Tuesday at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit, leaders from Tennessee, Louisiana and Mississippi made clear that while these gains are receiving overnight attention, they really emerged from years of cohesive strategy and accountability.
“What these ... states have in common is, they didn’t start six years ago,” former Louisiana state Superintendent John White said. “They started 20 years ago.”
In 2000, a congressionally sponsored National Reading Panel of experts published a landmark report synthesizing decades of research into five core components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. That base of research for the science of reading has remained largely unchanged, but how states acted on that information varied.
Lizzette Reynolds, now the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Education, said she can remember working on legislation in Texas to create a standardized system for teacher training as early as 1996, but governor transitions prevented the work from continuing on.
In 2013, Mississippi passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act specifically targeting K-3 reading instruction. The state paired the policy with intensive teacher retraining and a statewide network of literacy coaches working directly in classrooms. Today, Mississippi has more than 80 of these coaches ensuring instructors understand the research, which learning tools are of high quality and how to use them well, according to state Superintendent Lance Evans.
Similarly, starting in 2012, Tennessee overhauled its approach to instructional materials, professional learning and the role of educators in curriculum adoption. Other major changes emerged in 2020 with the state’s Reading 360 initiative, which put COVID-19 relief dollars toward training and materials for teachers and families.
For these literacy gains to be replicated in other states, panelists said, active leadership at the state level is key. In Mississippi, Evans said state support for literacy improvements through a line item in the budget rather than a funding formula helped stakeholders at all levels understand the investment and hold the state accountable for results.
State-sponsored teacher training on science-backed literacy instruction strategies and tools was one piece of the puzzle, panelists said, and another was training on how to implement large-scale change.
“Lots of people are unfamiliar with the basic best practices of implementing multistakeholder programs at scale,” Ashley Andersen Zantop, CEO of the ed-tech company Cambium Education, said at the panel. “We’ve got families and teachers and students and all kinds of folks in the ecosystem, and one of the things that is often missing is training those folks how to do that work.”
Additionally, states will need to understand that big changes take time and continuity.
“While Tennessee really didn’t adopt the whole science-of-learning cohesive strategy until a few years ago, the work has been happening through a number of governors,” Reynolds said. “We’ve had a number of governors that have put education at the top of their reform agenda, and so that has enabled the communities to be able to embrace the work as it moves along.”
By contrast, states that start and stop reforms, often due to leadership turnover, struggle to build trust and momentum at the district level, Reynolds said.
For a true upscale, White suggested national coordination. He said he could remember a time when state education leaders had a better working relationship with national ones — when former southern governors like Lamar Alexander could work with the Clintons to elevate issues to the national spotlight and, in White’s eyes, effect change like the No Child Left Behind Act.
“I think we’ve lost some of that muscle as a country,” he said.
He suggested convening an updated National Reading Panel to codify what worked well in southern states and share what researchers may not have known 25 years ago.
“I think this issue needs to be elevated nationally, or I think it will lose steam in places that don’t already have signs that it’s working,” he said.
