As state leaders explore reading reforms by opening the door to literacy-based retention, they are also examining the expansion of statewide literacy coaches as a piece of the puzzle.
Increasing the presence of literacy coaches, who bridge the gap between professional development and implementation, could help ensure that high-quality instruction — based on “science of reading” principles — is present in every classroom.
During a media scrum following the State of Business Forum in November, State Chamber of Oklahoma President and CEO Chad Warmington said literacy coaches have been key in the success of another state seeing remarkable recent gains in childhood literacy. Mississippi now has the ninth-best fourth-grade reading scores nationally, according to the 2024 NAEP scores.
As part of its “Oklahoma Competes” initiative — aimed at awakening Oklahomans to the state’s poor rankings in education, health and advanced job growth — Warmington is asking state leaders to examine Mississippi’s turnaround as a potential model ahead of the 2026 legislative session.
“You have to have professional development and literacy coaches. That is what Mississippi did so well. They came in with a whole phalanx of literacy coaches to help make sure that teachers that were teaching were actually getting up to speed every year on the science of reading,” Warmington said. “There was a philanthropic effort in Mississippi that got out ahead, too, and really tried to get reading coaches on the ground earlier, getting them trained up, so that when the state was ready, they could kind of catch up and feed into it.”
The science of what?
Often mistaken as a curriculum itself, the “science of reading” refers to research stemming from disciplines like neuroscience and psychology that is used to inform literacy education. Curricula based on science-of-reading research typically focus on several ideas, including phonics instruction, phonemic awareness — the ability to identify individual sounds in spoken words — and sequential, explicit guidance on how to decode words and sentences.
Founded in 2000 by Jim and Sally Barksdale through a $100 million charitable contribution, the Barksdale Reading Institute set out to “improve the overall quality of public education in Mississippi through strategic literacy initiatives and the providing [of] professional development,” according to the institution’s website.
Part of the institution’s programming included expanding educators’ knowledge of the science of reading through professional development, according to the Magnolia Tribune. Praised for its two decades of work, the institute was shuttered in 2023, but its Reading Universe taxonomy lives on.
Warmington said the State Chamber Research Foundation, led by executive director Jake Yunker, is working to fill the philanthropic lane that greased the skids for implementation of a robust literacy coach program in Mississippi.
“Jake and I have been talking about this internally. I think where we can best (help) is, how do we get the literacy coaches trained and deployed across the state? That is where we are going to lean into,” Warmington said.
Pitching state legislators and educators on such a partnership may have its pain points, as the state chamber’s most recent foray into education went awry, largely thanks to the tumultuous tenure of former Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters. Before he was elected in 2022 with significant backing from reform-minded business groups, Walters led Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, which the chamber originally founded as Oklahoma Achieves in 2019. Ultimately, a multi-county grand jury said Walters and EKCO mismanaged millions in COVID-era relief funds. After Gov. Kevin Stitt directed the federal dollars to EKCO in July 2020, Yunker joined the nonprofit advocacy organization’s board in January 2021, eventually becoming its president.
And while the chamber and other state leaders have bought into the “Mississippi miracle” as a framework for reform because of the state’s fourth grade NAEP score turnaround, questions remain about the oft-cited ranking. Mississippi’s eighth-grade reading scores lag behind its fourth-grade results, which has spurred skepticism about the Literacy-Based Promotion Act’s success, including suggestions that Mississippi gamed the statistics by retaining poor performers. Mississippi First, an education-focused think tank, disputed the claim, noting that the first cohort of third graders impacted by literacy-based retention were eighth graders in 2020.
Mississippi leaders acknowledge eighth grade reading rates are a “challenge point.” While Mississippi has not improved much from its 1998 eighth grade reading score of 251, it has avoided the same score depression seen in the national average. Mississippi eighth graders scored a 253 in 2024. The nationwide score was 256, down from 264 in 1998. Since 1998, Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading scores have increased from 204 to 219. Mississippi achieved the national average in 2019 after decades of below-average performance. A two-point decrease in nationwide scores aided the achievement.
‘Everybody can use some coaching’
While Oklahoma already has a statewide literacy coach program known as the HEROES Literacy Instructional Team, its 14-coach roster is limited in a state with more than 500 public school districts.
“Coaching is really important to provide the professional development and the consistency that we need across the state,” Mary Dahlgren, founder of Tools 4 Reading, told Oklahoma legislators during an Oct. 22 interim study. “It is not enough to have quality professional development around the state. We need help in supporting our teachers, and that is what the HEROES network is designed to do. We just need to grow that model from 14 (literacy coaches) to about 60.”
A literacy what?
The Florida Department of Education defines a literacy coach as “an instructional leader with specialized knowledge in the science of reading.”
