A Working Paper from EPIC

“A Lot of States Were Doing It”: The Development of Michigan’s Read by Grade Three Law

May 2021

In recent years, many states have adopted policies intended to ensure that students are reading proficiently by third grade. This kind of policy transfer across states is not a unique phenomenon; researchers have documented analogous proliferations of similar policies both in and outside the field of education. However, there has been little attention paid to how policy transfer happens in K-12 education policy, particularly at the state level. To better understand how education policies spread across states, we turn to the case of Michigan’s Read by Grade Three Law, which was adopted in 2016. Events in the problem and political streams opened a policy window that allowed for the passage of the Law. These findings contribute to policymakers’ and other stakeholders’ understandings of the development and passage of third-grade literacy policies—information that will be important as these policies continue to receive national attention in both policy and research communities.