One winter morning at the Woodville School in this town about 15 miles north of Boston, teacher Danielle Masse was guiding her class of kindergartners through a lesson on identifying the sounds that make up words.

She instructed her students to say aloud the word “said,” then explained how to separate it into two parts. The kindergartners repeated the “s” sound followed by the syllable “ed.” Then, Masse walked the students through how to make a new word from the severed sounds, telling them to substitute the “r” sound for the “s” sound and then combine the new “r” with “ed.”

“Red!” the kindergartners shouted in unison.

Experts say that without skills like these, some students will struggle to become fluent readers because they often misidentify words.

In recent years, a movement known as the science of reading, which promotes explicit literacy instruction in five areas — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension — has influenced classrooms across the country, including Masse’s. It’s gained traction amid growing evidence that other approaches to teaching reading, such as balanced literacy, do not provide enough explicit instruction to help students learn to decode words, leaving some young readers with reading deficiencies that have snowballed into a nationwide literacy crisis. As concern has spread, more than 40 states have enacted some form of legislation to promote evidence-backed reading instruction.

But while Massachusetts has taken some steps to advance literacy instruction — for example through an effort to invest millions in educator training and curriculum support — it is not among the states that have adopted a significant legislative fix. Now, though, the Bay State is poised to enact what its supporters call some of the strongest reading legislation in the nation — and some educators worry it goes too far in imposing new standards that override teacher control of classrooms.

Like most states, Massachusetts allows districts to make their own decisions about literacy curricula. That has meant that in many classrooms across the state, the kind of systematic skills instruction seen in Masse’s class in Wakefield is less common. In an email, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said it estimated that only about half of the state’s school districts “are using high-quality, evidence-based curriculum to teach early literacy.”

Meanwhile, just 42 percent of third graders in the state met reading expectations on 2025 state tests.