| The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

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Joan Kelley

11.13.2025

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The science of reading (SoR) revolution has propelled instructional change, but to fulfill promised reading results at scale, there is more to do: We need families in true partnerships with schools.

The case for tapping into parents is based on two issues that are endemic to the larger reading problem regardless of approach used. But this time, with research-based approaches in the public eye and embraced by more and more educators, we have a chance to engage untapped stakeholders to help us fix these persistent and critical issues.

1. We have a watchful-eye problem

Many key reading skills accumulate over time. If skill growth stagnates, there are effective tools to change trajectories. But if teachers are distracted or overwhelmed, if they’re not teaching research-based programs with fidelity, or if they just don’t organize sufficient support to address a child’s struggles, the intervention opportunity is missed and the struggling continues. Our current “system” is like too many people watching a child at the beach; parents assume teachers will make sure a child reads successfully, teachers count on the process and assume time will make the difference, principals count on teachers—it’s set up to end badly, and it often does.

For SoR programs to be successful, we need more informed eyes on a child’s learning-to-read progress, all through the early years. Currently, families are in the dark. According to Learning Heroes’ research, almost 90 percent (!) believe that their children read at or above grade level. There’s no motivated to engage when there’s no identified problem to solve. We need to give these invested stakeholders the opportunity to understand enough about how learning to read “works” so they can bring more attention to a child’s struggles at school, and ensure the default instructional approach in classrooms is SoR based.

Parents could do that alerting and monitoring. With the right messaging, the reporting feels collaborative, not antagonistic.

2. We have an oral-language “dosage” problem:

To read books beyond the early years, children need to have been steeped in rich language settings their whole young lives. That’s because academic vocabulary and complex language fill texts throughout middle school, high school, and beyond, and take lots and lots of exposure and practice to learn. To succeed, students need to become so familiar with this kind of language and vocabulary that they can read it fluently and respond to it in speech or writing.

Schools can’t do this language-building alone because of the high dosage of complex language opportunities that it demands.

For SoR programs to prepare students to read complex high-school texts, schools need more people to help children accumulate these language- and knowledge-based skills through regular, high-quality, back-and-forth talk about ideas and books. When supported and motivated, any caring adult can provide high-quality language moments throughout a child’s days and years, with the added bonus of building personal connection.

Parents could initiate the extra dosage children need if given realistic, ongoing support and motivated by knowledge of the task’s importance.

How do we set up strong partnerships between schools and families that address both problems listed above—and therefore make sure the SoR revolution makes a difference?

We combine the best research on reading development/SoR with the best research on family partnerships to create substantive, productive, more transparent and mature (!) partnerships between schools and parents/caregivers. This combination lets us:

Raise SoR awareness of all the adults who spend time with children.
Set up parents to feel integral to reading success but not be overwhelmed by the task.
Make implementing partnerships turn-key and low lift for teachers and leaders.

Our recent standing-room-only presentation at The Chicago Reading League conference showed that teachers, principals, and district leaders are ready to hear how to engage families in SoR. They are often mandated to include families more generally, but haven’t thought through how SoR might include parents to boost reading outcomes. Besides, they don’t have simple, realistic tools to make it happen. I left a literacy lab at Harvard GSE to take on the family partnership challenge. I spent a summer at MIT’s delta v to figure out how. If that doesn’t show a “wonk” component to this work, I don’t know what does.

For more information about the program we’re using in schools and why this kind of structured, systematic family-partnership approach is necessary, see the “wonkier” part below. Note that we have made the charge minimal—enough for schools to have skin in the game but not so much to exclude any school. $500/school/yr for any and all members of the community (e.g., staff, families, afterschool providers):

Program specifics:

1. Schools offer each family (via the Abound app and supported by weekly newsletters): a 25-question benchmark check-in (taken two times yearly), with check-in results to be shared with a child’s teacher one week before each conference; and daily app questions to support skill building through back-and-forth conversations about ideas and words—conversations that also connect adults and children.

2. Weekly book suggestions (publicly-available video links) and discussion content to support family talk about books.

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Edmund W. Gordon Eric Tucker

11.13.2025

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Mississippi’s reading revolution offers powerful lessons: the state paired phonics mandates with on-the-ground capacity-building—training, coaching, and assessments—to catch struggling readers early. The results demonstrate that all children can succeed when given appropriate and sufficient opportunities. Broad adoption of science of reading (SoR) laws is a fortunate arrival, as we face a literacy challenge with barely a third of our fourth graders proficient on the NAEP. Mississippi’s success proves that passing a law is just the beginning.

