Isabella C. Ehrlich — a Cambridge parent of four — made the decision to have her youngest child repeat kindergarten when she struggled to meet grade-level reading standards.

Her daughter was adopted at four years old and had to learn English. Two of her other four children have individualized education plans.

Ehrlich remembered the moment her children began to enjoy reading — not because of a test score or a benchmark, but because a teacher “inspired them and met them where they were.”

Improving literacy for her children has never been one-size-fits-all, she said. And a blanket retention policy, she argued, would not address the root cause of a child’s literacy issue.

“In Cambridge, it could be anything from this child isn’t eating regularly because they’re unhoused or they’re moving around, to this child has dyslexia, to this child’s English is not their first language,” Ehrlich said.

“There’s so many different issues that could be impacting why they are or are not reading at grade level,” she added.

District leaders have historically steered away from holding struggling students back, often promoting students based on age rather than strict mastery of grade-level material. The district has emphasized interventions — both widesweeping and individualized — to support struggling readers.

But in March, Cambridge School Committee members Elizabeth C.P. Hudson and Richard Harding Jr. introduced a proposal to prevent students who do not meet grade-level reading standards from advancing past the third grade.

The proposal has since divided School Committee members, educators, and parents — many of whom advocate for less severe outcomes for students who fail to meet grade-level standards.

The March proposal was never intended to solve the problem, according to Hudson. The goal instead, she said, was to “jumpstart the conversation” after years of growing concern about students’ reading performance across the district.

‘A Significant Problem’

Roughly 40 percent of third-grade students in Cambridge Public Schools fell short of meeting statewide benchmarks for English Language Arts last year, according to state standardized testing data.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams test student performance against state curriculum standards. Students begin taking the Math and English Language Arts exams in third grade — a benchmark experts consider one of the earliest indicators of a student falling behind.

The district’s literacy outcomes have remained relatively consistent over the past decade. Across the last 10 years, the number of third grade students who have fallen short or only partially met benchmark scores on the ELA exam has ranged from 32 and 46 percent.

Still, in an interview with The Crimson, Superintendent David G. Murphy argued that literacy challenges do not affect all students equally.

The district has faced a growing racial achievement gap — with 67 percent of Black students and 54 percent of Hispanic students falling short of grade-level standards on the 2025 MCAS exams, compared to 24 percent of white students and 33 percent of Asian students.

“It’s not the case that we have vast numbers of students who are not excelling in the area of elementary literacy,” Murphy said.

“It is the case that if any students are not getting what they need to excel in the area of literacy, that is a significant problem that needs to be prioritized and addressed,” he added.

Over the past decade, the gap between Black and white students in early literacy has widened significantly. In 2015, roughly 29 percentage points separated the share of students below grade level; by 2025, that gap had grown to more than 40 points.

Former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville said there was a “straight line correlation” between socioeconomic status and literacy outcomes — a problem schools alone cannot fully solve. But the correlation becomes apparent as literacy gaps pervade across the district’s elementary schools.

Heather Francis, the director of academics at CPS, pointed to strategies the district is using to lessen gaps between schools, including using federal Title I funding to hire additional literacy interventionists at higher-needs schools and support summer academic programming.

“Our hope is that, by having this more aligned and coherent experience and instructional approach, that students in some of those different demographic categories who have historically not succeeded at the same level as students in other demographic categories start seeing stronger achievement,” Francis said.

Hudson said that the proposal was most focused on accountability, which she argued has been absent from the district’s other attempts to improve literacy rates.

“Between kindergarten and third grade, you’re learning to read, and after fourth grade, as they say, you are reading to learn,” Hudson said.

Still, as the School Committee weighed Harding and Hudson’s proposal, members remained divided over whether retention would effectively improve literacy.

‘Necessary but Insufficient’

Foundational issues with literacy in elementary school often follow students into high school, pushing district administrators to focus on increasing early intervention and individualized support.

The district implemented an aligned curriculum for each of its 11 elementary schools in 2024 and bolstered its faculty with literacy and math interventionists, but has continued to see high numbers of students failing to meet reading standards.

The curriculum — titled Amplify CKLA — was implemented to align ELA curriculum across CPS, finalizing the district’s plan to have aligned curricula for first grade through the end of high school.

Francis said the growth the district has seen since implementing CKLA has been “really encouraging,” especially for younger students.

After CPS introduced CKLA in fall 2024, the percentage of third graders reading at or above grade level rose from 59 percent to 74 percent by winter 2025. The following year, scores rose again, from 64 percent in fall 2025 to 77 percent by winter 2026.

Superintended David G. Murphy said that CKLA was evidence of progress, but that curriculum change alone cannot bridge longstanding achievement gaps in the district.

“I think the investment in an aligned curriculum is a necessary but insufficient step to meeting this challenge,” he said in an interview.

He added that improving outcomes depends not just on resources, but on how those resources are implemented across schools.

“Aligned curriculum alone, or frankly, any curriculum alone, is not going to provide students what they need,” Murphy said. “Aligned curriculum has to be coupled with sound execution and the levels of support that educators need to actually engage in the practices that we know will help eliminate learning gaps.”

Francis said the district has also prioritized early intervention to improve literacy — including literacy bootcamps during school breaks, expanding tutoring services, and increasing in-classroom support for higher-need students.

While gaps in literacy outcomes persist with current interventions, parents have split on whether the proposal would be effective in practice — often agreeing with its underlying concern while questioning the benefit of a blanket policy.

Anne Coburn — a King Open Elementary School and Putnam Ave. Upper School parent — said she is “absolutely aligned” with the School Committee members’ concerns about literacy outcomes, but that policy should consider the range of students’ circumstances.

“It is very much reliant on the specific child, and the specific conversation that should be had with the educators and the family. That is why it shouldn’t be a blanket anything,” she said.

“It shouldn’t be a blanket recommendation or policy because I think that each child is very different and has very different circumstances,” she added.

‘A Last Resort’

Reading proficiency is not an issue unique to Cambridge, according to Reville.

“I applaud Cambridge for tackling this issue in a high priority way,” he said. “It’s an urgent matter.”

But he cautioned that retention alone is unlikely to solve the problem. He said that it was more important for the district to prioritize “having clear standards and having a real accountability system.”

“Retention, if it’s used at all, ought to be absolutely a last resort for ways of addressing the problem of reading development,” Reville said.

Instead, he said districts should focus on expanding learning time and providing more targeted support for struggling students. CPS currently provides three-tiered support, ranging from universal to intensive interventions.

A recent audit by Thrive! Equity and the Cambridge Community Foundation found that the district has underinvested in existing Tier 2 and 3 interventions. Some School Committee members said that the district should focus on improving support systems rather than preventing students from advancing.

“But retention is not the incentive some people think it is, and there are other ways to address that problem, which includes truly robust, multi-tiered systems of support — like real tier two interventions, real tier three interventions — which, as far as I’ve seen, the district is not doing well,” School Committee member Luisa de Paula Santos said in an interview.

The district currently spends nearly $40,000 per student on average, with a 9-to-1 student-to-staff ratio — a higher proportion of staff than most other districts. But without a mechanism to ensure students build reading proficiency before advancing to the next grade, Hudson argued, students will continue to consistently fall below grade-level literacy through high school.

“We have updated our curriculum. We have the lowest student to staff ratio in the nation,” Hudson said.

“The only thing we didn’t have was this accountability line,” she added.

—Staff writer Jaya N. Karamcheti can be reached at [email protected].

—Staff writer Tess E. Sumner can be reached at [email protected].