By Robbie Sequeira, Stateline.org

As states rush to address falling literacy scores, a new kind of education debate in state legislatures is taking hold: not whether reading instruction needs fixing, but how to fix it.

More than a dozen states have enacted laws banning public school educators from teaching youngsters to read using an approach that’s been popular for decades. The method, known as “three-cueing,” encourages kids to figure out unfamiliar words using context clues such as meaning, sentence structure and visual hints.

In the past two years, several states have instead embraced instruction rooted in what’s known as the “science of reading.” That approach leans heavily on phonics — relying on letter and rhyming sounds to read words such as cat, hat and rat.

The policy discussions on early literacy are unfolding against a backdrop of alarming national reading proficiency levels. The 2024 Nation’s Report Card revealed that 40% of fourth graders and 33% of eighth graders scored below the basic reading level — the highest percentages in decades.

No state improved in fourth- or eighth-grade reading in 2024. Eight states — Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah and Vermont — scored worse than they did a year or two prior in eighth-grade reading.

Five — Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, South Dakota and Vermont — saw dips in their fourth-grade reading scores.

In response to these troubling trends, a growing number of states are moving beyond localized efforts and tackling literacy through statewide legislation.

New Jersey last year mandated universal K-3 literacy screenings. Indiana lawmakers this month passed a bill that would allow some students to retake required reading tests before being held back in third grade; that bill is en route to the governor’s desk.

Oregon and Washington are weighing statewide literacy coaching and training models, while lawmakers in Montana introduced a bill to allow literacy interventions to cover broader reading and academic skills, not just early reading basics.

Mississippi, a state seen as a model for turnaround in literacy rates over the past decade, seeks to expand and require evidence-based reading interventions, mandatory literacy screenings and targeted teacher training, and to explicitly ban the use of three-cueing methods in reading instruction in grades 4-8.

Together, these efforts signal a national shift: States are treating literacy not as a local initiative, but as the foundation of public education policy.

“Literacy is the lever,” said Tafshier Cosby, the senior director of the Center for Organizing and Partnerships at the National Parents Union, an advocacy group. “If states focus on that, we see bipartisan wins. But the challenge is making that a statewide priority, not just a district-by-district hope.”

‘It’s the system that needs fixing’

Before he was even sworn in, first-term Georgia Democratic state Sen. RaShaun Kemp, a former teacher and principal, had already drafted a bill to end the use of the three-cueing system in Georgia classrooms.

This month, the final version passed the state legislature without a single “no” vote. GOP Gov. Brian Kemp signed it into law Monday.

Sen. Kemp said his passion for literacy reform stretches back decades, shaped by experiences tutoring children at a local church as a college student in the early 2000s. It was there, he said, that he began noticing patterns in how students struggled with foundational reading.

“In my experience, I saw kids struggle to identify the word they were reading. I saw how some kids were guessing what the word was instead of decoding,” Kemp recalled. “And it’s not technology or screens that’s the problem. It’s what teachers are being instructed on how to teach reading. It’s the system that needs fixing, not the teachers.”

The new law requires the Professional Standards Commission — a state agency that oversees teacher prep and certification— to adopt rules mandating evidence-based reading instruction aligned with the science of reading, a set of practices rooted in decades of cognitive research on how children best learn to read.

“Current strategies used to teach literacy include methods that teach students to guess rather than read, preventing them from reaching their full potential,” Sen. Kemp said in a public statement following the bill’s legislative passage. “I know we can be better, and I’m proud to see our legislative body take much-needed steps to help make Georgia the number one state for literacy.”

In West Virginia, lawmakers have introduced similar bills that would require the state’s teachers to be certified in the science of reading.

Cosby, of the National Parents Union, said local policy changes can be driven by parents even before legislatures act.

“All politics are local,” Cosby said. “Parents don’t need to wait for statewide mandates — they can ask school boards for universal screeners and structured literacy now.”

Still, some parents worry their states are simply funding more studies on early literacy rather than taking direct action to address it.

