By Brent Haken
Oklahoma has made an important commitment to literacy.
During the 2026 legislative session, state leaders strengthened the Strong Readers Act, placing greater emphasis on early identification, evidence-based reading instruction, intervention, teacher preparation and communication with parents.
What a great step forward! Reading is foundational to nearly everything that follows in a child’s education. But I feel we are still falling short; there is another part of the literacy equation that deserves our attention: the home.
We can provide a child with excellent instruction during the school day. We can identify reading difficulties earlier. We can equip teachers with better tools and give families strategies to reinforce learning at home.
But what happens when the parent receiving those instructions struggles to read them? What happens when a mother wants to help with homework but lacks the literacy skills or confidence to do so? What happens when a father wants to read with his child but spent his own childhood struggling with reading and never received the help he needed?
Those are reminders that literacy can be intergenerational.
If Oklahoma wants to change literacy outcomes for children, we need to understand that a child’s education does not begin and end at the schoolhouse door. School is an opportunity; parents are the key to literacy gains.
Parents are a child’s first teachers, and the home is a child’s first classroom.
That is why adult education and literacy need to be part of Oklahoma’s broader conversation about educational improvement.
In fiscal year 2025, Oklahoma CareerTech’s Adult Education and Family Literacy System served more than 11,000 Oklahomans through 49 providers operating at 125 sites across the state.
These aren’t simply adults working toward a diploma. They are employees trying to qualify for better jobs. They are Oklahomans learning English. They are parents trying to improve their reading and math skills. And many of them are mothers, fathers and grandparents who want to be better equipped to help the children in their homes succeed. The connection between adult education and children’s education deserves greater attention.
Consider the expectations we appropriately place on parents: Read with your child every night, help with homework, review information sent home from school, monitor academic progress, practice vocabulary, communicate with teachers and create a culture of reading in the home. These are the correct expectations. But they assume the adult in the home possesses the literacy skills necessary to perform them.
For some Oklahoma families, that assumption simply isn’t true.
Oklahoma CareerTech recently estimated that approximately 279,000 Oklahomans do not have a high school diploma. Behind that number are individual stories, and in many cases children are part of those stories.
Our response should not be to lower expectations for parents. It should be to give more parents the opportunity to meet them.
That means thinking about adult literacy as a key contribution to the children’s literacy issue. Looking even further, it is a workforce issue, an economic development issue.
Imagine the difference when a parent improves his or her reading ability at the same time a child is learning to read.
The child brings home a book, and instead of reading being another source of frustration, parent and child read together. A school sends home information about a student’s reading progress, and the parent can understand it and act on it. Homework becomes an opportunity for interaction rather than a reminder of the parent’s own struggles in school.
Perhaps most importantly, that child watches an adult learn. There is tremendous power in a child seeing a parent studying, improving and refusing to give up on his or her own education.
Oklahoma’s Strong Readers Act recognizes that schools and families share responsibility for literacy. The state’s implementation materials specifically include strategies families can use at home to support reading development. For families in which adults already have strong literacy skills, it may mean providing better information and resources. For families in which the parent is struggling with literacy, the need may be different. A pamphlet explaining how to help a child read cannot solve the problem if the parent struggles to read the pamphlet. So how do we fill the gap?
Oklahoma has already built a statewide network capable of serving adults. The question now is how effectively that network can be connected with the state’s larger literacy strategy. I fully plan to engage the State Department of Education and other state agencies supporting families, as better coordination could make it easier for parents who need literacy assistance to find it.
The goal should be straightforward: improving literacy for all Oklahomans.
Oklahoma has taken meaningful steps to improve early childhood literacy. That work should continue.
But lasting educational improvement is difficult when we focus exclusively on one generation at a time.
We can change the trajectory of one student at a time. If we help that child’s parent improve his or her literacy at the same time, we have the opportunity to change the educational culture of an entire household. And when we strengthen households, we begin changing communities.
The next chapter of Oklahoma’s literacy work is not simply about what happens inside our classrooms. It is about connecting the classroom to the kitchen table.
If Oklahoma wants stronger readers, stronger students and ultimately a stronger workforce, we cannot focus only on teaching children to read. We have to make sure the adults sitting beside them have that opportunity, too.
Source notes: Oklahoma State Department of Education, Strong Readers Act resources; Oklahoma CareerTech Adult Education and Family Literacy FY2025 program data.
