After Years of Declines, Young Students Show Gains in Reading and Math
America’s Fastest-improving School System Still Falls Short
Students' Test Scores Began Declining Way Before COVID. These Schools Are Making Gains
Southern States Boost Early Reading, But Gains Stall in Middle School
Why One Reading Expert Says ‘Just-right’ Books Are All Wrong
A New Nation's Report Card Shows Drops in Science, Math and Reading Scores
What Happens to Reading Comprehension When Kids Focus on the Main Idea
Why is Teaching Reading Comprehension Such a Big Challenge?
‘Banned Book Club’, Anime and Third Spaces: How to Get Teens Really Reading
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"title": "After Years of Declines, Young Students Show Gains in Reading and Math",
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"content": "\u003cp>New federal test scores show younger students are making gains in reading and math — \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5526918/nations-report-card-scores-reading-math-science-education-cuts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">after years of declines\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think this is an optimistic release,” Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Results from \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the long-term trend (LTT) report\u003c/a>, released Wednesday, provide a national look at progress in reading and math for 9- and 13-year-old students. The tests, which students take on pencil and paper every few years, have asked many of the same questions since they were first given in the 1970s. The tests are part of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) and are nationally representative of student learning. More than 30,000 students took the exams between October 2024 and March 2025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Here are five takeaways from the results:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>1. Nine-year-olds made some solid gains. \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The younger students tested showed gains in both reading and math, “which is fantastic,” said Soldner. What’s notable is that students across the board improved their scores, including lower-performing kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is just so encouraging,” he said. “Even though they’re performing below average, [they] are trending upward.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One possible reason for the overall improvement, the report points out, is the students’ age. They were 4 when the pandemic started in 2020 and didn’t begin school until after most places had returned to full-time, in-person instruction. That means they didn’t miss key lessons in literacy and math in the early years of elementary school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These students gave researchers hope about the potential that the nation can build back some of the slide \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/05/13/nx-s1-5812483/reading-math-scores-data\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">that began long before COVID-19\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>2. But 13-year-olds are hurting.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The report paints a less optimistic picture about 13-year-olds. Compared to the last assessment, students showed no significant improvement in reading or math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scores in reading remain below where they were at the start of the pandemic on average, and that includes Hispanic students, white students, female students, students who are economically disadvantaged and suburban students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading scores from this test, on average, are not significantly different from performance in the first-ever administered test in 1971.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The lack of progress in 13-year-olds raises huge questions and ought to serve as a catalyst for change,” Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, said during a press briefing. Her organization sets policy related to NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For these 13-year-old students, unlike their 9-year-old counterparts, the pandemic was the backdrop for much of their elementary school experience. In 2020, they were in second or third grade. Those critical years for literacy and math skills were disrupted by school closures, and this stagnant performance may be one consequence.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>3. Fewer students are reading for pleasure — than ever.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the report found that reading is a pastime for a shrinking number of kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1984, 35% of 13-year-old students reported reading for fun on a daily basis. In 2022 and 2025, only 14% said the same. A far greater share of 9-year-olds — 37% — indicated they read for fun every day, but that’s sharply down from decades earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-66396\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun.png\" alt=\"Graph showing downward trend\" width=\"2348\" height=\"1452\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun.png 2348w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-2000x1237.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-160x99.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-768x475.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-1536x950.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-2048x1266.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2348px) 100vw, 2348px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>4. Math progress erased for 13-year-olds.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>From 1978 to 2012, the average math scores on the LTT for 13-year-olds improved by 21 points. The climbing scores were a bright spot in more than 50 years of data. This report shows that most of those gains have been erased.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lowest-performing students now show no gains at all compared with the 1978 math test results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As a nation, we have to bring more focus to the middle school years,” Muldoon told reporters. “It’ll take a lot of collective work, but we’ve seen progress before, and it’s possible to see it again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>5. This is the last we’ll see of the long-term trend report for a while.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This is the first NAEP long-term trend report released since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department in 2025. Those cuts \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5325854/trump-education-department-layoffs-civil-rights-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">included laying off more than half the workers at the Institute of Education Sciences\u003c/a>, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After those cuts, the department also \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fewer-subjects-students-data-points-feds-to-scale-back-naep/2025/04\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">canceled about a dozen national and state assessments\u003c/a> of student progress through 2032 — one of those being the next iteration of these tests. (Since then, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2026/release-board-meeting-actions-051526.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">plans have been announced\u003c/a> to restore some of those exams.