Massachusetts’ House of Representatives passed a bill on Oct. 29 that calls for changing the standards for literacy curricula in Massachusetts public schools.
The new legislation asks the state to require districts to teach science-based teaching methods, such as phonics, and outlaw methods like figuring out words based on context, sometimes referred to as “balanced literacy.”
Passing the bill would put an end to a long debate in Lexington that has set some parents, particularly those of students with dyslexia who have been advocating for a more phonics-based curriculum, at odds with Superintendent Julie Hackett, who argues there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to literacy instruction.
While Lexington, and Massachusetts as a whole, have some of the highest literacy rates in the country, students from poorer families and students with learning disabilities consistently fall behind. The pandemic only exacerbated that delta, and literacy scores have yet to fully recover.
This bill aims to close that gap.
“Massachusetts is the nation’s education leader, but we need to make sure all of our youngest learners can read and read well,” Gov. Maura Healey told the Observer in a statement. “We have been proud to partner with the Legislature to increase literacy funding, and this bill is another important step toward ensuring every student has high-quality literacy education.”
The bill passed through the House with 155 yes votes, zero no votes, and five voters abstaining.
The Senate still has to pass the bill for it to take effect. Members of the Senate’s Joint Committee on Education are expected to vote on the bill by Dec. 3, Mary Tamer, Founder and Executive Director of MassPotential, told the Observer. MassPotential is the convener of the MassReads coalition, which has been a staunch supporter of the bill since its inception in 2023. If the Committee passes the bill, it will go before the entire Senate, likely sometime in January.
Hackett expects the Senate will pass the new legislation, she wrote in a Parent Square post on Nov. 6.
The new legislation requires teachers to choose from a list of approved curricula. Those curricula include instruction in the “five research-based areas in reading instruction”: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. They are also based in “evidence-based literacy instruction,” which is instruction that’s “grounded in scientific research methods; and demonstrated through well-designed and well-implemented studies to produce significant and positive effects on student learning outcomes,” the bill states.
No district will be allowed to teach curricula that includes implicit and incidental instruction in word reading, visual memorization of whole words, and guessing from context and picture cues, which is also known as MSV or three-cueing.
Jennifer Elverum, a Lexington parent, is excited about the legislation. Two of her children have dyslexia and had difficulty learning how to read under Lexington’s curriculum, which includes Units of Study, Fundations, and Heggerty.
“I am grateful to the entire House of Representatives for passing this crucial law, which will protect students from ineffective literacy programs,” she said. “While it’s unfortunate that Lexington wasn’t a leader on this issue, it serves as a powerful example of why this law is necessary.”
Hackett does not share the same excitement.
She wrote in her memo to district parents that she is not in support of government intervention in education. She feels this legislation supports a one-size-fits-all approach to literacy instruction, which is not how she believes students should be taught.
“Teachers, not politicians, should decide what works best for their students,” she wrote. “Educators need a repertoire of tools to close opportunity gaps — there is no single solution. Change should come from evidence and collaboration, not mandates.”
Lucy Calkins, who created Units of Study, the curriculum Lexington has used for years, likewise worries the new bill promotes uniformity.
“It is astounding that Massachusetts, renowned for its commitment to education, and with the highest scores in the country, is proposing legislation to wrest control of the classroom away from its teachers,” Calkins wrote to the Observer in a statement. “Wiping away everything teachers and school leaders have learned to do and asking them to robotically adhere to a ‘teacher-proof’ curriculum will not meet the needs of Lexington’s families and will drive the best teachers out of Lexington.”
Others who are against the new bill fear it will be expensive for districts to switch curricula.
The state is offering one curriculum, called Appleseeds, to districts for free under this new bill, Tamer said. The state is also offering two grants, PRISM and Literacy Launch, to which districts can apply to help pay for professional development and the cost of materials among other expenses.
Lexington is already piloting different literacy programs. LPS planned to try out Arts and Letters, EL Education, and Revised Units of Study. Revised Units of Study is an updated version of Units of Study and likely won’t make the list of approved instruction districts can teach next year.
Hackett therefore decided “to end the Revised Units of Study pilot immediately,” she wrote in her memo.
