accountability should not be about labeling schools. It should be about improving them.”

Todd Bess with the Indiana Association of School Principals emphasized that the new model “prioritizes student growth alongside proficiency.”

“It recognizes the progress schools make every day with students at all starting points. Moving up those that are below (proficiency). Those that are just about there — and then obviously, those that are still wildly proficient — keep moving them, too, and finding those success indicators,” Bess said. “Families and communities can better understand school performance … and what I like is we can say we’re going to add these things up. Every kid matters, and here’s the greatest outcome.”

A transition year before grades ‘count’

The new accountability system will roll out through a transition period Sandlin tagged “Year Zero,” which applies to the 2025-26 school year.

Letter grades for the current academic year will be calculated and publicly released under the new model, but they will be informational only and will not trigger any timelines or consequences tied to ���Ի徱���Բ�’s accountability laws.

Sandlin said that the goal is to give schools and communities time to understand the new calculations and respond before the grades formally carry weight. Year Zero, he said, is intended to “set a clear baseline” and provide families and schools with transparent information about where performance stands under the new system.

IDOE plans to begin sharing detailed performance data with schools later this year, followed by the public release of Year Zero grades.

“This is different than any past A-F years,” Sandlin said.

As part of the transition, the grading scale will also be temporarily adjusted. For Year Zero, an A grade will span 85 to 100, rather than the traditional 90 to 100 range.

Starting with the 2026-27 school year, letter grades will once again count for accountability purposes. At that point, the cutoff for an A will gradually increase over time, rising by 2.5 points in any year when at least 25% of schools earn an A, until it reaches a final target of 90 to 100.

State officials said the approach is intended to allow an initial transition period while steadily increasing rigor as schools improve under the new model.

Wednesday’s vote followed months of revisions and public feedback led by IDOE, as well as parallel negotiations with federal education officials over ���Ի徱���Բ�’s accountability obligations.

Jenner said the — which would give Indiana added flexibility in how it aligns accountability and funding — to avoid locking in a model that was still being revised.

The seeks permission from the federal government to overhaul how Indiana spends and tracks billions of dollars in education aid — a request that Hoosier officials said would align the state’s accountability system with federal law and allow more freedom in how schools use their funds.

Hoosiers officials specifically requested exemptions from multiple provisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, the federal law governing K-12 education, plus permission to combine funding from more than 15 federal education programs into a single “strategic block grant.”

The U.S. Department of Education has 120 days to review and respond to waiver applications once they’re received. ���Ի徱���Բ�’s was submitted in October, but the pause extends that timeline.

“We intentionally paused our federal waiver process as we were working through the final touches in our accountability model ….  in order to get this at the best place,” Jenner said. “We will unpause our waiver timeline shortly.”

“The fact that we’re doing this accountability work simultaneously as we’re working on our waiver has been a huge advantage to Indiana,” she said. “In addition to stakeholders in Indiana pushing us on some things, (federal officials) have also pushed us on some things. … A lot of people think policy work is threading the needle. We’ve had, like, multiple pieces of yarn.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

Policymakers in Washington are starting to pay attention. Last year, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon named “Evidence-Based Literacy” as her No. 1 academic priority. And this month, the House Appropriations Committee held a on the science of reading.

So what role should the federal government play in reading policy?

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as stealing the playbook from the best-performing states. The so-called “” states of Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama,and Louisiana have seen the biggest gains in recent years, and many states have tried to copy them with their own science of reading bills — to of success.

The federal government also has a record of big investments in reading not leading to improved outcomes. That’s at least partly because reading policy is tricky, given all the potential reasons a child may or may not understand the words on the page.

But that doesn’t mean federal leaders are helpless. They just need to find the right levers. Here are five potential ideas:

1. Create a new national reading panel

In 1997, Congress brought together a group of experts to “assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read.” After reviewing thousands of research articles, the group focused on five critical components of reading instruction — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

The document that came out of that work, the , became a foundational text for the field. But it’s now decades old, and researchers know a lot more today than they did back then. It would be useful to have an update and a new consensus document from an esteemed body of experts.

2. Expand the National Assessment of Educational Progress

The NAEP exams have been instrumental in documenting the extent of students’ challenges, but they don’t say much about the underlying reasons why kids are having such reading comprehension problems.

For example, on , 46% of fourth graders couldn’t accurately understand the meaning of the word “conform” in a passage from the book The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. Was it because they didn’t understand the question, didn’t know the meaning of the word “conform” or got misled in some other way?

Reading researchers like Hugh Catts have been raising the that most reading comprehension exams are not well equipped to pinpoint the reasons behind a student’s literacy mistakes. NAEP could take the lead here by introducing other types of assessments that seek to unpack the root causes of reading struggles, and how they might differ across age groups. 

For example, young students might get a phonics check like the one England administers to its 6-year-olds. Older students might benefit from an age-appropriate version of this, as researchers have found that even middle and high school students can struggle with complex words.

3. Give states flexibility on English Language Arts assessments

Building on the point above, the federal government currently requires states to administer their own reading or language arts assessments annually in grades 3 to 8 and once in high school. Right now, the states have all interpreted that requirement to mean that they must give generic reading comprehension tests.

But states could be given flexibility to interpret this differently. Educators might gain better insights into students’ reading challenges if they were tested on discrete skills like decoding, fluency and vocabulary, and comprehension questions were left to specific content areas like social studies and science. Louisiana attempted something like this a few years ago, but the feds could give states much more leniency to pursue this line of inquiry.

4. Nudge states on accountability

Congressional leaders probably don’t have much appetite to rewrite the Every Student Succeeds Act, which requires states to draft goals for student achievement and plans for holding schools accountable. But those original state plans were written nearly a decade ago, and conditions have changed (for the worse) since then. The Department of Education can’t force states to revisit their plans if they don’t want to, but it could signal that it would be open to letting states amend them in light of the declines of the last decade, especially among the lowest-performing students.

5. Empower parents with information

Despite their best intentions, schools are not good at helping students who fall behind in reading catch up. According to the from Amplify’s DIBELS early literacy screener, just 49% of students who start kindergarten well behind in reading get on track by the end of third grade. And the odds get worse every year that schools wait. Last year, among third graders who were far behind at the beginning of the term, just 5% caught up by the end of the year.

Thanks to , parents already have access to their child’s education records, but only if they request them. To bring greater urgency to this issue, Congress could require schools to inform parents when their child is behind in reading and to work with families to develop specific improvement plans.

If reading scores are a crisis, policymakers should treat it accordingly. But they also have to be realistic in accepting that there’s only so much they can do, and that part of the decline in performance can be traced back to the fact that kids aren’t reading for pleasure as often as they used to — and are adults.

So one way to improve literacy scores is for education leaders at all levels to talk about the importance of reading. People who read a lot tend to know more about the world, and people who know more about the world tend to succeed in many aspects of life. That’s not exactly a policy change, but leadership can shape behavior to make knowledge — and reading — cool again. 

But new studies bolster the evidence that done well, virtual models can be just as effective at moving students forward as face-to-face instruction.

In Massachusetts, first graders who spent 15 minutes a day online with a tutor from stayed on track a year later without additional tutoring, according to exclusively with The 74. Students gained, on average, at least five additional months of learning over their expected growth. 

Another virtual program, , produced positive results for the lowest-performing students in the Kansas City, Missouri, schools. Students who received one-on-one tutoring from certified teachers made greater progress than those who didn’t receive the extra help, .��

“Virtual models are getting stronger,” said Amanda Neitzel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the Ignite Reading study. “If you go back just a few years, we had no examples of evidence-proven models and now we are getting them.”

In addition to following Ignite Reading for two years, she recently published a study showing that elementary school students in Texas and Louisiana who received virtual tutoring from , outperformed their peers and gained nearly three additional months of learning.

Results like those have broadened the conversation about how to bring students who are missing critical reading skills up to speed. 

“Tutoring can work in many ways and in different settings,” Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, said earlier this month at the nonprofit’s annual conference. 

When the organization began funding tutoring research four years ago, there were doubts, he said, about whether virtual programs could compete with in-person models. There’s more confidence in online versions now, but as with tutoring in general, progress depends on whether providers feature the components of a high-dosage program — meaning they were offered for roughly 90 minutes a week, during the school day with a trained tutor. Ensuring kids get all the tutoring hours a program is designed to deliver is also key.

“We obsess over student attendance,” said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, Ignite Reading’s founder. Now in 24 states, the program focuses on building phonics skills and reading fluency.

