“We’re asking you to take a pledge today,” he said during the May 20 Zoom session, providing a link for participants to sign. Other elements of Thurmond’s agenda include for 100,000 children, free access for families to ebooks and a campaign to deliver to children’s homes.

The event followed the work of a literacy task force Thurmond created last fall. But the superintendent, who is running for reelection, was clear that as long as he’s in charge, California won’t follow the lead of other states — adopting a statewide literacy policy that prioritizes phonics, the connections between letter sounds and written words.

“We are not promoting a one-size-fits-all approach in California,” he said. “That’s been tried before. Our state is too large, is too diverse.” 

Critics dismissed Thurmond’s plan to combat what they describe as a literacy crisis in the nation’s most populous state. 

District leaders, advocates and some lawmakers want all schools to screen for dyslexia, a learning disability, and adopt phonics-based instruction. While Mayor Eric Adams has mandated a phonics-based curriculum and Michigan lawmakers are that would require dyslexia screening, California, some argue, passed up an opportunity to address long-standing achievement gaps in children’s reading.

Overall, 37 percent of the state’s fourth-graders score below the basic level on . The average score for Hispanic students is 27 points below that of white students, and the gap between Black and white students is even larger.

“We keep applying patchwork solutions to a system that never worked,” said Todd Collins, a school board member of the Palo Alto Unified School District in Silicon Valley. He’s also an organizer of the , which last year issued a “report card” ranking districts on the percentage of high-need Hispanic students proficient in reading by third grade. “Library cards and e-books are not going to fix a system that doesn’t teach kids right in the first place.”

Some members of Thurmond’s literacy agree. Kareem Weaver, part of the Oakland NAACP’s education committee and leader of a nonprofit focusing on literacy, said the group produced “a grab bag” of solutions. 

But they “didn’t get to the root cause of why kids aren’t reading,” he said. “We’re not explicitly teaching them how to read and crack the code.”

Thurmond isn’t opposed to districts adopting phonics-based instruction but instead emphasized that because of relief funds and a budget surplus “California has more resources than we’ve ever seen” to provide teacher training and increase the number of reading specialists in schools. passed last year requires new teachers entering the field to know how to teach “foundational reading skills,” but the state isn’t pushing districts to adopt a specific curriculum.

During Thurmond’s online event, only Tyrone Howard, an education professor at the University of California Los Angeles and president-elect of the American Educational Research Association, emphasized phonics. 

“I’m old school,” he said. “The data shows that phonics instruction can go a long way in helping kids to develop the fundamentals around reading.”

Roughly 20 states have adopted so-called based on decades of that emphasize phonics, fluency and vocabulary development as the foundations of learning how to read. Some experts who previously embraced strategies that encouraged children to depend on pictures and familiar words to read ones they don’t know have since changed their views. Once an exemplar of this approach, Lucy Calkins updated her curriculum based on the research, according to a recent article that generated a . 

The question in California is whether a commitment is enough.

“We’ve been committing since ‘A Nation at Risk’ and we haven’t gotten there yet,” said Barbara Nemko, superintendent of the Napa County Office of Education, referring to the landmark 1983 report that inspired education reform efforts. One of Thurmond’s task force co-chairs, she added that if the label has become divisive, “then call it something else.”

Policymakers and education groups in the state are also divided over dyslexia screening, even though over 30 states already have such laws in place. 

Thurmond promised to make a currently in development at the University of California San Francisco available to schools once it’s ready, possibly by the 2023-24 school year. But the California Teachers Association opposes that was introduced last year and never received a hearing. They said mandated screening “lessens the instructional time available for learning the required curriculum.” The California School Boards Association also opposes it.

Reading Recovery and Mississippi

Thurmond isn’t the only state leader whose response to what some have called a has come under fire. Some question the support of researcher and state board Chair Linda Darling-Hammond for Reading Recovery, a long-running tutoring program for first graders offered in about . In a , on pandemic recovery and a recent literacy task force , Darling-Hammond linked the program to successful schools. 

A , presented at a research conference, found that children who participated in the program scored lower on state tests in third and fourth grade than those who didn’t participate. Her comments, said Collins from Palo Alto, show “we have a dated and misguided understanding of what works.”

But Darling-Hammond, who also led President Joe Biden’s education transition team and recommended Miguel Cardona to be U.S. education secretary, told ����Ӱ�� that her statements about the program have never been in the “context of an endorsement” and noted that Reading Recovery is listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s “clearinghouse” of . 

She underscored the limitations of the study, including the fact that the researchers collected follow-up results from just a quarter of the third graders and 16% of fourth graders who were part of the original sample. She noted that a on Reading Recovery, presented at the same conference, found positive results for students in England through age 16.

