Georgia tackles 'literacy crisis' -- Will California be next?

Reading scores are up in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee. Other states are trying to follow the leaders.

Only one in three fourth-graders reads proficiently in Georgia, reports Atlanta News First. Gov. Brian Kemp is expected to sign new laws requiring schools to use research-based reading methods and teacher-ed programs to train teachers in the "science of reading," reports Andy Pierrotti.

Two legislators who are former teachers, a Democrat and a Republican, led the charge to ban "three cueing," which encourages children to use pictures and context clues, rather than decoding, to understand what they read.

“This method did not teach him to read,” said state Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta, who read a letter from a parent on the Senate floor. “It taught him to guess, leaving him anxious, struggling, and believing he wasn’t capable for his first five years of school.”

The law also prohibits Georgia schools from using Reading Recovery for struggling first-graders, citing a 2023 University of Delaware study which found the program left students worse off in the long run.

California students have fallen behind in reading because too many haven't been taught well, writes Claude Goldenberg, an emeritus Stanford education professor and literacy expert, and a former first-grade teacher. "The average low-income California fourth grader is a full year behind their counterpart in Mississippi."

Assembly Bill 1121 would align reading instruction, teacher training and instructional materials with decades of research, he writes. This will help students who are learning English -- and everyone else.

"Many schools in California continue relying on 'balanced literacy' approaches that emphasize memorization, guessing words from pictures and using context clues rather than teaching children to decode words explicitly and systematically," writes Reading Rainbow's Levar Burton in the Sacramento Bee. "With only four in 10 students reading on grade level by third grade, we can no longer accept the status quo."