hile state leaders lauded incremental improvements in English language arts (ELA) demonstrated by 2025 California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress results, they also acknowledged there is more work to be done, with less than half of the state’s 5.8 million students meeting grade-level standards. Additionally, large gaps in achievement between student groups continue to languish without the movement needed to accelerate outcomes in lower-achieving groups.
During an Oct. 9 webinar attended by education leaders, policymakers and media, CSBA called for the State of California to adopt a coherent, state-level plan for how it will better support — not dictate — the work of local educational agencies in closing achievement gaps.
Despite some improvement, just 48.8 percent of all students scored as advanced or proficient in ELA, with just a third of African American students attaining proficiency or higher and 39 percent of Latino students proficient or advanced. By comparison, 61.8 percent of white students were proficient or advanced in ELA and 74.4 percent of Asian students met or exceeded standards.
And while National Assessment of Education Progress results were not disaggregated by state this year, the U.S. as a whole is in a similar or worse position, with students scoring below “Basic,” the lowest achievement level, on reading — 33 percent of eighth graders and 40 percent of fourth graders — and drops in overall scores.
Over the past few years, the Newsom administration has provided additional funding and the California Legislature has passed several laws in an attempt to improve student literacy. Investments include literacy coaches and reading specialists, funding for elementary schools with the lowest ELA scores and professional development for the ELA/English Language Development (ELD) Framework.
The capstone to this work came with the signing of Assembly Bill 1454 in 2025, which in addition to requiring the use of “evidence-based” reading instruction and instituting early reading difficulties screeners, also calls for restructuring how reading instruction is taught to teacher candidates in preparation programs. This evidence-based instruction is also known as the “science of reading.”
In a Nov. 3 online session for the 2025 California Reading Summit, California Department of Education Statewide Literacy Co-Director Bonnie Garcia summarized the state’s approach. “We’re taking an intentional, comprehensive approach to literacy and biliteracy that’s grounded in the ELA/ELD Framework and our Dyslexia Guidelines and Standards for TK-12,” she said. “And this approach really ensures that students are going to be reading by third grade and beyond through equitable high-quality instruction, appropriate assessments, interventions and, on our end, through the educator strategic planning that supports all learners across California. This approach has been supported over the years by multi-level initiatives and by multi-level investments, all building blocks to our comprehensive system, such as the recently released Golden State Literacy Plan.”
The Golden State Literacy Plan highlights the “multi-year, step-by-step strategy” for improving the reading achievement of California students. At a total of nine pages that list the many literacy initiatives, including the state’s comprehensive literacy plan some experts have questions on just how effective it will be and if it can truly provide the guidance needed to improve California students’ ability to read.
A recent report from an international team of literacy experts found that certain fundamental principles of effective reading instruction are universal and rely on interconnected skills that can be grouped in two domains: decoding and language comprehension. They found this holds true across a wide cross-section of languages and cultures.
A recent report from an international team of literacy experts found that certain fundamental principles of effective reading instruction are universal and rely on interconnected skills that can be grouped in two domains: decoding and language comprehension. They found this holds true across a wide cross-section of languages and cultures.
“A fundamental insight from reading research is that children do not learn to read naturally — reading must be explicitly taught,” the report states. “Unlike spoken language, which children acquire naturally through exposure, reading requires direct instruction.”
“The ‘science of reading’ as a term has drifted in and out of use over the last couple of centuries,” said Timothy Shanahan, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where he was founding director of the UIC Center for Literacy, and author/editor of more than 300 publications on literacy education. “And the reason it’s come back now is specifically because of some radio documentaries about reading instruction. The reporter was stressing that schools weren’t following the research on phonics.
“There’s strong research showing that teaching phonics is advantageous and we know effective ways of teaching it,” Shanahan continued. “But we also know about other aspects of language that are more in the language realm or reading comprehension realm should be taught for the same reason — because we have science showing that that can be advantageous to kids learning. The fact is, if kids are going to learn to read to get to the levels they need to, phonics is crucial. But if all you do is phonics, there’re going to be a lot of kids who don’t succeed.”
Providing the breadth of reading instruction is especially important for English learners (ELs), according to Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together, a statewide advocacy coalition for ELs.
“We agree on the importance of foundational skills to crack the code. We think they’re critical and they’re critical for English learners,” she said. “Those skills are necessary, but not sufficient. We do think that explicit instruction and phonemic awareness fluency benefits multilingual learners for accurate word reading, but to build readers, English learners also need intentional work in all of the other components including oral language, vocabulary, comprehension and writing and knowledge building — all which are part of a unified system of instruction.”
In fact, Californians Together had advocated against previous legislation attempting to mandate evidence-based reading instruction for being too narrowly focused. “AB 1454 centered and included English learners and multilingual learners in a much more extensive way than the previous version,” Hernandez explained. “The alignment to the ELA/ELD Framework was woven throughout the bill, as well as the importance of integrated and designated ELD; the acknowledgement that for English learners, ELD is the sister skill to literacy.”
Californians Together Strategic Advisor Shelly Spiegel-Coleman added that there was a new willingness to work with stakeholders from the outset on AB 1454. “In this bill, our voices, the voices of CSBA, the voices of the California Teachers Association — many voices who are passionate and who have a depth of experience and knowledge were engaged in the development of the bill,” she said. “It really has benefited from hearing from people who are in the classroom to those who are administrating to those who have to set policy in the district. And I think that’s what made it such a strong bill for us to be able to support.”