In the Johns Hopkins Ignite Reading study, which focused on 13 Massachusetts school districts, 85% of students who mastered foundational reading skills “during the crucial first grade window” were still keeping up at the end of second grade, Neitzel wrote. But if students didn’t meet expectations on time, they couldn’t catch up. Some were just too far behind.

“Many kids start our program still not knowing basic kindergarten skills, like letter names and sounds,” Sliwerski said. That means tutors have two years of content to get through.

To Sliwerski, the findings demonstrate that third grade, when many states decide whether students are strong enough readers to advance, is too late to intervene. If kids struggle to decode unfamiliar words, they won’t be able to comprehend more complex reading assignments. 

“We are so caught up in ‘reading by grade three’ that we aren’t honoring that kids are actually supposed to have fully cracked the code and be able to fluently read grade-level text at the end of first grade,” she said. “We act like kids have all the time in the world, when they don’t.” 

The 5,700-student Chelsea Public Schools was among the Massachusetts districts using Ignite Reading as part of a project funded by One8, a nonprofit that helped schools get high-dosage tutoring off the ground. The state the program.  

At first, “our teachers were a little skeptical,” said Superintendent Almi Abeyta, a former kindergarten and first grade teacher. “They were like, ‘We just got off of remote learning. Why are we going to put kids on a computer again?’ ” 

Then they saw the data. Students made similar gains on DIBELS, a widely used early literacy assessment, whether they were Black, Hispanic, English learners or had a disability, the study found.

‘A great opportunity’

Results like those are why the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District, near San Diego, California, is now spreading the program to all of its elementary schools as part of its First Grade Promise initiative. 

In a pilot, Fallbrook STEM Academy, which serves a high-poverty population, enrolled 20 second graders in the program. Many of the students speak Spanish at home, didn’t attend preschool and lack access to books, flash cards and other early reading materials, said Principal Ana Arias. She called each parent to ask that they get their children to school a little early so they could meet with a tutor.

“I phrased it as an opportunity — a great opportunity — but I needed their commitment,” Arias said. “We have so many kids in the classroom and there’s so much need. It’s very rare to have a teacher meet one-on-one with a student every single day.” 

At the beginning of this school year, the 20 students were reading at a kindergarten level. By November, 19 had advanced to a first grade level, and she’s hoping they’ll be on par with their peers by the end of the school year. 

‘Transcend time zones’ 

The latest findings build on those that Harvard University and City University of New York researchers published last year. Whether tutoring is remote or in-person, , matters less than whether the tutor is well qualified and students attend sessions regularly.

Virtual models even have some advantages over in-person programs, experts say. Schools have to pay an in-person tutor whether or not the student is present. But virtual programs “transcend time zones,” Sliwerski said, and can redeploy a tutor to meet with another student.  

If the tutor is absent, “we have a substitute ready to go,” she said. “The technology underpinning the program ensures the child receives the exact lesson they were supposed to get.”

In Kansas City, consistency was key to the strong results. Students in first through fourth grade across 14 schools met with their tutors for 30-minute sessions at least three times a week for 20 weeks during the 2024-25 school year. The more sessions completed, the stronger the growth. Some students gained more than two months of additional learning and were less likely to be placed in special education. 

On average, the students who participated in the Hoot program and those in the comparison group began the school year two grade levels behind. While many are still struggling readers, their progress was significant, said Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.

“This wasn’t a boutique pilot,” she said. “It’s tutoring operating inside a district system that is messy, and it still proved to be effective.”

The district had to contend with technical glitches and unexpected snow days that forced students to miss some sessions.

Not all virtual programs have been able to overcome disruptions. 

In a large suburban district in Texas, some students meeting with virtual tutors during the 2021-22 school year did worse in reading than their peers who didn’t receive the intervention. Scheduling conflicts, like school assemblies, and tutor turnover, contributed to the disappointing results.

‘A higher bar’

Those challenges grow even more complex in the middle grades with electives and block schedules where students don’t have the same classes every day. But Rahul Kalita, co-founder of Tutored by Teachers, said maintaining relationships between tutors and students is essential. 

He hopes to contribute to the research base on virtual tutoring by participating in a randomized controlled study, funded by Accelerate and focused on math in two large Indianapolis middle schools. 

“It felt like the right opportunity to test our model under a higher bar of rigor,” he said.

On top of virtual programs refining their practices, districts, he said, “have also become more sophisticated buyers of tutoring.” Multiple districts across the country pay providers higher rates if students make measurable progress or pass state tests. 

In addition, there’s growing agreement that literacy tutoring, whether virtual or not, is more effective if it’s part of a strong early reading program that includes a curriculum based on the science of reading and screening students for dyslexia or other learning difficulties. 

“You can’t throw tutoring at the problem,” Sliwerski said at the Accelerate conference. “It has to be part of a very intentional system.”

Then, we did a similar project looking for positive outliers in middle school math. There was Worcester again, leading all of Maryland.

So it came as no surprise when we did a follow-up reading analysis last year, this time looking for exceptional individual schools, that three of Worcester’s five elementary schools made our Bright Spots list. In fact, Worcester’s high-poverty Pocomoke Elementary made our Top 5 list, beating the odds for its kids — posting proficiency rates far higher than its average poverty level would suggest — by the biggest margins in Maryland. It wasn’t even particularly close.

In fact, when Thomas Hamill, Worcester’s coordinator of research, presented to the school board, even he was at a loss for words, saying, “To have the quantity of scores that we have, at the level that we have, with the poverty that we have, there is no [statistical] reason for us to be performing as high as we are. … We are doing the improbable in Worcester County.”

So what is Worcester doing differently?

It starts at the top. The district is led by hard-charging superintendent . Back in 2016, she was as the state’s high school principal of the year for leading a turnaround at Pocomoke High School. When we talked, she repeatedly brought the conversation back to building a culture of connection and belonging. While many school and district administrators might espouse similar ambitions, Wallace makes it concrete by expecting all principals to be able to walk into any classroom and know every student by name, as well as each one’s individual strengths and needs. That’s a high bar.

More unusually for a superintendent, Wallace knows the exact number of third graders in her district who were not proficient in reading last year — 133 — and she has set it as her goal to reduce that number to zero. When asked why, she pointed out that kids tend to fall behind over time and worried that those 133 kids who weren’t reading proficiently by third grade are, “more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to live in poverty and more likely to suffer food insecurity” as adults.

Worcester is not just a literacy story, but it is getting amazing results in early reading. So what can we learn from them? On the surface, Worcester’s might look pretty familiar. When I spoke with Cassidy Hamborsky, the district’s coordinator of instruction (who was also an – educator), she talked me through what a typical day might look like. In grades K-2, teachers devote 150 minutes per day to literacy, divided among 90 minutes of core instruction using Great Minds’ , 30 minutes to foundational phonics skills and 30 minutes for the 100 Book Challenge from the .

But what seems different about Worcester is its clarity of purpose. This comes out in a few ways. One, Hamborsky says the district is vigilant about protecting core instructional time for all kids. For example, they wouldn’t take a student away from that time for personalized help or even something like talking with a school counselor. Those things can happen during other parts of the day, but they don’t want any kid to miss out on the time dedicated to building vocabulary and language development.

Two, they are religious about giving kids lots of time to practice. This is mostly through the 100 Book Challenge. During the school day, kids are typically reading physical books that help them build phonics skills or engage in sustained independent reading. Students are expected to complete two 15-minute blocks of reading at school — and then read for 30 additional minutes per day at home. This regimen may vary based on the child’s age and skill level, but kids have to log what they read and then have their teacher or parent sign off.

Families, in fact, are the third key component of Worcester’s reading plan. At the beginning of the school year, they’re asked to sign a “home coach contract” saying that they will check and monitor their child’s reading. Throughout the year, kids are expected to read for half an hour at home five days a week. Over the course of a 180-day school year, that could add up to 900 extra minutes of practice.  

Four, Worcester’s reading instruction is both personalized and data-driven. Every district says it’s data-driven, and Worcester uses some of the same off-the-shelf reading assessments (such as and ) that other districts use. But what separates Worcester from others is that it uses student reading logs to track each kid’s progress. The teachers know exactly which books each child has read and whether kids are keeping up with their reading on a weekly and even daily basis. Teachers will also hold regular check-ins with students, ask them about their reading and even listen to them read aloud.

I suspect this last piece is one of the reasons Worcester sees such consistently strong results. For example, low-income students in the district outperform wealthier peers across the rest of Maryland.

But while Worcester has a lot to be proud of, I think the most enduring reason for its success is that it has leaders like Wallace and Hamborsky who continue to strive for better. Wallace, for example, told me she lies awake at night thinking about those 133 kids who aren’t proficient readers yet and what it will take to get them there. There’s a lot to learn from what Worcester has accomplished so far, but perhaps the biggest lesson is that its leaders don’t think they’re done. 

