2025 was another banner year for science of reading (SOR) policy advocates. States including California, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New York, and Pennsylvania passed legislation around evidence-based literacy instruction. South Dakota revised state standards in alignment with SOR principles.
Statewide laws and policies provide crucial groundwork, but the real action takes place in the classroom. That’s why we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute want to know: With more than 40 states having passed SOR legislation, what comes next? What will make science of reading laws succeed? Last month, we gathered a team of literacy and implementation experts to get their take. Here’s some of what we learned (check out the whole recording for more).
1. It’s not just “plug and play” from here.
Above all, the experts agree: Education leaders have miles to go before they sleep when it comes to SOR implementation. For states newer to SOR work, “Mississippi Marathon” leader Kymyona Burk cautions against attempts to “plug and play” from another state. Although states can certainly learn from one another, Burk emphasizes the need for each state to examine its own student and teacher data to identify “breakdowns” in understanding and implementation. From there, state leaders can tailor policies to meet the needs of their unique populations.
Even in more seasoned states, however, Instruction Partners co-founder Emily Freitag fears that many policymakers incorrectly “think they did the big work” already. The reality, she says, is that implementation is more complex than scaling practices. How can education leaders figure out what it is they don’t know about implementation? According to Freitag, establishing challenging goals (e.g., 80 percent of kids will read on grade level, with no achievement gaps, within five years) will force more authentic inquiry into how to make SOR ambitions into reality.
Once education leaders have established goals, where should they go next?
2. “Start with teachers.”
Burk suggests that the next move for implementation is to “start with teachers.” That includes training and professional development, of course, but it’s in no small part a matter of building buy-in. When educators have dedicated their careers to teaching a certain way—having been trained that way, truly believing in that way—an isolated training or even a new curriculum is unlikely to change their practice.
To advance SOR, one of the important mindset shifts is around the role of knowledge in reading instruction. For years, the emphasis around reading instruction has been on abstract skills over content. That’s partly because, a decade and a half ago, education leaders wanted to persuade as many states as possible to sign onto the Common Core Standards. In reading, prescribing specific content seemed like a bridge too far—no state wanted to sacrifice so much autonomy—so the compromise was to design Common Core reading standards around skills (e.g., “compare and contrast,” “describe characters, settings, and major events”). An unintended consequence of designing standards (and their aligned assessments) around skills, however, was an overemphasis on abstract “skills” as the goal of instruction. As Freitag said, the message was delivered to a generation of educators: “My job as a teacher or leader is to teach the standards, and one by one I’m going to move through them.”
How can the message be delivered that reading instruction shouldn’t be centered on skills-of-the week?
3. Assessment may help shift this mindset.
Especially amidst a federal emphasis on “returning education to the states,” revamped Common Core standards are unlikely at best. Content-rich curricula can help, but they aren’t enough. As literacy expert Louisa Moats emphasizes, “The material doesn’t do the teaching; the teacher does the teaching.” If they don’t buy into a particular curriculum, individual educators can and often do bypass mandated curricula. (Ask any veteran teacher how we know.)
Educator preparation programs and ongoing professional development are critical, and longtime Core Knowledge advocate David Steiner also highlights assessment as a viable means of reframing educators’ priorities. Because we don’t expect kids to be familiar with any particular content in English language arts, Steiner explains, we test them on abstract skills like “demonstrating understanding,” “inferencing,” and the like. But because this structure necessarily means that students end up being assessed on random passages, the tests end up testing their background knowledge. Think of it this way: In a famous 1980s study, kids who read a narrative about baseball understood it better if they were familiar with baseball. They understood who was involved because they knew what a shortstop was. They understood how “bases loaded” contributed to narrative tension. No amount of skills practice could’ve replaced this knowledge crucial for comprehension.
But, as Steiner notes, if teachers and students know the specific content that will be tested, then they can work to ensure that students are familiar with that content in advance of the assessment. Even in the U.S., with our emphasis on state autonomy, Steiner believes a move to this type of assessment is possible. He notes the success of Louisiana, where over 90 percent of teachers use the same state-vetted ELA curriculum.
Making the change to content-centered assessment wouldn’t be a light lift, but it could certainly help shift how educators perceive their role. If they don’t have any way to predict the content on a reading assessment—as currently is almost always the case—then it makes sense for them to emphasize reading skills. What practical alternative do they have?
Teachers want their students to be successful on assessments, and they know that that’s a core part of their job. If they know certain content will appear on the test, then they will absorb the message that they are responsible for teaching that content. And, as webinar panelist Eric Tucker and his blog post co-author Edmund Gordon argued, a stronger culture of formative assessment can help teachers see what knowledge is sticking along the way. Assessment won’t do it alone, but it can help create the “schema change” that Freitag has called for.
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In sum, when it comes to the science of reading, states are jumping the gun if they declare victory before classroom practice actually changes. In many states, the policy battles may be won—at least for now—but the “big work” lies ahead.