A Portland, Oregon, parent of three — one of whom has dyslexia — sent written testimony this year urging lawmakers to skip further studies and immediately implement structured literacy statewide.

“We do not need another study to tell us what we already know — structured literacy is the most effective way to teach all children to read, particularly those with dyslexia and other reading challenges,” wrote Katherine Hoffman.

Opposition to ‘science of reading’

Unlike in Georgia, the “science of reading” has met resistance in other states.

In California, legislation that would require phonics-based reading instruction statewide has faced opposition from English learner advocates who argue that a one-size-fits-all approach may not effectively serve multilingual students.

In opposition to the bill, the California Teachers Association argued that by codifying a rigid definition of the “science of reading,” lawmakers ignore the evolving nature of reading research and undermine teachers’ ability to meet the diverse needs of their students.

“Placing a definition for ‘science of reading’ in statute is problematic,” wrote Seth Bramble, a legislative advocate for the California Teachers Association in a March letter addressed to the state’s Assembly Education Committee. “This bill would carve into stone scientific knowledge that by its very nature is constantly being tested, validated, refuted, revised, and improved.”

Similarly, in Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in March vetoed a bill that would have reversed changes to the state’s scoring system to align the state’s benchmarks with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal assessment tool that has recently been hit with funding cuts and layoffs under the Trump administration. Evers said in his veto that Republican lawmakers were stepping on the state superintendent’s independence.

That veto is another step in the evolution of a broader constitutional fight over literacy policy and how literacy funds are appropriated and released. In 2023, Wisconsin lawmakers set aside$50 million for a new statewide literacy initiative, but disagreements over legislative versus executive control have stalled its disbursement.

Indiana’s legislature faced criticism from educators over a 2024 mandate requiring 80 hours of literacy training for pre-K to sixth-grade teachers before they can renew their licenses. Teachers argued that the additional requirements were burdensome and did not account for their professional expertise.

In Illinois, literacy struggles have been building for more than a decade, according to Mailee Smith, senior director of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute. Today, only 3 in 10 Illinois third- and fourth-graders can read at grade level, based on state and national assessments.

Although Illinois lawmakers amended the school code in 2023 to create a state literacy plan, Smith noted the plan is only guidance and does not require districts to adopt evidence-based reading instruction. She urged local school boards to act on their own.

“If students can’t read by third grade, half of fourth-grade curriculum becomes incomprehensible,” she said. “A student’s likelihood to graduate high school can be predicted by their reading skill at the end of third grade.”

Despite the challenges, Smith said even small steps can make a real difference.

“Screening, intervention, parental notice, science-based instruction and thoughtful grade promotion — those are the five pillars, and Illinois and even local school districts can implement some of these steps right away,” she said.

“It doesn’t have to be daunting.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

For more than 50 years, non-public schools have been able to access money from their local school districts for transportation, learning materials and perhaps a counselor or a nurse. Money in the state budget is not sent to the non-public school but, rather, again, to the district and then dispersed. Nobody from the state shows up at Our Holy Mother of the Perpetual Deficit with a large canvas bag of cash.

Gov. Tim Walz wants to end that practice of modest sharing, the first governor to attempt to do so. He claims to be looking for ways to put a dent in the pending $6 billion budget deficit. Being the sharp numbers guy that he is, that $109 million for non-public education must have really jumped out at him, even when the funding for public education is routinely about half the entire state budget.

The governor also doesn’t have his facts straight. On the day when parents, teachers and students gathered in the Capitol Rotunda to demonstrate on behalf of preserving the payments, the governor said that he didn’t think it was fair to the taxpayers “to pay for for-profit schools.”

The non-public schools are not for-profit. On the contrary, they run on thin margins. It’s usually the school’s affiliated parishioners, in the case of a Catholic school, who get hit up when the school’s furnace conks out. The teachers and administrators don’t work with the safety net of the always-running state spigot. And you’ll have to tell me the last time you read a headline that said Our Holy Mother of the Perpetual Deficit falls $6 billion short of budget and needs more state money. You can’t tell me. It doesn’t happen.

