At the end of the 2025-26 school year, fresh-faced kindergarteners at Sylvia Mendez Elementary School in Berkeley practiced reading using small story books. They sounded out aloud in Spanish, like a disorganized, but undeniably impressive, chorus.
“Lo..lo..la manzana!” “Esta es mi casa.”
At their own pace, students decoded the words on the pages, pulling apart the sounds and common parts, and then stringing them back together.
“If you go around, everyone is reading,” their teacher, Rocio Guzman, said. Guzman has taught at the Berkeley Unified School District for 17 years, and most recently at this dual-language school.
“They are in kindergarten, and you see their writings, too. For me, it’s incredible.”
It wasn’t always that way, she said.
“Before there was a big difference between who could read and who couldn’t,” she added.
Nearly a decade after a landmark class-action lawsuit accused BUSD of failing students with reading disabilities, the district is starting to see evidence that a sweeping overhaul of literacy instruction is taking root.
A final report delivered this month found that the change extends beyond curriculum — reforms from the legal settlement and shifting educational paradigms in the U.S. are becoming embedded in the district’s culture.
The changes stem from a 2017 lawsuit, when several district families alleged the district allowed their kids with reading disorders like dyslexia to fall through the cracks, causing lifelong harm. The plaintiffs argued that the district had failed to test kids for these learning differences — which, if identified and met with appropriate interventions in their early years, could allow them to progress alongside their peers and even excel.
The district settled the suit in 2021, agreeing to a formidable list of 35 action steps. BUSD embarked on a plan to improve literacy the following year, alongside three years of mandated oversight. This work coincided with a national reckoning on how to teach reading, which has become known as the “Reading Wars.”
The debate was addressed in Sold a Story, a 2022 podcast by education journalist Emily Hanson. Her report described how many parents realized during COVID-19 lockdowns that phonics — analyzing a word by its parts and sounds —was no longer the instructional approach for their children.
Instead, schools encouraged kids to try to figure out words from context or pictures, a practice known as “cueing,” as part of a “balanced literacy” approach. This method focused more on developing a love of books and ensuring students understood the meaning of stories. BUSD was among the practice’s most fervent adherents.
Following a protracted legal dispute and other delays, BUSD joined districts state- and nationwide in reversing course on its approach to teaching literacy.
In its first three years of monitoring, the district adopted screenings and science-based interventions for struggling elementary and middle schoolers. During that time, the teachers were required to review their reading curricula to see if it was evidence-based. They concluded that it wasn’t and began the process of selecting a new approach.
BUSD eventually selected two new programs for all elementary school-aged kids: a functional phonics and morphology curriculum, and a Spanish-language equivalent — programs that experts say aren’t just the right way to teach kids with learning differences — but are great for all young learners.
In a final report delivered at the end of BUSD’s recent school year — its first using the new approach district-wide — Kim Gibbons, the district’s former literacy consultant and most recent settlement monitor, told the school board the “ shift” she observed “is one of the clearest indicators that improvement efforts have really started to become embedded within the district’s culture and systems.”
According to Gibbons’ analysis, the district’s youngest readers showed the largest gains: 79% of BUSD kindergarteners were reading at or above grade level by the spring, a 27% improvement from the fall. Of first graders, 86% finished on track, a 19-point jump over the year.
Still, according to the report, challenges remained. Nearly a quarter of second graders at one of two unnamed focus schools identified previously as lagging in adopting the new methods remained well below benchmarks.
And while Hispanic K-2 students showed strong growth alongside some benchmark improvement for African American students, longstanding achievement disparities persist between white and African American students, especially in older grades.
“We know we’re not done,” BUSD Literacy Coordinator Rose James said. “The data doesn’t look as good as we want it to look, and it never will. We’re going to keep going.”
Gibbons found that the district had met its legal obligation to the settlement, but some families still worry the district still isn’t ready to fly solo when it comes to literacy education.
Lindsay Nofelt, a Berkeley mom of a dyslexic child as well as a BUSD middle schooler, has tracked the district’s literacy transformation, creating a resource website for other families.
Nofelt said a monitor is still needed because she believes the report, which focused on grades K-5, hasn’t proven BUSD met the settlement goal of “ensuring fidelity of Literacy Improvement Program implementation” in upper grades.
“The settlement is not complete until middle school students have better instruction and support. They don’t read many books. It’s a roulette wheel based on what teacher you get,” Nofelt said.
George Ellis, director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UC Berkeley and BUSD’s former settlement monitor, disagreed. He said while the district has overhauled special education interventions for middle schools, structured literacy likely won’t be the focus of any future changes to overall middle school curriculum because it’s not age-appropriate.
Yet Ellis said he understands why some families are reluctant to lose a rare level of oversight.
“This was a very unique situation where you had outside monitors reporting on progress and compliance. You don’t see that in public schools,” Ellis said, “I think the monitoring piece was a wonderful addition and a very necessary piece. I think at the same time at some point it became a crutch for going around the systems that are already in place for holding the district accountable for improving student outcomes.”
That said, Ellis said he believes the data shows Berkeley administrators and many teachers have successfully internalized a culture of data-based decision-making. He said he expects that to carry forward into real student gains beginning next year.
Special education attorney Deborah Jacobson, who brought the original lawsuit, is optimistic, too.
“There were many times where I was like, crap, we didn’t have language in there that could enforce this, or that could do this, or that; we had some loosey-goosey language that was the result of years of exhaustion,” Jacobson said, “But in the end … the experts … really did see a culture shift. That was the goal.”
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