From Laws to Literacy: The Science of Reading Needs More Than Statutes to Succeed

Legislation doesn’t change how teachers teach. The science of reading movement must become what good teaching looks like.

This essay began as an entry in the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s annual “Wonk-a-Thon,” which this year invited writers to consider what must happen next for the “science of reading” movement to fulfill its promise. I was delighted to collaborate with my friend Kristen McQuillan, Chief Program Officer at StandardsWork. She is a gifted literacy coach and former classroom teacher whose expertise and insight into the daily realities of reading instruction grounded this piece in both policy sense and practical wisdom. Together, we argue that while new laws mandating evidence-based reading instruction mark real progress, statutes alone can’t deliver literacy gains. Success depends on what happens in classrooms—on changing the culture and craft of teaching itself. — RP.


We’ll be blunt: if legislation was enough to raise student achievement, every child in America would have been reading proficiently by 2014, the year No Child Left Behind mandated 100 percent proficiency on state tests.

Over a decade later, forty-plus states have passed “science of reading” laws—the most significant shift in literacy policy since NCLB and an extraordinary bipartisan moment that recalls the heady, can-do optimism of ed reform’s heyday. But as Rick Hess likes to remind us, policy can make people do things, but it can’t make them do them well. The central tension in education reform has always been that policy is an unreliable mechanism for improving real, on-the-ground classroom practice.

Policymakers have at least tacitly assumed teachers already know what to do and simply need to be compelled to do it. But as Emily Hanford made clear in her influential podcasts Hard Words and Sold a Story, that assumption doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In sharp contrast to three decades of testing, accountability, and finger-pointing, Hanford’s work cast teachers not as villains but as victims of bad ideas and weak training. That insight now needs to guide what comes next for shifting teaching habits and routines, if the present science of reading movement is to be anything other than another swing of the pendulum in reading wars that have persisted for more than a century.

Good Reading Instruction Is a Practice, Not a Policy
The science of reading (SoR) describes how children learn to read, not how to teach them well at scale. The two are not the same. Turning scientific consensus into classroom practice requires teachers who are capable practitioners, not merely compliant implementers.

But the typical teacher and most administrators have spent their careers steeped in balanced literacy, workshop models, and “data-driven” practices encouraging them to identify which standards kids struggle with most so that they can reteach and remediate skills like “identifying the author’s purpose” and “making inferences”—as if such sophisticated cognitive processes can be taught, practiced and mastered like throwing a ball or riding a bike.

Effective implementation, therefore, is not a matter of retraining—it’s a process of re-socializing an entire profession around a new understanding of expertise and evidence. Laws cannot create competence. They can create the conditions for change but not the craft of teaching itself.

The Curriculum Connection
One of the least appreciated truths of literacy is that decoding and comprehension draw on different sources of knowledge. The first depends on phonemic awareness and phonics—the cornerstones of current SoR reforms. Decoding is a transferable skill; that’s why we can “read” nonsense words like gox, yake, or churbite and agree on their pronunciation. But comprehension is not a skill at all. It depends on deep cognitive processes fueled by vocabulary and background knowledge built across years of content-rich, text-centered instruction.

Many state reading initiatives, understandably focused on early decoding, stop short of this second, steeper challenge. They treat comprehension as both a natural byproduct of fluent decoding, and as a generic skill—something students can master by practicing “finding the main idea.” As a result, even students who crack the phonics code often hit a ceiling when texts get more challenging, requiring familiarity with knowledge they haven’t been taught. This explains why promising 4th-grade NAEP scores tend to fizzle out by 8th grade: even if kids can decode, as the knowledge demands of more sophisticated texts increase, unaddressed gaps in knowledge and vocabulary that were there all along are exposed.

