EDUCATION: Rosalinda wants to be an astronaut, but she doesn’t read very well.

In 2010, Harvard published a report that warned of a “cycle of academic failure” if Massachusetts did not get better at teaching kids to read, write McLaren and Martin. A panel named to study the issue issued five reports in 2019. The recommendations were not followed. “Teachers unions oppose state mandates on curriculum choices.”

Massachusetts, the “birthplace of public education,” lets schools do their own thing. Some schools “use instructional methods grounded in the science of how children learn to read, an approach which teaches kids to sound out words phonetically rather than guess, and helps them build a store of knowledge about the world early on, instead of skipping from topic to topic.” But nearly half use less-effective “balanced literacy” methods and low-quality curriculum.

“Poor children learning to read are now slightly better off going to school in Florida or Mississippi — states that got serious about early literacy years ago — than they are in Massachusetts,” they write.

With that much warning, you have to conclude that this is what Massachusetts educators want for their students.