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, sudents won’t see these questions again \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/content/dam/nagb/en/documents/naep/assessment-schedule-051426.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">until 2033\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/g-s1-123933/nirvi-shah\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Nirvi Shah\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348775569/la-johnson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some good news this morning from a pencil-and-paper test given every four years since the 1970s. After years of declines, the National Assessment for Educational Progress shows younger students gaining in reading and math. Many of them started school after the pandemic began. NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: As an education reporter, it’s been a while since I’ve heard this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MATT SOLDNER: I think this is an optimistic release.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: That’s Matt Soldner. He’s acting commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, which helps oversee this exam. The federal long-term trend report looks at achievement in two key subject areas for 9- and 13-year-olds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: We’re seeing some really encouraging signs for our 9-year-olds. They’re making progress both in reading and in mathematics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Especially notable is the progress lower-performing students made. That’s a group that struggled to make gains. So what happened with those younger students?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: Our 9-year-olds were about 4 when the pandemic was declared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Their schooling wasn’t really disrupted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: For 13-year-olds, though, the pandemic was the backdrop for the elementary school experience. When the pandemic was declared, they were in second or third grade, which are the years when they were surely learning foundational literacy and numeracy skills in the classroom setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: It makes sense, then, that their scores continued the downward trend of the past decade. This is the first report of its kind since the Trump administration began making cuts to the Education Department last year. They also cut a dozen of these student assessments, which means the next time students see these test questions will be seven years from now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sequoia Carrillo, NPR News.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>New federal test scores show younger students are making gains in reading and math — \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5526918/nations-report-card-scores-reading-math-science-education-cuts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">after years of declines\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think this is an optimistic release,” Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Results from \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the long-term trend (LTT) report\u003c/a>, released Wednesday, provide a national look at progress in reading and math for 9- and 13-year-old students. The tests, which students take on pencil and paper every few years, have asked many of the same questions since they were first given in the 1970s. The tests are part of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) and are nationally representative of student learning. More than 30,000 students took the exams between October 2024 and March 2025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Here are five takeaways from the results:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>1. Nine-year-olds made some solid gains. \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The younger students tested showed gains in both reading and math, “which is fantastic,” said Soldner. What’s notable is that students across the board improved their scores, including lower-performing kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is just so encouraging,” he said. “Even though they’re performing below average, [they] are trending upward.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One possible reason for the overall improvement, the report points out, is the students’ age. They were 4 when the pandemic started in 2020 and didn’t begin school until after most places had returned to full-time, in-person instruction. That means they didn’t miss key lessons in literacy and math in the early years of elementary school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These students gave researchers hope about the potential that the nation can build back some of the slide \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/05/13/nx-s1-5812483/reading-math-scores-data\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">that began long before COVID-19\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>2. But 13-year-olds are hurting.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The report paints a less optimistic picture about 13-year-olds. Compared to the last assessment, students showed no significant improvement in reading or math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scores in reading remain below where they were at the start of the pandemic on average, and that includes Hispanic students, white students, female students, students who are economically disadvantaged and suburban students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading scores from this test, on average, are not significantly different from performance in the first-ever administered test in 1971.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The lack of progress in 13-year-olds raises huge questions and ought to serve as a catalyst for change,” Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, said during a press briefing. Her organization sets policy related to NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For these 13-year-old students, unlike their 9-year-old counterparts, the pandemic was the backdrop for much of their elementary school experience. In 2020, they were in second or third grade. Those critical years for literacy and math skills were disrupted by school closures, and this stagnant performance may be one consequence.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>3. Fewer students are reading for pleasure — than ever.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the report found that reading is a pastime for a shrinking number of kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1984, 35% of 13-year-old students reported reading for fun on a daily basis. In 2022 and 2025, only 14% said the same. A far greater share of 9-year-olds — 37% — indicated they read for fun every day, but that’s sharply down from decades earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-66396\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun.png\" alt=\"Graph showing downward trend\" width=\"2348\" height=\"1452\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun.png 2348w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-2000x1237.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-160x99.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-768x475.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-1536x950.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-2048x1266.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2348px) 100vw, 2348px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>4. Math progress erased for 13-year-olds.