Oklahoma Education and You

I’m not sure what the Oklahoma Legislature is trying to accomplish with proposed legislation around early literacy. Oklahoma already has a literacy law that requires schools to: screen students, identify reading deficiencies, notify parents, and provide intervention under the Strong Readers framework. 

SB 1778 requires districts to either use stand-alone transitional classrooms or pull-out transitional intervention, and imposes mandatory responses for certain 1st- and 2nd-grade students who remain below target, while tightening the 3rd-grade promotion standard. 

It has some language regarding the accreditation of state colleges of education and their teaching education students the science of reading, but not much about resources to grow teacher or school capacity around early literacy.

If this bill were focused on building capacity, it would first assess whether schools have enough trained interventionists, coaching, and implementation support to make the current law work well. Instead, SB 1778 is focused on what happens to students rather than on what the state must provide to schools. That is why the bill reads less like a support bill and more like a compliance bill. 

There is an old joke: The beatings will continue until morale improves. SB 1778’s response to Oklahoma’s poor early literacy outcomes is to tighten control, reduce discretion, and increase consequences. If students are still not reading at grade level, the bill requires mandatory placements, stronger retention rules, and fewer ways around them.  It seems to be built on the premise that more pressure will produce better outcomes.

But pressure is not the same thing as capacity, and poorly equipped systems tend to break under pressure.

If Oklahoma wants stronger reading outcomes, the state should start with a harder question than the one SB 1778 asks: Have we fully built the conditions for the current law to succeed? Have we given schools the people, time, and support to deliver the intervention they are already expected to provide? Until the answer to that is yes, adding another layer of mandated consequences is not much of a literacy strategy.