If your child sounds out every letter and still writes ‘their’ when they mean ‘there,’ you have already run into the edge of phonics. Sounding words out is powerful, and it does most of the work of reading, but no amount of it tells a child which of two identical-sounding words belongs on the page. Massachusetts has now written that insight into law. On June 26, 2026, Governor Maura Healey signed Chapter 113, an early-literacy bill that overhauls how the state teaches reading from kindergarten through third grade. Much of the coverage filed it as a phonics law, and the science of reading has always been broader than that one word.
If your child sounds out every letter and still writes ‘their’ when they mean ‘there,’ you have already run into the edge of phonics. Sounding words out is powerful, and it does most of the work of reading, but no amount of it tells a child which of two identical-sounding words belongs on the page. Massachusetts has now written that insight into law. On June 26, 2026, Governor Maura Healey signed Chapter 113, an early-literacy bill that overhauls how the state teaches reading from kindergarten through third grade. Much of the coverage filed it as a phonics law, and the science of reading has always been broader than that one word.
Massachusetts has passed a sweeping reading law, and parents are asking what it changes for their own children. Here are the questions that come up most.
Common questions
Will Massachusetts’s new law screen my child for dyslexia?
Is the ‘science of reading’ the same thing as phonics?
My child sounds out words well but still struggles to read. What is going on?
Do I have to wait for the school to screen my child?
Massachusetts signed a science-of-reading law and most coverage called it a phonics law. The statute's own definition names five components, and no child ever sounded out 'their' from 'there.'
What the law actually does
Chapter 113 of the Acts of 2026 (H.5511) had cleared the House the previous October and advanced out of Senate Ways and Means on a 13-0 vote in January before Healey signed it. It rewrites three parts of how Massachusetts teaches young readers: the curriculum districts choose, the way children are screened, and how new teachers are trained. “Helping students learn to read is one of the most important things we can do to set them up for success,” Healey said.
The curriculum piece is the one that made headlines. K-3 districts must adopt literacy programs covering what the statute calls “the five research-based areas in reading instruction,” defined as “phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.” The same section bars programs from relying on “visual memorization of whole words or guessing from context and picture cues, also known as MSV or three-cueing, as a substitute for identifying a word.” Starting in the 2027-2028 school year, all K-3 students must be screened at least twice a year for “potential neurological learning disabilities, including dyslexia,” and districts must notify parents within 30 days if a child scores significantly below grade-level benchmarks.
Not everyone welcomed the mandate. Massachusetts Teachers Association president Max Page objected that “this bill is focused on telling our educators what they can and cannot do.” The money is not settled either: WBUR reports that a $25 million appropriation was stripped from the final bill, with funding now expected through the supplemental budget and surtax revenue rather than secured in the law itself. Worth knowing too, the state was not starting from zero. Massachusetts has required twice-yearly K-3 reading screening since a 2022 regulation took effect in 2023, so Chapter 113 extends and funds an existing screening regime rather than inventing one.
Helping students learn to read is one of the most important things we can do to set them up for success.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
The frame the science supports
Most of the coverage compressed Chapter 113 into a single idea: the phonics law, the three-cueing ban, the end of guessing from pictures. That compression is understandable, because the three-cueing bar is the sharpest, most fightable line in the bill. But it quietly rewrites what “the science of reading” means. The law’s own definition names five components, and two of them, vocabulary and comprehension, have nothing to do with sounding words out. The science of reading was never phonics alone. The shorthand that says otherwise is the thing worth correcting, not the statute, which got the definition right.
Here is the part the phonics headline leaves out. Some words are unreachable by sound. A child sounding out letters will never arrive at whether ‘their,’ ‘there,’ or ‘they’re’ is the right one, because all three sound identical. The letter string itself has to have been stored. This is a fact about English, not a theory about children, and it shows up in the data on how children spell. In a study of 641 UK children from Reception through Year 6, Niolaki and colleagues (2023) found that a whole-word similarity measure predicted spelling accuracy better than sound-based measures did, at every age they tested. That study is a snapshot across ages rather than a track of the same child over time, and it describes what predicts accuracy rather than what causes it, so read it as evidence that a second route exists, not as a recipe.
None of this is a case for less phonics. Phonics does most of the work of early reading, and it is the only route that handles a word a child has never seen before. The honest correction is narrower. In our own work we treat reading as drawing on more than one system, sound above all, but also attention, working memory and processing speed. That is our position about scope, not a number and not a finding from any single study. The International Dyslexia Association’s 2025 definition puts it carefully: phonological difficulty is “common but not universal.” A child who decodes fluently and still struggles to read for meaning has a gap the word “phonics” will never name for you.
Key takeaways
- Five components, not one: the law’s own definition names phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
- The science was never phonics-only: no child sounds out ‘their’ from ‘there,’ because whole words get stored, not decoded.
- Twice-yearly screening from 2027: every K-3 student gets checked, with parents notified within 30 days of a low score.
What it means for your child
The most useful thing in Chapter 113 for a parent is not the curriculum fight. It is the screening. From 2027-2028, every Massachusetts K-3 child will be checked twice a year, and you are owed a notice within 30 days if your child lands well below benchmark. That is genuinely good, and it comes with the catch every screening mandate carries: a screen helps or harms depending on what happens next. Caught early and met with the right teaching, it changes a trajectory. Caught early and met with a label and a shrug, it becomes a ceiling.
So treat the notice, if it comes, as the start of a conversation and not the verdict at the end of one. Ask the school which of the five components the screen flagged. Ask whether your child is struggling to decode, or decoding fine and losing the thread of meaning, because those are different problems with different fixes. And you do not have to wait until 2027 to start noticing. A free reading screener asks you about what you already see at home, and gives you a place to start today, in language that builds your child up instead of boxing them in.
The deeper point is one no law reaches. A statute sets the floor, the minimum every classroom owes every child. The person who turns that floor into progress for one particular child, who notices the fluent-but-lost reader the twice-yearly screen might miss, who keeps the practice going at the kitchen table, is you. That is not a gap in the system. It is how every system works, and it is the reason your attention to this matters more than any single provision in the bill.
This bill is focused on telling our educators what they can and cannot do.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
You do not need a degree in literacy to help your child read. Children are capable of building every part of reading, the sounding-out, the storing of whole words, and the meaning-making, when the practice is aimed at what they actually need. The villain here is not Chapter 113, which names all five components, and it is not phonics, which does most of the work. It is the shorthand that shrinks “the science of reading” down to one word, so a parent whose child decodes fluently and still struggles is left thinking there is nowhere else to look. Learning Success was built to refuse that flattening. Our All-Access membership opens an assessment that asks about the processing systems your child’s reading runs on, and a roadmap that names what to build first.
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Why we use AI, plainly: it writes from a knowledge base our team maintains and audits. We work through it line by line and pull anything the evidence stops supporting. The roadmap you get on Tuesday reflects what we corrected on Monday, and a human still reads it before you do.
Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
Your answers stay yours. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not hand identifiable assessment data to outside AI companies to train their models.
A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
References
- Massachusetts Acts of 2026, Chapter 113 — Chapter 113 of the Acts of 2026 (primary statute text)
- WBUR — Massachusetts early-literacy reading legislation signed into law
- Massachusetts DESE — Department news on the early literacy law and its five components
- Massachusetts DESE — Early literacy screening guidance (603 CMR 28.03 background)
- Niolaki et al., Frontiers in Psychology (2023) — What spelling errors can tell us about the development of processes involved in children’s spelling