It begins with clapping syllables — to-ma-to, ba-na-na — with the children clapping along. The lesson then shifts to letters. A capital H appears on the whiteboard, followed by a lowercase h. The teacher models the sound. Children skywrite it in the air, then return to their desks to copy the letter across a line. Some do so carefully. Others hesitate, gripping their pencils too tightly, unsure where to begin.

Back to the rug. Now vowels. Him, stretched slowly. Back to desks again — this time to write nap. A few children stare at the page. One reverses the n. Another pauses at the p, pencil hovering.

No questions are asked.

No time is wasted.

Children return to the rug to compare ham and nap. Back to their desks once more to write a phrase: a pan. Back to the rug for flashcards: letter names, letter sounds, key words, then a phrase or two. Some letters have two sounds. Some children guess. Others stay silent. The lesson ends where it began: clapping syllables.

This entire 30-minute sequence is delivered with perfect fidelity. In the neighboring classroom, we observe the same words spoken. The pacing is precise. The script is followed. And yet, across the room, children’s faces tell a different story — not frustration exactly, but puzzlement. They are doing what they have been asked to do. They just don’t seem to know why.

Moments like these are easy to misread. It would be tempting to attribute what we observed to classroom management, to the quality of a particular lesson or to children’s readiness for kindergarten. Indeed, debates about early literacy often return to familiar explanations: uneven preparation in pre-K, insufficient “dosage” or children who simply are not ready.

But decades of research point to a different problem. What matters most for learning is not the strength of any single component, but how instructional expectations, opportunities and support are organized over time. When learning experiences come in a coherent sequence, understanding accumulates. When they do not, instruction can feel busy without being productive.

To be clear, this is not a call to slow down kindergarten or lower expectations. Kindergarten rightly reflects ambitious goals for children’s learning by the end of the year. The issue is not rigor, but sequencing. A coherent instructional system distinguishes between what children are expected to learn eventually and when they are given sustained opportunities to consolidate what they’re learning. When instructional demands accelerate too quickly, rigor can give way to fragmentation.

The problem, then, is not kindergarten itself, but a breakdown in alignment from pre-K to kindergarten. At kindergarten entry, this often arises when standards written as cumulative, end-of-year goals are treated as early instructional demands.

This framing challenges a dominant narrative in early childhood education. Much of the research on the pre-K–to–elementary transition has focused on the “fade-out” of the benefits of early education, implicitly locating the problem in children’s preparation or in instructional quality after pre-K. Far less attention has been paid to whether the transition itself is coherently designed — whether expectations, materials, pacing and assessments work together.

Why does this matter? Because the transition to kindergarten appears to affect children across the skill distribution: not only those who enter with lower scores, but also those who begin school performing relatively well. In a of over 800 children across 64 classrooms, researchers found that the transition itself was associated with changes in children’s academic and behavioral functioning, regardless of where children started. How children experience kindergarten is therefore not a short-term adjustment issue; it can shape educational trajectories for years to come.

Perhaps, then, instead of asking whether children are ready for kindergarten, educators should be asking whether early instructional systems are ready for children.

In early literacy, this question is especially urgent. Foundational skills are not acquired through brief exposure or rapid movement across tasks. They are built through repeated, connected practice. When expectations, materials and assessments move faster than children can reasonably integrate new learning, compliance can mask fragility.

On paper, the transition from pre-K to kindergarten often looks well aligned. In New York state, for example, early literacy standards reflect a sensible developmental progression. Pre-K standards emphasize broad print awareness, phonological sensitivity and early letter knowledge. Kindergarten standards build on these foundations, specifying more advanced expectations, such as consistent letter-sound knowledge and simple decoding, by the end of the year.

Viewed side by side, the standards themselves are not the problem.

The trouble begins when these end-of-year expectations are translated into curriculum materials, pacing guidance and early assessments. In many classrooms, children are asked within the first weeks of kindergarten to produce written words, coordinate vowel and consonant sounds, and move rapidly across multiple phonological and print-based tasks — before they have had sustained opportunities to consolidate underlying skills.

The result is a subtle but consequential shift: cumulative goals become entry-level demands.

For a child who is still learning the basics, this acceleration can make learning feel fragmented rather than cumulative. Tasks change quickly. Success depends on coordinating several emerging skills at once. Children may appear engaged and compliant, but their uncertainty is visible: in reversed letters, hesitant pencil strokes, guessing, or silence during group responses.

This is what structural incoherence looks like — not a dramatic mismatch, but a quiet misalignment between what children are expected to do and the opportunities they are given to get there.

When this pattern becomes routine, the risk is not that children are challenged — but that challenge outpaces learning. Compliance can mask confusion. Activity can replace accumulation. Kindergarten can begin to feel like a race before children have learned how to run.

The solution is not to retreat from rigor, but to design more coherent pathways to it. Kindergarten standards are cumulative by design; instructional systems should treat them that way. This means clarifying which skills are meant to be introduced early, which require sustained practice and which are intended to integrate later in the year.

It means reducing overload by limiting how many new demands children are asked to coordinate at once. And it means aligning early assessments to instructional timing. None of these shifts lowers expectations. They make rigor stick.

Kindergarten should be the place where reading begins to make sense — where sounds connect, words hold meaning and effort leads to understanding. When instructional systems move too fast, even well-intentioned reforms can work at cross-purposes, asking children to perform before they have had time to learn. The challenge before us is not whether to be ambitious, but whether we are willing to design systems that honor how learning actually unfolds.

If early literacy reforms are to deliver on their promise, coherence cannot be an afterthought. It must be the bridge that turns high standards into real understanding for every child.

My own state, Arkansas, is preparing to implement a key piece of its 2024 , which is modeled after legislation in Mississippi. This summer will be the first in Arkansas when third-graders will be retained if they are not reading proficiently. As expected, parents and educators are on edge and questions abound. The prospect of thousands of students being held back is generating lots of attention and anxiety. 

But as Arkansas moves to implement its version of the Mississippi law and other states look to emulate it, policymakers would be wise to consider what the research says about retention. In short, like everything else in education, there is no panacea for increasing student learning. Retention in and of itself is not going to singlehandedly raise literacy rates. The key to success in Mississippi was the supports the state provided before and after students were retained. 

�Ѿ���������������辱’s , passed in 2013, was a comprehensive K-3 reform law designed to ensure that all third graders read on grade level. Core elements included intensive professional development aligned with the science of reading, early identification of struggling readers, targeted intervention beginning well before grade three, deployment of state-funded literacy coaches and the retention of a small share of third graders who did not meet the reading benchmark.

As science of reading reforms expand nationwide and districts work to address pandemic-related learning losses, third-grade retention policies have become more common. As of 2024, have laws requiring promotion based on reading proficiency, and 13 additional states allow districts to retain students for this reason. Importantly, these laws typically are more generous in allowing exemptions than previous versions.

But while exemptions are often well-intentioned, suggests that, when broadly used, they can undermine policy effectiveness. Exemptions tend to reduce participation among the students who may benefit most from intensive intervention, including English learners who could benefit from extra help. The primary benefit of promotion-linked literacy policies is early detection paired with substantial supports, such as additional instruction, tutoring and coaching, before students reach third grade. So when exemptions are granted, they must be coupled with the same level of structured intervention Mississippi requires through individualized reading plans and intensive instruction.

Evidence from Mississippi helps clarify why retention alone is not the driver of literacy gains. In the first year of implementation, roughly 15% of the state’s third graders who scored below the promotion cutoff in the 2014-15 school year were retained, and among students just below the threshold, were held back. Yet fourth-grade scores began improving almost immediately, from 2013 to 2024, making Mississippi those children for reading and math gains during that time — well before retention could plausibly affect outcomes at scale. This timing strongly suggests that the gains were driven primarily by early identification, targeted intervention and intensive instructional support rather than by retention itself.

Importantly, Mississippi paired promotion decisions — whether retention or exemption — with structured, mandatory resources. Even students promoted via exemptions were required to have individualized reading plans, summer literacy programs and ongoing intervention. Survey and administrative evidence suggest that these promoted-but-still-supported students made meaningful reading gains, underscoring that the policy’s effectiveness hinged on the , not simply on whether students were retained.

Evidence from other states reinforces this point. In Florida, where third-grade retention has been studied extensively, outperformed exempted peers who did not two years later. This suggests that exemptions, when not paired with intensive intervention, can dilute policy effectiveness by allowing struggling readers to advance.