One Lexington parent, who asked to be unnamed to protect the anonymity of her children, is happy Lexington is moving away from Units of Study because it didn’t serve her children. She trusted the district to teach them to read and didn’t pay for outside tutoring. They’re now in fourth grade, have yet to meet benchmarks, and one has a recent dyslexia diagnosis.
“[LPS] is always in the top five. But pull out the kids that aren’t getting the additional paid help and see,” she told the Observer. “If [Units of Study] was so effective, I wouldn’t have two kids that are underperforming. If it’s so effective, it should be bringing everybody along.”
That parent is hopeful that retiring Units of Study in Lexington could mean a better literacy curriculum for all students.
The district will continue teaching Calkins’ method until it adopts a new curriculum at the end of this school year.
Throughout the pilot program, the district will visit classrooms over 100 times to examine how Arts and Letters and EL Education are going. At the end of the year, they’ll make a decision to adopt one of those curricula to teach to students starting next year, in addition to Fundations, which is a phonics curriculum.
The curricula the state will approve for districts to teach as a result of this bill won’t require teachers to set aside time for independent reading, Sara Calleja, Lexington’s director of elementary literacy, told the Observer. Lexington’s school district will add independent reading time to the school day so students will still have allotted time to pick out a book and read.
If Lexington kids aren’t learning phonics in early elementary school, that’s a big problem. More than six decades ago, I was in first grade in the Belmont school system where they did not teach phonics. They used the “whole word” system, where they showed you a word and you were supposed to remember it. I got out of first grade barely able to read. I did not find reading fun.
For second grade, my parents put my brother and me in a local private school. Among other things, my teacher gave her 2nd graders phonics lessons. I quickly became able to read, and I found the logic of phonics very satisfying. That autumn, I got my first Peanuts book, and whizzed through it, with great enjoyment. I’d read at least several more Peanuts books before the election that put JFK in the White House. (My mother took me to vote with her, but that’s another story.”
That spring, one day I took Dr. Doolittle out from the library. It was a long chapter book, probably with more than 100 pages. I figured it would take me at least a few days to get through it. I started reading it the next morning. By about 4PM, to my immense surprise, I’d finished it. I quickly became an avid reader, and have remained so.
Lexington families with students in elementary school should be concerned about the article in last week’s Lexington Observer on the likelihood that the state will mandate how the Lexington public schools teach reading beginning in the 2025-26 school year. Lexington’s current approach is markedly successful for most students since Lexington is one of the highest achieving school districts in Massachusetts, the country’s highest performing state.
Despite a stubborn gap in the achievement of poor students, special needs students, and English language learners, 4 elementary schools have been labeled by the federal government as “exemplary schools that are recognized for closing the achievement gap between subgroups and all students over the past five years.” (Literacy Update for Elementary Parents. 11/7/25)
Despite high levels of literacy achievement, the approach developed by Lexington’s teachers and school leaders is being forced to change by a state mandate. The need to teach phonics effectively is being given a great deal of attention in the state legislature and in the comments of parents with children who have reading disabilities. Yet, Superintendent Hackett states that Lexington already teaches phonics systematically and plans to continue using the same, effective phonics approach in 2025-26 that it has been using.
The change that should most concern Lexington elementary parents will be to the reading and writing curriculum, especially in grades 2-5. The reading curricula likely to be mandated by the state focus largely on reading short passages that touch lightly on topics to give all students some background information about many topics. Fill-in-the-blanks worksheets accompany some of these types of readings, reminiscent of the kind of task ubiquitous in the “back to basics” Reagan era of education. There is almost no writing instruction in these curricula. The lack of writing is in sharp contrast to the expansive writing curriculum in Lexington’s current “Units of Study” curriculum developed by Lucy Calkins and colleagues.
As a resident and as an educator, I am sad that effective elements of Lexington’s literacy approach are being curtailed by politicians and I commend the efforts of Lexington’s superintendent and literacy leaders for their efforts to change this outcome in the state legislature.
The writer has been a literacy educator for 40 years including co-directing a federally funded literacy and math achievement network for high poverty/low achievement schools.