“I think different interventions work well for different students,” Darling-Hammond said “I hope we won’t get wrapped up in a silver bullet idea about any intervention.” 

She said California fourth graders’ reading scores have inched closer to the since 2013 and highlighted the state’s plan this year to spend $500 billion on literacy initiatives, including reading coaches and specialists. Those positions are necessary, she said, because the state hires too many teachers without full credentials.

“In the schools with the greatest needs, you might have half or more of the teachers without any training to teach reading,” she said.

She also pointed to gains in , which in 2019, made more progress in reading than any other state. But she said people often “simplify” the state’s approach by only highlighting teacher training in phonics-based instruction.

“It’s a very robust program,” she said. “Phonics is very important. Phonemic awareness is very important, but that is not all they do.” 

‘An equity issue’

With the state taking what Darling-Hammond called a more “decentralized” direction than Mississippi, some school and district leaders have moved on their own to revamp the way they teach children to read. 

In 2019, when Lilia Espinoza took over as principal of Hardin Elementary in Hollister, California, she found staff members who worked hard on student reading with little to show for it.

“Historically, this school has struggled to really pump out students who are on grade level,” she said. With a high English learner population — as is the case in many California schools — she said teachers thought if children couldn’t read a word, they just didn’t understand the vocabulary instead of not being able to sound it out.

She reached out to , a private school in Seaside, California, that offered training in structured literacy and using practices that have worked with struggling readers. 

Hardin teachers and reading specialists now devote 45 minutes to an hour each day to explicit phonics lessons as part of a larger English language arts curriculum. Children can get “antsy” during that time, Espinoza said. But despite remote learning, the number of students referred to special education has dropped from 21 in 2017-19 to three this year. She thinks the gains would have been stronger if it hadn’t been for the pandemic.

Now, she worries that other “budget issues” will lead the district to cut funding for reading intervention teachers. She started with four, is now down to two, and might only have one next year. She wrote a letter to state leaders asking for more specialists.

“It’s an equity issue,” she said. “Not being able to secure support for early literacy for all students is not OK.”

Thirty-seven percent of the state’s fourth-graders score below the basic level on , and a shows many districts are struggling to provide strong reading instruction to disadvantaged Latino students — who make up over 40 percent of the state’s K-12 population.

Meanwhile other states, such as , have enacted major legislation aimed at improving reading achievement and have seen gains. 

Now, with young readers set by the pandemic, California lawmakers and state officials are trying to catch up and attacking the problem on multiple fronts. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation last month ensuring that prospective teachers learn reading instruction practices backed by research. Another proposed bill would require universal screening for dyslexia. And state Superintendent Tony Thurmond has launched his own literacy agenda, creating a aimed at making sure all third-graders can read by 2026 and pledging to distribute to students. But some wonder whether leaders have thought through all it will take to reduce racial gaps in reading performance.

Stephanie Gregson, deputy executive director of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, a nonprofit working to help low-performing districts improve, is among those saying a piecemeal approach to addressing poor reading performance won’t work.

“Where’s the coherence and the coordination of those efforts?” she asked during a recent virtual summit held by the California Reading Coalition, the new organization that released the “report card” ranking 287 districts on the percentage of low-income Latino third-graders meeting or exceeding grade-level reading standards. Gregson added that while this year’s includes $10 million for literacy training for teachers, “We have to think about the context of California. How far will $10 million go?”

Gregson, who began her career as an elementary school teacher in Sacramento and served as a deputy state superintendent until last month, said she was among those who left college unprepared to teach reading to students from homes where English is not the first language.

, now law, would aim to make sure that doesn’t happen to new teachers entering the field. The legislation requires colleges and universities to meet higher standards for ensuring that new teachers can teach “foundational reading skills” and have strategies for supporting English learners. The state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing will certify teacher preparation programs, and candidates for elementary and special education teaching positions will have to pass a new literacy assessment, beginning July 2025.

The new assessment replaces an for teachers that many have criticized as outdated and difficult to pass. But that’s because teacher preparation programs aren’t doing an adequate job of making sure teachers are well prepared to teach reading, said Lori DePole, co-state director of Decoding Dyslexia California, an advocacy group that supports the new law.

“This bill raises the bar on teacher prep programs to do a better job in preparing … candidates to teach evidence-based reading instruction,” she said.

In a from the National Council on Teacher Quality, one school in the state — California State University, Bakersfield — was among the list of 32 with teacher preparation programs that include all five components of teaching children to read. Those are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. CSU Bakersfield and CSU Dominguez Hills were among the six schools earning A’s for their graduate programs.

