Starting Young: Massachusetts Birth-3rd Grade Policies that Support Children's Literacy Development

Massachusetts, like Minnesota, is often recognized as a leader in public education. The Commonwealth consistently outperforms most states on national reading and math tests and often leads the pack in education innovations. Still, the Bay State struggles to close gaps between children from middle- and low-income families, between white and black students, and for English learners. But strong groundwork is being laid that could turn the tide.

Today, Early & Elementary Education Policy at New America released the report, Starting Young: Massachusetts Birth-3rd Grade Policies that Support Children’s Literacy Development, which discusses the state’s promising vision for early education and emerging approaches that could ensure more students have access to high-quality early education opportunities.

In the report, authors Shayna Cook and Laura Bornfreund, explain that Massachusetts is a state that is doing a lot of things right when it comes to early education. In 2014, Massachusetts was named a winner of a federal Preschool Development Grant worth $15 million. This money is designed to be used to enable the state to expand access to its pre-K program beyond the 4 percent of three-year-olds and 14 percent of four-year-olds who currently have access to state-funded pre-K. Massachusetts leaders are also supporting an increase in the use of developmental screenings and a revision to state standards so that each grade builds upon the skills learned in the previous. With its winning RTT-ELC grant came a mechanism, the birth-through-third grade alignment grants, to spur school districts and community partners to work together on improving coordination and transitions for families across children’s early years. These competitive grants provide support to local communities to assess early education needs and invest in birth-3rd grade programming that helps to improve student outcomes. Localities have built community awareness regarding the importance of early education, and are now moving to invest in specific programs that work to increase student access to high-quality early learning environments. Massachusetts is taking a number of important steps to create a strong early education continuum.

While Massachusetts students are performing better in reading than students in other states, there is still room for improvement. The same National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data that illustrates the achievement of the state’s fourth-graders overall also highlight a persistent achievement gap in the state: while 58 percent of white fourth-graders reached reading proficiency, only 25 percent of black and Hispanic students achieved the same milestone.  And students from low-income families who are eligible for free- or reduced-price meals achieved an average reading score that was 27 points lower than that of their more affluent peers.

Cook and Bornfreund offer several recommendations to help close this achievement gap and strengthen the state’s efforts to build strong readers. For example, Massachusetts should make it a priority to increase investment in high-quality, full-day pre-K, particularly for children in high-need communities, and require and fund full-day kindergarten across the state. We also recommend that Massachusetts commit to improving the education of dual language learners by replacing its current English-only instructional model with a bilingual educational model. Research suggests that bilingual instruction is more effective than English-only instruction in supporting DLL academic achievement. In addition, comprehensive screenings for DLLs are needed in pre-K or earlier to evaluate student knowledge in both home language(s) and English. Today, there are over 81,000 dual language learners in Massachusetts, an increase of 37 percent from just five years ago. Despite this rapid growth in the state’s DLL population, Massachusetts continues to be one of only a handful of states that adheres to an English-only instructional model in its schools.

These are just a few of the report’s recommendations aimed at helping Massachusetts better support its districts in promoting positive outcomes for children and building strong readers using a comprehensive, birth-to-third grade approach. Massachusetts remains a leader when it comes to public education, but much work remains to be done to ensure that all of the commonwealth’s children receive a high-quality early education that sets them on the right track for success in school and life."