- Less than half of Utah 3rd graders are able to read at grade level.
- Gov. Cox proposed a retention policy to hold more students back.
- Cox also wants to remove technology from elementary classrooms.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox launched a campaign on Wednesday to boost the state’s stubbornly low third grade reading scores by hiring more teaching assistants and holding more students back who don’t read at grade level.
This carrot-and-stick approach mirrors some of the policies that are reportedly behind the “Mississippi Miracle,” which took the state from the bottom of national elementary literacy rankings to the top 10 over the past decade.
“We’ve implemented some of the things that have happened in Mississippi. We need to implement the rest of those things and get everybody pulling together,” Cox said at the presentation of his Fiscal Year 2027 budget.
The governor announced his multipronged literacy proposal at the Kearns Branch of the Salt Lake County Library on Wednesday before surprising local children by leading the library story time with first lady Abby Cox.
In addition to trying to reverse Utah’s spike in chronic homelessness and the state’s shortage of affordable homes, Cox said his 2026 agenda will center around a “huge literacy push” aimed at young elementary students.
Cox said he aims to go “all in” on education funding despite a challenging budget year, with a total recommendation of $654 million — including a 4.2%, or $191 million, increase in the weighted pupil unit — out of the $30.7 billion budget.
Cox’s proposed investments would include $80 million for schools to hire paraprofessionals to provide behavioral interventions and reading support for kindergarten through third grade, and $500,000 for a public literacy ad campaign.
Will holding kids back work?
Since 2022, the Utah Legislature has implemented new teacher trainings and resources to achieve the goal of 70% of third graders reading on grade level. But reading scores haven’t budged, remaining around 48% in recent years.
This convinced Cox that the state should implement Mississippi’s most controversial, and potentially most effective, change: a retention policy that makes students repeat the third grade if they don’t pass a reading comprehension test.
“I know that’s kind of unpopular,” Cox told the Deseret News editorial board on Tuesday. “It turns out that that is a really important incentive, a motivator for parents and kids, and teachers and just everyone.”
This low-cost approach appears to have worked wonders in Mississippi, according to Cox. The southern state ranked 49th in the 2013 NAEP fourth-grade literacy test scores. In 2024, the state was tied with Utah for eighth place.
While a 2024 study said Mississippi’s initial 2013 law likely had a positive impact on reading scores, an analysis published last month argued that this “miracle” merely reflects the fact that the state prevents struggling kids from taking the fourth grade test by holding them back.
“There is nothing special in Mississippi’s literacy reform model that should be replicated globally,” one recently published analysis stated. “It just emphasizes the obvious advice that, if you want your students to get high scores, don’t allow those students who are likely to get low scores to take the test.”
As part of Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act, lawmakers approved an additional $15 million annually to improve classroom instruction for kindergarten through third grade. The percentage of students who were held back after also failing the state reading test has fallen from 9% in 2019 to 6.5% in 2023.
Retention combined with resources
Cox expects opposition from teachers, teachers’ unions and parents on his proposed “retention policy” for third graders. He acknowledged that holding students back can create stigmas for students and be hard on families.
As a longtime elementary school educator, state Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, said she is sensitive to research showing the negative effects students feel when they are left behind, as well as to research showing the long-term impacts of not learning to read well early on.
A strict retention policy could do more harm than good if it is not coupled with serious reading resources in second and third grades, including before- and after-school programs with licensed teachers, and summer remediation programs for struggling students, according to Riebe.
“I can get behind retaining third graders, if we are putting everything else in place,” Riebe said. “There’s nothing more powerful than a smart, educated community, but it takes a large investment to bring the people that are struggling the most up.”
A retention policy must take into account the fact that reading comprehension rates also include the categories of students who are on special IEP programs with learning disabilities and those who are learning English as a second language, Riebe said.
In addition to these unique cases, many students who struggle with reading have difficult situations at home, whether that be a single parent or a lack of food, that makes it difficult to find time to read. And holding these students back could make their situation worse.
Technology in the classroom
Another factor the governor insists is hurting reading scores across age groups is technology. Too much technology in school, introduced too early has become more of a distraction than a teaching aid in many cases, according to Cox.
On top of his push for legislators to prohibit cellphone use “bell-to-bell” during school hours, Cox said he plans to lobby lawmakers to remove technology like tablets and laptops for elementary students so they can return to analog assignments, homework and learning methods.
“We’ve certainly overloaded on the device side,” Gov. Cox said. “We’re going to be looking at how, instead of having more and more devices, how do we go back to computer labs? Still we want them to know how to use these tools. It’s really important. But we don’t want the tools to be ubiquitous.”
At the root of Utah’s low literacy rate for third graders is a lack of reading at home, Abby Cox said, standing above the main floor of the recently constructed Kearns library. This important pastime has been, in large part, replaced by technology, she said.
If Utah wants to address the “sad statistic” of having less than half of third graders reading on grade level by the end of the year, then the state needs to encourage schools and families to fill the “big hole” created in children’s lives by technology with books.
“We know that it’s the best thing for all of us and as a community, we are going to get Utah reading again,” the first lady said.