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>From 1978 to 2012, the average math scores on the LTT for 13-year-olds improved by 21 points. The climbing scores were a bright spot in more than 50 years of data. This report shows that most of those gains have been erased.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lowest-performing students now show no gains at all compared with the 1978 math test results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As a nation, we have to bring more focus to the middle school years,” Muldoon told reporters. “It’ll take a lot of collective work, but we’ve seen progress before, and it’s possible to see it again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>5. This is the last we’ll see of the long-term trend report for a while.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This is the first NAEP long-term trend report released since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department in 2025. Those cuts \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5325854/trump-education-department-layoffs-civil-rights-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">included laying off more than half the workers at the Institute of Education Sciences\u003c/a>, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After those cuts, the department also \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fewer-subjects-students-data-points-feds-to-scale-back-naep/2025/04\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">canceled about a dozen national and state assessments\u003c/a> of student progress through 2032 — one of those being the next iteration of these tests. (Since then, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2026/release-board-meeting-actions-051526.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">plans have been announced\u003c/a> to restore some of those exams.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, sudents won’t see these questions again \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/content/dam/nagb/en/documents/naep/assessment-schedule-051426.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">until 2033\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/g-s1-123933/nirvi-shah\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Nirvi Shah\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348775569/la-johnson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some good news this morning from a pencil-and-paper test given every four years since the 1970s. After years of declines, the National Assessment for Educational Progress shows younger students gaining in reading and math. Many of them started school after the pandemic began. NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: As an education reporter, it’s been a while since I’ve heard this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MATT SOLDNER: I think this is an optimistic release.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: That’s Matt Soldner. He’s acting commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, which helps oversee this exam. The federal long-term trend report looks at achievement in two key subject areas for 9- and 13-year-olds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: We’re seeing some really encouraging signs for our 9-year-olds. They’re making progress both in reading and in mathematics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Especially notable is the progress lower-performing students made. That’s a group that struggled to make gains. So what happened with those younger students?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: Our 9-year-olds were about 4 when the pandemic was declared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Their schooling wasn’t really disrupted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: For 13-year-olds, though, the pandemic was the backdrop for the elementary school experience. When the pandemic was declared, they were in second or third grade, which are the years when they were surely learning foundational literacy and numeracy skills in the classroom setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: It makes sense, then, that their scores continued the downward trend of the past decade. This is the first report of its kind since the Trump administration began making cuts to the Education Department last year. They also cut a dozen of these student assessments, which means the next time students see these test questions will be seven years from now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sequoia Carrillo, NPR News.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>It seems like a tale of two school systems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington, D.C., has emerged as the fastest-improving school system in the nation, according to a major new analysis of student test scores released last week by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Education Scorecard \u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/\">analysis\u003c/a>, which compares more than 5,000 school districts across 38 states, finds that most of the country has been stuck in a reading recession — a decade-long slide in achievement that predates the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2025, only five states and the District of Columbia showed meaningful gains in reading. The nation’s capital posted the strongest growth of all and also led in math improvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington students in both public and charter schools gained roughly two-thirds of a grade level in math and about a third of a grade level in reading over that period, according to the analysis. A grade level represents roughly a year’s worth of learning, which means that eighth graders in 2025 were about six months ahead in math compared with eighth graders in 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the gains should not obscure a grimmer reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate \u003ca href=\"https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/v3_SODCS_2024_25_full_report-2.24-copy-2.pdf\">report\u003c/a> from the D.C. Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Just 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered to be college or career ready.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A school system can improve rapidly and still leave most children behind. The contradiction is fueling an important politically and emotionally charged debate in education: Should schools be judged by how many students are proficient, or by how much students improve each year?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Critics of public schools are seizing upon the low proficiency rates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when most students — roughly two-thirds to three-quarters in the case of D.C. — are not functioning at grade level, this is nothing to applaud,” said Steven Wilson, a former education policymaker in Massachusetts and charter school leader. “Most students are still being failed by the system.” (Wilson’s 2025 book, “The Lost Decade,” criticizes recent school reform efforts.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even before last week’s national data release, Washington school leaders were celebrating the gains. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education, trumpeted the strength of the schools after 2025 annual tests revealed a whopping 3.6 percent improvement in reading and math, similar to the grade-level increases that the Education Scorecard team calculated. “Our academic achievement is unsurpassed in the country in terms of growth,” Kihn said in a March 2026 \u003ca href=\"https://dme.dc.gov/page/inside-dc-education-blog#03262026-1\">blog post\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tom Kane, a Harvard economist and one of the authors of the new Education Scorecard report, explained that there is a long-running debate in the field of education about whether to focus on proficiency or growth. In this report, he said, the research team chose growth in order to “combat” what they see as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re trying to highlight that something good is happening in some of these places,” Kane said. “And hopefully, if we can, rebuild the public sense of agency with respect to public education.