Survey evidence suggests that in part by the supplemental assistance provided to low-achieving students who were promoted via exemptions. By contrast, evidence from Florida shows that in reading two years later, indicating that exemptions were not consistently granted to those who would benefit most from promotion.

As Arkansas moves toward implementation, it would do well to consider not just �Ѿ���������������辱’s experience, but also Indiana’s, which saw the rubber meet on the road on retention more recently. students are repeating third grade after failing the state test or qualifying for an exemption. State leaders had expected to retain more, but passing rates on the reading assessment jumped nearly 5 points last school year, to just over 87%. Officials said the progress stemmed in part from the expansion of a statewide program, the Indiana Literacy Cadre, that focuses educators’ attention on research-based instructional methods. Participation increased from 41 schools in 2022 to more than 550 in 2025, and schools in the Literacy Cadre saw a 7-point increase in passing rates, compared with gains of 3.6 points at other schools. 

Arkansas can hope for similar outcomes of this year’s state tests. There is cause for optimism – when it comes to not just retention but the resources that come before these critical decisions, is more expansive and students have access to more assistance both at school and home (through a $1,500 grant to families for literacy tutoring). Secretary Jacob Oliva, who leads the state Department of Education released in January to ensure families are aware of their students’ standing and students are receiving ample supports both before and after the testing window.��

Across studies, the evidence is consistent: retention mandates alone do not drive literacy gains in isolation. only when retention is part of a that intervenes early and intensively. �Ѿ���������������辱’s experience demonstrates that it is the comprehensive series of interventions—  — that produces lasting improvement.

In one classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language: an exercise in labeling text features. Students defined the types of language and carefully annotated the text with examples of both kinds, concluding with a perfunctory discussion.

In the other classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language, but went further, grappling with what Neil Armstrong meant by “one giant leap for mankind” and connecting the famous phrase to the broader significance of the moon landing. The teacher engaged students by asking them if they, third graders firmly located on planet Earth, were part of the “mankind” of whom Armstrong spoke as he stepped onto the moon. The power of the text and the instruction echoed through that classroom.

Both teachers used the same high quality instructional materials. Only one truly supported students in building meaning. Across classrooms and districts, this pattern repeats, according to a.

In nearly two-thirds of 111 observed comprehension lessons, the work that students did supported only surface-level comprehension — a literal or task-oriented, partial understanding of the text that stops short of the deeper and fuller comprehension work readers need to engage in to succeed in later grades and beyond. Only 24% of lessons fostered robust comprehension, the kind that integrates literal and inferential understanding into a cohesive mental model of the text.

In other words: the curriculum is there. The materials are being used. But, in many classrooms, the meaning-making is missing.

SRI’s research focused on four large school districts that have implemented high quality curricula — including Core Knowledge Language Arts, Wit & Wisdom, and EL Education — for several years. Researchers surveyed 539 teachers who reported near-daily use of their district-adopted curriculum.

Students in these districts are reading and discussing knowledge-rich texts. On paper, this is what policymakers hoped for when states began recommending adoption of such curriculum.

But SRI also sent observers into classrooms in those four districts. The observations showed that teachers spent high proportions of class time on comprehension instruction, and that lessons featured many opportunities for student participation and highly engaged students. These findings represent the notable successes of the districts’ comprehension-focused curriculum implementation. But the comprehension instruction often stopped with the task — finding details, answering literal questions, naming text structures — without guiding students toward the bigger ideas and themes that define deep comprehension.

High quality instructional materials can lay the foundation for robust comprehension instruction. But they cannot deliver it on their own.

This is not just an instruction problem; it’s a systems problem. Curriculum designers, district leaders and instructional coaches may be unaware of the extent to which systemic practices determine the depth of comprehension instruction. SRI’s findings point to multiple well-meaning school and district forces that unintentionally nudge instruction toward the shallow end.

SRI researchers found narrow “standards-aligned,” “data-driven” approaches guiding teachers to focus on discrete skills and individual standards, despite the reality that comprehension standards are not individually measurable. There’s also insufficient teacher time spent discussing, analyzing and mastering the texts — and their content — as they prepare to teach knowledge-rich curriculum

Administrator classroom walkthrough observation rubrics and checklists often reward the most visible aspects of a comprehension lesson — posted objectives, student participation andx curricular materials in use — rather than what actually matters: Are students making meaning?

In short, well-intentioned systems may be signaling to teachers that addressing standards, completing tasks and tests, and simply using curriculum materials are the most important goals. But SRI’s findings suggest that these efforts might distract teachers from the true goal of teaching students to understand texts.  

SRI’s analysis of the 24% of observed lessons that did foster robust comprehension points to six teaching practices that matter. These practices include engaging students in text-specific analysis, modeling meaning-making, leveraging prior knowledge, providing instructive feedback, creating opportunities for text-based reasoning and structuring peer learning. These practices were more tightly correlated with robust comprehension — suggesting they could be steps toward how teachers might shift their practice toward that goal.

None of these are new ideas. Educators have talked for years about modeling, text-based evidence, and rich peer-to-peer discussion. What is new is the clarity with which we observed how these practices must be oriented toward the big ideas of a text — not merely toward a task — to move instruction from surface to substance.

For example, in one lesson, a teacher used strong instructional modeling to show students how to collect key details and paraphrase a main idea. Then, she showed students how to do it in a history text about how new navigational technologies facilitated European exploration of the New World, truly unlocking robust comprehension.

For policymakers and system leaders who championed high quality materials as a lever for literacy improvement, these findings offer both a warning and a roadmap. Fortunately, the districts involved have the literacy leadership and professional learning infrastructure to make key shifts toward robust comprehension instruction. Three next steps for literacy leaders stand out:

1. Define and communicate a clear vision for robust comprehension instruction. Districts must go beyond “fidelity” to curriculum and articulate what deep understanding looks like for students and what it demands from instruction. Discussion, writing, knowledge-building, and standards are all part of the story, but ultimately, robust comprehension must be the target.

2. Reorient professional learning around the knowledge-building texts and their meaning. Teachers need structured opportunities to build the historical, literary, and scientific content knowledge necessary to facilitate robust understandings of the knowledge-building texts. Their professional learning should require deep, collective unpacking of all the nuances in the texts. .

3. Align observation and assessment systems to priorities for instruction. If tools and interim assessments measure only surface features, surface-level instruction will persist. Systems must adopt tools that can discern whether instruction leads students toward robust comprehension and use that data transparently to support improvement.

These changes are not small lifts, but they are essential.

Perhaps the most hopeful finding in the study is this: Lessons that supported robust comprehension didn’t just deepen learning, they increased student motivation and engagement. Students liked these lessons more. The students in the robust One Giant Leap lesson could see themselves in the Apollo mission — and on the moon.

In short, the path to better literacy outcomes is also a path to more joyful teaching and learning.

SRI Education and The 74 both receive financial support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies

Teachers are rightly concerned that AI cheats and shortcuts will erode students’ independent thinking and that increased screen time will the social skills and human connection kids need more than ever in a technology-powered world.

As New York City superintendents, one in the Bronx and one in Brooklyn, we decided to lean into this moment and try to develop AI-powered teaching assistants that increase student thinking, foster human connection and complement effective teaching practice.

As a guide for sorting through the many AI product pitches in our inboxes, we focused on NYC’s big goal of increasing reading achievement and decided to concentrate on improving our core English Language Arts classes. We didn’t want another supplemental solution — an extra intervention when core instruction fails to meet the needs of diverse learners. Instead, we wanted more students to receive the support and feedback they need during class, so fewer of them require additional help. 

Since the New York City Public Schools had already done a lot of to improve phonics instruction and foundational reading skills in the , we decided to focus on middle school, where rigor increases along with students’ struggles. We met with principals who wanted to be early adopters share our goals and an early demo. Eleven schools in the Bronx district and three in Brooklyn signed up.

We did not want the entire class to become tech-powered; rather, we targeted the AI toward the most challenging parts of the lessons, when students were doing close reading and writing. Teachers assign each student to a small group, and they all open their Chromebooks and log into , which takes the texts and questions from the curriculum, makes them interactive and provides more targeted support for students who need it. 

Students first collaborate with their partners, discussing their initial thinking about each question. Then, they type or speak their response into the AI. The technology confirms what the students understand through instant feedback and then pushes them to go deeper, often directing them back to a specific portion of text and asking a follow-up question that guides them from literal comprehension to inferences and author’s craft. As one student said, “It’s like the handout is talking to me.” 