While many wonks highlight essential work in teacher training and curriculum, these advances require an often-overlooked backbone: an assessment system that ensures every child’s learning is visible. Optimizing SoR 1.0 approaches is necessary but insufficient; teachers won’t get far flying blind without timely insights. SoR laws will succeed best if states, districts, and schools prioritize assessment in the service of learning.

To truly fulfill its promise, the focus must move beyond K–3 to include both pre-kindergarten and older readers who were omitted by earlier efforts. Implementing this requires alignment across educators, training programs, and parents.

A balanced assessment system—where each quiz, screening, and exam is used to improve instruction, not just audit status—will help ensure SoR reforms translate into real reading gains. This approach builds upon existing commitments to instructional excellence and high expectations for every learner, proposing we move towards what we characterize as SoR 2.0. As members of the editorial team of the recently published Handbook for Assessment in the Service of Learning series, we base the arguments herein on rigorous, hyperlinked research.

Building reader positioning systems: From single-score verdicts to balanced assessment

While current SoR approaches have promoted high standards, transparency for families, and data disaggregation, their assessment systems have often fallen short of their potential to support teaching and drive better decision-making. Technological breakthroughs, analytic methods, and artificial intelligence (AI) are rapidly transforming how we can measure and enhance reading.

To best support educators, states and school systems must establish balanced assessment systems designed to maximize learning for every child. The redesign must center ambitious instruction, using data to inform schools and teachers. Assessment in the service of learning holds educators and communities accountable to cultivate ability. With colleagues, we have proposed research-backed principles to guide the design and use of learning-focused assessments. For these systems to advance SoR-grounded approaches, they must:

Measure what matters most, not just what’s easy to measure.
Leverage emerging technologies to provide rich, useful insights.
Prioritize solutions optimized for scientific soundness, SoR fidelity, scalability, usefulness and usability.

The sciences of learning and development can and should guide this innovation.

Learning to improve: Practical measures to inform ambitious teaching of reading

The Mississippi lesson is clear: Lasting gains require ongoing monitoring and support.

Traditional assessment systems administer infrequently, focus on distal outcomes, and return results too late, remaining distant from the specific needs of practitioners. In contrast, practical measurement for improvement uses evidence to inform judgment about the “why,” “how,” and “for whom” of daily improvement.

How might educators translate the snowstorm of data into actionable insights? Through instructionally useful assessment, which facilitates educator engagement in high-leverage practices such as quality formative assessment. This includes dynamically integrating SoR curriculum, instruction, and assessment. For example, a quick phonemic awareness quiz for a small group on a Friday might help a first-grade teacher immediately reteach a blending skill on Monday, long before it becomes a months-long lag.

We recommend Hattie’s evidence-backed mindframes that emphasize insights into reader progress, strategies, emotions, and self-regulation rather than just status. This means prioritizing the development of “assessment-capable learners”—students who can interpret and act on feedback to take charge of their own improvement. Odemwingie shares a practical example where reading assessments foster learner agency and self-efficacy while supporting classroom learning culture. A culture of formative assessment makes it impossible to ignore a child’s needs until it’s too late, serving as a continuous GPS, recalculating the route to reading success for each child.

Embracing reader variation: Customized learning powered by SAFE AI

AI and person-specific measurement can reshape how we understand and nurture reading processes. AI has the potential to generate insights that:

Customize learning, adapting to reader strengths and weaknesses, optimizing pace, accessibility, content, and scaffolding.
Provide real-time feedback, supporting readers’ processes like motivation, attention, engagement, and metacognition.
Leverage predictive analytics to match interventions to learner needs.

The integration of AI into assessment, while beneficial, demands a rigorous evaluation of its safety and efficacy, necessitating clear guidelines and guardrails. Duolingo‘s responsible AI standards are instructive.

