From the signing ceremony to the first day of school, fifty-two new mandates are waiting on a system that doesn’t yet exist.

Governor Stitt signed Senate Bill 1778 into law Tuesday morning at John Rex Charter Elementary. I’m sure you’ve seen the photos and videos of the governor surrounded by the cutest group of young Oklahomans, flanked by the legislative leaders who spent two sessions earning this moment — studying the research, producing interim studies, asking the right questions, and in some cases pursuing their own advanced degrees to understand what Oklahoma’s literacy crisis actually requires. Now the real work begins, and it belongs to the two statewide leaders Governor Stitt has appointed to carry it: Secretary of Education Dan Hamlin and State Superintendent Lindel Fields.

The bill is the most substantive rewrite of Oklahoma’s early literacy statute in a generation, and necessarily so. Nearly three in four Oklahoma third graders are not reading proficiently (NCES, 2024). The statute needed to match the scale of that problem.

But by Wednesday morning, teachers in break rooms and hallways, group texts and TikTok lives across the state were already counting what August will require of them.

The coaches the bill funds have not been found. The rules that define what compliance means have not been written. The approved-materials list has not been audited against the new instructional standard. The micro-credential academies do not yet have criteria, institutions, or enrolled teachers. And the teachers who will carry the first year of implementation report back on contract in a matter of weeks.

Where the Weight Lands

Oklahoma now has just over 510 school districts. The majority of them are rural, and many have been unable to fill a reading specialist position for years. As of early 2025, the state had issued more than 4,600 emergency certifications — roughly eleven percent of the state’s entire K–12 teaching workforce — and only one in five of those emergency-certified teachers will remain in the profession long enough to gain the classroom experience needed to meet the complex needs of today’s students. Teacher preparation bachelor’s degrees in Oklahoma have fallen twenty-seven percent over the past decade. Across the state’s far-reaching rural expanses, K–3 teachers are often emergency-certified, often teaching multiple grade levels, and almost never working alongside a dedicated reading specialist down the hall.

Fifty-two new mandates. Some of them belong to the State Board, which has to write the rules. Some of them belong to OEQA and CEQA, which have to decide what a micro-credential actually means. Some of them belong to OSDE, which has to hire and train twenty coaches not yet identified. And some of them belong to the K–3 teacher in a rural Oklahoma district, who will open their classroom in August carrying the mandates that reach the classroom before the rules that govern them do.

These are the districts where the classroom-level mandates will land hardest. Every K–3 classroom is now required to deliver systematic and explicit instruction in the five elements of reading, using approved materials, inside a multi-tiered framework, with universal screening three times a year, thirty-day parent notifications, intervention plans written and monitored and documented, and a reading specialist or micro-credentialed teacher identified in every elementary school in the state.

In districts already aligned with the science of reading — districts that have adopted high-quality materials, trained their teachers in LETRS, built internal coaching capacity — these requirements will be additive work, not foundational work. The compliance load is still real. But it lands on a system that is already doing the instruction the law now requires.

In districts that are not yet there — the majority of our rural districts — compliance becomes the entire job. A K–3 teacher who is already covering multiple certifications, already writing IEPs, already working alongside emergency-certified colleagues, already managing differentiated instruction for a classroom shaped by high rates of poverty and a growing population of English learners, will now also be expected to administer universal screeners three times a year, interpret benchmark data, write intervention plans within thirty days of identification, document fidelity inside a multi-tiered framework, notify parents in writing when a child falls below benchmark, and deliver systematic and explicit instruction in materials the district may not yet have replaced.

That teacher does not have a trained reading specialist down the hall. They may not have one in their district. The reading coach assigned to their region has not been hired to help them plan for these changes. The rulemaking that would tell them what compliance looks like has not been written. And the teacher across the hall is likely on an emergency certificate, holding their own classroom together.

This is where the weight of SB 1778 will land. Not on the statute. Not on the signing ceremony. On the K–3 teacher who opens their classroom in August — and on whether the system behind them is built to carry the load with them, or to drown them in the paperwork of proving they tried.

Where Oklahoma Joins the National Movement

SB 1778 arrives in the middle of a national literacy moment. Forty-five states passed literacy legislation between 2019 and 2022. The 2025 and 2026 sessions accelerated the trend. Massachusetts passed comprehensive literacy legislation through its Senate on a 38-0 vote this January, seeded with $25 million in implementation funding. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s 2026 budget included $45 million for adolescent literacy expansion. Missouri advanced companion bills to ban three-cueing and mandate science-of-reading instruction.

Oklahoma is not passing the first serious literacy law in the country. Oklahoma is passing one of forty-five.

