Georgia legislators say they’re going all-in to improve literacy rates. On March 10 the House approved a budget proposal of $38.5 billion, including more than $60 million for literacy initiatives through HB 1193, the Georgia Early Literacy Act of 2026. The plan is to put an in-house literacy coach in every public elementary school in the state so that by the time kids are in the fourth grade, they can read at a fourth-grade level. Their concern does not seem to extend to all the adults in the state’s 50,000-plus prison population who aren’t reading at a fourth-grade level.
Public school funding structures will be adjusted to cover salaries for the 1,300 or so literacy coaches. Those school-based coaches will also be supported by additional, highly trained literacy coaches assigned to the state’s 16 Regional Education Service Agencies—including leadership literacy coaches who will work specifically with principals and superintendents. All this is because state officials agree that teachers aren’t equipped to fix literacy shortfalls all by themselves.
“Our number-one priority in the House this session has been literacy,” House Speaker Jon Burns (R) said, according to Atlanta News First. “When you drill down into this budget, it uplifts every community and every citizen across our state.”
Perhaps not every community. The new budget approved by the House includes an increase of $101 million for the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC), with $34.9 million for hiring more correctional officers, but only $800,000 is slotted for vocational training.
Research show that prisoners who participate in educational programming prior to release are less likely to be reincarcerated later. Perhaps a state as invested in rehabilitation as Georgia claims to be could scrape together the funds for a few dozen trained literacy coaches, for the warehouses where it collects all the adults who never properly learned to read. In the 30-plus years I’ve been incarcerated in GDC, most of the vocational instructors I’ve known have been former corrections officers, many of them retired and filling part-time positions that failed to attract any actual experts.
An estimated 70 percent of the United States prison population can’t read at a fourth-grade level.
By the most widely used estimates, around 70 percent of the United States prison population can’t read at a fourth-grade level. Literacy instruction inside prisons is limited, caught between teacher shortages and security protocols that always override everything else. GDC has a remedial literacy program for prisoners who read below a fifth-grade level. But it’s easy for people to languish there.
Without fifth-grade reading skills, prisoners are not able to get into the Adult Basic Education classes, which in theory prepare them to take the GED test. When someone enters the prison system without a GED, counselors will tell them that their case plan includes getting their GED as a prerequisite for parole. So not only does a low literacy level make someone more likely to end up in prison, it’ll keep them there longer, too.
When presenting the bill to the House in February, Rep. Chris Erwin (R) said that after the initial K-3 push there are plans to expand to higher grade levels in the public school system. But again, no mention of the other large state system that might benefit from such investment.
In the most recently available data from the Nation’s Report Card, Georgia’s fourth graders were exactly on par with the national average for reading skills. But what that really represents is Black and Hispanic students scoring lower, and white students scoring higher. There’s no mention of this in HB 1193, or the fact that fourth-graders grow up to be adults who are under- or overrepresented in the state prison system. Low literacy in childhood leads to dropping out of high school, which increases the likelihood of incarceration. Not that any legislators are touting the budget as a proactive investment in prison reform.
Georgia lawmakers are investing tens of millions of dollars in early childhood reading programs because they recognize that literacy shapes a person’s future opportunities. Many incarcerated adults passed through those same classrooms years earlier without reaching that milestone. By the time they enter prison, the impacts of their educational lapse have them ready to make the best of a bad situation, if only there were means to do so.
When education was neglected in childhood, common sense dictates that education should be the foundation of rehabilitation in adulthood.
Image via Nebraska Department of Corrections