Massachusetts MoJo: Will a Deep-Blue State Lead on Curriculum Reform?

All eyes on Massachusetts as landmark literacy legislation advances to the Senate in a bellwether blue state.

This week, the Massachusetts House passed legislation that would give its department of education – known as DESE – the right to mandate use of state-approved curriculum.

A similar bill failed last year, yet Massachusetts outcomes have continued to slide:

In October, the Boston Globe proclaimed a “Northern Nosedive” in reading scores, and finally, Massachusetts leaders are willing to touch a third rail with curriculum mandates. Most states – and especially blue states – honor local control norms when it comes to curriculum, enabling districts to use whatever they please.

Massachusetts is on to something. Curriculum reform was the cornerstone of literacy work in Louisiana and Tennessee, two of the three states with the biggesr reading gains since 2019.

States are looking to replicate this Southern Surge, and Massachusetts – a longtime bellwether state for education policy – is already a reform pacesetter.

As an advocate for curriculum improvements in US schools, I’m cautiously cheering this bill. It’s necessary to combat the entrenchment of poor programs.

But I’m sounding some alarms, too.

Balanced Literacy Remains Rooted in Massachusetts

Unlike most states, DESE publishes data on curriculum used by district. It isn’t a perfect picture: the database was last updated in 2024, and some districts are blank. But it offers a decent window.

Here are the most-used elementary ELA curricula in Massachusetts, as of last year:

Those are the most-frequently used core programs¹, anyway. I would be concerned about the quality of instruction in any category other than “book-centered and knowledge-building.” Basals have zero to few books, among other varied issues. Balanced Literacy programs have a long list of shortcomings, beyond phonics weaknesses; for example, they fail to get all students working with complex texts. Curriculum creation is hard, and it’s really the work of specialists, so DIY curricula tends to fall short.

I spy other red flags. Three districts use truly-outdated programs (ReadyGen 2016, Journeys 2017, and even Journeys 2014!). Some exceptional materials have little traction. Bookworms has the most studies showing it’s effective, yet it isn’t used anywhere in Massachusetts. Neither is Success for All, the program featured by Sold a Story for its outcomes. The book-rich Reading Reconsidered program is in one charter only.

While I primarily focused on comprehensive core programs, I noticed that UFLI, an excellent and viral foundational skills option, is only in 2 districts.

Believe it or not, this is a better picture than five years ago. To its credit, DESE has been working to incentivize curriculum upgrades for years. Its creative grant programs targeted weak curricula by name in 2021 and 2022. More recent grant programs have required the use of good materials for eligibility.

But the grants and persuasive efforts have produced limited change. Arguably, DESE has done as much as it can do without the new powers it would get from the legislation. So, the progress of the bill, and the state’s early momentum on curriculum improvement, is all good news.

The bad news: DESE’s current curriculum list isn’t consistently strong, which is fueling resistance to the legislation.

Meet CURATE

If you’re going to require districts to pick off a state list, everything rides on having an excellent list. Massachusetts isn’t there yet.

The current Massachusetts curriculum list (called CURATE) is a mixed bag. The state leans heavily on EdReports, a national review organization, for its own reviews. EdReports has been widely-critiqued in recent years, for good reasons².

Unfortunately, DESE’s list inherits those issues:

• Bloated, book-lite basal programs made its list. For example, Wonders is still recommended by CURATE. Into Reading once made it, although it was dropped in recent years (a good sign).

• Quality programs didn’t make the list if EdReports reviewed them wrong. Bookworms should be on any state list, but it has been blackballed by most states³ because EdReports gave it middling reviews.

There’s a clear line between the issues with CURATE and the issues with the Massachusetts landscape, detailed above. CURATE has probably encouraged some districts⁴ to adopt basals in recent years, just as EdReports ushered basals into districts.

I believe CURATE has moved the curriculum quality ball forward, but it’s a ways from the end zone.

CURATE shortcomings have enabled the resistance by Balanced Literacy loyalists. Last year, Lexington superintendent Julie Hackett organized an open letter claiming that CURATE “exclusively favored” basal programs. She was wrong – but her narrative had a tiny bit of truth to it, and it stuck.

Brent Conway led Pentucket schools away from Balanced Literacy, and he confirmed the fears in holdout districts. “They think basals and anthologies are going to be forced on them.”

Will the Massachusetts curriculum list evolve?

