By Robbie Sequeira, stateline.org
While states rush to fight against the drop in literacy scores, a new type of debate on education in the legislatures of the States is installed: not if the reading instruction must be repaired, but how to repair it.
More than a dozen states have promulgated laws prohibiting public school educators from teaching young people to read a popular approach for decades. The method, known as “three courses”, encourages children to find unknown words using contextual clues such as the meaning, the structure of the sentences and the visual advice.
Over the past two years, several states have rather adopted the teaching rooted in what is called “science of reading”. This approach is strongly based on phonetics – based on letters and rhyme sounds to read words such as cat, hat and rat.
Political discussions on early literacy take place in a context of alarming levels of mastery of national reading. The 2024 Nation report revealed that 40% of fourth year students and 33% of eighth students obtained a lower score in the basic reading level – the highest percentages in decades.
No state has improved in reading fourth or eighth year in 2024. Eight states – Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah and Vermont – marked worse than they did it a year or two previously in eighth year.
Five – Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, Southern Dakota and Vermont – have seen diving in their fourth year reading scores.
In response to these disturbing trends, an increasing number of states go beyond localized efforts and attacks literacy thanks to state-scale legislation.
The New Jersey last year forced universal K-3 literacy projections. Indiana legislators adopted this month a bill that would allow certain students to take over the required reading tests before being held in third year; This bill is on the way to the governor’s office.
Oregon and Washington weigh the models of coaching and literacy training on a state scale, while Montana legislators have presented a bill to allow the literacy interventions to cover broader reading and academic skills, not just early reading bases.
The Mississippi, a state considered as a model for the recovery of literacy rates over the past decade, seeks to develop and require reading interventions based on evidence, compulsory literacy screenings and targeted teachers’ training, and explicitly prohibiting the use of three-use methods of reading 4-8.
Together, these efforts report a national change: states treat literacy not as a local initiative, but as the foundation of public education policy.
“Literacy is the lever,” said TafiShier Cosby, principal director of the Center for Organizing and Partnerships in the National Parents Union, a defense group. “If the states focus on this, we see bipartite victories. But the challenge is to make a priority at the scale of the state, not just a hope of district by district. ”
“It is the system that must be fixed”
Even before an oath, the senator of the Democratic State of Georgia in the long term Rashaun Kemp, a former teacher and director, had already written a bill to put an end to the use of the three -actions system in Georgia classrooms.
This month, the final version adopted the state’s legislature without a single “no” vote. GOP GOVER Brian KEMP signed it on Monday.
Senator Kemp said that his passion for literacy reform extends over decades, shaped by children’s tutoring experiences in a local church as a student in the early 2000s. It was there, he said, that he began to notice models in the way students fought with fundamental reading.
“According to my experience, I saw children fight to identify the word they read. I saw how some children guess what was the word instead of decoding,” recalls Kemp. “And it is not technology or screens that is the problem. This is what teachers are educated on how to teach reading. It is the system that must be repaired, not teachers.”
The new law obliges the Commission of Professional Standards – a state agency that oversees teachers’ preparation and certification – to adopt rules forcing reading education based on aligned evidence on reading science, a set of rooted practices in decades of cognitive research on the way children learn to read the best.
“The current strategies used to teach literacy include methods that teach students to guess rather than reading, preventing them from reaching their full potential,” said senator KEMP in a public press release following the legislative adoption of the bill. “I know that we can be better, and I am proud to see our legislative body take essential measures to help make Georgia the number one state for literacy.”
In Virginia-Western, legislators have introduced similar bills that would oblige state teachers to be certified in the science of reading.
Cosby, of the National Parents Union, said that local policy changes can be motivated by parents even before the law on legislatures.
“All policies are local,” said Cosby. “Parents do not need to wait for state levels – they can ask school boards for universal leaflets and structured literacy now.”
However, some parents fear that their statements simply finance more studies on early literacy rather than taking direct measures to remedy it.
A parent from Portland, Oregon, of three people – one of whom has dyslexia – this year sent written testimonies urging legislators to jump other studies and immediately implement structured literacy throughout the state.
“We do not need another study to tell us what we already know – structured literacy is the most effective way to teach all children to read, in particular those who suffer from dyslexia and other reading challenges,” wrote Katherine Hoffman.
Opposition to “reading science”
Unlike Georgia, the “science of reading” has encountered resistance in other states.
In California, legislation that would require a phonetic reading instruction throughout the state has been faced with the opposition of the defenders of the English learner who argue that a unique approach may not effectively serve multilingual students.
In opposition to the bill, California Teachers Association argued that by codifying a rigid definition of “reading science”, legislators ignore the evolutionary nature of reading research and undergo the ability of teachers to meet the various needs of their students.
“Placing a definition of” reading science “in the law is problematic,” wrote Seth Bramble, a legislative defender of California Teachers Association in a letter from March addressed to the Education Committee of the State Assembly. “This bill would size in scientific stone knowledge which, by its very nature, is constantly tested, validated, refuted, revised and improved.”
Similarly, in Wisconsin, Democratic Governor Tony Evers supported a bill that would have reversed the changes in the State rating system to align State references on the national evaluation of education progress, a federal assessment tool that has recently been affected by cuts and financing layoffs under the Trump administration. Evers said in his veto that republican legislators were showing the independence of state superintendent.
This veto is another step in the evolution of a broader constitutional struggle on literacy policy and the way in which literacy funds are appropriate and released. In 2023, Wisconsin legislators put aside $ 50 million for a new state -of -scale literacy initiative, but disagreements on legislative control against executive blocked its disbursement.
The Indiana legislature was faced with the criticism of educators on a 2024 mandate requiring 80 hours of literacy training for kindergarten teachers at K at the sixth year before being able to renew their licenses. The teachers argued that the additional requirements were heavy and did not take into account their professional expertise.
In Illinois, literacy difficulties have been built for more than a decade, according to Mailee Smith, principal director of politics at Illinois Policy Institute. Today, only 3 third and fourth year out of 10 students can read at the school level, based on national and national assessments.
Although Illinois legislators modified the school code in 2023 to create a state literacy plan, Smith noted that the plan was only advice and does not require the districts that they adopt the teaching of reading based on evidence. She urged local school boards to act alone.
“If students cannot read in the third year, half of the fourth year program becomes incomprehensible,” she said. “The probability of a student with a graduate of the school can be predicted by their reading competence at the end of the third year.”
Despite the challenges, Smith said that even small steps can make a real difference.
“Screening, intervention, parental notice, scientific education and the promotion of reflected grade-these are the five pillars, and Illinois and even local school districts can implement some of these stages immediately,” she said.
“It is not necessary that it is intimidating.”
Stateline journalist, Robbie Sequeira, has crsequeira@stateline.org.
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