The Personalized Mastery Learning Ecosystem (including My Reading Academy®) has showcased significant learning gains across multiple ESSA-aligned studies. PBS KIDS uses dynamic leveling systems to adapt to individual reader motivations and needs. Khan Academy analyzes performance data—like accuracy and scaffold usage—to provide continuous, skill-level insights. Its AI-powered assistant, Khanmigo, is transforming the modalities through which insights are generated and understood. Huff, of Curriculum Associates, proposes design approaches that foster a deeper shared understanding of the reader’s cognitive processes and maintain the integrity of the reading constructs being measured.

Together, these examples reflect a rising generation of assessment: highly personalized, multi-modal, adaptive, and focused on continuously optimizing the learning journey for every student.

SoR 2.0: A call for assessment systems that cultivate reading ability

States and districts have a window to marry proven reading science-driven standards with efficacious implementation. The SoR wave set strong expectations; now, we must actively deploy modern, balanced assessment systems that personalize and inform reading instruction at scale. This can transform assessment from a bureaucratic speed bump into a building block for learning.

We urge three critical steps, which compliment the recommendations outlined above:

Tie balanced assessment into SoR implementation: Ensure that SoR rollout plans include robust universal preK–3 screeners, appropriate middle-years screeners, and revamped summative exams that integrate SoR domains.
Invest in innovation pilots: Fund pilot programs for AI-powered literacy interventions and tutors guided by embedded assessments, and evaluate which tools best boost reading gains.
Incentivize innovation with accountability: Create policies that encourage school systems to try new assessment models while holding them accountable for transparent, real-time learning.

The payoff is clear: confident third-grade readers, engaged middle-schoolers, and graduates prepared for the future of work. As our first author has long championed, assessment must be re-purposed to facilitate the cultivation of ability and actively support the learning process, not just audit outcomes after the fact. By embracing this vision, honoring the strength of the learning sciences and potential AI, together we can help to secure literacy and flourishing for more children.

Policy Priority:

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Daniel Whitlock

11.13.2025

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Let’s be honest: The “science of reading” has turned into a Rorschach test. States passed sweeping laws. Districts bought shiny new curricula. Schools sat through professional development sessions with Scarborough’s Rope slides and checklists. But kids don’t learn to read because adults attended workshops. They learn when three boring things line up—materials, time, and feedback—and stay aligned long enough to show growth.

The next phase of this so-called revolution has to be about execution, not slogans.

At the state level, the job is to set the rules of the game and actually enforce them. That starts with defining the “science of reading” narrowly enough to mean something. If everything aligns, nothing does. States should publish a short, non-negotiable specification: Core K–2 programs must include explicit, systematic phonics with cumulative review; decodables that match taught patterns; daily phonemic awareness; and language comprehension built through content-rich knowledge units. Screening should be curriculum-agnostic, skill-specific, and administered three times a year.

Funding should flow to muscle, not meetings. States should tie dollars to two concrete artifacts: protected literacy schedules by grade level, and simple fidelity logs—one page, yes/no boxes on key routines. Forget glossy reports; show proof that minutes and materials match the mandate.

Data policy should follow a “verify, then trust” model. States should collect de-identified benchmark data statewide each fall, winter, and spring, and publicly report growth—not just proficiency. Progress, not posture, should drive recognition.

Teacher-preparation programs also need accountability with teeth. If graduates can’t pass a rigorous reading licensure test, the program loses approval. Publish pass rates publicly. Nothing motivates reform faster than daylight.

Finally, guardrail the AI hype. Approve only tools that align to taught phonics patterns, expose skill-level data, and have evidence within two years of rollout. No proof, no funding.

At the district level, the focus should shift to choosing well, scheduling hard, and coaching forever. Procurement should happen through results, not vibes. Run short pilot comparisons between two programs in matched schools and choose based on effect size and usability, not vendor branding.

Schedules are destiny. Lock daily time blocks: kindergarten and first grade get 120 minutes of literacy, with at least 45 minutes of foundational skills, 30–45 minutes of knowledge building, and 20–30 minutes of read-alouds. Second grade gets ninety to 120 minutes with heavier fluency work. Tier 2 intervention should be 30–45 minutes daily, with no more than four students per group. Principals should be evaluated on adherence, not intention.

Coaching has to be serious and sustained. One coach for roughly every 20 teachers, using a weekly cycle: plan, model, co-teach, observe, feedback, and adjust. Coaches should be measured by teacher skill growth and student outcomes, not the number of workshops delivered.

