Dive Brief:
- Massachusetts became, in June, one of the latest states to pass science of reading legislation, codifying evidence-based practices, statewide literacy screening and teacher training requirements, and creating new accountability measures for student performance in grades K-3.
- While the state has long had a more “laissez-faire” philosophy toward curriculum and instruction, the law sets in motion expectations and benchmarks that will require “major ramping up” on the part of some districts, according to Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a former state secretary of education.
- Laura Davis, senior research scientist at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, theorized that Massachusetts has been a later adopter due to its high performance on national tests overall. But she noted that with national declines in reading scores over the past decade, momentum has picked up across the country and even globally to revamp curriculum, develop higher-quality instructional material and boost professional development.
Dive Insight:
“It seems like a good time, regardless of the state and its achievement profile, to join in and ensure the resources that support instruction are there to make sure students have access to early literacy,” Davis said.
The new law will require significant training on evidence-based phonics instruction that might be limited somewhat by union contracts, but “it’s not going to be enough to do a one-shot training,” Reville said. Districts and the state will also need to build out data systems to track results, such as fewer students requiring intensive remediation by the 3rd grade.
“There’s a long way to go,” he said. “It’s going to be a while before you’re going to see any impact data on this. … This is a major focus in a particular area that narrows the range of choices teachers can make and prescribes a certain type of instruction. We’ve never been that top-down in teaching and learning. This is a shift. We’ll see how it’s received and complied with at the local level.”
When the law goes into effect in the 2027-28 school year, districts will either need to adopt a curriculum the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has approved or be granted a waiver for an evidence-based alternative curriculum. Reville doesn’t expect performance data to become meaningful until the third year, “and then it will be modest and incremental in the beginning, and hopefully more significant as time goes on.”
Accounts in the media sometimes make it sound like such a policy is adopted “and therefore, the game is over,” he said. “Getting the policy passed is phase one. Phase two is implementing it with fidelity to the intentions of the original legislation. … This is something we needed to correct an imbalance. It will take time for the results to show up.”
Davis said she hopes Massachusetts and other states find a balance between the phonics and foundational skills taught in grades K-3 and the ability to engage with text, learn new vocabulary and develop comprehension that’s built on top of that.
“Nobody thinks you can live in a house that only has a foundation,” she said. “Learning to read is not phonics alone. The ideal is that there’s this braiding of skills that have to be developed concurrently.”
Given that nationally normed literacy assessments don’t start until 3rd grade, Davis doesn’t expect an immediate impact in Massachusetts in that regard, but she suggested that perhaps students’ reading challenges will be identified earlier. But literacy achievement improvements are “a bit of a lagging indicator,” she said.
“By and large, the big changes on the measures we look at nationally would be downstream, several years from now, as these young people now participating in the science of reading-informed instruction move through the grades,” Davis said. “We would expect, ideally, in the next handful of years, for students to demonstrate better achievement.”
In all, 42 states have passed legislation around the approach, according to The Reading League, a nonprofit focused on strengthening literacy instruction.