Most believe DESE will need to create a new curriculum list if the legislation passes – one reason I’m cheering the legislation. The bill has criteria, such as inclusion for student outcomes, which were not contemplated by CURATE’s process.

Assuming the bill does push DESE to update its list…

There are good reasons to think Massachusetts will end up with a great curriculum list. Sharp leaders at the Shanker Institute have applauded the bill’s language. Honestly, I don’t think nuances of these bills matter as much as leadership in state education departments. Yet DESE’s leaders have been ahead of the curve nationally, given its creative grant programs and a curriculum list that is better-than average, so I’m optimistic.

The Massachusetts bill will hinge on implementation, as they all do. A perfect bill would be more prescriptive about the need for an expert committee to steer the curriculum list, as legislators did in Wisconsin⁵ . Yet I see no reason to make perfect the enemy of progress.

I’m cheering for Massachusetts to pass this legislation, because getting the weakest programs out of schools would be a win for kids. Still, Massachusetts must use the opportunity to bring the very best options to all schools. If the bill passes, we must encourage DESE to follow the leaders.

Meet the Resistance

This bill sailed through the House with unanimous support (!), but it faces more resistance in the Senate. Apparently, the Massachusetts AFT affiliate and the AFL-CIO are joining MTA to fight the bill, so things could change.

The resistance isn’t all public. Some is behind-the-scenes. To better understand that story, let’s return to Lexington, Massachusetts, the headquarters.

In Lexington, a dad named Kyle was facing a troubling situation in 2023. His daughter was in fifth grade and she was struggling to read. It was affecting her deeply; she would come home from school calling herself stupid, and she spoke of self-harm. The district’s evaluations suggested that his daughter did not have a serious reading issue, but private evaluations revealed her dyslexia.

Kyle couldn’t get Lexington to provide real support for his daughter. He requested mediation with the district using a state mediator, and Lexington refused. Kyle hired a lawyer to advocate for her needs. Eventually, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get to the bottom of the district’s practices.

Imagine Kyle’s shock when he discovered emails showing district staff knew Teachers College Reading Workshop Units of Study didn’t support dyslexic learners – and they kept using it, anyway:

In this 2020 exchange, Lexington’s Coordinator of Professional Learning and Special Projects (I’ll call her Ms. A⁶) was openly telling a parent that TCRWP Units of Study “would not be great” for dyslexic children.

Ms. A became Lexington’s Director of Elementary Education in August, 2021. In 2023, when Kyle was battling the district to teach his fifth grader to read, Lexington was still using Units of Study as its core curriculum.

In fact, Lexington continues to use Units of Study today, while adding supplements to placate outraged parents like Kyle.

The Lexington story illustrates the need for the reading legislation in Massachusetts. Some educators are irrationally loyal to flawed programs. It’s time to take away districts’ rights to poor or irrational curriculum decisions.

Lexington isn’t the only district clinging to its curriculum and working to undermine reform efforts. In Lexington email exchanges, Kyle discovered saw that districts are collaborating across Massachusetts, and across state lines, to keep this kind of legislation from succeeding. And they have a notable collaborator: Lucy Calkins.

I’ll share that story soon. Stay tuned for the next installment, Balanced Literacy’s Last Stand.

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To Support the Bill

If you live in Massachusetts and want to support this bill, you can email or call your Senator and find additional information on the Mass Reads website.

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PostScript: Understanding MTA and Teacher Resistance

Some readers have expressed surprise that the Massachusetts Teachers Association opposes the bill, so I’m adding some context: some good media coverage and MTA’s statement.

Teachers unions typically resist any effort to prescribe what happens in classroom, so this resistance isn’t a shock. I’m encouraged to read that the MA superintendent association is not lining up against the 2025 legislation, after opposing the 2024 bill.

Unions aside, some teachers resist curriculum change. In most schools over the last few decades, teachers have been a great deal of latitude to teach as they please, and some portion of the field values that freedom. One reality, though, is that many of the curricula that have been imposed on teachers over the years have been basals, which are fairly uninspiring. So, some teacher resistance to curriculum mandates comes from a reasonable place: not wanting crummy stuff forced into their classrooms. I share that concern – and this is all the more reason that DESE needs to get its list right, especially with superintendents like Julie Hackett fanning their fears.

As I have written previously, the curriculum landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade. The Common Core standards ushered in a wave of investment in new curricula to align to those standards. Nearly every program in the “book-centered and knowledge-building” category is new since 2015, and education leaders speak of a “curriculum renaissance”. Yet the entire field hasn’t received that memo. It’s very possible that the districts clinging to Reading Workshop, an approach that rose to prominence between 2000 and 2010, haven’t really looked at the newer options.