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also released a list of 108 “\u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/districts-on-the-rise/\">districts on the rise\u003c/a>”: school districts where math and reading gains exceeded those of similar districts in their state. Washington was not included because there are no comparable districts within the city. But its gains are comparable to many districts on the list. And, like Washington, most of those districts still have large shares of students below grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In theory, if a district’s scores keep growing by outsized amounts each year, students should catch up and eventually reach grade level. But public school critics like Wilson point out that even if a school system improves by one or two percentage points a year, it could take decades for the majority of students to get a decent education. In the meantime, the students who are currently in the system lose out. They can’t wait for that progress. Wilson worries that shining a light on a school system where most kids are far behind grade level can mislead the public and potentially cause school leaders to adopt the wrong policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Let’s take the klieg light and move it to the school systems that are educating nearly all of their students, rather than a third of their students,” said Wilson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson points to individual schools or charter school networks, where very \u003ca href=\"https://classicalcharterschools.org/\">high percentages of low-income\u003c/a> students are at or exceeding grade level. It’s much harder to replicate that success with low-income students across an entire large school district.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Income is a big factor in this debate. If the public and policymakers focus only on proficiency, affluent suburbs tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often appear to be the most successful, not necessarily because their schools are more effective, but because students from wealthier families begin far ahead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That concern has prompted researchers to focus on growth-based measures of school performance over the past couple decades. A widely cited example came from research by Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the current report, who a decade ago found that Chicago was running the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/upshot/a-better-way-to-compare-public-schools.html\">most effective schools\u003c/a> in the country based on student growth, even though many students were behind grade level. (Illinois was not among the 38 states in the latest analysis because of changes to its state assessment, so it’s unclear exactly where Chicago stands right now.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, many parents would probably rather enroll their kids in a school system where most of the students are on grade level, even if annual improvements are small or nonexistent, than a school where only a small share of students are on grade level but the school is turning around and improving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s Kane agreed that getting more students over the proficiency line is important too. For the team’s next Education Scorecard report, researchers are planning to add a new data point showing the share of kids who are proficient compared to other districts with similar demographics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth captures whether students are learning more than they used to. Proficiency captures whether they have learned enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is what makes Washington such a revealing case. It shows how a school system can post some of the strongest gains in the country and still fall short by the most basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-rapid-growth-low-proficiency/\">\u003cem>school improvement\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"headline": "America’s Fastest-improving School System Still Falls Short",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>It seems like a tale of two school systems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington, D.C., has emerged as the fastest-improving school system in the nation, according to a major new analysis of student test scores released last week by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Education Scorecard \u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/\">analysis\u003c/a>, which compares more than 5,000 school districts across 38 states, finds that most of the country has been stuck in a reading recession — a decade-long slide in achievement that predates the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2025, only five states and the District of Columbia showed meaningful gains in reading. The nation’s capital posted the strongest growth of all and also led in math improvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington students in both public and charter schools gained roughly two-thirds of a grade level in math and about a third of a grade level in reading over that period, according to the analysis. A grade level represents roughly a year’s worth of learning, which means that eighth graders in 2025 were about six months ahead in math compared with eighth graders in 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the gains should not obscure a grimmer reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate \u003ca href=\"https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/v3_SODCS_2024_25_full_report-2.24-copy-2.pdf\">report\u003c/a> from the D.C. Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Just 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered to be college or career ready.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A school system can improve rapidly and still leave most children behind. The contradiction is fueling an important politically and emotionally charged debate in education: Should schools be judged by how many students are proficient, or by how much students improve each year?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Critics of public schools are seizing upon the low proficiency rates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when most students — roughly two-thirds to three-quarters in the case of D.C. — are not functioning at grade level, this is nothing to applaud,” said Steven Wilson, a former education policymaker in Massachusetts and charter school leader. “Most students are still being failed by the system.” (Wilson’s 2025 book, “The Lost Decade,” criticizes recent school reform efforts.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even before last week’s national data release, Washington school leaders were celebrating the gains. