LAWMAKERS ARE “ALIGNED with a lot of things” on literacy education changes, the Senate’s chief negotiator said Wednesday as tries to finalize the Legislature’s reform approach.
Sen. Sal DiDomenico of Everett said the formal negotiation process for the House and Senate bills addressing literacy education will start “in the next couple weeks” as advocates at the State House again rang the alarm of the urgency to address declining reading proficiency in Massachusetts.
“There aren’t a lot of substantial differences between the two bills. So hopefully we can get this done in a quick manner when it comes to conference committees,” DiDomenico told the News Service.
Bills approved by the House and Senate would require districts to adopt literacy curricula in five researched-based areas in reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
The Senate bill (S 2940) puts $25 million toward a new early literacy fund to support districts as they purchase curricula and provide professional development for teachers. The House bill (H 4683) does not include a funding transfer, but bans certain teaching methods that rely on visual memorization of words and using context and picture clues, also known as “three-cueing.” The Senate bill does not explicitly ban three-cueing.
National Council on Teacher Quality President Heather Peske named teacher preparation programs included in the House bill, along with requirements for “high quality” teacher curriculum vetted by the state, as provisions she thinks should be in the final legislation. Boston Arts Academy reading specialist Michael Phaneuf also stressed the importance of ongoing training for educators about how to implement new curricula.
DiDomenico and Rep. Ken Gordon of Bedford will chair the negotiations, and DiDomenico said they have not determined when they’ll begin meeting. Sens. Jason Lewis of Winchester and Patrick O’Connor of Weymouth, and Reps. Simon Cataldo of Concord and John Marsi of Spencer have also been tapped as negotiators.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association has raised issue with the reforms in play. While the union said on January 27 that it was “pleased to see improvements to the bill that was passed by the House, including the removal of language banning specific instructional practices in our classrooms,” it “remains concerned that any mandated curriculum will inevitably leave behind some students who are struggling with reading.”
Others have pointed to increased reading proficiency in states that have passed curricula initiatives based around the “science of reading.” There was a 3.5 percentage point increase in reading proficiency in New York City as a result and increases in some southern states, according to the group Educators for Excellence.
“Louisiana and Mississippi are states that have been leading what we call the southern surge. And I will tell you — I talked to some legislators about it three years ago who said, ‘Heather, are you kidding me? You want me to think about Mississippi? We’re Massachusetts,'” Peske recalled.
“But the fact of the matter is, folks, that we’ve done the projections in terms of the data, and if we don’t make the drastic changes that are needed, we are on a declining pace, and Mississippi is on an increase,” she continued. “Guess when we collide? 2028.”
A presentation on Wednesday based on 2025 MCAS results showed that 68 percent of third graders in Massachusetts aren’t proficient readers; 79 percent of English learners in fourth grade scored “not meeting expectations” in English language arts; and 38 percent of fifth graders are proficient readers.
“Six out of ten kids in third grade are not reading at grade level. Something is wrong here,” DiDomenico said. “I will make sure that we protect all the good things that we put in our bill and add some good things the House did as well. I know some teacher preparation stuff you’re talking about as well, and I know three-cueing is a big issue for a lot of folks, as it is for us.”
DiDomenico in January spoke on the Senate floor about his son’s struggle to learn to read with dyslexia. Mass Reads Coalition’s Jill Norton added her experience Wednesday. Despite special help beginning in kindergarten, the difficulty her son had learning to read impacted his desire to want to go to school and his mental health.
“He started referring to himself as the dumbest kid in the class starting in second grade, and then by third, he was saying, maybe it’d be better if he weren’t here. And so that’s when we were like, ‘This is an emergency,’ ” Norton said. Even though she got him tutoring and additional teaching support, Norton had to pull him out of his school in fourth grade and put him into a school that focused on teaching students with evidence-based approaches.
“This is a child that could learn to read if given the right strategies and instruction,” Norton said. “This legislation will protect kids like him, but it also protects their families and parents from having to be monitoring their kids’ education at that level and making decisions that have financial implications to pull them out, to get them what they deserve and are owed in the typical public schools.”