Oklahoma Education Association executive director Rhonda Harlow is a certified reading specialist who has worked as a literacy coach at site and district levels. With OEA members no longer feeling like a Walters-led State Department of Education is working against them, Harlow and others hope the experiences of educators are considered in whatever reforms the 2026 legislative session may hold.
“I do think the HEROES literacy instruction team (…) is a necessary component, because what that instructional team is able to do is offer supports to areas of our state that may not have the resources,” Harlow said. “They may not have reading specialists that are on staff, or someone who has the professional development and training to give supports to the classroom teachers.”
While Harlow said she would support expansion of the statewide HEROES program — which stands for Helping to Elevate Reading Outcomes for Every Student” — she would like to see incentives for teachers to pursue literacy expertise that would enable them to stay and utilize their knowledge in their respective districts.
“How can we get educators to continue with their education and make it worthwhile for them? I worked on my master’s, and I got a bump on the salary schedule,” Harlow said. “I got a bump of $800, maybe $1,000 more for the year. Not per month — for the year. That did not even cover the cost of the student loans I had to take out to obtain my master’s. Why would some people do that? So what can we do to make that worthwhile?”
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Established in 2023 as a three-year pilot program that is up for renewal in 2026, the HEROES program aims to support schools’ implementation of the Strong Readers Act through professional development sessions and ongoing coaching, largely at the regional level.
Laura Yeager serves as principal of Frederick Elementary School, located about 30 minutes southwest of Lawton. She said working with the HEROES team and using a program developed at the University of Florida has moved the needle for her Tillman County district.
“They implemented the UFLI program as part of our Tier 1 instruction,” Yeager said.
Developed at the University of Florida Literacy Institute “for teachers, by teachers, with teachers,” UFLI Foundations is an “explicit and systematic program that teaches students the foundational skills necessary for proficient reading.”
“We have been high-achieving, but there are still areas where, you know, we always want to have continuous improvement,” Yeager said. “So having somebody who is an expert available to ask those questions, come in and model lessons — things like that — has been very, very helpful.”
Despite its status as a small Title I school district less than 20 minutes from the Texas border, Frederick Public Schools has been outperforming the state as a whole.
At Frederick Elementary School, 81 percent of 363 students are economically disadvantaged, according to the school’s 2024 state report card. Statewide, 62.7 percent of students are economically disadvantaged. Nonetheless, 42 percent of the Frederick’s students score proficient or advanced on English assessments compared to only 26 percent statewide.
Danna Akins, a reading specialist at Frederick Elementary School, grew up in the community and has worked for the school since 2006. She said the HEROES team has been “great” and that if you quit learning as a professional, you hurt yourself.
“Everybody can use some coaching,” Akin said. “If somebody wants to give me some advice, I always try to [listen]. If there is something I can do better, I am willing to do it if it is going to benefit my kids.”
The difference between ‘coaching’ and ‘consulting’
Even with the HEROES program’s early track record of impact, those with intimate knowledge believe the state needs to be doing more to assist with literacy education.
Melissa Ahlgrim, OSDE’s director of literacy policy and programs, said during the Oct. 22 interim study that the HEROES program has one open position, but hiring has become challenging without the promise of a full year of work. The program — launched as a three-year pilot — is on track to sunset in 2026.
According to Ahlgrim, HEROES coaches are located around the state geographically, but they only reach “about 132” of the roughly 925 elementary schools in Oklahoma.
“We are literally going all over. The thing that we ran across when setting up this program, (…) the directive I was given within the agency, was to make sure that each of these people were working with at least 20 schools. Folks, that is not coaching, that is consulting,” Ahlgrim said. “It worked to be able to get our people into the schools. They have done a great job with professional development, but to actually see ‘coaching,’ we are going to have to pull way back on that to actually embed them in schools.”
At its Nov. 20 meeting, members of the Oklahoma State Board of Education discussed the importance of mentorship for teachers. Board member and former educator Becky Carson said she wants to see a literacy coach in every school district.
After the meeting, new State Superintendent of Public Instruction Lindel Fields agreed that literacy coaches are important, and he offered a different linguistic take to all the talk of the “Mississippi miracle.”
“We talked about the ‘Mississippi Marathon.’ You know, that is what I call it. Literacy coaches are a big component of that,” Fields said. “Literacy coaches, I think, will be a tremendous asset to school districts.”
During the Oct. 22 interim study, Casey Taylor, former assistant state literacy coordinator with the Mississippi Department of Education, also said Mississippi’s improvement is the result of intentional efforts, not a miracle.
“We like to call (it) the Mississippi Marathon, because when you’re doing the work, I have to tell you it does not feel much like a miracle,” Taylor said. “It feels like the payoff to some really hard work from a lot of people moving in the same direction.”
Like it did with third-grade reading retention, Oklahoma has seen positive results before with literacy coaching, only to see the effort rolled back.
