Despite Union Opposition, Massachusetts House Puts Students and Teachers First with Literacy Reform
Last week, the Massachusetts House unanimously passed a bipartisan literacy reform bill, 155-0, that would mandate the evidence-based, “science of reading” approach that has swept the country. The state, additionally, has a $35 million grant program called Literacy Launch that is dedicated to helping districts transition their curriculum to science-based literacy materials. After years of ineffective “balanced literacy,” a discredited approach to reading instruction that does not teach children how to sound out words, the Massachusetts vote is the latest sign that America is turning a new page on literacy—and turning around the failures of the past few decades in the classroom by prioritizing the needs of students and teachers alike.
The Massachusetts legislature is usually quite friendly with teachers unions, so it’s telling that the vote came despite opposition from the Massachusetts Teachers Association. The union’s president told WBUR, Boston’s public radio station, that union members feared mandating phonics education would fail “to address the needs of a very diverse student body."
Looking at the actual numbers, though, the most socioeconomically diverse schools are the ones that have seen the greatest drops in literacy. “[Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System] scores among our youngest readers are falling,” said House Speaker Ron Mariano, a former teacher himself. “Between 2011 and 2024, the average fourth-grade reading scores fell by 11 percentage points. Among our most economically challenged districts, the decline has been greater.”
“This bill is not about telling the teachers how to do their job,” he added. “Indeed, it’s about ensuring that teaching colleges equip future teachers with the tools they need to succeed — and that current teachers have access to high-quality, evidence-based materials to support their work in the classroom.”
In other words, by opposing this bill, what the union has opposed is one of the few top-down measures that can actually help teachers thrive, which is particularly alarming given the sheer amount of teacher turnover in the country as well as in the state. In the 2024-2025 school year, Massachusetts lost 10% of the teachers it had in the 2023-2024 school year, with the poorest districts hardest hit. A Boston Globe story from this spring highlighted high teacher turnover in schools that mostly educate students of color. “The way schools are set up, it’s not the teachers’ fault,” said one teacher who had previously taught in Boston Public Schools. “The system has to be set up for you to be consistent.”
In the foreword to Independent Women’s report, “Give Teachers a Break: Cutting Red Tape and Unleashing the Potential for America’s Great Teachers,” former teacher and education reform advocate Beanie Geoghegan noted that teachers are done a disservice when they are not given proper guidance on effective pedagogical practices, making the job needlessly difficult for teachers and barring students from learning the material they should be able to.
“As a starry-eyed new teacher…I couldn’t have anticipated the challenges I would encounter,” she wrote. “Although my college professors emphasized the importance of fostering a ‘love of reading,’ I realized that none equipped me with the tools necessary to teach my students how to read effectively…If we genuinely want to improve education for American children, teachers must have the training, support, authority, and materials necessary to accomplish the monumental task.”
Fortunately, literacy education is simple, even if getting kids to read is no small task: phonics works, and mandating phonics instruction, as 26 states and counting have, facilitates better teaching and better learning, allowing American education to escape its current death spiral. Equipped with a curriculum that actually works, teachers have a better experience teaching and are more inclined to stay in the profession, and students are less frustrated and benefit from the consistency of having good teachers at their schools.
That the Massachusetts House stood up unanimously, that too across partisan lines, to ensure that teachers teach effectively and that students learn effectively should be celebrated. And the teachers union’s thankfully failed attempt at thwarting this success should be a sign that the opinions of union bosses can be as safely disregarded as balanced literacy.