EdVoice Founder Marshall Tuck participated in the California Reading Summit panel on AB 1454, explaining that signing the law is just the first step in improving how students learn to read.
“Passing policy is only the 50-yard line. Implementation — from the state all the way down to the classroom — is what changes classroom behavior and shifts instructional practices, and unless it accelerates student learning, the policy doesn’t mean a whole lot,” Tuck said. “That starts with the state having really strong instructional materials and professional development lists. It comes down to supporting districts and schools at the county, and where necessary, at the state level in the actual roll out of the policies. It means doing a better job of sharing best practices. And then we have to have this strong feedback loop back to the electeds as to what is working and what’s not working so we can get that information back up to folks in the Legislature in case we do need to have improved legislation from what we’re learning through the implementation cycle.”
A recent study by Stanford Professor Thomas Dee and graduate student Sarah Novicoff looks into the achievement impacts of the first two years of implementation of this grant and found positive and statistically significant effects on third grade ELA test scores. Specifically, it increased those scores by 0.14 standard deviations among third graders served by the targeted schools over the first two years of the grant.
“We’re seeing this incredible attention to bringing more evidence-based practice to literacy instruction, but I do worry that declarations of support for the science of reading that occur in state houses won’t necessarily translate into evidence-aligned changes in classroom practice and in curriculum,” Dee said. “Needed change is going to require a very persistent and detailed focus on professional development for in-service teachers and also an honest look at what teachers are learning in their pre-service training programs. With respect to the Early Literacy Support Block Grant, the Sacramento County Office of Education played an absolutely critical role in supporting schools. And the challenge will be if we can replicate that across all California counties. Replication of one-off successes are famously difficult in education.”
Becky Sullivan, SCOE director of K–12 English Language Arts and project lead: Literacy Coaches and Reading Specialists Educator Training Grant, shared implementation tips during the California Reading Summit panel.
“Having a comprehensive literacy plan that serves as a strategic roadmap for improving reading, writing, speaking and listening outcomes for all learners across all grade levels is extremely important. And that’s about integrating your curriculum, your instruction, your assessment and your supports,” Sullivan said. “I think this is a perfect time to take inventory of everything that’s going on in your district and put together a cohesive and coherent literacy plan so that you’re not taking a piecemeal approach.”
Sullivan outlined key steps in creating a comprehensive literacy plan, including selecting research-based, comprehensive instructional materials that include supplemental materials for struggling students; ensuring integration of language throughout the plan; ensuring overall goals and protocols for giving students more intensive support are clear; and instituting a comprehensive assessment system that ensures a data feedback loop is used for continuous improvement.
The state, too, is using a continuous improvement model, with its comprehensive literacy plan currently undergoing review and updates. LEAs should look beyond the Golden State Literacy Plan to this more detailed document that aims to “align and integrate state literacy initiatives, content standards, and state guidance documents to support teachers of students birth through grade 12.”
“AB 1454 is certainly very hopeful legislation,” literacy expert Shanahan said. “It assumes that the state is equipped with the trainers and the knowledge and that they’ve come to agreements on what quality is and what the research is and so on. And so, we don’t have to worry about any of that part, right? The state education department is certainly going to have its hands full, trying to implement a plan that will obviously address what the legislation’s requiring, but allow them to make sure that all of that training is really providing the right stuff.”
Standford’s Dee believes some of the reasons that the Early Literacy Support Block Grant resulted in improving student outcomes was due to the intentional funding and design of the program. The $50 million allocated for the grants amounted to an average of $1,444 per K-3 student in the 70 targeted schools.
“I think there are broader lessons in this design for how we think about school improvement more broadly because it was an unusual mixture of some prescriptive guardrails and oversight from the state-chosen expert lead in literacy,” Dee explained. “But within those guardrails, around undertaking evidence-based practice and articulating a site literacy plan, schools were given considerable autonomy in exactly how they designed that. Some of them needed to buy new textbooks that are aligned with the science of reading. Other places invested in literacy interventionists to support teachers, and other districts spent a little more money on getting parents involved. I thought that was really an interesting approach with implications for school improvement generally, the idea of establishing some evidence-based guardrails and oversight and some financial support for schools, but at the same time giving them autonomy to offer solutions appropriate to their context.”
However, looking at the funding provided for the statewide rollout, the $455 million budget allocated for screeners, professional development and coaching amounts to only about $300 per K-3 student and is diluted further if the resources are used beyond grade 3.
“In sum, this budget only allows for one fourth of the per-student investment that was made under the Early Literacy Support Block Grant initiative,” Dee said. “I think that’s notable but, at the same time, I’m more concerned about how we can ensure spending of any magnitude will actually promote evidence-aligned instructional practices at scale.”
Dee emphasized the need to bring a continuous improvement mindset to this work, using data to evaluate against clear goals set by the LEA. “My broader concern here is, five years from now, we’re going to look back on everything you were undertaking and see it as yet another fad reform that came and went, when in fact, I think there is real promise in this if we can get the implementation right.
“If kids have a shaky foundation in early literacy, it vexes virtually every other dimension of their academic trajectory through public schools,” Dee continued. “So, getting this right is important for all the reasons that education matters in terms of economic prosperity and justice and effective citizenship. It’s hard not to be mindful of this right now when we seem to be in an era where we’re living with the bitter fruits of institutional failures.”