DePole’s group pushed to make sure the new legislation incorporates for teaching students with dyslexia, a learning disability in which children have difficulty processing speech sounds, and, therefore, can struggle with learning to read, spell and speak. 

The organization wants the state to go even further by joining almost 40 others that require schools to implement early for dyslexia. An estimated 15 percent of the population is affected by dyslexia, which could amount to nearly a million children in California.

“They are the canaries in the coal mine,” DePole said. “We can target these kids early on so they don’t have to wait to fail.”

Reading laws are ‘equity laws’

Some argue that Thurmond has waited too long to make early reading achievement a priority. Kymyona Burk, policy director for early literacy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, said the state has made “some efforts over the years but not with a state-led, comprehensive approach.”

The foundation’s tracks states’ adoption of literacy policies across five areas, including support for teachers, intervention and notifying parents if teachers identify reading problems. California has “minimal or no fundamental principles,” according to the analysis, while Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi and North Carolina are among the 12 states with comprehensive K-3 policies.

“I look at these laws as equity laws,” Burk said during the reading summit. “Some of these things are already happening in higher-performing or higher-income schools. They’re not happening, and they’re not required to happen, everywhere.”

The state, in fact, settled last year after students sued because of poor literacy skills. The settlement includes $50 million in block grants to 75 low-performing districts.

Burk led work in Mississippi when the state implemented a new reading program that emphasized phonics, ensured teachers were using high-quality curriculum materials and trained both university faculty and classroom teachers. Between 2013 and 2019, Mississippi’s fourth-graders climbed from 39th in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to second. And in 2019 — when reading scores for fourth-graders dropped in 17 states — Mississippi was the only one showing significant improvement. 

“Because we’re California, we kind of snicker at Mississippi, but they did a good plan,” said Barbara Nemko, superintendent of the Napa County Office of Education and a member of Thurmond’s task force. ”They made more progress than anyone.”

Some critics have recently questioned Thurmond’s leadership throughout the pandemic. The Los Angeles Times that while his push to improve reading is noteworthy, it needs to “result in concrete measures that will bring about real improvement, including a statewide reading curriculum based on a body of real evidence, which might not be popular with all teachers. In other words, Thurmond must take on the tough stuff over the next year.”

At the district level, some leaders view Thurmond’s goal of getting all third-graders to read by 2026 as a way to win over voters when he faces re-election next year.

“Like many political statements, the date falls beyond the next election cycle and neglects third-graders in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025,” said Don Austin, superintendent of the Palo Alto Unified School District.  “The lack of national urgency around this topic is staggering.”

Austin expressed a sense of urgency about his own district’s performance as well. The low-poverty, well-funded district’s elementary schools all score in the “very high” range on English language arts in the state’s . But in the California Reading Coalition’s report card, Palo Alto ranked near the bottom, with just 1 in 5 low-income Latino third-graders meeting or exceeding grade-level reading standards.

“I don’t believe we can truly call ourselves the best K-12 school district in California when populations of students are not experiencing the same degree of success,” he said.

The district has since trained teachers in the primary grades in strategies designed to help students with dyslexia and is considering new English language arts curriculum materials.

“We aren’t chasing a statement from Secretary Thurmond,” Austin said. “We identified the issue, put action steps in place, and plan to see what happens if a district can attack an issue with laser focus.”

Thurmond was not available for comment, but a department email said the “timing is right” to address reading issues. “Thanks to support in this year’s state budget, resources and conditions are in place to make good on a promise of reaching literacy by third grade, a key benchmark in measuring and predicting student success.”  

Nemko said reading, like other issues in education, has been politicized, but that doesn’t mean the task force can’t help bring together the different initiatives currently underway. Her office, for example, is one of seven grantees in the state involved in a federally funded to improve literacy from preschool through 12th grade.

“I don’t want to see seven different siloed reports,” she said. “That is confusing and doesn’t lead to a good outcome.”

Others want to see a stronger emphasis on ensuring districts have high-quality curriculum options. Chris Ann Horsley, senior director of elementary curriculum for the Bonita Unified School District, near Los Angeles, said she hopes the task force members “promote the research on successful reading programs and ensure publishers put together curricula using proven methods.”

Her district — where almost two-thirds of disadvantaged Latino third-graders read at grade level or above — ranked first in the coalition’s report card. English learners, she said, receive the same phonics-based literacy instruction as English-speaking students, but bilingual aides work in some classrooms to provide additional support. Along with requiring children to read 20-30 minutes a day outside of school, the method results in most English learners being fluent and proficient in English by second or third grade.

“The research has supported this … for years,” she said, “but our state has not ensured that adopted reading programs use this approach.”