And yet. As literacy researcher Karen Vaites has documented in her analysis of the Southern Surge, the states that have actually moved outcomes — Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama — did not do it solely by passing strong laws. They did it by passing strong laws and building the delivery systems those laws required (Vaites, 2025a). Mississippi State Literacy Director Dr. Amanda Malone, who calls her state’s transformation not a miracle but a marathon, oversees a statewide network of more than eighty literacy coaches working directly in classrooms (Malone & Mississippi Department of Education, 2025). Louisiana built its own state-developed curriculum, issued public curriculum reviews, and entered statewide contracts that made high-quality materials the path of least resistance for districts. Ninety-nine percent of Louisiana middle and high school students now have access to high-quality instructional materials in both ELA and math (Steiner, 2024). Tennessee’s Reading 360 trained thousands of educators and funded statewide curriculum adoption.

Many states passed reforms that on paper look like the Southern Surge playbook. Scores moved in the states that built the system underneath the law. Scores did not move in the states that passed the law and waited (National Council on Teacher Quality, 2024; Vaites, 2025b).

Measured against the statute books of states that legislated without results, Oklahoma’s bill looks strong. Measured against the full architecture the surge states actually built, it is the first step of work that has decades of building still ahead of it.

What the Bill Gets Right

Tier 1 instruction now has teeth. The old statute said teachers should “incorporate” the five elements of reading. The new one says teachers must “provide systematic and explicit instruction” in those elements. That single verb change separates Oklahoma’s law from the weaker versions passed in states whose scores have not moved. “Incorporate” lets a balanced-literacy block pass inspection. “Systematic and explicit instruction” does not.

The integration requirement tightened on the same day. For years the State Board “shall encourage” districts to align subject-matter standards with reading instruction. Now it “shall require.” Knowledge-rich instruction is now a requirement the State Board can audit against, not a suggestion it can encourage.

The approved-materials list is named in statute as the enforcement surface. Teacher preparation is addressed directly through program audits with enforcement teeth. Coaching expands from five regional coaches to twenty, each required to pass Oklahoma’s Foundations of Reading test. Every elementary school in the state must identify a reading specialist, interventionist, or micro-credentialed teacher to hold the literacy work in the building.

On the page, this is the architecture of a surge-state law. Every provision is the right one. The work now is building what the provisions assume.

What the Bill Leaves to Be Built

The statute ends and the building begins in two places.

The first is assessment coherence. The bill consolidates screening to a single statewide instrument, required three times a year for every K–3 student. But it leaves open a question that matters in every district in the state. Can a district continue using its own internal screener — Renaissance STAR, for instance — as a parallel promotion gate outside the statewide framework? The statute prohibits the statewide instrument from being used for promotion. It does not explicitly forbid a district from using a different screener to do exactly that. The broader principle — that a screener is not a promotion instrument — is not on the page. Rulemaking will decide whether the principle or the loophole prevails.

The second is accountability sequencing. The third-grade retention standard begins in 2027–2028. Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act passed in 2013, but Mississippi spent the years that followed building coaches, retraining teachers, and adopting vetted curriculum before the retention gate became the system’s most visible feature. Statute, then capacity, then consequence. In that order.

Oklahoma’s bill places the statute and the consequence on parallel tracks and hopes the capacity arrives in time. Whether it does depends on the decisions being made in the next twelve weeks.

The Twelve-Week Problem

The bill is signed and now the implementation clock is running. That clock’s deadline is shorter than most of the news coverage has acknowledged.

The binding constraint is not the first day of school. It is the window in which districts make the decisions that shape the year. District curriculum committees meet through May and June. Principals build master calendars and staffing rosters in June and July. Superintendents submit Strong Readers Plans for State Board approval before August. The earliest districts bring teachers back on contract the first week of August, with students following a week later. Any rulemaking that lands after mid-July arrives into a year whose shape is already set.

Twelve weeks from signing lands in mid-July. That is the operative clock.

In those weeks, the State Board has to promulgate implementation guidance for each of the three tiers. Select the statewide screener. Set grade-level benchmarks. Publish audit criteria for the approved-materials list. The Office of Educational Quality and Accountability has to write the program criteria for the micro-credential academies. The Commission for Educational Quality and Accountability has to vet the higher education institutions authorized to issue the credential. The State Department of Education has to hire and train twenty regional coaches, each of whom has to pass the Foundations of Reading test. The data pipeline for statewide screener reporting has to be built. The first micro-credential academy has to enroll its first cohort before the school year begins — which means the curriculum has to be built, the institutions approved, and the teachers recruited, in that order, before late summer.

