(Illustration via Pixabay)

ON SEPTEMBER 16, 2025, when the Right to Read Act was being debated at the State House, I testified before the Joint Education Committee in support of this crucial legislation. This was nerve-racking, but I had to do it because I strongly believe that all students should get appropriate reading instruction. It felt good to see legislators listen to me, a teacher of 23 years.

During my two-plus decades in the first- and then second-grade classroom, I have been responsible for teaching hundreds of students how to read. I realized long ago that the content I had learned way back when in my teaching program, and even in my masters of literacy and language program, was not enough to help my most struggling kids.

I had to independently find ways to supplement my teaching. Fortunately, my school district embraced the importance of teaching our students how to read using evidence-based reading instruction, which is now universally known as the science of reading. More than once, I was witness to the difference it made for the students in my school.

In early June, when Gov. Healey signed the Right to Read into law, it was an exciting day for me. Now school districts like mine would be required to shift to evidence-based literacy curriculum to teach reading to students in kindergarten through third grade, including explicit instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. They would no longer use the three-cueing method.

While this is certainly a victory for students in Massachusetts, the law is only as successful as the teachers who can implement it. In this, crucial gaps remain. One of the most important is that most of the teacher preparation programs in the state do not teach the science of reading methodology. It is not enough for the Right to Read to work great in theory. It must work in practice.

Our state must overhaul teacher preparation so that new teachers entering the profession are properly trained to teach reading. The good news is that Massachusetts has a precedent we can follow. When the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education established the requirement for a license endorsement for teaching students for whom English is not their first language, student teaching programs immediately adapted to this and made sure new teachers studied the best practices of teaching English language learner students. These new teachers then left college with an English language learner license endorsement and armed with the most recent strategies to be able to teach ELL students in their classroom.

The ELL license endorsement also meant that longstanding teachers like me received the required rigorous training to work with students learning English. Every five years when I renew my teaching license, I again have to prove that I’m up to date on ELL learning. My ELL students have directly benefited from this teaching license endorsement. We can provide the same benefit to our struggling readers by requiring that teachers in the classroom and teacher training programs obtain a literacy license endorsement.

I have been an elementary school teacher since my daughter Carly was a kindergartener. She has now been an elementary school teacher for five years. Although our graduation dates were 22 years apart, much of our college preparation programs, especially in regard to literacy, were very similar.

We both had just one class that covered the general aspects of reading, and we both learned to use a reading curriculum that has now been debunked. A quarter of a century without meaningful improvement in teaching aspiring educators how to teach reading is a very long time for Massachusetts students to wait. It is past time for a change.

All teachers encounter students with reading challenges, whether they are actively teaching students to read or are a 10th grade math teacher with a student struggling to understand a word problem. Both the initial license endorsement and the licensure expectations would enable all teachers to be more successful in meeting the needs of all of our struggling readers.

In order to be sure our state’s new literacy legislation has the most impact on our students, we need to ensure that we have the same laser focus on our teachers that this bill has brought to our students. The right to read can only become a reality for our students if all teachers in our state are properly trained.

Donna Thayer is a 2nd grade teacher at Mason-Rice Elementary in Newton and a Teach Plus Massachusetts Policy Fellowship alumna.