California Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed Thursday that the state budget will include hundreds of millions of dollars to fund legislation needed to achieve a comprehensive statewide approach to early literacy.

Assembly Bill 1454, which passed the Assembly on Thursday with a unanimous 75-0 vote, would move the state’s schools toward adopting evidence-based literacy instruction, also known as the “science of reading” or structured literacy.

Although phonics, the ability to connect letters to sounds, has drawn the most attention, the science of reading focuses on four other pillars of literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, identifying distinct units of sounds; vocabulary; comprehension; and fluency. It is based on research on how the brain connects letters with sounds when learning to read.

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