“In 2013, we were at about (217) on our NAEP scores. But you will notice in 2015, we jumped to [222]. That was pretty impressive, then we have dropped to 208,” Dahlgren said. “What happened in 2015 is, we had 58 reading coaches statewide that went out and did the hard work in the schools with our superintendents, with our teachers. They worked in all 77 counties. It was actually the 2013-2014 school year that that happened, and in 2015, those coaches were taken out of the budget.”
As the state chamber and others call for a return to what showed promise a decade ago, experts from Mississippi who helped lead their fourth-grade reading turnaround have the ear of Oklahoma policymakers.
During a conference hosted Oct. 30Â by the Oklahoma Center for Education Policy at the University of Oklahoma, former Mississippi Department of Education state literacy director Kymyona Burk served as a keynote speaker alongside Gov. Kevin Stitt, whose new secretary of education, Dan Hamlin, is the center’s faculty director.
Burk, now a senior policy fellow at ExcelInEd, described how literacy coaches supported Mississippi’s improvement through a model built over time. She also said there does not necessarily need to be a literacy coach in every school, preemptively contrasting Carson’s Nov. 20 statement at the State Board of Education meeting.
“The coaches are there to help teachers transfer their theory to practice,” Burk said. “We looked at our lowest performing schools — after two years of data — and we targeted it with those schools first. And I think just having a plan to be able to target some schools instead of looking at it like, ‘Oh my God, we need a coach in every school,’ that can begin to alleviate some of the pressure.”
Burk said Mississippi deployed a “multi-layered” literacy coach support system that involved embedded literacy coaches, regional coordinators, three statewide literacy coordinators and a state literacy director.
Taylor now works with Burk as senior policy director for literacy at ExcelInEd, an education think tank founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in 2007.
During the Oct. 22 interim study, Taylor said Mississippi’s literacy coaches generally have two “full support” schools, where they have a consistent, hands-on presence. Regional coordinators have one “full support” school and oversee four to five literacy coaches. As schools improve, they are gradually released and are considered “partial support” schools, where they receive monthly visits from literacy coaches.
“Supporting two schools in your full-time job versus supporting 15 schools is a drastic change,” Taylor told Oklahoma legislators. “I would encourage you to think about the impact of coaching, and as Melissa (Ahlgrim) said, are they functioning as consultants with limited time to interact and just really give high-level feedback and opportunities to support, or are they really coaching in a way that is changing and transforming what is happening in the classroom?”
‘You have to give up a little local control’
State leaders and lawmakers have already begun weighing that question.
Senate Education Committee Chairman Adam Pugh (R-Edmond) said he will fight to increase funding of the HEROES program in 2026, because “they have had tremendous success.” Still, he acknowledged the effort would require millions of dollars in new appropriations.
“To grow it, where we are not just reaching a quarter of our schools, when we want to reach all of our schools — obviously — it is going to take more,” Pugh said. “It has got to be scaled up, and that is going to require a larger investment, and it is going to require it year over year over year, so that we are not just funding something for three years and then saying, ‘OK, time to try something else.'”
Pugh, who is running for state superintendent of public instruction, said the Legislature’s initial investment into literacy coaches at OSDE has proven to be positive and productive. Now, he said, it needs “to go further.”
“I think there is a lot of interest in doing that this year, which is awesome,” Pugh said.
Warmington suggested the return on investment will be worth the price tag.
“When you look at what Mississippi’s expenditures are on literacy coaches, it is pretty small. It is like $17 — $18 million a year,” Warmington said. “That is a really low expenditure for the benefit of getting your teachers up to speed.”
Asked about literacy coaching after the forum, Senate Minority Leader Julia Kirt (D-OKC) said Oklahoma’s teachers need more resources, compensation and support.
“The most valuable thing is having our classroom educators better prepared and better supported,” Kirt said.
Rep. Chad Caldwell (R-Enid) said literacy coaches need to be part of future literacy legislation, but he acknowledged it could lead to local control tensions.
“It is about how we implement those as well. If you look at Mississippi, those reading coaches are directed from the state-agency level and they are coordinated, and they are housed within there and they are directed and sent out from the state level,” Caldwell said. “This is that kind of inherent conflict between more centralized control versus local control. If we really want to implement that, we set the standard from a state level and then, again, work with our local partners as far as how to implement that.”
Craig McVay, who is running for state superintendent of public instruction as a Democrat, shed light on the possibility of local control tensions from his perspective as the former superintendent of El Reno Public Schools.
“I am answering this question constantly: ‘Why are our test scores so low? What are we doing?’ I just got a phone call today from a parent, and I have been retired for three years,” McVay said. “You have to give up a little local control, and I think most superintendents would gladly give up that portion of local control with a completely funded and completely consistent plan.”
(Update: This article was updated at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 8, to clarify a timeline regarding Every Kid Counts Oklahoma.)