While all this is going on, teachers review a live dashboard that shows every student’s level of understanding of every question. If the teachers see students are struggling, they can provide immediate assistance to get them back on track.

After about 15 minutes of students working together with each other and the AI, the teachers push a button and the AI synthesizes the two biggest misconceptions in the class in real time, suggesting a discussion question to address each one (this was a “wow” moment for our teachers!). The teachers then lead a targeted class discussion, often with a lot more student participation than usual because the kids feel more confident after working with the AI and their partner.

Finally, all students complete an exit ticket, often a short written paragraph about the final question of the lesson. They again receive up to three rounds of real-time feedback on their work and revise their writing after each round. 

Based on 2025 New York State test results, classrooms that used these tools at least twice a week for the year doubled their rate of growth compared with the rest of their district. In in the Bronx, for example, those students saw growth of between 14 and 16 percentage points over the previous year, compared with a 7-point improvement overall.

While we are still learning, we hope the knowledge we gained will help other educators actively shape this next generation of AI-powered tools. Here’s some of what we learned.

First, it was important to ensure that our AI tools worked seamlessly with the high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) we had already adopted. As Heather Peske from the has highlighted, AI tools that instantly allow teachers to create lesson plans, change assessments or dial down the level of challenge risk undermining the quality and consistent learning progression on which HQIM curricula are built. 

Second, it was important to increase student collaboration, both in small groups and during full-class discussions. Most early AI products follow the old paradigm: Students put on headsets, look at a screen,and work silently on their own. No one knows the full complement of skills that young people will need in their AI-powered futures, but will be even more critical than it is today. 

Third, the biggest decisions we made were pedagogical, not technical. We wanted the AI not just to support students or save teachers time, but to help our educators be more effective. Our teachers helped design the “misconceptions spotlight” tool so they could see and address the biggest areas of student struggle. They also asked for a “highlight” tool so they could celebrate strong student thinking and call out exemplary work for discussion when the learning is still fresh and relevant.

Fourth, the North Star of any improvement effort must be student outcomes. Based on the 2024 NAEP results, reading achievement nationwide is at its lowest level in 30 years. In adopting any AI tool, school and district leaders must clearly define their goals at the beginning of any partnership, and then rigorously evaluate the impact. The is leading a movement to better align incentives and ensure contracts are tied to clear measures of student impact.

The decisions school leaders make today will shape tomorrow’s outcomes. When educators both embrace the transformative power of AI and hold tight to the values and knowledge of effective instruction, every school can build the future all students deserve.

Correction appended Jan. 29

When The 74 started looking for Bright Spots — public schools that are beating the odds  helping low-income students learn to read — it was hard to miss how well charter schools performed. Charters made up 7% of the elementary schools in our national sample but 11% of those that we identified as delivering exceptional results, with reading scores that far exceed what might be expected given the poverty rates of the populations they serve.

Charters were even more overrepresented in New York. There, charter schools made up 9.5% of the state sample, but they earned 38.5% of the spots on our list of exemplars. 

By our metric, the 10 highest-scoring schools in the state were all in New York City — and seven of them were charter schools located in the Bronx. Another was a charter school in Harlem, and the other two were traditional public schools in Brooklyn.

Click on the yellow dots to see the details for each Bright Spot school. Click anywhere in the map to close the data box. (Map: Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The74)

All serve a high concentration of low-income students, with 66% to 92% of children qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunch. And yet, 90% to 97% of their third graders were proficient readers in 2024, the year of our analysis. In comparison, the proficiency rate for all third graders across the state was just 43%. 

The highest-scoring school by our metric was the Success Academy Bronx 5 Upper Elementary School. In 2024, despite a 90% poverty rate, 94% of its students scored proficient in third grade reading. In , its students did even better, with 96% scoring proficient in reading and 100% doing so in math.

In fact, Success Academy has 21 of its schools on our Bright Spots list. The Icahn charter network has five, South Bronx Classical has three and the KIPP, Zeta and Harlem Village Academy networks have two each.

But even beyond charters, it is clear that families with young children in New York City in particular are blessed with a variety of good options. Of the 143 exceptional schools across the state, 97% — 138 — are in the city, and 84 of those are traditional district schools. 

As one example, in 2024, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis elementary (PS 66) had 81% of its students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch, yet 84% of its third graders read proficiently. It also did even better in , with 71% of students with disabilities, 84% of Hispanic students and 87% of all students scoring proficiently. These rates all far surpassed the statewide average.

These stats may be heartening, but New York City might soon be able to provide even better options for families.

As a district, the city is in the midst of sweeping changes to how literacy is taught. That initiative, called , requires schools to use one of three phonics-based reading programs with a track record of producing student gains. As that program continues to roll out, participating schools saw last year, and incoming Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels to double down and make teaching vulnerable students how to read his “No. 1 goal.”

These are promising signs of progress. On the charter school front, it bears noting that there’s a on how many can operate in New York City, and as the maximum has already been reached, no new ones can open until that cap is lifted. According to the advocacy group StudentsFirstNY, New York City students are on charter wait lists. New Mayor Zohran Mamdani has charter schools’ expansion in the past, but he may need to reconsider, given their prominence among the ranks of Bright Spot schools.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified one of the charter school networks with schools on our Bright Spots list. The networks are Success Academy, Icahn, South Bronx Classical, KIPP, Zeta and Harlem Village Academy.

Wielding chainsaws, they helped the 97-year-old former Colorado governor clear out fallen timber this year to make a path for some four wheelers. 

“They just enjoyed the working relationship back then, and they enjoy the friendship now,” Romer said in a recent interview. 

But when they finish the day’s projects, it’s not unusual for the group to relax over wine and cheese and trade war stories about Romer’s tenure. Under his leadership, the district saw several years of steady gains in reading on both and . Fighting bureaucracy and a powerful teachers union, he required elementary schools to use Open Court, a phonics-based program that embraced what is known today as the science of reading. The district trained teachers to use it and hired reading specialists to make sure they stuck to the curriculum. 

“For six years, we concentrated on that. It was the most important thing we did,” Romer said. But the teacher’s union chafed against the program’s rigid design and eventually demanded over the curriculum. “They didn’t want us to be screwing around in classrooms. They wanted the door shut. We forced those doors open.”

Nearly 20 years later, those stories have a new relevance as reading scores are once again on the rise. The current superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, has taken a similar, top-down approach to literacy with a program from curriculum provider Amplify. District leaders say they’ve learned from the past about the dangers of a lockstep approach to teaching reading, but some wonder whether teachers are getting the support they need. 

Tackling a new curriculum is “not an easy shift, and the ongoing support is needed,” said Francisco Villegas, chief academic officer at the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit that manages 20 high-need schools in the district. “There are fewer dollars, and that likely will have implications for what the district is able to provide.” 

The Partnership schools adopted the Amplify program in 2018-19 and began to see in English language arts on the state test. Since 2022, seven of the Partnership’s 11 elementary schools have seen double-digit increases in the percentage of students meeting or exceeding state standards. At a in September, Carvalho called the Partnership a “terrific incubator” that influenced the district’s curriculum choices. 

But systemwide, leaders are to balance the budget and layoffs are expected. Compared to the Open Court years, training on the reading curriculum districtwide is more “hit or miss,” said Maria Nichols, president of the district’s principals union. LAUSD offers opportunities, both online and in-person, for professional development. School leaders, however, often don’t know which courses teachers have taken or whether they’re using what they’ve learned, she said. “We are PD rich and implementation poor.”

‘On the same page’

Romer’s team implemented Open Court at a time when was pouring millions into training to teach reading. A $133 million from the U.S. Department of Education provided even more. Nearly all of the district’s 12,000 elementary school teachers participated in and many completed follow-up sessions throughout the year.

“It was phenomenal,” Nichols said. “We were treated as professionals. There was a lot of money back then.”

Former board members, among Romer’s annual visitors, said Open Court was a way to ensure all students, in an urban district where kids often change schools, would receive strong instruction. Marlene Canter, who served on the board from 2002 through 2008, said that regardless of teachers’ level of experience or the college they attended, “everybody would be on the same page.”

For some teachers, that played out literally. Many found Open Court . There was a specific set of cards with letter sounds to post on the wall and a recommended U-shaped classroom layout that, according to a teacher guide, left “a large open space on the floor for whole-group and individual activities” and provided “an easy ‘walk-around’ for the teacher.” Critics viewed the , deployed to ensure teachers followed the curriculum, as “Open Court police” ready to catch them veering off script. 

“They took my fun and creativity away,” former teacher Stuart Goldurs complained in a . “I became an instructional robot.” 

