If your child has ever ‘read’ a picture book by naming the pictures and guessing the words, you have watched the method reading researchers have warned about for years. On September 1, the Abington School Committee heard an update on its search for a new K-5 reading curriculum, part of a statewide mandate that every Massachusetts district adopt state-vetted, high-quality materials by the fall of 2027. Locally the story reads like a budget fight over an ‘unfunded mandate.’ The bigger story is why the mandate exists at all: the state’s own reviews found roughly half its districts using reading curricula rated low-quality, many of which taught children to guess words instead of reading them. Decades of reading science say that is backward, and it is worth understanding before the change reaches your child’s classroom.
Massachusetts is overhauling how reading is taught, and the change is reaching one district at a time. Here are the questions parents are actually asking about what it means at home.
Common questions
What does ‘high-quality instructional material’ actually mean?
What is three-cueing, and why are experts against it?
How do I tell whether my child is reading a word or guessing it?
My child is struggling to read. What should I do while my district sorts out its curriculum?
Massachusetts found half its districts using low-quality reading curricula that taught kids to guess words from pictures. Strong readers do the opposite. That is the real story behind the mandate.
What happened in Abington
At its September 1 meeting, the Abington School Committee heard Assistant Superintendent Dr. Christopher Basta present an update on the district’s search for a new K-5 English language arts curriculum, work funded through the state’s PRISM-2 literacy grant. Basta told the committee that Core Knowledge Language Arts, or CKLA, remains on Massachusetts’s vetted list as an all-in-one K-5 program that includes foundational reading skills, and that the district plans to evaluate it this fall alongside another prospective curriculum. The choice sits under a statewide requirement: every district must adopt state-approved high-quality instructional materials, drawn primarily from the state’s CURATE review registry, by the fall of 2027.
The money behind the effort is real but, in the committee’s eyes, not quite enough. The district is carrying about $136,000 in unspent PRISM-2 funds into the current year, plus a continuation grant exceeding $200,000 for pilot training and materials, together roughly $336,000. Not everyone was reassured. ‘Of course, all students deserve high quality instructional material regardless,’ committee member Heidi Hernandez said. ‘But this seems to be yet another unfunded mandate.’
This is the second chapter of a bumpy process. Earlier this spring, the district was piloting CKLA and was one week into a second pilot of HMH’s Into Reading when the state issued an updated review finding that Into Reading, not CKLA, failed to meet its criteria for high-quality materials. Because grant money is only spendable on approved programs, that pilot stopped immediately. ‘It’s unfortunate that districts weren’t told ahead of time that these are the programs that are being evaluated this year and we don’t know how they’re going to do,’ Basta said at the time.
Of course, all students deserve high quality instructional material regardless. But this seems to be yet another unfunded mandate.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
The frame the science supports
The reason the state is pushing this change is not in the meeting minutes, but it is well documented. A 2023 Boston Globe investigation of 263 Massachusetts elementary districts found that 47 percent used at least one of seven reading curricula that the state and the independent reviewer EdReports had rated low-quality. Of those districts, 88, nearly three in four, used either Fountas and Pinnell Classroom or Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study. EdReports found that Units of Study taught ‘cueing,’ using pictures to guess unfamiliar words. Heinemann, the publisher, disputed that, calling the programs supplemental rather than core. No source names what Abington’s own classrooms have been using, so this is the statewide pattern the mandate answers, not a verdict on one town.
This is where coverage of the ‘unfunded mandate’ misses the point, because the science here is well established. Decades of eye-tracking research by Keith Rayner show that skilled readers process nearly every letter on the page, and lean more heavily on letter-sound information as they improve, not less. Guessing a word from a picture or the surrounding context is what struggling readers fall back on, and the cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg calls the three-cueing approach ‘descriptive of how poor readers read.’ As Susan Neuman, a professor of early childhood and literacy at New York University, put it, ‘We have 25 years of data indicating those five pillars really make a difference.’ A curriculum that trains the guess is training the habit of the weakest readers, which is why the science on how children actually learn to read has hardened against it.
This is also the case for CKLA over a bare phonics program. Sounding words out is necessary and was never sufficient on its own: the alphabetic code alone does not resolve an irregular word or a homophone, because ‘their’ and ‘there’ sound identical and no sounding-out rule reaches the right one. Niolaki and colleagues (2023), studying 641 children, found whole-word and knowledge-based measures predicted spelling accuracy better than sound-based ones at every age they tested, which is the argument for a program that builds knowledge and vocabulary alongside systematic phonics, as CKLA is designed to do. And there is a deeper reason any of this has to be taught: reading is not something a child absorbs the way they picked up talking. Written language is a recent invention the brain never evolved for, and researchers from Stanislas Dehaene to Maryanne Wolf to the National Reading Panel agree it has to be taught explicitly and systematically.
Key takeaways
- A state mandate, not a local choice: Abington is piloting CKLA under Massachusetts rules requiring vetted materials by 2027.
- Half the state was flagged: Massachusetts reviews found roughly half its districts using reading curricula rated low-quality.
- Guessing is not reading: skilled readers process nearly every letter, while guessing from pictures is what struggling readers do.
What it means for your child
This mandate is landing on families more than it is landing with them, and Hernandez’s frustration is fair. A change to what and how children are taught, handed down without settled funding or a clear explanation to parents, is exactly the kind of reform that breeds resentment even when the underlying idea is sound. It is also worth keeping the scale honest. Abington has not adopted CKLA; it is piloting it again this fall against a second, unnamed program, with a purchase decision not expected until around June 2027. A separate bill moving through the state legislature would ban three-cueing outright, with the House version naming it directly, but that is policy catching up to the science, and it has not passed.
So while the district works it out, the useful move for a parent is to learn what ‘high-quality instructional material’ means and to ask a sharper question than whether the curriculum is new. Ask whether the materials teach a child to decode a word or to guess it. Then watch how your child meets a word they have never seen before: sounding it out letter by letter is reading, while scanning the picture and naming something that fits is guessing. That one distinction tells you more than any label on the box.
At home, a tool like the 5-Minute Reading Fix reveals a word letter by letter and holds the picture back until the word is complete, so there is nothing to guess from. It is short daily decoding practice meant to sit alongside a child’s reading program rather than replace it. The mandate will resolve over the next two years. Your child will not wait that long, and the thing the science keeps pointing to, explicit practice with sounds and letters, is something you are able to start supporting tonight.
It’s unfortunate that districts weren’t told ahead of time that these are the programs that are being evaluated this year and we don’t know how they’re going to do.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
You do not need an education degree to tell whether your child is reading a word or guessing at it, and no mandate, however well-intentioned, changes the fact that you are the one watching your child learn every day. Children are capable of learning to read the way strong readers do, given instruction built for that instead of instruction built around a guess. The villain here was never a school committee or a budget line. It is an older idea that lasted far too long in classroom materials, that a child looking at a picture and naming the word is reading, when the science says that is what struggling readers do. Learning Success was built to put decoding, not guessing, at the center of early reading. Our All-Access membership opens an assessment that asks about the skills your child’s learning runs on and a roadmap that names what to build first.
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References
- South Shore News — State Curriculum Mandates and Fall Launch Dominate Abington School Committee Agenda
- South Shore News — State Rejection of ELA Program Derails Abington Elementary Curriculum Rollout
- Boston Globe (Oct. 4, 2023) — Massachusetts called their reading curriculums ‘low quality.’ Here’s what publishers had to say.
- The Hechinger Report / Commonwealth Beacon — With reading scores slipping, Massachusetts is changing course. Some teachers aren’t happy
