SFUSD third-grade reading slips again, despite new literacy reforms

Half of San Francisco Unified third graders are still not reading at grade level, and the district’s latest numbers show the problem is getting worse even after a major reform push. SFUSD said third-grade literacy fell to 47.4% in the 2024-25 school year, down from 48.8% the year before, leaving the district far from its long-term goal of 70% by October 2027.

The decline is a sharp warning for families in San Francisco County, where reading by third grade is a predictor of later success in every subject. SFUSD had already missed its own 2023-24 target, reporting 49% proficiency in October 2024 when it had hoped to reach 55%. The district later said the target path had been adjusted, but the new numbers show the gap remains wide.

The district pinned much of its strategy on a new PK-8 Language Arts core curriculum adopted March 26, 2024, for the 2024-25 school year. In June 2024, the San Francisco Board of Education approved SFUSD’s 2024-27 Local Control and Accountability Plan and a $1.3 billion operating budget for 2024-25, placing literacy at the center of a costly turnaround effort. A separate campaign, Ready, Set, Read!, launched in August 2024 as a three-year, $5 million partnership with Spark SF Public Schools to support the curriculum, train teachers and expand tutoring.

SFUSD said the campaign trained nearly 1,500 educators and reached more than 20,000 students in its first year. The district also pointed to gains in the early grades: in its October 2025 release, kindergarten STAR reading proficiency rose from 65% to 69%, and first-grade proficiency rose from 55% to 62%. African-American and Pacific Islander kindergarteners increased from 39% to 53% at or above grade level.

But the third-grade results show the payoff has not yet reached the students closest to the state reading benchmark. SFUSD’s September 2025 progress monitoring report said 44 school sites declined in third-grade proficiency while 27 improved, underscoring how uneven the results were across the city. The district said the drop likely reflected the first year of implementing the new literacy curriculum.

That leaves district leaders, including Maria Su, Matt Wayne and Ginny Fang, under pressure to explain what changes will come next before another class moves through San Francisco’s elementary schools without the reading support it needs. The promise of the reform campaign was simple: stronger instruction, better training and more tutoring. The numbers now show that for third grade, the city is still waiting for it to work.