When Literacy Reform Meets the Classroom
Our guest author is Cooper Sved, an Elementary Educator and Education Policy Analyst.
Opening
Earlier this week, in my sixth-grade general education classroom, my students and I engaged in a thoughtful, generative discussion about North American colonialism as part of our social studies curriculum. I teach at an elementary school just outside Washington, D.C., serving a uniquely multilingual population that spans the full socioeconomic spectrum. My class, in particular, is a microcosm of the diversity present in our area and across the country. My students benefit daily from the range of cultural, linguistic, and economic perspectives that surround them. Unsurprisingly, students were deeply engaged in our discussion, regardless of academic standing. While I relied on a handful of county-provided resources, our social studies curriculum allows for teacher discretion and innovation. Because I know my students well, I was able to modify texts and discussion questions to account for the wide variance in reading proficiency in my room. That short discussion was energizing for students and deeply rewarding for me as their teacher.
Roughly twenty minutes later, our literacy block began.
Last year, in response to the Virginia Literacy Act, my district adopted a scripted literacy curriculum. According to the lesson script, students were to take out their consumable booklets and read two poems, one from the nineteenth century and one from the early twentieth. Despite reviewing key vocabulary and providing extensive background knowledge, none of my students were able to meaningfully comprehend the texts. The lesson assumed students could decipher and analyze both poems within a fifteen-minute window. I was forced to go “off script,” spending nearly twenty minutes simply helping students make sense of the language. What had moments earlier been a classroom full of curious, engaged learners quickly shifted into one marked by boredom, frustration, and escalating disruption. In the span of a single lesson, motivated students became irritable, resistant, and, perhaps most concerningly, disengaged.
The Science of Reading/Virginia Literacy Act
Virginia is just one of more than forty states that have passed legislation aligned with the "Science of Reading" (a brief overview can be found here). This wave of legislation has emerged in response to declining literacy rates nationwide. Virginia’s law, the Virginia Literacy Act, mandated that all public school divisions select and implement a basal literacy program from a list approved by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE). First adopted in 2022, districts were required to implement approved programs in grades K–3 by the start of the 2024–25 school year, with grades 4–8 following in 2025–26.
My district, after selecting its program, moved quickly toward implementation in grades K–6. That summer, all elementary teachers across the county received training in the new evidence-based curriculum. In what felt like an attempt to “rip the band-aid off,” the district adopted the curriculum across all elementary grade levels at once, despite the VDOE allowing for delayed implementation in upper grades. All K–6 teachers (our elementary schools end in sixth grade) were given two days of paid professional development, facilitated by out-of-state company representatives. These sessions offered a surface-level overview of the program’s structure, resources, and digital infrastructure. Ongoing implementation support was largely delegated to school-based reading specialists.
The message to classroom teachers was clear: adhere to the lesson scripts and structures as closely as possible. At my school, the expectation was that teachers would have their guides in hand throughout the two-plus-hour literacy block. In our linguistically diverse context, this approach felt overwhelming, constraining, and, most troubling, disrespectful to struggling learners.
Professional Development
The VLA also required that all K–8 classroom teachers receive professional development in the Science of Reading. Although my teacher preparation program had trained me in structured literacy only a few years earlier, and our school had already fully adopted a Science of Reading approach, my coworkers and I were still required to participate in a series of professional development opportunities that felt unresponsive, laborious, unnecessary.
To help us understand our new curriculum, we were required to complete two days of in-person training over the summer. Conducted by out-of-state representatives, the training provided a brief overview of the program but was completely devoid of district context. We were given the resources, yet left without a clear understanding of how to implement them within our district’s established pedagogical needs and expectations.
All Virginia teachers, regardless of district, were also required to complete a series of self-paced Science of Reading modules before the start of the following school year. While I understand the intention was to establish a baseline level of literacy knowledge across the state, the general consensus among teachers was that the modules were largely unnecessary and primarily enforced to “check a box.” Even my mother, a veteran elementary educator of nearly forty years, found the process unnecessary. Anecdotally, the modules seem to have had little effect on the work my fellow teachers and I were already doing.
Curriculum Adoption
The pressure of rapid adoption, and the recognition of its inevitable shortcomings, was felt across grade levels. During the first year of implementation, I taught a first-grade special education inclusion class. After several months of growing pains, my team found the program manageable, though our primary challenges stemmed from dense texts and unrealistic assumptions about student background knowledge and skill sets. When I moved to sixth grade the following year, those challenges were amplified. Many of my current students, even strong readers, find the program incoherent, the texts inaccessible, and the assessments deliberately confusing. Despite sharing many of their critiques, I have been given no leeway in either grade to modify tier-one instruction. Most of my professional judgment is reserved for deciding which in-program resources students can access during independent work. Still, these issues with adoption are intensified with VLA mandates for consistent intervention cycles. While I agree with this mandate in theory, it proves challenging in my classroom, where nearly half of my students require differentiated reading plans. At the moment, we lack the capacity to meaningfully intervene with every student who needs the support; the stress and exhaustion we already feel as a result of the VLA is being compounded by unrealistic expectations for intervention.
For many of my students, literacy instruction has reinforced a growing distaste for school, one that has intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic. While my diagnostic assessment scores indicate real academic progress, I remain unsure whether that success should be attributed to the program itself or to how I interpret and implement it in response to the particular students in my classroom this year. I also fear that this academic success has come at the cost of my students’ overall interest in academics.
Policy Reform
Despite my clear cynicism toward the current wave of reading legislation, I do not place sole blame on legislators or school leaders. I recognize the need for a clear, coherent strategy to improve literacy instruction statewide. In many ways, the Virginia Literacy Act represents a genuine attempt to address socioeconomic inequities between districts. I work in a system with significant internal capacity to support instructional decision-making; many districts do not. Mandated basal programs can help level that playing field. I also acknowledge a practical benefit: my workload related to lesson creation has decreased significantly. There are real, tangible upsides to the legislation we are seeing. My issue is not with the intent, but with the haphazard implementation.
Could lawmakers temper implementation through more deliberate legislative design? I believe my experience, and my students’, would have been markedly different if adoption timelines were more thoughtful and patient. Districts were given little time to prepare, leaving teachers overwhelmed and under-supported. Literacy legislation should prioritize not only the quality of instruction, but also the experience of those tasked with delivering and receiving it.
Future legislation (literacy-related or otherwise) should:
- Prioritize slower, more methodical adoption cycles;
- Provide teachers with greater opportunities to exercise professional judgment; and
- Require deeper, context-specific professional development well before classroom implementation.
Do lawmakers have an incentive to slow their own legislation? Probably not. Do these critiques suddenly make my students love the texts they find disengaging? Of course not. There is still work to be done. What I do know is that the perspective shared here is not mine alone, it is echoed by colleagues in my building and by educators across the country. For students, the experiential rewards of classroom learning are foundational to their engagement with the world, and a literacy curriculum should support, not stifle, that process.