Personally, I don’t think it’s fair to be governed by a guy so disingenuous, duplicitous and incompetent as Walz. But the voters, in a nod to the mystery of the cluttered human mind, voted for him, twice. That $6 billion budget deficit is the direct result of Walz and his trifecta of drunken sailors blowing the $18 billion surplus.

Fraud doesn’t seem to have gained any purchase with Walz supporters, either, but more than $600 million in fraud has leaked out of the state Capitol since Walz took office. A hotline established by a new legislative committee charged with stopping fraud has already, in a month’s time, received more than 600 calls.

Republicans in the Legislature vow to not let Walz strip the non-public school funding. Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, the GOP House floor leader, said, “House Republicans will not agree to an education bill that cuts non-public aid. We will not agree to an education bill that cuts this critical funding and leaves our next generation behind.”

Niska was talking about the 70,000 kids in Minnesota who attend non-public schools. There is no way of knowing how many of those kids would have to change schools if they face a tuition increase. Many parents, who, of course, also pay for public education, make significant sacrifices to send their children to private schools for a variety of reasons, none of which dare be questioned by Walz, who seems to harbor an ideological predisposition to believe in only a government school.

For example, Walz was quoted the other day as saying, “if you want to have a school that teaches your curriculum and things you do, you have every right to do that. I don’t think the taxpayers should be the ones who support you in that.”

You could almost hear a snarl of contempt for schools that might teach, oh horrors, faith. No other governor, remember, has tried to pull off this pathetic budget stunt. No other governor would purposely alienate the families of 70,000 kids.

And it is pathetic, a pathetically obvious stunt, which makes you wonder who he is pandering to.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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By Darius Tahir, KFF Health News

Rennie Glasgow, who has served 15 years at the Social Security Administration, is seeing something new on the job: dead people.

They’re not really dead, of course. In four instances over the past few weeks, he told KFF Health News, his Schenectady, New York, office has seen people come in for whom “there is no information on the record, just that they are dead.” So employees have to “resurrect” them — affirm that they’re living, so they can receive their benefits.

Revivals were “sporadic” before, and there’s been an uptick in such cases across upstate New York, said Glasgow. He is also an official with the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represented 42,000 Social Security employees just before the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.

Martin O’Malley, who led the Social Security Administration toward the end of the Joe Biden administration, said in an interview that he had heard similar stories during a recent town hall in Racine, Wisconsin. “In that room of 200 people, two people raised their hands and said they each had a friend who was wrongly marked as deceased when they’re very much alive,” he said.

It’s more than just an inconvenience, because other institutions rely on Social Security numbers to do business, Glasgow said. Being declared dead “impacts their bank account. This impacts their insurance. This impacts their ability to work. This impacts their ability to get anything done in society.”

“They are terminating people’s financial lives,” O’Malley said.

Though it’s just one of the things advocates and lawyers worry about, these erroneous deaths come after a pair of initiatives from new leadership at the SSA to alter or update its databases of the living and the dead.

Holders of millions of Social Security numbers have been marked as deceased. Separately, according to The Washington Post and The New York Times, thousands of numbers belonging to immigrants have been purged, cutting them off from banks and commerce, in an effort to encourage these people to “self-deport.”

Glasgow said SSA employees received an agency email in April about the purge, instructing them how to resurrect beneficiaries wrongly marked dead. “Why don’t you just do due diligence to make sure what you’re doing in the first place is correct?” he said.

The incorrectly marked deaths are just a piece of the Trump administration’s crash program purporting to root out fraud, modernize technology, and secure the program’s future.

But KFF Health News’ interviews with more than a dozen beneficiaries, advocates, lawyers, current and former employees, and lawmakers suggest the overhaul is making the agency worse at its primary job: sending checks to seniors, orphans, widows, and those with disabilities.

