Education

Third-grade retention law reaps results in Indiana

August 13, 2026

Ray Carter

When Oklahoma lawmakers voted this year to require students to repeat the third grade if they read far below grade level, Mississippi was held up as the chief example for that strategy’s success.

But Mississippi is not the only state with a retention law that is seeing notable improvement in student reading outcomes.

In 2024, Indiana lawmakers also voted to require students who read far below grade level to repeat the third grade, and (like Oklahoma and Mississippi) devoted resources to early intervention for struggling readers.

This month, Indiana officials released the results of their 2026 state tests, noting that Indiana’s literacy rates now surpass pre-pandemic levels.

In 2024, just 455 Indiana students repeated the third grade. That number exploded to 3,034 in 2025 when the retention mandate took effect. But officials previously predicted that nearly 7,000 kids might have to repeat the third grade. Intervention efforts helped struggling readers improve and avoid retention.

Public data show that Indiana students are dramatically outperforming Oklahoma students.

On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) fourth-grade reading test, 34 percent of Indiana students performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level and 65 percent performed at or above the NAEP Basic level.

When the 2024 NAEP results were released in January 2025, Indiana officials noted results in their state had improved dramatically, surging from 19th in the country in 2022 to sixth on the 2024 reading test, the highest Indiana had ever ranked in fourth-grade reading. Indiana also rose to sixth-best on NAEP’s eighth-grade reading test.

“Over the past three years, Indiana has taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to solving our literacy crisis, and today we see that without a doubt, this work is making a difference,” Dr. Katie Jenner, Indiana secretary of education, declared in a 2025 press release. “This new data is just one more piece of evidence that the time and resources invested in this effort are paying off for students.”

The performance of Indiana students improved even as the national average score on NAEP tests decreased in 2024.

The story in Oklahoma has been very different.

Just 23 percent of Oklahoma fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level on the 2024 reading test, and only 54 percent performed at or above the NAEP Basic level. Only two states performed notably worse than Oklahoma.

The gap between the national average NAEP score for 4th-grade students on the reading test and the Oklahoma average was the second largest recorded in the history of the test, which was first administered in Oklahoma in 1998.

The results of 2025 Oklahoma state tests, the most recent publicly available, similarly showed that nearly three in four Oklahoma students were not proficient in reading.

The spring 2025 state tests showed that only 27 percent of Oklahoma third-grade students scored “proficient” or better on the English Language Arts (ELA) test, meaning those students are performing at or above grade-level expectations. Further, 43 percent of third-grade students scored “below basic,” meaning they are performing far below grade-level expectations.

Oklahoma’s reading results have not always been so abysmal.

From roughly 2011 to 2014, the state had a reading law that required early intervention and third-grade retention as a last resort for severely struggling readers. Policymakers largely gutted the law starting in 2014, but not before it generated dramatic proof of concept.

By 2015, Oklahoma students tested above the national average on NAEP reading tests and 33 percent of students were proficient or better, marking the state’s best results in decades.

However, former State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister was a critic of the reading law and championed its negation during her tenure, during which Oklahoma’s academic outcomes cratered. Outcomes did not improve during the brief tenure of State Superintendent Ryan Walters, who won election after Hofmeister termed out. (Walters resigned mid-term.)

Oklahoma’s decline in reading outcomes occurred despite historic levels of funding.

According to financial data reported by schools to the state’s Oklahoma Cost Accounting System (OCAS), Oklahoma public schools received $9,586,994,906 in new revenue in the 2024-2025 school year, an increase of more than $3 billion compared to the $6,300,400,107 reported during the 2017-2018 school year.

A report from an arm of the National Education Association (NEA), a national teachers’ union, found that Oklahoma public schools had $15,111 in revenue receipts per student, based on average daily attendance, during the 2024-2025 school year.

That was a 55 percent increase since the 2017-2018 school year, when a prior edition of the NEA report found Oklahoma public schools had revenue receipts per student of $9,724 at that time, based on average daily attendance.

When Edunomics Lab analyzed return-on-investment (ROI) data from 2013 to 2024, tracking NAEP fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores alongside per-pupil spending, researchers found Oklahoma’s per-pupil spending far outpaced inflation during that time, but Oklahoma’s NAEP scores in both reading and math were far lower today than in 2013.

In Oklahoma, Edunomics noted, “Reading 4th grade scores fell through the decade and continue to decline even as spending increased.”

Oklahoma policymakers believe the new third-grade reading law, Senate Bill 1778, will generate improvement for the first time in years thanks to the requirement for both early intervention and third-grade retention as a last resort.

When SB 1778 passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives in April, House Speaker Kyle Hilbert predicted that it would mark a major turning point for academic outcomes.

“This, I believe, is going to be a bill and legislation that we will be able to look back on–if we stick with it–five and 10 years from now and remember when we planted a flag in the ground to have better outcomes for our kids,” said Hilbert, R-Bristow. “And we know, based on science, based on data, based on what other states have done, if we do this and if we stick with it, accompanied with the other reforms that we’ve made in education, that our outcomes will improve for the kids in Oklahoma.”