A statistic that doesn’t change has a subtly depressing quality. Georgia’s third-grade reading proficiency scores hardly changed for over twenty years. The Georgia Council on Literacy estimates that as recently as 2024, about 62% of the state’s third graders were not proficient readers. While lawmakers debated funding formulas and parents silently fretted, that number sat there year after year, unyielding and damning. This is the kind of figure that ought to have raised red flags much earlier.
Then came Fulton County’s “Every Child Reads” program, which was based on the same science-of-reading framework that had already transformed classrooms in Mississippi, North Carolina, and Louisiana. It was started with $90 million in federal COVID relief funds. The program retrained teachers using the LETRS professional development model, assigned specialized reading coaches and paraprofessionals to each elementary school in the district, and steadfastly emphasized phonics-based instruction starting in kindergarten. The outcomes were dramatic within a few years. Schools that had previously seen most of their third-graders struggle through simple reading passages started to report significant drops in failure rates; in some buildings, there were as many as 60% fewer students falling short of grade-level expectations. Naturally, not all schools achieved that. However, the direction was clear.
It wasn’t a groundbreaking discovery that set Fulton County apart. It was self-control. Mississippi had already demonstrated that phonics instruction combined with early screening, individual reading plans, and genuine accountability could make a significant difference, starting with its 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act. By 2024, Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading ranking had risen from 49th to ninth in the country. In a similar vein, fourth graders in Louisiana surpassed their pre-pandemic reading scores, making it one of just two states.
Georgia observed all of this from a distance, adopting some aspects of the strategy on paper but not applying them as strictly. The Progressive Policy Institute’s director of education policy, Rachel Canter, noted that the Georgia Department of Education initially approved 16 different reading screeners of wildly disparate quality—a sort of bureaucratic permissiveness that undermined the entire endeavor.
The Georgia Early Literacy Act of 2026, House Bill 1193, is intended to address that. The legislation, which was supported by House Speaker Jon Burns and signed into law this spring, tightens screening standards, increases literacy coaching throughout the state, and more closely links grade placement to reading benchmarks. Approximately $70 million was set aside by lawmakers for the rollout, which starts this autumn. Burns referred to it as “unprecedented change,” and supporters believe Georgia has finally begun creating its own version of the Mississippi miracle rather than merely admiring it from a distance.
All of this optimism, however, is tinged with caution. Senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Robert Pondiscio has cautioned that education policy often looks for the one lever no one thought to pull, chasing miracle stories. Canter herself has characterized Mississippi’s progress as a marathon rather than a miracle—years of arduous, incremental accountability work that resisted taking short cuts. The reason Georgia’s previous attempts at literacy reform failed was because enforcement was lax and implementation was uneven. Enacting legislation is one thing. It is quite another to ensure that a reading coach in rural Telfair County receives the same instruction and assistance as one in suburban Fulton County.
It’s difficult not to feel both hopeful and impatient as you watch this develop. Children who are unable to read well by the third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school, according to the research. They have lower incomes, greater odds in almost all quantifiable life outcomes, and frequently transfer these disadvantages to their own offspring.
Focused investment is effective, as demonstrated by Fulton County and Marietta City Schools, which established their own literacy ecosystem with a $2.5 million United Way grant. Now, the question is whether Georgia will be able to maintain the effort long enough and honestly enough to make those early gains last. This year’s kindergarteners will not take their third-grade reading assessment until 2029. It’s a long time to keep the interest of a state. However, if the flat numbers of the past 20 years have shown anything, it is that looking away is far more expensive.