At the district level, every district in the state has to submit or update a Strong Readers Plan. Every elementary school has to identify the specialist, interventionist, or micro-credentialed teacher who will satisfy the per-school staffing requirement. Every K–3 curriculum committee has to evaluate whether the materials already on the shelves satisfy the new instructional standard. Every principal has to rebuild the master calendar to protect math instruction from intervention pullouts. Every classroom teacher has to prepare to deliver systematic and explicit instruction in the five elements, using approved materials, inside a multi-tiered framework, with thirty-day parent notifications and an intervention plan for every identified child.

None of it is optional. All of it has to move in twelve weeks. And most of it cannot begin until the rulemaking above it is finished.

Mississippi did not build its literacy system in twelve weeks. Neither did Louisiana. Neither did Tennessee. They built it over a decade, in deliberate sequence, with regional delivery infrastructure carrying the load between the state agency and the classroom.

But we don’t have a decade.

Oklahoma is asking to stand up the operating system for a surge-state law in a single summer, through an agency structure that has no regional layer, for a statute whose implementing rules will land after most districts have already made their staffing and curriculum decisions for the year. That is not a small request. Yet it is the request the bill makes.

The Delivery Layer That Still Has to Be Built

Capacity without infrastructure is not reform. That was the argument of an earlier piece in this series, and SB 1778 is where the argument meets the test.

The approved-materials list Oklahoma maintains today was built under the old verb. “Incorporate” is what the prior statute permitted, and the current list reflects that permissive standard. The new verb is different. Any basal or curriculum on the list that cannot deliver systematic and explicit instruction in the five elements, inside a scope and sequence that integrates content-area standards with reading, does not satisfy the new statute. The audit is an affirmative obligation. It has not happened. Louisiana published its own curriculum reviews and made high-quality materials the path of least resistance for every district in the state. Oklahoma has not yet committed to the audit process that makes that kind of migration possible.

The micro-credential pipeline is funded but not vetted. An institution that has taught balanced literacy, Units of Study, Reading Recovery, or Guided Reading for decades can, on paper, apply to issue a science-of-reading credential. Whether the faculty delivering that credential have actually shifted their pedagogy, or whether they are translating existing training into new vocabulary, depends entirely on the rigor of the criteria OEQA writes. A rigorous process produces teachers prepared to lead literacy in their buildings. A procedural process produces credentials that are statutorily equivalent and practically much weaker. Mississippi paired its statute with intensive teacher retraining and a statewide coaching network. Oklahoma has funded the pipeline. Whether it produces the equivalent of a Mississippi-trained teacher or a differently badged version of the status quo is a rulemaking decision being made in the next few weeks.

The transitional classroom provision addresses a critical gap but only for districts with the capacity to staff it. Beginning in 2027–2028, the bill permits a stand-alone transitional second- or third-grade classroom for students not meeting grade-level targets. A transitional classroom relieves the general-education teacher of an impossible differentiation load and gives students instruction matched to where they are. In districts with multiple sections per grade, it is buildable. In districts with one section of second grade, it is not. The statute’s “or” between the transitional classroom option and in-class intervention becomes, in most rural districts, a default to in-class intervention delivered by a teacher who is already teaching twenty other children.

Each of these three gaps has the same underlying cause. The bill’s architecture assumes a delivery system Oklahoma has not yet built.

Mississippi did not route its coaching infrastructure through a single state agency serving more than five hundred districts. Louisiana did not expect a central office to vet curriculum, train teachers, deploy coaches, audit compliance, and support implementation simultaneously. Both states built or leveraged intermediate structures — coaching networks, regional centers, state-university partnerships — that carried the weight between the statehouse and the schoolhouse.

SB 1778 does not rebuild that layer. It extends coaching, expands credentials, and tightens requirements, but it leaves delivery coordination to the statehouse and the schoolhouse, the two structural poles that have been straining for a decade with nothing between them. The rulemaking happening in the next twelve weeks cannot rebuild that layer. It can only decide how the existing layer tries to carry the load.

And underneath the existing layer, in the rural Oklahoma classroom where the classroom-level mandates have to actually happen, is the K–3 teacher who will be asked to carry what the delivery system cannot.

Four Signals to Watch

Four decisions in the next twelve months will determine what gets built. Each one maps to something the surge states settled before they saw results. Each one is visible as it happens.

The first is the approved-materials list. Louisiana and Mississippi published reviews and migrated their districts to vetted curriculum within a few years of their statutes passing. If the State Board publishes audit criteria by late summer and begins removing non-compliant materials from the list before the next adoption cycle, the verb upgrade in the operative statute is being taken seriously. If the list remains unchanged, the verb upgrade becomes another line of documentation a compliant but failing district can cite.