Ronni Ephraim, who served as Romer’s chief instructional officer, said the change upset some teachers. The district asked them to replace storybooks that had been favorites in their classrooms for years with Open Court phonics-based “readers,” workbooks and classroom libraries. Despite the objections, the district saw struggling schools improve and outpace the state. 

“I don’t think top-down is bad,” Ephraim, now a consultant, said about curriculum choices. “I think the board and the superintendent have to believe in it, and then they have to make sure that everybody is prepared to teach it as designed.”

‘Big disconnect’

Critics said the program was ineffective with English learners. Over time, performance flatlined, and the district replaced Open Court with a program. 

Rob Rucker is among the LAUSD teachers who worked for the district during the Open Court years and is now adjusting to Core Knowledge Language Arts. A third grade teacher at 135th Elementary School in Gardena, one of several small cities within the district’s boundaries, he said some novice teachers valued Open Court’s structure. They didn’t yet have enough experience to write lesson plans of their own.

“I actually liked Open Court,” he said. “It was very straightforward and easy for teachers to understand.”

The Amplify program still covers the basic skills students need to decode words and recognize parts of speech. It’s also what reading experts describe as a knowledge-building curriculum. The units introduce students to early civilizations, like the Vikings in Scandinavia, and science content, such as the solar system and animal habitats.

That’s where Open Court fell short, said Nichols, with the principals’ union.

“When we tested kids, they could read beautifully,” she said, “but they couldn’t understand what they were reading.”

For a student population like LAUSD’s, with 86% living in poverty and one in five still learning English, strengthening kids’ knowledge of the world is “going to be the real game changer,” said Barbara Davidson, president of StandardsWork, a think tank, and executive director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Since 2015, the campaign has been a leading voice for integrating history, science and the arts into reading curriculum. 

Rucker said his students were already familiar with stories like “Alice in Wonderland” and “Aladdin,” so it wasn’t hard to keep them interested in a lesson on classic fairy tales. Getting them to relate to lessons on ancient Rome has been more challenging.

According to a district spokesperson, “the goal is to ensure that every school has access to the literacy expertise and coaching capacity it needs.” But other than a two-day training from Amplify, Rucker said he hasn’t had any additional support on how to implement the program, he said. He thinks his school would benefit from an English language arts coordinator teachers could lean on when they need someone with more experience, but because of enrollment loss, many schools have lost administrative positions. 

Some teachers feel Amplify is out of reach for struggling students, leading them to patch in other materials to make the material more relevant. 

During a recent lesson on early American irrigation systems, Kareli Rodriguez, who teaches at Stoner Ave. Elementary School on the west side of town, used pictures and videos to help her fifth graders grasp the idea. Excitement over the Dodgers’ successful World Series run helped her pique kids’ interest in a passage on Yankees’ relief pitcher Mariano Rivera.

But it’s “not realistic,” she said, for teachers to get through a lesson in the recommended 90-minute time slot with so many students working below grade level. A district coach modeled a lesson for the teachers last school year, Rodriguez said, but she couldn’t finish it in time either.

“I think that’s a big disconnect that the district needs to understand,” she said. “It’s definitely rigorous, but most of the students are always playing catch up.”

Still, like most other schools in the district, Stoner Avenue saw improvements in reading. Fifty-two percent of fifth graders met or exceeded expectations, compared to 41% last year. 

Literacy advocates hope those gains will convince leaders — as Romer did with Open Court — to stick with Amplify. “Our push is going to be to say, ‘You got to stay the course,’ ” said Yolie Flores, president and CEO of Families in Schools, a nonprofit that for research-backed teaching materials. Her group breaks down the science of reading for parents so they’ll know how to talk to teachers about the curriculum and help their kids at home.

District leaders gathered in October to celebrate the district’s recent improvement. Outside the auditorium at Maywood Elementary School, as students rushed back to class after lunch, Deputy Superintendent Karla Estrada took a moment to talk about lessons learned since the Open Court years, like taking feedback from teachers.

The district, she said, wants them to follow the Amplify curriculum “with integrity” while recognizing they often have to make decisions in the moment, depending on their students. 

“They let me know where something is not quite what they want,” she said. “But no curriculum is going to do everything for you.”

The “” report, conducted by nonprofit research organization SRI, examined literacy instruction in districts in Texas, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia that have been using materials rooted in the popular phonics-based literacy approach for at least five years. 

Through numerous classroom observations, teacher surveys and interviews with district officials in Aldine Independent School District, Baltimore City Public Schools, Guilford County Schools and Richmond Public Schools, researchers found a majority of reading lessons lacked “depth” – meaning foundational skills were mainly limited to working on single words rather than reading them in sentences. 

Comprehension lessons in later elementary grades also mainly focused on completing a task, such as identifying a main character, rather than using a text for discussion and understanding its purpose.

“You’re not able to really think about the unpacking of a complicated sentence. You’re not thinking about really intentional vocabulary instruction or the building of kids’ word knowledge over time,” said Dan Reynolds, one of the lead authors of the report. “Ultimately, how should we be framing kids to read? Are we teaching our K-4 kids that reading is just tasks? Are we teaching them that they just need to label stuff and fill out graphic organizers?”

In recent years, has passed science of reading laws, including many that have limited the type of programming and instructional materials a school can use – a move that has drawn that it’s too restrictive and that the instruction faces its own limitations.

The report defined surface literacy skills as a student’s ability to complete tasks and understand texts based on their literal meeting while robust instruction would further push a child to understand, evaluate and synthesize what they had read for its significance. 

The study said its “comprehension observations alone are more rigorous than nearly all studies conducted in the last 50 years.” It’s not expected to be representative of reading instruction across the country, Reynolds said, but “we have four big districts in four different states, and we saw this pattern happening in all four of them with three different curricula.”

The study also found that teachers struggled with implementing comprehension-focused learning materials and said many times the curriculum was too dense, required substantial planning or may not have been developmentally appropriate. Professional development opportunities for these educators were also limited.

Researchers reported less than a quarter of observed comprehension lessons were engaging in robust learning. More than two-thirds of the lessons focused on “surface-level” comprehension. 

“It seems that these curriculums are designed to build knowledge and they don’t develop meaning, and so then why read about the Civil War or about insects?” said Katrina Woodworth, director at SRI’s Center for Education Research & Improvement. “The point is to both teach reading and to build students’ knowledge base so that they have more scaffolding for future learning of both content and meaning.” 

The SRI researchers also found that many review tools that measure comprehension don’t make a distinction between surface-level and robust instruction and skills. So, while educators are tasked with meeting a baseline standard, like having a child compare and contrast a text, it may be “unintentionally encouraging teachers to focus on surface-level goals,” the report said.

Without distinction, it weakens instruction for students and can later manifest as a skills disadvantage, Reynolds said.

“Districts had done so much to get the kids all the way there [with literacy], but it was losing voltage in the end,” Reynolds said. “If we can actually shift the way that districts are thinking about improving their comprehension instruction, they can take that all the way home and deliver really high quality comprehension instruction because so many pieces are already in place.”

Reynolds and one of his fellow co-authors, Sara Rutherford-Quach, said they saw glimpses of “magic” in the classroom when students understood a passage in wide-ranging contexts, which is the type of instruction they’re hoping to see districts incorporate more of in early grades.

“The kids were way more engaged,” Rutherford-Quach said. “Surface-level is important and necessary in some cases, … but it really is fundamentally different when you start talking about meaning and making it matter to the kids, and you see that they’re invested in it.”

Reynolds added that it’s unlikely robust comprehension could make up 100% of lessons in the classroom, but “we are thinking that if we can shift that needle from 24% robust lessons up to 50 or 60, then that would be a real catalyst for comprehension growth.”

The report recommended district leaders create “a shared vision for robust comprehension and define what it means for students, teachers, schools and the district,” and align how to best measure the extent of learning. It also called for better professional learning structures that could help model and rehearse robust comprehension work. 

Previous reporting from The 74 found the percentage of recent high school graduates who lack “robust” comprehension skills is the highest it’s ever been, according to 2023 data. The sooner districts can engrain literacy skills that go beyond just explicit tasks, the easier it will be as they continue through the K-12 system, Reynolds said.

“I see the distinction between surface level and robust comprehension as critical to comprehension in fifth grade, but I also see it in the kids when they’re in 12th grade. Surface level comprehension and robust comprehension is the difference between a two on the AP exam and a three,” he said.

Something shifted. That day, Jomeilin worked almost entirely on his own, asked one question of the assistant about where to find a quote and submitted his response. When a 3 out of 4 appeared on his screen, Jomeilin let out a small yelp, broke into a grin and asked, “Can I call my mom?”

