California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond hosted a Literacy Leadership Summit yesterday with educational and philanthropic partners to discuss how to deliver on California’s literacy and biliteracy promise, specifically his five-year literacy plan to have every child reading by third grade.
Thurmond shared his vision for California to be “fully literate, fully biliterate by Grade 3” and is seeking private funding to help continue the state’s recent improvements in literacy levels. He called on educational and philanthropic partners to support the funding and implementation of the plan, which has received $200 million in one-off funding.
“California is moving the right direction, we’ve seen a lot of growth, but it’s not enough…We can embark on a public-private partnership to fund a long-term plan for literacy, but we need $300,000 a year despite the state’s structural deficits…This cannot wait—we intend to roll out this five-year plan and then implement it,” said Thurmond.
The summit convened state leaders, legislators, educational partners, and philanthropic partners to examine where California currently stands in literacy achievement, where the state aims to be, and how a comprehensive literacy strategy can help close the opportunity gap. The discussion focused on implementation, stressing the importance of the state’s ongoing Instructional Materials Follow-up Adoption, which attracted a record number of submissions, and was opened to partial programs for the first time.
“I have a vision that every child in this state will achieve literacy by third grade and also achieve biliteracy, opening doors later in life and better preparing our students for the global marketplace. Over the next five years, we are proposing a $1.5 billion investment to accelerate outcomes and ensure all students have access to high-quality literacy and biliteracy instruction,” Superintendent Thurmond said. “We’ve committed more than $1.2 billion to literacy efforts since 2019, and those investments are paying off: this past year, we saw the greatest single-year increase in literacy rates since 2015. We are on a positive trajectory, but progress requires consistency. The next phase will require continued focus and partnership.”
The plan would represent the most significant investment and the first long-term literacy plan in recent California history, including funding for:
- specialized professional learning and coaching to support those who teach students to read.
- high-impact tutoring, which recent research from Stanford University has shown to boost both achievement and attendance;
- family engagement supports for literacy development; and
- screening for reading difficulties like dyslexia.
Also included is legislation to make attending kindergarten mandatory for all five-year-olds across the state, AB 1631 (Muratsuchi). This effort aligns with the call to expand funding for the California Community Schools Partnership Program, which helps schools connect students and families to resources for health, mental health, and social services.