WAKEFIELD, Mass. — One winter morning at the Woodville School in this town about 15 miles north of Boston, teacher Danielle Masse was guiding her class of kindergartners through a lesson on identifying the sounds that make up words.
She instructed her students to say aloud the word “said,” then explained how to separate it into two parts. The kindergartners repeated the “s” sound followed by the syllable “ed.” Then, Masse walked the students through how to make a new word from the severed sounds, telling them to substitute the “r” sound for the “s” sound and then combine the new “r” with “ed.”
“Red!” the kindergartners shouted in unison.
Experts say that without skills like these, some students will struggle to become fluent readers because they often misidentify words.
In recent years, a movement known as the science of reading, which promotes explicit literacy instruction in five areas — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension — has influenced classrooms across the country, including Masse’s. It’s gained traction amid growing evidence that other approaches to teaching reading, such as balanced literacy, do not provide enough explicit instruction to help students learn to decode words, leaving some young readers with reading deficiencies that have snowballed into a nationwide literacy crisis. As concern has spread, more than 40 states have enacted some form of legislation to promote evidence-backed reading instruction.
But while Massachusetts has taken some steps to advance literacy instruction — for example through an effort to invest millions in educator training and curriculum support — it is not among the states that have adopted a significant legislative fix. Now, though, the Bay State is poised to enact what its supporters call some of the strongest reading legislation in the nation — and some educators worry it goes too far in imposing new standards that override teacher control of classrooms.
Like most states, Massachusetts allows districts to make their own decisions about literacy curricula. That has meant that in many classrooms across the state, the kind of systematic skills instruction seen in Masse’s class in Wakefield is less common. In an email, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said it estimated that only about half of the state’s school districts “are using high-quality, evidence-based curriculum to teach early literacy.”
Meanwhile, just 42 percent of third graders in the state met reading expectations on 2025 state tests.
The bill, which the Massachusetts legislature is expected to send soon to Gov. Maura Healey for her signature, would require school districts to use state-approved curricula that include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Under the legislation, districts can apply for a waiver, but the final decision comes from the state. Relatively few states — including Connecticut, Tennessee and Virginia — have mandated state-approved literacy curricula as the Massachusetts bill would do. More often, states that have passed legislation have focused on training teachers in the science of reading or other approaches.
In an emailed statement to The Hechinger Report, the governor called the bill “another step toward ensuring every student has high-quality literacy instruction.”
Advocates of the bill say it is needed as Massachusetts, where students have long outperformed those in most other states in reading, has seen its reading scores dip in recent years. “We need to protect that lead, and that requires changing and evolving and advancing when it comes to ensuring that our public schools are teaching kids the fundamentals,” said Simon Cataldo, a state representative who sponsored an initial version of the bill in the House.
But critics, including the state’s largest teachers union, say it is overly prescriptive, especially since Massachusetts students still outperform their national peers.
“We should be building on that, not saying, ‘Okay, we no longer trust you teachers, we’re going to have you use scripted curriculum,’” said Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which opposes the bill and helped to kill previous versions of it in recent years. “The way learning happens is with educators in classrooms supporting students, and having a one-size-fits-all type of curriculum is not conducive to that.”
Page said the bill erodes Massachusetts’s “long tradition of localism,” which empowers local school committees and educators to make the best decisions for their students. Others note that states that have seen scores jump after adopting science of reading approaches, notably Mississippi, have not mandated specific, state-approved teaching materials, per that state’s education agency. And such a mandate comes with a financial cost, in terms of paying for new curricula.
Still, some experts say that as long as Massachusetts provides the necessary funding and support to teachers as it implements the legislation, it could bring positive change.
“Given the well-documented use of curricula with fundamental weaknesses, it is understandable that lawmakers would want to put more guardrails in place,”said Phil Capin, an education professor at Harvard University focused on instructional practices for reading. “I see this bill as bringing Massachusetts in line with other states that have passed more comprehensive reading legislation, rather than as a particularly restrictive measure.”
Related: Reading comprehension loses out in the classroom
Teachers in Massachusetts districts that have introduced curriculum reforms on their own in recent years say the process has been relatively smooth and that they think the bill could help expand access to quality reading instruction across the state. In Methuen, near the New Hampshire border, kindergarten teacher Sarah O’Connor said she supports her district’s decision to adopt a new curriculum this school year that is more in line with the science of reading.
“I feel like the problem is a lot of older teachers aren’t willing to change, and they’re very stuck at their ways,” said O’Connor, who works at the Tenney Grammar School, a public elementary school, and has taught for more than 20 years. “But I feel like if you go in with an open mind and you learn how to do something new, it’s actually better than what you used to do.”
