Boston Globe: Massachusetts’ sinking reading scores should be a five-alarm fire on Beacon Hill
Boston Globe: If current trajectories hold, the Mass Reads Coalition predicts that Massachusetts’ fourth-grade reading scores could converge with Mississippi’s by 2028.
Yes, you read that correctly. And it isn’t just because Mississippi has dramatically improved since it ranked lowest in the nation in 2013. It’s also because Massachusetts’ reading scores are dropping.
In a state that prides itself for being the nation’s leader in education, this should be a five-alarm fire. But last year, the Massachusetts Teacher Association and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents opposed a bill mandating science-backed reading curriculum that failed to pass. Now some of the same voices are fighting a new bill on literacy.
Massachusetts can’t afford to have an ideological fight over literacy instruction. Barely 4 in 10 third-graders were proficient in English on the 2024 MCAS — down 14 percentage points from 2019. Low-income and students of color are faring worse, and in 2022, poor kids in Mississippi and Florida outperformed their peers in reading in Massachusetts. Scores aren’t merely dropping in the aftermath of COVID-19 school closures: From 2011 to 2019, Massachusetts’ public school fourth-graders’ average scores on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress dropped six points, compared to a drop of one point nationally.
The Mass Reads Coalition, a diverse group that includes members ranging from Boston’s NAACP branch to Latinos for Education, is backing the legislation that could help get Massachusetts students back on track by mandating school districts choose a literacy curriculum “aligned with evidence-based literacy instruction.” The bill would require that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education come up with annual data requirements for districts to report to ensure they are implementing science-backed literacy instruction. If the results show that more than 50 percent of kindergarten through third-grade students are falling behind, the district would be required to come up with a plan to implement science-backed instruction.
“Our data has been telling us a very clear story for a number of years, and that story is, we’re not teaching children how to read the right way,” Mary Tamer, MassPotential’s executive director and a member of the Mass Reads coalition, told me. (Disclosure: Tamer is related to me through marriage on my father’s side.) “We need to do what 42 other states have already done, which is to say we’re no longer going to use these debunked methods of teaching.”
According to a 2023 Globe report, almost half of districts were using what the state calls “low quality” curriculum, much of which relies on patterns and context, like a picture, to guess unknown words. Science-backed reading curriculum, on the other hand, is grounded in phonics and building knowledge with demanding texts — so that students learn to sound out a word and to understand what it means. In a 2018 study in the Association for Psychological Science, the authors noted that despite a “a strong scientific consensus around the importance of phonics instruction in the initial stages of learning to read,” there’s still “resistance to using methods based on scientific evidence.”
Even as the literacy crisis worsens, the MTA is yet again opposing the literacy bill. The union has raised questions about district autonomy. Max Page, the union president, told me there’s a need for a “systematic approach to improving literacy,” and even said that phonics needs to be a part of it. But he’s opposed to the bill’s supposedly narrow approach. “This notion of science of reading, as if it is a thing that does not change and develop, seems wrong-headed and it limits the kind of creativity and flexibility that school districts and educators need to model instruction for their particular students.”
But the bill doesn’t mandate just one curriculum — it would allow for a range of approved methods.
State Representative Simon Cataldo, a Democrat from Concord who is one of the cosponsors of the bill, told me that it’s “not acceptable” for the state to tolerate methods that have been proven not to work. Cataldo, a former special education teacher, said: “What are we doing in government if we’re not ensuring that a student can read?”
Without accountability, some districts will continue to use disproven methods — often at the expense of their most vulnerable students.
Some of the strongest pushback against state literacy requirements has come from Massachusetts’ wealthiest communities. Lexington Superintendent Julie Hackett, for example, opposed the 2024 literacy bill and argued that “it’s best to leave educational decisions to local educators who understand the needs of their students.”
That’s easy to say in a wealthy town like Lexington.
“If you look in leafy suburbs, you will find that there is a very robust portfolio of private tutoring, and parents can afford it, and they can access it, and they’re going to do everything they can to make sure that they get their kids up to performance,” Jamie Gass, an education expert at the Pioneer Institute, told me. “Mostly poor and minority kids in larger school districts don’t have those same resources.”
That might also be true for disadvantaged kids in wealthy districts. On the third-grade English MCAS in 2024, not one of the 52 Black or Hispanic students in Lexington exceeded expectations. Only 8 percent of low-income students exceeded expectations.
Massachusetts has two options going forward. The supposedly progressive state can continue to settle for mediocre reading outcomes, dooming a generation of students to the challenges that come with poor literacy. Or it can set the standards it takes to be the leader in public education it purports to be.
Carine Hajjar is a Globe Opinion columnist. She can be reached at carine.hajjar@globe.com.
