Parents of young kids starting to learn to read in Massachusetts should consider moving to Mississippi. This advice is jarring, no doubt. Mississippi’s child poverty rate today is nearly twice that of Massachusetts’. Yet when it comes to teaching children to read, Mississippi is a bright spot, one of three states (Illinois and Louisiana are the others) whose gains in reading achievement put their students ahead of where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data from the Education Recovery Scorecard by Stanford University and Harvard University reveal that Mississippi students’ reading achievement is above the national average while Massachusetts’ economically disadvantaged students have been in decline since 2016. They have not bounced back from the pandemic but continue to decline.
On average, a student in Jackson, Miss., now reads a full year and a quarter ahead of a similar student in Boston. This is the result not of a short-term fix but of a decade of intensive focus on improving reading instruction throughout Mississippi. Policy makers and school leaders in Massachusetts may be dismissive of the comparison, but they can’t ignore the data. Instead, there are three things that the Bay State could learn from Mississippi’s progress.
First, Mississippi’s political leaders, from governors to district superintendents and teachers association heads, have articulated a common mission to raise reading achievement. A decade ago, Mississippi’s then-governor Phil Bryant authored comprehensive reform legislation and set an ambitious reading improvement goal for the state. In nine of the last 10 Mississippi State of the State addresses, emphasis has been on not just the importance of education but Mississippi’s long-standing commitment to improving literacy. What’s more, the state’s largest teachers lobby, the Mississippi Association of Educators, helped advance the reform agenda. In a 2022 interview, MAE president Erica Jones credited “increased state guidance on reading instruction” for helping the state make transformative reading gains: Mississippi used to be more like Massachusetts, with “many … districts … just kind of picking programs that they wanted to implement,” but now, “the state [gives] us a lot of direction on which way we should go… and that really seemed to pull us together.”
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Second, Mississippi has strengthened the professional expertise of teachers. Historically, most university teacher preparation programs have had significant autonomy, with tenured faculty highly resistant to change. Even so, Mississippi required that its colleges and universities redesign their teacher prep program requirements to align with the research on reading by offering all aspiring early literacy teachers three common courses grounded in the evidence on how best to teach reading.
These bold efforts paid off. Last year, the National Council on Teacher Quality gave high ratings to two-thirds of Mississippi’s nine colleges training teachers, as their courses now address all five components of evidence-based reading instruction. In Massachusetts, half of university programs scored an “F” for not addressing any of the components.
Finally, Mississippi has placed high-quality reading curriculum at the center of its reform efforts. The state provides an approved textbook list, with choices that are all highly rated for alignment to college and career-ready standards. One of those curricula, Wit and Wisdom, is also well-regarded for its knowledge-building features. Students read whole texts of fiction and nonfiction that showcase diverse perspectives and topics.
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In the past nine years, publishers have also created well-regarded curricula such as Bookworms and EL Education and made them openly accessible to districts and schools. This helps districts save potentially millions on costs and frees up resources to support teachers’ implementation.
Unfortunately, the state of reading instruction is not so rosy in the Bay State. A 2023 Globe investigation found nearly half of all Massachusetts districts use a low-rated curriculum the state does not support. Those curricula do not meet evidence-based standards and fall short in how they help all students, especially English learners, to recognize words and develop vocabulary.
Encouragingly though, two state legislators, Representative Danillo Sena and Senator Sal DiDomenico, have advanced legislation that would change how reading is taught in Massachusetts. Educator prep programs would need to be aligned with evidence-based methods for teaching reading and districts would be required to use evidence-based curriculum materials as a means of protecting students from poor instruction. Districts would also screen K-3 students twice a year to identify those who might have dyslexia. Teachers would have access to online training to bring them up to speed on the latest reading research. There are no silver bullets, but this new legislation and recent initiatives by Governor Maura Healey — including calling for a $30 million state investment to support building teacher capacity — are giant steps in the right direction.
Still, some education leaders and the Massachusetts Teachers Association have expressed concern that the proposed reforms infringe on local control of schools and will lead to “one size fits all” instruction. With respect, look at what local control has gotten Massachusetts: By 2031, more than half the jobs in the state will require an associate’s degree or higher. Yet only 24 percent of Massachusetts students from low-income families, and 42 percent of all students, read at grade level.
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We urge the MTA to stand up for students and teachers and leverage its influence to promote evidence-based reading among educators and localities.
With the political will to help struggling readers, literacy reform is possible. The Legislature should act now to ensure that all Massachusetts students learn to read.
David Scarlett Wakelyn is a consultant at Upswing Labs, a nonprofit that works with school districts and charter schools to improve instruction. Michael Hartney is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an associate professor of political science at Boston College.
