Massachusetts' sinking reading scores should be a five-alarm fire on Beacon Hill
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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.
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'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
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According to a 2023 Globe
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 to model instruction for their particular students.'
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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
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.'
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That might also be true for disadvantaged kids in wealthy districts. On the third-grade English MCAS in 2024,
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
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