The introduction of the platform came after teachers and school leaders spent months discussing ways to incorporate artificial intelligence to improve reading comprehension and the quality of student writing. What if an AI tool could show teachers exactly what each student was struggling with in real time, so they could give targeted help, instead of waiting a week to see patterns in graded work? The result was the launch of the teaching assistant in DREAM East Harlem Middle School’s sixth-, seventh and eighth-grade English classes. 

Marjorie and Ashlee start their class by explaining to students what they will be reading, what they will learn, the steps to understanding the text and how to approach the assignment, which focuses on one key element of the reading. Students make notes on scrap paper as they read the full text on their school-issued Chromebooks. Then, they do a close read of a smaller excerpt on the AI assistant’s platform and answer questions regarding what they read. These questions build in complexity as students work their way up to writing a full response.

Students respond to the AI assistant’s suggestions, note which advice they will adopt and why, and submit those annotations with their revision. Ashlee and Marjorie then discuss the annotations with the students and coach them through any further revisions that are needed.

The AI platform mirrors what the teachers would do one-on-one with students. It surfaces issues that Ashlee and Marjorie are already watching out for and enables them to address them with students in real time. The platform pulls together all student responses at once, showing the teachers where the whole group is struggling and highlighting strong examples from students who got it right. Teachers can see what those students did to succeed and share that approach with classmates who are stuck.

Across the school network, AI assessment and data tools have saved each teacher about 50 hours that otherwise would have been spent grading student work and entering data. Instead, they are using that time for small-group instruction, extra lesson planning and instructional practice sessions. Since the platform was introduced in October, students’ performance on benchmark assessments rose by about 5 points in math and 2 points in English — changes the school attributes in part to the extra targeted instruction those hours made possible.

But not everything about this AI adoption has been smooth. Early on, some teachers worried that requiring students to write rationales for why they accepted or rejected the assistant’s feedback felt like busywork. Sometimes, the AI feedback was too general and needed more teacher input. Other educators found the rubric too rigid for open-ended creative tasks.

DREAM’s leadership and curriculum team adjusted after listening to the teachers, building more flexibility into the system and clarifying when to use the AI platform and when to set it aside.

Other schools have asked what it would take to replicate this. Early success at DREAM has stemmed from giving teachers time to learn and master AI tools before students start using them and building in guardrails that train and enforce ethical AI use.

Jomeilin’s success that afternoon wasn’t about his use of AI itself. It was about two teachers who spent weeks thinking through his specific needs, how AI could fill the gaps and how to catch his struggles early. Marjorie had been skeptical of AI at the start of the year. year. She worried that the students who most need to build independence could become too reliant on AI.

What changed her mind was watching students like Jomeilin work through a full writing process, make decisions about feedback and build confidence along the way. Jomeilin has changed his mind about writing, too.

But that may or may not be due to anything the schools themselves are doing. And poverty is not destiny; around the country, schools are bucking that general trend.

Last year, we set out to find the schools that were doing much better at teaching third graders to read than their poverty levels might predict. After looking at data for nearly 42,000 schools, we identified 2,158 that we called Bright Spots. While these schools didn’t always have the highest absolute scores, their students performed much better than might be expected, based on their poverty rates.

Today, we’re calling out 255 of those Bright Spots — five public schools in every state and Washington, D.C., that are beating the odds for their kids by the biggest margins.

For example, Merton E. Hill Elementary School in Orange County, California, had a student poverty rate of 87%. Given the relationship between poverty and reading outcomes across California, we expected the school to have just 29% of its third-graders reading proficiently. Instead, it surpassed 81%. As another example, Pocomoke Elementary School in Worcester County, Maryland, had 100% of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and yet it far exceeded statewide reading proficiency rates (71% versus 47%). 

Scroll through the list below to find the brightest stars in your state.

Bright Spots

Top Five Schools by State

(For more information on how we identified these schools, see the “About This Project” section here. Or to see where these schools are located in your state, check out our interactive map.)

Here at The 74, we chronicled the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and its cuts to crucial department staffing, education research and funding. We wrote about immigration crackdowns that spurred concerned families to keep children home from school (or leave the country altogether), significant changes in vaccination recommendations, efforts to remove crucial protections for students and a broader push for school choice and religious instruction in schools, among other things. And we did much more than just cover that news; our team dug further to help explain what these changes mean to school districts, teachers, parents and – most importantly – children. 

At the same time, other storylines were playing out. A big one was literacy. Testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress painted a dismal picture of America’s children’s ability to read. But there were some encouraging signs, especially in the South. Separately, our team created an interactive database that compares literacy versus poverty rates in 10,000 districts and 42,000 schools to discover where educators are beating the odds. (We will be continuing to feature these Bright Spots in the new year.)

We also took a close look at teacher pay, special education and the challenges teachers and parents face as they grapple with the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. And, with the launch of our zero2eight vertical, we expanded our coverage to include the crucial issues facing early child care and education. 

It has been a busy year and this list only scratches the surface of the great work the team at The 74 produced. We hope you take the time to read (and share) these memorable and impactful stories.

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Many Young Adults Barely Literate, Yet Earned a High School Diploma

By Jessika Harkay

The numbers are staggering: One in four young adults in the U.S. is functionally illiterate – yet more than half earned high school diplomas. In 2023, a total of about five million young adults could understand the basic meaning of short texts but could not analyze long reading materials, according to an analysis by the American Institute of Research. At the same time, the share of young adults earning diplomas increased significantly. “We know that over 20% of (young adults) that get their high school diploma do not have the skills commensurate with that,” Sharon Bonney, chief executive officer of the Coalition on Adult Basic Education, a national adult education nonprofit, told The 74’s Jessika Harkay. “So, when we have this ‘’ agenda, but people can’t read, write, speak the language or do math, they can’t get good jobs and better jobs. They can’t be skilled up.”  

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The South Surges Academically in Alternative View of National Exam

By Kevin Mahnken

According to an analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a raft of mostly Southern states — Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and others — can boast the highest math and English scores anywhere in the country. There’s just one catch, The 74’s Kevin Mahnken explained. That new educational hierarchy is only visible when researchers adjust for the demographics in each state. In other words, after accounting for the uneven distribution of low-income and minority families, special-needs students, and English learners, the nation’s K–12 hierarchy looks wildly different. 

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School Spending Is Up. Teacher Pay Isn’t. See What’s Happening in 8,900 Districts

Analysis by Chad Aldeman; Interactive by Eamonn Fitzmaurice

In districts nationwide, school spending has skyrocketed — in Los Angeles, for example, it’s up 108% from 2002 to 2022. But L.A’s teachers have seen a meager 5% salary increase during that time. In fact, teacher salaries nationally have hovered around an inflation-adjusted $70,000 for decades, lagging behind not only per-pupil spending, but earnings of other college-educated workers. Contributor Chad Aldeman and The 74’s art and technology director, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, document this disconnect in a series of interactive charts. See what’s happening in nearly 8,900 districts.

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Another AI Side Effect: Erosion of Student-Teacher Trust

By Greg Toppo

As AI colonizes school assignments, a small but growing body of research suggests it’s eroding trust between teachers and students. It’s making school more transactional and forcing teachers to rely on unreliable AI detectors that create mutual suspicion. The 74’s Greg Toppo explains how that dynamic is damaging student-teacher relationships, with students feeling surveilled and teachers losing faith in student work. Experts suggest returning to the fundamentals: handwritten assignments, in-class work, blue-book essays and addressing root causes of cheating through better course design and intrinsic motivation.

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For Students With Disabilities, Suspension Not Just a Matter of Race and Gender — But Geography

By Amanda Geduld 

An exclusive analysis by The 74’s Amanda Geduld of federal data revealed stark disparities among students already subject to disproportionate punishment in school — not only by race and gender but also geography. Some 15% of special education students in South Carolina faced out-of-school suspensions for up to 10 days in the 2022-2023 school year — nearly twice the national average and more than any other state in the nation. Meanwhile, students with the same disabilities were the least likely to be excluded from school if they lived in California or Vermont.

Shut Out: High School Students Learn About Careers — But Can’t Try One That Pays 

By Patrick O’Donnell

Schools and businesses have prioritized teaching students about careers they might pursue, but they rarely take the next step and let students try them. Though career days, job shadowing and field trips to businesses are common, fewer than 5% of students have a chance at an internship or apprenticeship while in high school. “We still have a long way to go to provide more opportunity for young people,” career training advocate Julie Lammers told The 74’s Patrick O’Donnell.

