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Against the backdrop of the pandemic learning slump – which brought a further slide in already anemic reading proficiency rates for Massachusetts 3rd graders – advocates are redoubling their efforts behind legislation that would require all school districts in the state to use “evidence-based” literacy instruction in teaching early elementary grade students.
As part of a new push for the reading legislation, which was first introduced last session, a coalition of Massachusetts groups is bringing in one of the national leaders of the campaign to get districts and states to adopt a literacy curriculum based on the so-called “science of reading.” Kareem Weaver, a former Oakland, California, educator and NAACP leader who now heads a national nonprofit focused on literacy, will speak at a State House briefing on Wednesday organized by the Mass. Reads Coalition, a group of more than a dozen organizations backing the literacy bill.
“Literacy is our greatest civil right. If you can’t read, you can’t access anything in our society,” Weaver said in a 2023 documentary, “Right to Read,” that he co-produced on the literacy crisis and the fight to get schools to use more effective reading curricula.
When it comes to Massachusetts 3rd graders, an astonishing number can’t read.
Just 42 percent of 3rd grade students were proficient in English on the 2024 MCAS. The numbers are far worse for student groups on the bottom end of the state’s yawning achievement gap. Only 24 percent of low-income 3rd graders are proficient in reading, and only 27 percent of Black students and 22 percent of Latinos are reading at grade level.
In Boston, the numbers are even worse, with just 20 percent of Black students and 19 percent of Latino students proficient in reading. Put differently, that means 80 percent of these students in the state’s largest school district – where they account for three-quarters of the student population – are not reading at grade level, an ominous indicator for their long-term success in K-12 schooling and beyond.
“We have a system now that is clearly failing students,” said state Rep. Danillo Sena, a co-sponsor of the legislation mandating that school districts employ evidence-based literacy instruction.
The bill would have Massachusetts join 42 other states that have adopted some form of required literacy instruction.
At the heart of the legislative push is a battle that has raged in education circles over the best way to teach children to read.
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