Massachusetts Senate Moves Forward on Comprehensive Early Literacy Reform Legislation

 Massachusetts Senate Moves Forward on Comprehensive Early Literacy Reform Legislation 

Evidence-Based Literacy Reform and $25 Million Investment Headed to Senate Floor 

 

(BOSTON—01/22/2026) The Senate Committee on Ways and Means today advanced legislation to create a new statewide standard for how Massachusetts schools teach reading and literacy to young students. 

The bill—An Act relative to teacher preparation and student literacy, S.2924—requires that local school districts use an evidence-based curriculum to teach reading and literacy to students from kindergarten to 3rd grade. The curriculum would be approved by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and feature phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and phonemic awareness. 

The Senate voted during its session today to schedule the legislation for debate by the full Senate on Thursday, January 29. Senators will have until 2:30 P.M. on Monday, January 26 to file amendments for consideration by their colleagues. 

The legislation would also have DESE make one complete curriculum available for free, directly to schools. Schools would be required to regularly assess students’ reading levels and act if a student is significantly behind benchmarks.  

The bill includes $25 million in one-time funding from the ‘Fair Share’ surtax on millionaire households to help school districts purchase new, evidence-based curricula and provide professional development to teachers. 

The Committee on Ways and Means voted to report the bill, a new draft of legislation previously approved by the House of Representatives, H.4683. The committee’s vote also included a related Senate bill, S.2855, which was also before the committee and was based on legislation originally filed by Senator Sal N. DiDomenico.  

All of the underlying House and Senate bills were the subject of a public hearing held on September 16, 2025 by the Joint Committee on Education.