After getting flooded with public comments, the Maryland State Department of Education is softening the most controversial part of its proposed literacy policy.

In July, the education department drafted a mandate for third graders to be held back if they aren’t reading at grade level. The policy mirrored one Maryland’s State Superintendent Carey Wright introduced in Mississippi, which preceded a rise in fourth grade reading scores on a national test from second-to-last to the middle of the pack.

But it seems Maryland won’t be taking that exact approach. In a revised draft of the policy, parents have gained the right to challenge a school district’s decision to make a child repeat third grade.

According to the proposal, schools would have to inform families when a student will need to be retained — the term educators use for holding back students — no later than 15 days after that decision has been made. But parents would have the option to have their children continue on to fourth grade, as long as they agree to use additional help for their child provided by a school district. That could come in the form of summer school programs, before- and after-school tutoring or other aid that happens outside of the normal school day.

“Family engagement is a critical portion of this entire policy,” Maryland State Board of Education President Joshua Michael said. “This really extends that family engagement to that decision point.”

The board is slated to discuss the latest version of the policy at its Tuesday meeting.

In order to move on to fourth grade, students must score above 735 on the state’s third grade English test, according to the policy, and students may be allowed to retake the test. That’s the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program, or MCAP, Michael said, which is administered toward the end of the year.

There are exemptions to the policy, such as for some students with disabilities or those who have already been held back in a previous year for reading difficulties.

Starting in the 2025 school year, school districts would need to screen students for reading proficiency three times a year. Students would also be screened for dyslexia once a year, starting in kindergarten.

The retention portion of the literacy policy would not go into effect until the end of the 2026-2027 school year, meaning children entering first grade this fall might be the first group affected.

The rest of the literacy policy would go into effect without the retention component at the beginning of this school year — or as close to it as possible, as the board won’t vote on the policy until its September meeting. The policy bans reading instruction that has kids guess words based on sentence context, a technique brain science has shown to be ineffective. Most of Maryland’s school systems instead rely on the science of reading, which teaches students the sounds of letters and how they come together to form words.

Students in kindergarten through the third grade who struggle with reading, and fourth graders who would have been held back but continued on through an exemption, will be put on an improvement plan and “must receive intensive reading intervention until the student no longer demonstrates difficulty in reading.”

The education department said in the revised policy that it incorporated feedback from the board, the Literary Advisory Panel, and “close to 1,000 comments of explicit feedback from the public comment period that ended on July 19.”

The first version of the policy was met with some criticism and concern from local superintendents and school boards who said holding kids back can hurt their confidence and academic motivation, and that it is particularly harmful for Black, Latino and Native students, as well as students who are still learning English. They also took issue with basing whether a student moves on to the next grade level on “high-stakes testing” that can be limited in assessing whether a student is really learning.

Joan Dabrowski, Baltimore’s chief academic officer, previously raised concerns about how struggling readers would be assessed. She said Thursday that she appreciated the feedback the state incorporated into the revised policy, though she still wants to discuss how it will be implemented and whether MCAP is the right test. But she said reading is the right thing to focus on.

“I think parents want to know how the children are doing,” Dabrowski said. “This is the right conversation for the adults to have.”

The state board will hold a public hearing on the proposed policy Tuesday. At 3:30 p.m., the board will hear from up to 20 members of the public, who can each talk for up to three minutes, including virtually. The deadline to sign up to speak is 3 p.m. Monday. Members of the public can also speak during a 30-minute block in the morning.

Baltimore Banner reporter Liz Bowie contributed to this article.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.