Across the country, we have witnessed a consistent pattern: when districts select genuinely-better curricula, and invest in training for teachers on using those materials (which are more rigorous and therefore harder to use if you aren’t trained), teachers come around because they see their students performing better.

The best evidence of this shift is in Tennessee. As I wrote in my Southern Surge writeup, the teacher response to new materials was incredibly good:

Two years into Tennessee’s curriculum adoption, 96% of teachers reported that they primarily used the materials adopted by their districts, an unprecedented level of embrace.

This is the virtuous cycle we hope for in Massachusetts.

1. I looked at full programs; the supplement landscape could be different. None the less, I would reminder everyone that phonics isn’t the only issue with Teachers College Reading Workshop Units of Study or any of the flawed programs. If districts have upgraded their phonics work with a quality supplement, that is a great first step. But I still call that a phonics patch because it leaves other issues unaddressed.

2. If you want states to pursue curriculum reform, you must take the time to understand why EdReports, the curriculum review heavyweight, has lost the trust of the field. Here’s some reading:

Natalie Wexler detailed the issues with EdReports brilliantly.

Holly Korbey recently explained the problems with EdReports and shortcomings of the curriculum review landscape generally. “The piecemeal system of rating curriculum is frankly bananas,” Korbey writes, and she’s not wrong.

Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story puts a spotlight on Ohio to understand why two high-performing programs aren’t on the EdReports list.

Before that media wave, I summarized the concerns about EdReports. Later, I reported on the slow pivot at the organization, which recently announced a leadership change.

If you want to see how EdReports made a mess of one state’s curriculum list, read about the Ohio curriculum list. It’s a cautionary tale.

The failures at EdReports leave the field in a rough place. Most states don’t have the capacity to do strong curriculum reviews; they are a TON of work, and the work of savvy literacy minds. We’d be in a batter place if there was one national guidepost that states could reference. Sadly, we lost that opportunity when EdReports – which once did stronger work – went sideways around 2018-19.

3. Bookworms has made the curriculum list in 8 states, up from no states a few years ago. At least a few states have begun breaking with the EdReports view of the world. Still, cotrast this with Wonders and Into Reading, which make nearly every state list. Massachusetts is the first state I have noticed to exclude Into Reading.

4. I spoke with one Massachusetts superintendent who moved from Journeys to Into Reading, aided by Massachusetts grant funds. This IS a step forward… the latest version of Into Reading is better than dusty old Journeys. And the district has seen reading outcomes improve since the switch. Still, a curriculum with actual books would be better. I told this superintendent honestly that I hope Into Reading is his stepping stone to something great.

5. I like Wisconsin’s approach, and believe that the state ended up with the best curriculum list in the country, in spite of hiccups in the process (note: having a politically-elected state superintendent like Jill Underly can be a recipe for disaster where education reform is concerned). To produce a good curriculum list, you want a savvy evaluation team that includes educators and experts, Wisconsin’s selection team did good work. However, even Wisconsin’s list is becoming outdated, based on the pace of change in the curriculum space. Districts are swapping their existing foundational skills programs for UFLI, even in districts using book-rich, knowledge-building programs, and UFLI is only a few years old. Wit & Wisdom’s publisher Great Minds has a brand new program, Arts & Letters. Nell Duke recently developed an intriguing new program for early grades. Lucy Calkins will soon debut an updated version of Units of Study. Nothing endures but change, so I would encourage states to plan for nimble adoption processes that revisit the market frequently.

6. Ms. A is no longer in Lexington. As of July, 2024, she is an Assistant Superintendent in Westwood Public Schools (MA). I have chosen to redact her name because I’m not here to shame people when these issues are very much systemic. Ms. A worked in a system where superintendent Hackett is clearly loyal to Lucy Calkins; you’ll hear more on that in the next installment. I do not know what Ms. A did or didn’t do behind the scenes to question Lexington’s curriculum choices.

However, when I consulted friends about whether or not to share Ms. A’s name, opinions were divided. As one pointed out, “district leaders are highly mobile and have the ability to influence districts as they move around. Make their names available so that their decisions in one district can bear scrutiny when they shape shift into another district. Parents and school boards deserve to know this sort of stuff.”

If you are in Westwood, I am sure Kyle in Lexington will help you understand which leaders have moved from Lexington to your district.