Data should be used without drowning in it. Districts should run three benchmark windows per year and biweekly progress checks for intervention students. After each window, hold short grade-level huddles to review names, data, and next steps. If a student shows no progress after eight weeks, change the intervention, not the presentation slide.

District offices should also monitor fidelity with short rubrics. Schools that fall behind get extra coaching and coverage support, not reprimands. But if non-adherence persists, the district temporarily takes control of scheduling. It sounds heavy-handed, but it’s far kinder than letting kids fail to read.

At the school level, the work becomes deeply practical: protect the minutes, teach the routines, and own the bottom quintile. The literacy block must be sacred—no assemblies, no test rallies, no interruptions. Substitutes should have a one-page plan with oral drills, review, new pattern introduction, dictation, decodable reading, and a knowledge-building read-aloud.

The micro-routines matter most. Ten minutes of brisk, corrective phonemic awareness every day. Phonics lessons that teach, review, write, and read the same pattern within a single session. Daily fluency practice—one-minute oral reads with charted words correct per minute. Content-based units in history and science that build background knowledge for comprehension.

Each grade should keep a live roster of the lowest 20 percent of readers. Every name gets an assigned adult, an intervention plan, and a simple traffic-light color: green, yellow, or red. The roster gets reviewed weekly. Students move off the list only when they hit skill benchmarks, not when adults “feel good.”

AI tools can help, but only as force multipliers. Use speech-recognition for fluency practice, auto-scored probes for faster feedback, and generative tools to create decodables that match the phonics sequence. But the adult remains the diagnostician. The AI assists; it doesn’t replace.

How will we know it’s working? Stop worshipping annual proficiency charts and start tracking growth. Measure average gains from fall to spring in phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency. Monitor Tier 2 dosage delivered versus planned. Track the percent of students meeting adequate growth targets by grade and subgroup. At the school level, check how many students are reading aligned decodables within six weeks of each unit. When those numbers stagnate, fix the schedule or staffing—not the narrative.

The truth is, the real barrier isn’t belief—it’s time. Teachers aren’t resistant to research; they’re overloaded with noise. Reforms stall because we keep taxing teacher attention without buying teacher time. The fix is straightforward: Pay for coverage so teachers can be coached during their actual block, stop piling on conflicting initiatives, and trade one more PD day for one more coach.

The reading crisis isn’t mysterious. Kids need tightly sequenced instruction, protected time, and fast feedback. States build the guardrails, districts lock the schedules and coach, schools execute the routines and own their bottom quintile. Do those things faithfully for two years and scores move. Keep doing “alignment PowerPoints,” and we’ll keep getting slogans with flat lines.

This moment calls for proof, not posture. Let’s finally rebuild reading instruction to deliver both.

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Jason Kamras Taikein Cooper Alyssa Schwenk

11.13.2025

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When Virginia passed the Virginia Literacy Act in 2022, we at Richmond Public Schools cheered. Why? Not because we were excited at the promise of the law. Because we’d been implementing science of reading–aligned practices for two years, and we knew what this could mean for every child in Virginia.

Science of reading, to us, is not about the policies, it’s about the practices. At RPS, we’re bouncing back from the pandemic faster than most school districts across the nation. Our economically disadvantaged students are growing five times faster than their peers across the state; more than 70 percent of our K–2 students are considered reading on grade level. Nearly 90 percent of our students are students of color, and more than two-thirds are considered economically disadvantaged—and yet, at the rate we’re growing, we’ll be level with our affluent, suburban neighbors within the next five years.

How did we do it? While the VLA is a strong piece of legislation, and an important backbone, it’s just that—a foundation. And while important, it’s what you build on top of it that matters. At RPS, with the support of our city and philanthropic partners, we’ve made significant investments in teacher professional development, teacher supports, curriculum, and, most importantly, strong systems and faithful implementation to see this success.

Take curriculum, for instance. Several years ago, a handful of teachers emailed Jason, the superintendent, and shared that they’d been using UFLI—University of Florida Literacy Institute—materials with their students and seeing strong success. Instead of reminding them to use the materials already purchased, Jason met with the teachers, learned more, and observed their classrooms. We then piloted the program and, eventually, expanded it to every K–2 classroom. And those teachers? Now, many of them are in Central Office, training our literacy coaches, interventionists, and teachers, and amplifying their impact across the division.