Philadelphian Lisa Seda, who has cancer, has been struggling for weeks to sort out her 24-year-old niece’s difficulties with Social Security’s disability insurance program. There are two problems: first, trying to change her niece’s address; second, trying to figure out why the program is deducting roughly $400 a month for Medicare premiums, when her disability lawyer — whose firm has a policy against speaking on the record — believes they could be zero.

Since March, sometimes Social Security has direct-deposited payments to her niece’s bank account and other times mailed checks to her old address. Attempting to sort that out has been a morass of long phone calls on hold and in-person trips seeking an appointment.

Before 2025, getting the agency to process changes was usually straightforward, her lawyer said. Not anymore.

The need is dire. If the agency halts the niece’s disability payments, “then she will be homeless,” Seda recalled telling an agency employee. “I don’t know if I’m going to survive this cancer or not, but there is nobody else to help her.”

Some of the problems are technological. According to whistleblower information provided to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, the agency’s efforts to process certain data have been failing more frequently. When that happens, “it can delay or even stop payments to Social Security recipients,” the committee recently told the agency’s inspector general.

While tech experts and former Social Security officials warn about the potential for a complete system crash, day-to-day decay can be an insidious and serious problem, said Kathleen Romig, formerly of the Social Security Administration and its advisory board and currently the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Beneficiaries could struggle to get appointments or the money they’re owed, she said.

For its more than 70 million beneficiaries nationwide, Social Security is crucial. More than a third of recipients said they wouldn’t be able to afford necessities if the checks stopped coming, according to National Academy of Social Insurance survey results published in January.

Advocates and lawyers say lately Social Security is failing to deliver, to a degree that’s nearly unprecedented in their experience.

Carolyn Villers, executive director of the Massachusetts Senior Action Council, said two of her members’ March payments were several days late. “For one member that meant not being able to pay rent on time,” she said. “The delayed payment is not something I’ve heard in the last 20 years.”

When KFF Health News presented the agency with questions, Social Security officials passed them off to the White House. White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston referred to Trump’s “resounding mandate” to make government more efficient.

“He has promised to protect social security, and every recipient will continue to receive their benefits,” Huston said in an email. She did not provide specific, on-the-record responses to questions.

Complaints about missed payments are mushrooming. The Arizona attorney general’s office had received approximately 40 complaints related to delayed or disrupted payments by early April, spokesperson Richie Taylor told KFF Health News.

A Connecticut agency assisting people on Medicare said complaints related to Social Security — which often helps administer payments and enroll patients in the government insurance program primarily for those over age 65 — had nearly doubled in March compared with last year.

Lawyers representing beneficiaries say that, while the historically underfunded agency has always had its share of errors and inefficiencies, it’s getting worse as experienced employees have been let go.

“We’re seeing more mistakes being made,” said James Ratchford, a lawyer in West Virginia with 17 years’ experience representing Social Security beneficiaries. “We’re seeing more things get dropped.”

What gets dropped, sometimes, are records of basic transactions. Kim Beavers of Independence, Missouri, tried to complete a periodic ritual in February: filling out a disability update form saying she remains unable to work. But her scheduled payments in March and April didn’t show.

She got an in-person appointment to untangle the problem — only to be told there was no record of her submission, despite her showing printouts of the relevant documents to the agency representative. Beavers has a new appointment scheduled for May, she said.

Social Security employees frequently cite missing records to explain their inability to solve problems when they meet with lawyers and beneficiaries. A disability lawyer whose firm’s policy does not allow them to be named had a particularly puzzling case: One client, a longtime Social Security disability recipient, had her benefits reassessed. After winning on appeal, the lawyer went back to the agency to have the payments restored — the recipient had been going without since February. But there was nothing there.

“To be told they’ve never been paid benefits before is just chaos, right? Unconditional chaos,” the lawyer said.

Researchers and lawyers say they have a suspicion about what’s behind the problems at Social Security: the Elon Musk-led effort to revamp the agency.

Some 7,000 SSA employees have reportedly been let go; O’Malley has estimated that 3,000 more would leave the agency. “As the workloads go up, the demoralization becomes deeper, and people burn out and leave,” he predicted in an April hearing held by House Democrats. “It’s going to mean that if you go to a field office, you’re going to see a heck of a lot more empty, closed windows.”