The second is the micro-credential vetting. Mississippi’s coaches were not produced by the same institutions that had been training teachers in balanced literacy. If the program criteria require institutions to demonstrate that faculty have completed LETRS or equivalent structured literacy training, that syllabi exclude balanced literacy and three-cueing as primary methodological sources, and that credential recipients demonstrate competency on an assessment tied to structured literacy practice, the pipeline will produce teachers prepared to lead literacy in their buildings. If the criteria permit institutional self-attestation, the credentials will certify participation, not expertise.

The third is the coaching deployment. Mississippi has more than eighty literacy coaches today. Oklahoma’s bill funds twenty, for a state with more than five hundred districts. If those twenty are recruited, trained, and deployed to the lowest-performing schools before October, the coaching-as-bridge component is functional at its funded scale. If the positions remain partially filled into the spring, even the funded scale is nominal, and the rural K–3 teacher will carry the first year of implementation with no coach assigned to their building.

The fourth is the parallel-screener question. Surge-state statutes are explicit that a screener is not a promotion instrument. If the State Board clarifies through rulemaking that no screening instrument — statewide or district-administered — may be used as a promotion gate in K–3, the statute’s principle is intact. If the clarification never comes, districts that have been using Renaissance STAR or equivalent internal gates will continue, and the statute’s coherence will be hollowed out while its letter is obeyed.

These are not abstract questions. Each one has a published rule, a hiring report, a list, or an announcement attached to it. Each one will answer whether SB 1778 becomes the system Oklahoma’s children need or the third iteration of a pattern the state has been repeating for a decade.

The Bill Is Signed. The Decade’s Work Starts Now.

Oklahoma has the statute. What it does not yet have is the decade the Southern Surge states had to build the system behind it.

That gap is not a failure of ambition. It is the cost of urgency. And meeting that cost will require more than the existing education establishment can deliver on its own. Former Louisiana State Superintendent John White identified the structural problem plainly: “State regulation of local entities is not a popular thing, so the states have become passive” (as cited in Vaites, 2025b). Oklahoma cannot build a science-of-reading system by recycling the institutional relationships and professional networks that presided over its absence. The state has literacy expertise — in its classrooms, its research community, its rural districts, and its independent practitioners — that has not been systematically drawn into this work.

That is the next decision. Fifty-two mandates are already on their way. The teachers who will carry them deserve a system built by people who have actually carried them.

The bill is signed. The decade’s work starts now.

About the author: Dr. Rebecca Pellam, EdD, is founder of Diamond P Academic Consulting and a literacy researcher and advocate. With classroom and reading specialist experience in Oklahoma and Texas and a doctorate in education, she writes the Oklahoma Education Forum on Substack.

References

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (2024). 2024 NAEP reading assessment: Results at grades 4 and 8 for the nation, states, and districts. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.

Malone, A., & Mississippi Department of Education. (2025). How to build strong readers: Mississippi’s guide to developing literacy skills from birth through grade 12. Mississippi Department of Education. https://mdek12.org/literacy/

National Council on Teacher Quality. (2024). Five policy actions to strengthen implementation of the science of reading. https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/state-of-the-states-2024-five-policy-actions-to-strengthen-implementation-of-the-science-of-reading/

Pellam, R. (2026, February). Capacity before cash: Why Oklahoma’s literacy bills need infrastructure first. Oklahoma Education Forum.

StateImpact Oklahoma. (2024, December 5). Report shows modest ‘turning point’ in Oklahoma teacher workforce recovery. KGOU/Oklahoma Public Radio. https://www.kgou.org/education/2024-12-05/report-shows-modest-turning-point-in-oklahoma-teacher-workforce-recovery

Steiner, D. (2024, January). The unrealized promise of high-quality instructional materials. State Education Standard, 24(1). National Association of State Boards of Education.

Vaites, K. (2025a, February 16). The Southern Surge: Understanding the bright spots in the literacy landscape. School Yourself [Substack]. https://www.karenvaites.org/p/the-southern-surge-understanding

Vaites, K. (2025b, October 23). The Southern Surge watershed. School Yourself [Substack]. https://www.karenvaites.org/p/the-southern-surge-watershed

Velasco, R., Feile, K., Pleasants, J., Raymond, K., & Brugar, K. (2025). Preparing emergency certified teachers for long-term success: OU’s FAST program. Oklahoma Education Journal, 3(4). https://oej.scholasticahq.com/article/125476