Additionally, using our ARP funding—and now city-provided funding—we worked to ensure that every elementary school not only has a literacy coach (to work with teachers) but an interventionist, to provide targeted instruction to students. At the same time, we’ve increased our teacher pay by an average of $25,000, making it more possible for excellent teachers to make a living in the profession. A budget is a statement of your priorities, and even as stimulus funding faded, we’ve maintained and expanded these line items because we know that they’re the single most important factor in student achievement.

Why do we do this? Because we live in the capital of the former confederacy, and at the General Assembly—a building that is just across the street from our offices—in 1831, Virginia state lawmakers made it illegal to teach any free African to read “by day or by night.” They knew that reading was liberation, and that the best way to suppress dissent was to suppress the right to read. The echoes of this mentality, and a century of Jim Crow laws, still reverberate through our schools—but so does the spirit of the civil rights leaders who fought, in Virginia and elsewhere, for these precious rights. In RPS, our goal of 100 percent literacy by third grade isn’t just words on the paper—it will be a generational promise fulfilled.

It’s still early days, but our biggest lesson so far—and one that we hope others take from us, and replicate—is that to be successful, you need to orient your entire system around that goal. Literacy proficiency is a part of every conversation with our school leaders. School schedules and our collective-bargaining agreements have been designed to preserve planning time, coaching debriefs, and data deep dives. Partners and volunteers have been enlisted to provide additional support to students and families. And most notably, Jason is obsessed with literacy because he understands that it is the key to transforming future outcomes for our students. He spends about 30 percent of his week alongside principals, principal directors, and coaches observing classrooms and students, offering tweaks, and synthesizing trends across the Division. It’s far too easy, as a system, to get bogged down in the operational outputs of what a half-billion-dollar agency needs, or to get dazzled by innovations and buzzwords. But you cannot lose sight of the academic outcomes, which should be at the heart of everything we do.

None of this would be possible, of course, without many others: Philanthropic investment has been the “tip of the spear” for this shift. We’re an entirely ordinary school system, with an elected School Board and funding that comes solely from the city and commonwealth: The support of our board, as well as mayors and city council, have been invaluable. The state's framework has been helpful (though we’ll be reminding our new governor and lawmakers that our state funding is woefully inadequate). It takes time to get the right internal leaders, and school leaders, who have the expertise and capacity and passion to do this right. And, of course, we need excellent teachers in each and every classroom.

We often say that excellent teaching is magical, but it isn’t magic. We’re optimistic about where we’re going because we’ve got the right ingredients in place. For every district in the country to get on this trajectory, it will take every facet of the sector, at every level, orienting around this goal. We hope you’ll join us.

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Ed Jones

11.13.2025

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In 2019, as the “science of reading” label gathered steam, I was in a position to do something different. From an odd trifecta of fate sprung a question: Is it possible to create a mobile app that would help both expert and novice teachers? To work together at understanding excellent reading instruction? To move from a body of science to a common set of habits of mind?

The truth is, beyond first principles (which were actually somewhat unique), it wasn’t clear how this would actually evolve. None of us could then have known that the amazing Donna Trinca Schultz Hejtmanek would mold Facebook to create a “Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College” group. Or that it would quickly surpass 5000, then 20,000, now ~250,000 members. Or that many other SoR groups would evolve to take on specific needs of the teaching communities. Nor could we have foreseen that the gifted storyteller Emily Hanford would take her curiosity about America’s reading problem, and her milestone Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read? to a new level with the release of the teacher-jolting series Sold a Story. Even less could we have thought that Emily’s stories and the SoR groups would combine with the growing power of tired parents of dyslexic students, to pass such strong reading science laws as quickly as they did.

All of which is to say that motivation to change happened very fast. Much faster than the tools, standards, and systems that could define what—exactly—that change should be.

So fast that, by only 2025, the eminent Mark Seidenberg would feel compelled to write, “Doing all this instruction is wildly inefficient.” So fast that the same short time would impel plenty of other literacy experts to be ready to shun the very label, “science of reading.”

Yet this path was, in 2019, generally predictable, if not inevitable. Three million teachers, tens of thousands of education professors, many thousands more professional development providers and district consultants…it was certain that nearly every message the science had to give would be transformed and corrupted many times over.