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For Decades, the Feds Were the Last, Best Hope for Special Ed Kids. What Happens Now?

By Lauren Wagner and Beth Hawkins 

When it wrote the laws protecting children with disabilities, Congress tried to make it simple for parents to act when schools weren’t delivering. But the paths for complaining have never been as easy — or effective — as intended. Now, the threat of federal intervention, the ultimate backstop, is collapsing. The 74’s Lauren Wagner and Beth Hawkins crunched the numbers and found big disparities in how complaints get resolved. 

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The Massachusetts Teen Who Held PowerSchool Ransom Was a ‘Sophisticated’ Cybercriminal, Prosecutors Say

By Mark Keierleber

When The 74’s Mark Keierleber knocked on Matthew Lane’s door in August, the 19-year-old college student seemed an unlikely figure to have pulled off what’s considered the largest exposure of private student data in history. Lane was known as a soft-spoken gamer and skilled computer programmer, but open-source reporting, threat intelligence research and a federal sentencing memo show him to be a “sophisticated” cybercriminal. After pleading guilty to the 2024 PowerSchool hack, Lane was sentenced to four years in federal prison and $4 million in restitution.

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30 Years Without a Real Raise: New York’s Early Intervention Pay Crisis

By Sarah Carr

Emily Lengen has been a special education teacher for the New York State Early Intervention Program since the 1990s. She loves her work, but is distraught about remaining in what might be the only profession in New York that hasn’t gotten a real raise in three decades. “As a 30-year veteran with a master’s degree, I am working twice as hard as when I started in early intervention, and making less now,” Lengen tells  zero2eight’s Carr.

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Some 15 Years After Disastrous Debut, Common Core Math Endures in Many States

By Jo Napolitano 

The once-derided standards have proven their staying power, with many states holding onto the original version or some close iteration, The 74’s Jo Napolitano reports. Despite early complaints from teachers and parents and fierce political opposition from the left and the right, Common Core math has withstood three presidents and more recent revamps to state curriculum. And while critics say it failed to boost student achievement — math scores have dropped nationally since it was adopted in 2010 —  advocates say it did something far more important: provide an on-ramp to algebra. 

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No Idea Too Radical: Inside New Orleans’ Dramatic K-12 Turnaround After Katrina 

By Beth Hawkins 

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina forced the wholesale reboot of New Orleans schools — by most measures, among the worst in the country in 2005. Two decades later, education researchers and the city’s civic leaders have released comprehensive data outlining what worked to get rapid academic growth for kids, how preschoolers and college students are doing and where racial inequities persist. Beth Hawkins uses highlights from the research to tell the story of the singular reform. You can read (and listen) to our other coverage on the 20th anniversary of Katrina here.    

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The California Mom at the Center of Trump’s Crackdown on School Gender Policies

By Linda Jacobson 

A California mother spent three years battling a school district that supported her child’s social transition from female to male. Her story is now at the heart of the Trump administration’s push to clamp down on schools that conceal changes in students’ gender identity from parents. Some say students’ well-being could be at risk if educators are forced to get parents’ permission before using different names and pronouns. But one attorney told The 74’s Linda Jacobson that officials can’t “by default assume that every parent … is going to reject and hurt their children.” 

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Strapped for Cash: Districts OK Union Raises, But Don’t Have the Money to Fund Them

By Lauren Wagner 

Several school districts across the U.S. had to borrow money or renegotiate teacher contracts over the summer after budget shortfalls left them without enough funding to pay for agreed-upon raises, The 74’s Lauren Wagner discovered. Philadelphia Public Schools approved $1.5 billion in borrowing, while districts in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Baltimore County, Maryland, rescinded teacher pay hikes. Chicago Public Schools considered delaying pay bumps in its union contract to address a $734 million deficit. “Contracts are not optional documents,” Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates wrote in a letter to the school board.  

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From Screen Time to ‘Green Time’: Going Outside to Support Student Well-Being 

By Jessika Harkay

As cell phone bans are widely underway this year in schools nationwide, there’s a question of what else to do in the effort to aid student mental health and re-engage kids back in the classroom, The 74’s Jessika Harkay reports. Some experts believe one next step may be to incorporate outside time into the school day (a.k.a. “green time’) for older students. While some schools have developed full programming, research shows 15 to 30 minutes outside can have big benefits, too.

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How LAUSD School Zones Perpetuate Educational Inequality, Ignoring ‘Redlining’ Past 

By Ben Chapman

School attendance zones are meant to provide Los Angeles families with strong options for their children’s education. But a growing number of critics say the outdated school zones of LAUSD reinforce educational inequality by locking needy students out of a good education. Some of these enrollment zones match racist redlining maps of the 1930s that were used to deny housing loans in Black neighborhoods. “The district doesn’t want to touch those lines, because families overpaid for homes within them,” says local parent and researcher Tim DeRoche

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LifeWise’s Big Red Bus Is Driving Thorny Questions About Church and State

By Linda Jacobson

Lifewise Academy is a fast-growing program that allows students to leave school during the day for religious instruction and is the most visible example of an evangelical Christian movement to require districts to participate. But as LifeWise and similar programs spread, opposition is increasing among those who say releasing students during the day is disruptive and crosses the line between church and state. “It’s insulting,” one former teacher told The 74’s Linda Jacobson about watching students miss his class once a week to attend LifeWise.

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With Bees, Drones & Ancient Technology, New Mexico Schools Engage Students to Save Precious Water for the Next Generation

By Beth Hawkins 

This year, the Rio Grande ran dry in Albuquerque — a climate-change fueled event of particular interest to students at a high school a few blocks from the river. Students at Rio Grande High School and three lower-grades schools that share its sustainable agriculture focus live on neighborhood farms. Lessons combining cutting-edge technology and centuries-old conservation techniques are real-life relevant — and key to the region’s survival.

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It’s a simple question, one that adults often ask of children. But as a co-founder of a bookstore in Pittsburgh, I know that Obama’s gift, coupled with his question, could be life-changing for those students. 

Books can be powerful tools for dreaming. When I was a graduate student, I spent many hours on the phone with my grandfather talking about life. I vividly remember him telling me he didn’t know much about the world I was experiencing in graduate school; I would have to figure it out for myself.

I turned to biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of people I admired, of people who pursued big dreams, overcame big and small barriers, and sought to make this world better — because that is what I wanted to do. 

Many years later, I stumbled on picture book biographies with my young sons. One day, when we were at our local library, my oldest son grabbed a book titled Preaching to Chickens off the library shelf. He and his younger brother had a running joke about chickens; they would say “chicken” to every question I asked them. So, of course, this book caught his eye.

I’d had my fill of chicken jokes, so I told them it was off limits. Then, my youngest son began crying, and like all fathers in public libraries, I folded. We checked the book out. It was about how future congressman John Lewis would make speeches to chickens as a child and imagine they were people. It gave me so much insight into the childhood of the Civil Rights Movement giant and taught me a lesson too: that sometimes, when children play, it can be a dress rehearsal for the person they will become.

From that moment, I realized that picture book biographies can be powerful tools for helping Black children imagine their future selves, overcome personal barriers, navigate big emotions, even use their talents to make the world a better place. 

The book , for example, reveals how James Earl Jones’ childhood stutter left him silent in school, until a caring teacher inspired him to write a poem and perform it in class. Presenting the poem out loud inspired him to take on acting, for which he became famous. His platinum voice became the gold standard. Ode to Grapefruit is a powerful illustration of overcoming personal obstacles, a lesson that can inspire children going through their own struggles.  

As any parent knows, managing big emotions can be especially challenging for young children. In the book , author Valerie Bolling shows how Marian Wright Edelman used her frustration and disappointment over racial injustice to make the world a better place by founding the Children’s Defense Fund and the Freedom Schools initiative. For kids struggling with big emotions, this book can be a tool to help them convert those feelings into positive change.  

Finally, in her book , Lisa Brathwaite writes about how fashion icon and entrepreneur Eunice Johnson used her exceptional fashion sense to found Ebony Magazine, which serves as an inspiration for Black women and continues to spark the imagination of Black people across the country. In addition to creating the magazine, Johnson founded the Ebony Fashion Show, which traveled to 66 cities across the United States from 1958 to 2009 to raise money for philanthropic causes. It’s an enduring lesson for children about how to use their talents to impact their community in big and small ways. 

For me, picture book biographies are not cradle-to-greatness stories for kids. Rather, they’re tools to inspire children to pursue their dreams. This holiday season, as you think about the young people in your lives, perhaps consider a picture book biography, keep in mind Obama’s simple question. There’s no better time to encourage children to dream big.