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.