To give just one of many examples of the confusion that’s so widely sown: the teaching of “blends.” Not of blending, an essential skill that should be explicitly taught and practiced. But “blends” as units of speech or text: “S blends,” “R blends,” “L blends,” etc.

One vendor, boasting seemingly well-credentialed expert advisors and proudly offering “SCIENCE OF READING X GAME-BASED LEARNING,” also offers “Race Track Blends”. Teaching and practicing these “Blends” will “enable children to identify blends as familiar units within unknown words....this then will make decoding unfamiliar words easier.”

Except that the science says it won’t. As UFLI’s Professor Holly Lane puts it, “Blends are not an actual linguistic construct.” “We blend sounds together…but we don’t teach blends. “Kids already have 26 letters and 44 phonemes to learn....to make more than 300 graphemes.” Why on earth, on top of having to learn all of that, would I want for kids to have to learn around 70 more things we call “blends”?

Many more such “science-based practices” regularly show up in the wild.

Thus, Structured Literacy still has to deal with lots and lots of intellectual waste.

All living things must deal with waste. Even the tiniest of prokaryotic cells. Just last year, I lost a longtime friend to the failure of his body (kidneys, liver) to deal with waste. That waste can kill is a lesson societies too often forget. While wastewater management goes back 8,000 years, plagues and pandemics have afflicted many societies since.

The cure for SoR? If teaching were psychology and the year were around 1952, the answer might be something like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Yet we well know how that would go.

Coaching is now considered a primary solution.

This spring, I attended one of the most thoroughly professional sessions I’ve seen since entering education. Two leaders from the ReadOhio Literacy Coaching project presented Ohio’s new statewide coaching program, (See ReadOhio Coaching Report: Cohort 1 2023-2024 School Year.) I left elated!

Such state-directed coaching is certainly a recipe for lifting instruction, as we saw from Mississippi’s fantastic investments and results. It is a huge part of the infrastructure we must—at least until ed schools get their act together—build.

Yet this can only take us so far. It, too, is subject to the gaps in our common understanding of what outstanding and efficient reading instruction looks like.

Not that this challenge is new to SoR. Problems with the infrastructure of teaching go back to the ‘70s and ‘80s gatekeeping of orgs like the NEA. In newer infrastructure, from the glossy publications loved by foundations since the ‘90s, to the infinite blog posts of the 2000–2025 era, the conveyance of evidence-based methods has not kept up.

There is one other profession that has dealt well with garbage-collecting at this scale. Scale not just in member numbers and domain complexity, as teaching certainly faces. But also in the challenges of professional organization. Teaching autonomy, 16,000 districts, the behind-the-closed-door nature of actually delivering instruction, lack of tort law applicable to instruction: All these provide unique challenges.

True Open Source communities of practice could help to solve them.

This proven process of developing reliable intellectual assets has now been refined for 30 years by software engineering professionals. “Collaboration, not confrontation” is its ethos.

Workflow in an open source community is simply different from the discussions that normally take place around K–12 education. Better tools help enable this. Everything has a documented, linked history. There is a stability to intellectual assets that blog posts and podcasts never enjoy. Adopted procedures have a certain chain of custody, responsibility, and community buy-in.

Too, the culture of open source truly is to contribute to where you can, and be respectful where you can’t.

When I set out to build the Science of Reading mobile app (and its ecosystem), the goal was to build such a community. (And thus to help deal with accumulated intellectual waste.) In many ways, the effort went far further than I ever expected. Yet, in the biggest way, in building and modeling open source communities to teachers, it has completely fallen far short.

Structured Literacy’s biggest challenge remains.

It is no longer enough to fix K–3 foundations alone. (Though that is far from fixed yet!)

We must also cut instructional waste, reduce the opportunity costs of unneeded practices that don’t help kids read.

It’s past time for the experiments needed to create better, stronger sources of truth than reading instruction has yet had.

In short, to know better, and do better, to carve room for all the other learning that kids rightly deserve.

Policy Priority:

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Chad L. Aldis

11.13.2025

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Note: Today, the Ohio House Education Committee heard testimony on House Bill 455 which, among other things, aims to eliminate outdated and irrelevant sections of state education law. Fordham’s vice president for Ohio policy presented proponent testimony on several aspects of the wide-ranging bill. These are his written remarks.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today in support of House Bill 455.