Methuen superintendent Brandi Kwong said the district decided to transition toward evidence-based instruction after realizing kids’ progress in reading was plateauing. Kwong said she publicly supports the bill “because we’re doing it and we’re seeing the outcomes.”
Parents say school districts need a legislative push to move away from discredited curricula. Dan Lluch, an engineer and a parent in the Lexington school district, said his three kids have all struggled to learn to read in public schools there, especially his child with dyslexia. Luch blamed the district’s use of a curriculum that doesn’t align with the science of reading, which he said did not give his children foundational skills.
“One out of five or six kids have dyslexic issues, and so serving literacy in a way that’s known to not align with their needs is a really big disservice,” he said. But he worried that even with legislation, his district might resist changes, given that its superintendent, Julie Hackett, co-authored an opinion piece in the Boston Globe last February critical of the science of reading movement. (Hackett declined an interview request, but Sara Calleja, the district’s K-5 English Language Arts and literacy department head, said in an email that Lexington is moving away from the curriculum Luch criticized.)
Leaders of the teachers union raise criticisms similar to those expressed by Hackett, arguing that the science of reading movement and its backers are overly prescriptive and not open enough to new research and approaches. Deb McCarthy, the union’s vice president, called the science of reading “basically like a buzzword.”
“This state is trying to rush into this idea,” said Page, the union president. “All science is evolving. There’s no such thing as, like, ‘the science of reading,’ as if it’s boxed and done.” If you take only the idea of a movement that’s in vogue now and impose a few specific curricula on districts for the next decade, he said, “you’re not allowing for the development of new techniques.”
Susan Neuman, a professor of early childhood and literacy instruction at New York University, acknowledged that “science is always evolving” but said that doesn’t mean it’s too soon to act on reading reform. “We know that there’s important new information coming out, but at the same time, we have 25 years of data indicating those five pillars really make a difference,” she said.
Timothy Shanahan, a former member of the federal government’s 2000 National Reading Panel and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that new research has developed over the last two and a half decades, but nothing has emerged that contrasts with the panel’s takeaway from 2000 that the five pillars are essential for most students to learn how to read.
“We don’t have some new finding that says, ‘Oh, we made such a mistake on that, don’t teach that,’” Shanahan said. “It’s largely the same, but with a few updates.”
For example, Shanahan said, the 2000 panel didn’t consider the importance of building writing skills for learning to read, but “there’s overwhelming research at this stage” showing that writing improves reading ability.
The House version of the Massachusetts bill explicitly bans three-cuing and implicit word reading, controversial techniques that encourage students to guess words based on meaning and shape rather than sounding them out. That ban is absent in the state Senate’s version.
Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.
Jill Pentimonti, an early language and literacy development professor at the Washington office of the University of Notre Dame, said an explicit prohibition is important because guessing techniques never help students, and even harm some.
The Senate version of the bill, meanwhile, requires the state to provide a free approved curriculum to all districts that need it, which, if it survives reconciliation with the House version, may help ease the teachers union’s concerns that the bill would be an “unfunded mandate.”
Joslyn Delancey, vice president of the Connecticut Education Association, the state’s largest educators union, said that funding was critical. When her state began requiring teachers to use state-approved curricula, there was “a lot of frustration” among educators, and the costly curriculum also resulted in some staff cuts, Delancey said.
“Many districts in having to switch their programming had to make a choice between the materials from the program or classroom teachers,” she said.
Legislators, meanwhile, want to move the bill forward quickly, to ensure that students aren’t left to languish with subpar curriculum and instruction. State Sen. Sal DiDomenico, who represents four communities near Boston, said he hopes it will go into effect by the 2026-27 school year.
“We don’t have a lot of time to waste,” DiDomenico said. “We’re looking for speed and efficiency here.”
Back in Wakefield, the town near Boston where Masse teaches, Assistant Superintendent Kara Mauro said her district’s voluntary adoption of new teaching methods and curriculum is paying off.
“Change is hard and scary, but ultimately we made a district decision,” she said. “But it was backed with a lot of input from our teachers.”
She was unsure, though, if the process would go as smoothly for other districts under a state mandate.
“Sometimes I think initiatives fall flat when they’re too abrupt. There’s not enough groundwork laid for the understanding of why the change is needed,” she said. But if that initial work does happen, she said, “Everyone kind of just looks around and says, ‘Well, yeah, of course, we should do this.’ It just makes sense. It’s just in the best interest of students.’”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about phonics was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Since you made it to the bottom of this article, we have a small favor to ask.
If you believe stories like the one you just finished matter, please consider pitching in what you can. This effort helps ensure our reporting and resources stay free and accessible to everyone—teachers, parents, policymakers—invested in the future of education.
Thank you.
Liz Willen
Editor in chief
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