To fulfill the promise of the science of reading, states must connect it to the science of learning. That means integrating text-rich, knowledge-building curricula—like Core Knowledge, Wit & Wisdom, or Reading Reconsidered into state frameworks, teacher training, and assessments. These programs build knowledge and vocabulary through well-designed learning experiences that invite students to make sense of what they read through discussion and writing. Deliberate practice opportunities enable deeper comprehension and prepare students to handle increasingly complex texts over time. Additionally, the approach taps into children’s natural curiosity about the world around them. They want to become smarter about the world, and the right curriculum gives that natural impulse room to run.

Teacher Preparation and Professional Formation
College and university schools of education remain the last redoubt of “whole language” ideology and balanced literacy. Many have responded to new state mandates to teach the science of reading as a compliance item: a syllabus addendum here, a brief phonics module there. But genuine reform in teacher preparation means more than checking boxes. It will require rebuilding professional identity—reimagining what it means to be a competent literacy teacher.

State oversight of teacher-prep programs is notoriously weak, but it’s precisely where policymakers can wield the greatest leverage. Accreditation standards, licensure tests, and partnerships with districts should all align around the expectation that new teachers will not only know the science of reading but also be ready to apply it through evidence-based curriculum and coaching.

And because we’re not going to turn 3.7 million teachers into cognitive scientists, we must complement training reforms with better materials. There’s no reason that educator preparation programs shouldn’t incorporate the types of curricula we advocate for into their coursework—helping future teachers to internalize, rehearse and practice with said materials. Yet currently, we still see programs that mostly ask teachers to design their own lesson plans that they likely won’t—and shouldn’t—use as actual practitioners.

Accountability and Fidelity
Legislators are understandably impatient; parents even more so. But reform timelines and political timelines rarely align. The risk is that the science of reading becomes another compliance exercise—same teachers, same lessons, new labels. Avoiding this trap is a particularly sticky challenge for public policy since getting right it implies monitoring not just student outcomes but pedagogy and curriculum: Are student experiences really aligned to the science of reading? Are children getting the chance to read and make meaning of content-rich, worthwhile texts? Are they talking and writing about them? It’s one thing—and essential—to track student proficiency, but it’s a much stronger tool for improvement to track how their instructional experiences are evolving over time.

There should be room for thoughtful experimentation here and greater transparency. Parents might not care if their children’s teachers use an adopted curriculum 100 percent of the time, but it would be a useful point of comparison to learn, for example, that “In your district, students were working with texts in only 15 percent of classrooms observed.” That level of transparency likely would drive changes in classroom practice. Similarly, districts should hold administrators accountable for ensuring curriculum alignment, coaching quality, and the use of diagnostic data to guide instruction.

Above all, school accountability should move beyond punitive compliance toward continuous improvement. The question is not “Did teachers attend training?” but “Are children actually being taught with evidence-based methods—and supported when they aren’t?”

From Policy to Practice
Every education reform effort starts as a movement. The successful ones end as culture shifts. Right now, the “science of reading” is still in the movement phase—an identity marker as much as an instructional approach. On social media and in professional circles, it can feel tribal, even combative: a cause to champion rather than a craft to master.

What’s needed next is humility and persistence. Reformers must shift from evangelizing to operationalizing—creating professional cultures where evidence-based practice is the norm, not a novelty. Teachers need communities of practice, structured time for study, and leadership that prizes competence over compliance.

Reform fatigue is real. Teachers will not internalize what they do not believe. And they won’t believe in practices that feel imposed rather than learned. As Doug Carnine recently reminded us, the greatest danger is not failure but reversion—the quiet drift back to familiar but discredited habits once the spotlight moves on.

The science of reading laws now sweeping the nation represent a once-in-a-generation opportunity. They matter immensely. But if the past thirty years of reform have taught us anything, it’s that top-down pressure doesn’t produce bottom-up mastery. The SoR revolution will only succeed if it changes not just what teachers are told to do, but what they know, believe, and value about their craft. The goal is not simply to pass new laws—it’s to make those laws obsolete.

We will know we’ve arrived when evidence-based literacy is no longer an education policy agenda, but simply what good teaching looks like.