Supporting Smarter Regulation to Refocus on Teaching and Learning

First and foremost, I want to commend Representatives Manning and Bird for their leadership in introducing House Bill 455. This thoughtful legislation takes important steps toward streamlining state education requirements so that educators can devote more of their energy to what truly matters—teaching and learning. This has long been a Fordham priority. We published a report more than a decade ago called “Getting Out of the Way: Education Flexibility to Boost Innovation and Improvement in Ohio”.

Over time, Ohio’s education code has become cluttered with outdated, duplicative, and overly prescriptive mandates that consume valuable time and resources. By revising or eliminating dozens of unnecessary provisions—from obsolete reporting requirements to redundant mandates—House Bill 455 helps reduce regulatory clutter and allows schools to focus more squarely on student outcomes.

This approach strikes a healthy balance: maintaining accountability and transparency while giving educators the flexibility they need. In doing so, the sponsors are helping restore common sense to how Ohio’s schools are governed.

Responsiveness to Stakeholder Feedback

We also appreciate the sponsors’ responsiveness to stakeholder feedback during the development of this bill. Their willingness to listen and make thoughtful adjustments is a model of good policymaking.

In particular, we thank Representatives Manning and Bird for removing the proposed changes related to community schools and the end-of-course exams in American history and U.S. government. The original community school provisions, while well-intentioned, could have inadvertently lowered accountability standards—something that would have undermined Ohio’s commitment to ensuring quality options for all families. By promptly addressing those concerns, the sponsors demonstrated a clear commitment to maintaining strong accountability even while rightly pursuing regulatory relief.

Similarly, the decision to retain the American history and government end-of-course exams reflects a careful balance between simplification and maintaining essential measures of civic understanding. These subjects remain foundational to preparing informed and engaged citizens, and we appreciate that they will continue to be an area of focus in Ohio high schools.

Improving Measures of College, Career, Workforce, and Military Readiness (CCWMR)

We also support the bill’s thoughtful updates to the College, Career, Workforce, and Military Readiness (CCWMR) component of the state report card. These adjustments refine how Ohio measures postsecondary preparedness—an area of ongoing importance to both families and policymakers.

By adding another objective method to demonstrate academic preparedness, the bill takes an important step toward identifying true indicators of readiness. These refinements will help ensure that Ohio’s report card more accurately reflects whether students are genuinely prepared for success beyond high school—whether in higher education, the workforce, or military service.

At the end of the day, our shared goal should be to find and reward true measures of readiness and preparedness—those that capture whether our students are leaving high school equipped for the opportunities and challenges ahead. House Bill 455 moves Ohio closer to that goal.

Suggested Improvement: Protecting the Integrity of the Early Literacy Measure

While we strongly support the overall direction of House Bill 455, we do have one concern regarding a change found in the substitute version of the bill—specifically, the revised definition of the early literacy component of the state report card.

Under the substitute language, the measure of students promoted to fourth grade now includes all students who move on, regardless of whether they demonstrated reading proficiency on the third-grade English language arts assessment. The previous version appropriately linked the rating to reading on grade level—either by scoring proficient on the state test or demonstrating competency on an approved alternative assessment.

By removing that linkage and awarding full credit simply for promotion, the measure risks rewarding (and even incentivizing) social promotion rather than true reading achievement. This could undermine the purpose of Ohio’s early literacy initiatives and diminish the report card’s value and accuracy.

To preserve the integrity of Ohio’s early literacy measure, we encourage restoring language that ties this indicator to demonstrated reading proficiency. Doing so ensures schools are recognized for preparing students to read proficiently by fourth grade—not merely for advancing them through the system.

Ohio has made tremendous strides in improving early reading instruction and implementing the science of reading. Maintaining strong and meaningful measures of reading proficiency is essential to building on that progress.

Conclusion

In closing, House Bill 455 represents thoughtful reform that simplifies the education code, reduces unnecessary burdens, and preserves essential standards of quality and accountability. We deeply appreciate the sponsors’ leadership and responsiveness and offer this small recommendation to further strengthen an already strong bill. Going forward, we hope this legislation is merely a first step toward even deeper reductions in red tape and bureaucracy.

Thank you again for the opportunity to testify.

Policy Priority:

Public Testimony

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