With Oklahoma’s third-grade reading outcomes among the worst in the nation, state lawmakers have advanced legislation that requires early intervention for struggling readers in elementary school and mandatory retention for students who end the third grade reading years below grade level.

House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, said Oklahoma cannot afford to continue its current trajectory.

“In 2015, Oklahoma students performed near the national average in reading,” Hilbert said. “Today, we trail peer states by more than a full grade level. Based on spring testing last year, only 27 percent of Oklahoma third graders are reading at or above grade level.”

He noted that about 30 percent of Oklahoma fourth graders are reading at a first-grade reading level or below, based on state test results.

House Bill 4420, by Hilbert, requires third-grade students to score above the “below basic” level on the statewide reading test before they can be promoted to the fourth grade. In effect, the bill would require that students read at a second-grade level before starting fourth grade.

The legislation includes exemptions for children with special needs or who speak English as a second language and have less than two years of language instruction.

The bill requires early identification of reading deficiencies in lower grades followed by intensive interventions for struggling readers, with retention also a possibility for children in first or second grade who read far below grade level.

When a student is struggling to read and is performing far below grade-level expectations, the legislation requires that parents be notified within seven days.

The legislation also increases the number of required regional literacy leads from five to 20, and requires that there must be one reading specialist, or a contracted reading specialist, for each elementary school.

Schools performing the worst on the end-of-year reading assessment will be given priority access to the reading coaches employed by the State Department of Education.

The program is projected to require $75 million annually to implement.

Hilbert’s bill is modeled, in part, after Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA), approved in 2013. Since the implementation of the LBPA, Mississippi has climbed from 49th to ninth for fourth-grade reading, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). And Mississippi is the only state in the nation where the bottom 10 percent of students scored higher in 2024 than their 2013-2014 school-year counterparts.

Oklahoma had a law similar to Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act that produced dramatic improvement in outcomes through 2015, but the measure was substantially watered down and largely repealed in subsequent years. Oklahoma’s academic outcomes on reading have steadily declined since 2015.

Hilbert said repeating the third grade is meant as a last resort, but he said the mandate is needed to ensure children are not academically shortchanged.

“This is not about punishment,” Hilbert said. “This is about ensuring the kids can read. I would argue that we are punishing kids if we advance them on when they are not ready. It’s about accountability paired with support.”

State Rep. Michelle McCane, D-Tulsa, said 43 percent of third-grade students score below basic on tests today, noting that translates into thousands of students statewide.

“We’re going to see a significant number of kids that are being retained,” McCane said.

She questioned if the state could provide enough teachers to instruct those students who repeat third grade.

But Hilbert noted additional funding is part of the plan and also stressed that the state does children no favors by socially promoting them to fourth grade when they are not ready.

“We are doing an absolute disservice to our kids if you’re in the fourth grade and you read at or below a first-grade reading level,” Hilbert said. “That is an absolute disservice. How can you even go about learning when you don’t know how to read?”

When the threat of mandatory third-grade retention was removed from state law about a decade ago, Hilbert noted it had a major ripple effect.

“When we took the accountability metric of third-grade retention out of the legislation, schools did not do early intervention,” Hilbert said. “They did not do it.”

State Rep. Chad Caldwell, R-Enid, noted that Oklahoma’s reading gains from 2013 to 2015 were third highest in the nation before the retention mandate was gutted.

“One of the biggest mistakes that I think we made as a Legislature was rolling those things back,” Caldwell said. “Now we have an opportunity to say we got it wrong, to say we listened to the wrong voices.”

HB 4420 passed the House Appropriations and Budget Subcommittee on Education on an 8-2 vote that broke along party lines with Republicans in support and Democrats opposed. The bill now proceeds to the full House Appropriations and Budget Committee.

“We know if we pass this bill, we will have better education outcomes,” Hilbert said. “That is a fact.”