Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2025 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “What needs to happen next—at the state, district, and school levels—for the science of reading revolution to fulfill its promise and ensure that far more children learn to read well?” Learn more.
We asked ChatGPT to tell us what a state education agency (SEA) does. It came back with:
- Setting academic standards
- Administering funding
- Monitoring performance
- Ensuring compliance
We’d say that’s a pretty accurate definition, but that’s not enough when it comes to creating meaningful change in education.
For the past few years, states across the country have been passing early literacy laws to address our nation’s literacy crisis, yet far too few states are reaping the rewards of these efforts to date. The reason? These laws reflect decades-long practices of a siloed K–12 education system: the state sets the rules, the district enforces them, and teachers scramble to keep up. There’s an “implementation gap” between legislation and classroom instruction—an assumption that once state initiatives are announced, it’s “mission accomplished” and “problem solved.” Educators aren’t given what they need to achieve the goals outlined in state mandates, yet they’re being held accountable to them, which can be pretty frustrating.
The missing component is a cohesive, scalable, state-led implementation strategy encompassing multiple roles across all levels of the education ecosystem. Let's take a look at Delaware as an example.
Delaware’s blueprint
The Delaware Department of Education (DDOE) recently announced its FY2026 budget, which included $8 million for early literacy investments and $3 million in teacher-selected literacy resources. So far, this aligns with the role ChatGPT thinks a state should play: administering funding.
This investment by the DDOE is in response to the reading crisis that Delaware (like most states) faces. The state is still clawing its way back from COVID-19, with fourth grade 2024 NAEP reading results eight points below where scores were in 2019. As a result, Delaware’s Governor, Matt Meyer, has declared a “literacy emergency.”
In response, Governor Meyer and State Secretary of Education Cindy Marten launched the Delaware Early Literacy Plan. The plan isn’t a set of mandated requirements for school system and school leaders to follow, but rather a cohesive partnership between local education agencies (LEAs) and the SEA. “My team and I will be in classrooms, shoulder-to-shoulder with educators and school leaders, to celebrate what’s working and help where it’s hard. We can do this, we must do this, and we will do this—together,” said Secretary Marten. The plan includes four priorities:
- Access to meaningful, grade-level instruction: High-quality instructional materials (HQIM) aligned to the science of reading, universal screeners, and responsive teaching.
- Sustained, job-embedded professional learning: LETRS, AIM Pathways, Delaware’s Early Literacy Leadership Academy (ELLA), and ongoing coaching connected to teachers’ daily lessons from their HQIM.
- Strategic staffing and enabling conditions: Team-teaching pilots, principal coaching, and DOE site visits that celebrate bright spots and tackle barriers.
- Family engagement and student supports: Family Literacy Toolkit connecting home and school learning.
The real difference in Delaware is that the DDOE did not just announce a plan; it is already fulfilling its partnership promise by launching several initiatives to build leaders’ knowledge and skills to support strong literacy instruction.
Here are some examples:
- Early Literacy Coaching Program: The DDOE launched the program in 2024 to support districts and charters in implementing early literacy legislation. The state recruited and trained the coaches, deploying them in the state’s highest-need schools in the 2024-25 school year. Prior to working in their assigned schools, each coach underwent six months of training to hone their coaching skills, including student-centered coaching, to better support teachers in using their high-quality early literacy curriculum and meeting the needs of their students.
- Early Literacy Leadership Academy: Supporting literacy efforts requires a collective vision and intentional leadership. For this reason, Delaware’s Early Literacy Leadership Academy (ELLA) supports system-level literacy leaders, elementary building administrators, and instructional coaches in developing the knowledge, tools, and community needed to lead with confidence and make lasting change. ELLA ensures local leaders have the systems and structures to best support teachers and students in improving literacy outcomes statewide.
- Bridge to Practice Grants: This fall, the state is providing targeted grants to strengthen classroom instruction and improve early literacy outcomes across Delaware. These grants will support a comprehensive strategy to ensure all early literacy teachers complete LETRS or AIM training and/or receive professional learning aligned to their district’s HQIM. Grants will also fund participation in ELLA to equip district-, school-, and coach-level leaders with the knowledge and skills to provide effective feedback grounded in the science of reading and high-quality curricula. Additional supports include early literacy coaching services, professional learning for all literacy staff, and the use of Delaware’s HQIM Implementation Dashboard to monitor progress. Districts and charters may also explore innovative staffing approaches such as the Next Education Workforce™ model. Priority for funding will be given to schools that have adopted HQIM, have strong professional learning systems in place, and/or are identified for school improvement. All grant recipients will engage in continuous accountability through DDOE consultation, site visits, implementation check-ins, and data review.
Is this working?
These initiatives all sound good—or at least different from what ChatGPT says is the norm for an SEA. But is the DDOE effort working?
While the data shows that districts and charters have adopted HQIM aligned to the science of reading, student outcomes do not currently reflect expected gains. After consulting with other states and national partners, DDOE leaders began to reflect on how they can invest in state-wide HQIM implementation monitoring, which provides day-to-day implementation data that can be used in real time to inform changes to the state’s literacy plan.
This work led to the initial pilot of Rivet Education’s Instructional Materials Implementation Dashboard—a digital platform that tracks implementation activity at the school, district, and state levels. The Dashboard reports implementation data and trends of what is going well in implementation across the state and what needs improvement, and provides the SEA with the ability to assess implementation impact by state-led initiatives, curricula, or professional learning providers. The DDOE then uses the data in the dashboard to adjust the state’s literacy plan, resources, and initiatives.
Our recommendation to states:
Here’s our call to action to other state leaders: roll up your sleeves! ChatGPT doesn’t know it yet, but you’re about to know all about the science of reading and how to implement it well. We call on fellow state agencies to:
- Invest in HQIM and science of reading materials
- Invest in job-embedded coaching, curriculum-based professional learning, and support across all levels (state leaders as well!)
- Monitor the impact of investments and create feedback loops between the state department of education and its educators on the ground in schools. This means developing a way to actually see and track implementation activities across every district.
There’s no denying this call to action is a pretty massive undertaking, but it’s critical if we want to see student progress in reading at last. When we ask ChatGPT next year what a state education agency does, let’s make sure its answer reflects what we already know: a partner, not a monitor, makes change possible.