The departures have hit the agency’s regional payment centers hard. These centers help process and adjudicate some cases. It’s the type of behind-the-scenes work in which “the problems surface first,” Romig said. But if the staff doesn’t have enough time, “those things languish.”

Languishing can mean, in some cases, getting dropped by important programs like Medicare. Social Security often automatically deducts premiums, or otherwise administers payments, for the health program.

Lately, Melanie Lambert, a senior advocate at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, has seen an increasing number of cases in which the agency determines beneficiaries owe money to Medicare. The cash is sent to the payment centers, she said. And the checks “just sit there.”

Beneficiaries lose Medicare, and “those terminations also tend to happen sooner than they should, based on Social Security’s own rules,” putting people into a bureaucratic maze, Lambert said.

Employees’ technology is more often on the fritz. “There’s issues every single day with our system. Every day, at a certain time, our system would go down automatically,” said Glasgow, of Social Security’s Schenectady office. Those problems began in mid-March, he said.

The new problems leave Glasgow suspecting the worst. “It’s more work for less bodies, which will eventually hype up the inefficiency of our job and make us, make the agency, look as though it’s underperforming, and then a closer step to the privatization of the agency,” he said.

Jodie Fleischer of Cox Media Group contributed to this report.

©2025 Kaiser Health News. Visit khn.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. ©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Researchers are hoping they can tackle the mystery of how to diagnose CTE in the living.

The Boston University CTE Center and other research centers have received a $15 million NIH grant to diagnose CTE during life, as the scientists recruit hundreds of former football players for the new study.

Former NFL quarterback Matt Hasselbeck is among the first to sign up for “The DIAGNOSE CTE Research Project-II.”

“As a former NFL player, I know I am at risk for CTE, but right now I am blessed to be feeling healthy,” said Hasselbeck, a three-time Pro Bowler during his 18-season career.

“As a former quarterback, I’m choosing to volunteer for DIAGNOSE CTE II to honor my teammates, especially those who blocked for me and took hits to the head, so I didn’t have to,” he added. “I encourage former college and pro football players age-50 and over to join me in signing up for the study to help researchers learn how to diagnose and treat CTE.”

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Right now, CTE only can be diagnosed definitively after death following an autopsy.

Researchers in the study will look at new disease biomarkers to help doctors diagnose the progressive brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy in living patients.

Scientists are also trying to learn how to differentiate CTE from similar diseases like Alzheimer’s.

“This study will create unprecedented data sets needed to accurately diagnose CTE during life,” said Michael Alosco, associate professor of neurology at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.

“It will fill two missing links in the literature preventing us from developing definitive diagnostic criteria for CTE during life,” Alosco added. “First, we need longitudinal studies that include brain donation. Second, we need to better compare people at risk for CTE to other disease groups.”

Although this study will only study male football players, researchers said the findings will benefit all groups at risk for CTE — including male and female contact sports athletes and military veterans.

The study will examine new potential biomarkers using blood and brain imaging to help doctors accurately diagnose CTE in living patients.

Participants will enroll in one of the five NIA-funded Alzheimer’s disease research centers to complete neurological, cognitive and neuropsychiatric exams, multimodal brain imaging, tau PET imaging, and blood draws.

The information will be analyzed to characterize the specific signs, symptoms, and biomarkers of people at risk for CTE. Travel support for participants is provided.

Chris Nowinski and the Concussion Legacy Foundation will lead recruitment efforts. Robert Turner, an associate professor from Duke University, will help with recruitment focusing on understudied groups.

The DIAGNOSE CTE Research Project-II will recruit 350 men, age 50 and older, including 225 former college and professional football players, 75 control participants and 50 people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Former football players, as well as men who have no history of contact and collision sports, who are interested in participating are encouraged to sign up for the Concussion Legacy Foundation Research Registry at CLFResearch.org.