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education, trumpeted the strength of the schools after 2025 annual tests revealed a whopping 3.6 percent improvement in reading and math, similar to the grade-level increases that the Education Scorecard team calculated. “Our academic achievement is unsurpassed in the country in terms of growth,” Kihn said in a March 2026 \u003ca href=\"https://dme.dc.gov/page/inside-dc-education-blog#03262026-1\">blog post\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tom Kane, a Harvard economist and one of the authors of the new Education Scorecard report, explained that there is a long-running debate in the field of education about whether to focus on proficiency or growth. In this report, he said, the research team chose growth in order to “combat” what they see as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re trying to highlight that something good is happening in some of these places,” Kane said. “And hopefully, if we can, rebuild the public sense of agency with respect to public education.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also released a list of 108 “\u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/districts-on-the-rise/\">districts on the rise\u003c/a>”: school districts where math and reading gains exceeded those of similar districts in their state. Washington was not included because there are no comparable districts within the city. But its gains are comparable to many districts on the list. And, like Washington, most of those districts still have large shares of students below grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In theory, if a district’s scores keep growing by outsized amounts each year, students should catch up and eventually reach grade level. But public school critics like Wilson point out that even if a school system improves by one or two percentage points a year, it could take decades for the majority of students to get a decent education. In the meantime, the students who are currently in the system lose out. They can’t wait for that progress. Wilson worries that shining a light on a school system where most kids are far behind grade level can mislead the public and potentially cause school leaders to adopt the wrong policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Let’s take the klieg light and move it to the school systems that are educating nearly all of their students, rather than a third of their students,” said Wilson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson points to individual schools or charter school networks, where very \u003ca href=\"https://classicalcharterschools.org/\">high percentages of low-income\u003c/a> students are at or exceeding grade level. It’s much harder to replicate that success with low-income students across an entire large school district.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Income is a big factor in this debate. If the public and policymakers focus only on proficiency, affluent suburbs tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often appear to be the most successful, not necessarily because their schools are more effective, but because students from wealthier families begin far ahead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That concern has prompted researchers to focus on growth-based measures of school performance over the past couple decades. A widely cited example came from research by Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the current report, who a decade ago found that Chicago was running the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/upshot/a-better-way-to-compare-public-schools.html\">most effective schools\u003c/a> in the country based on student growth, even though many students were behind grade level. (Illinois was not among the 38 states in the latest analysis because of changes to its state assessment, so it’s unclear exactly where Chicago stands right now.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, many parents would probably rather enroll their kids in a school system where most of the students are on grade level, even if annual improvements are small or nonexistent, than a school where only a small share of students are on grade level but the school is turning around and improving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s Kane agreed that getting more students over the proficiency line is important too. For the team’s next Education Scorecard report, researchers are planning to add a new data point showing the share of kids who are proficient compared to other districts with similar demographics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth captures whether students are learning more than they used to. Proficiency captures whether they have learned enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is what makes Washington such a revealing case. It shows how a school system can post some of the strongest gains in the country and still fall short by the most basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-rapid-growth-low-proficiency/\">\u003cem>school improvement\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "students-test-scores-began-declining-way-before-covid-these-schools-are-making-gains",
"title": "Students' Test Scores Began Declining Way Before COVID. These Schools Are Making Gains",
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"content": "\u003cp>The pandemic-era backslide in math and reading scores for students across the U.S. was not a sudden catastrophe but the continuation of a brutal, decade-long “learning recession” that began years before COVID-19’s arrival. That’s according to the latest \u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/about/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Education Scorecard\u003c/a>, an annual deep-dive into student data from The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new Scorecard, released Wednesday and in its fourth year, offers several revelations for families, educators and policymakers looking for clarity — and hope — at a time when public education has been blamed and battered for those persistent declines in student performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Among the report’s takeaways: Most states are finally making gains in math; federal relief dollars likely helped the lowest-income districts mount a hearty comeback; and, while most states have yet to make gains in reading, those that have all made legislative changes to how it’s taught in their schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before we dive in, one caveat: The annual Education Scorecard includes data from the vast majority of states and Washington D.C. drawn from their own state tests — as opposed to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5526918/nations-report-card-scores-reading-math-science-education-cuts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nation’s Report Card\u003c/a>. But some states were excluded for various reasons, including if their state assessments had changed recently (Illinois, Kansas), if test opt-out rates were too high (New York, Colorado) or if a state didn’t publish district-level data with enough detail.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘The learning recession’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For nearly a quarter-century, from 1990 to 2013, math achievement among fourth- and eighth-graders “rose steadily,” according to the Scorecard’s analysis. So steadily that “the average fourth grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth grader could in 1990. That’s enormous progress,” says Stanford University’s Sean Reardon, one of the Scorecard’s authors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading gains weren’t quite as eye-popping, but they were gains nonetheless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These sustained gains “may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about,” says Harvard’s Thomas Kane, one of the Scorecard’s authors. “Racial gaps were narrowing too. We just need to get back on that track.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short, much was right with America’s schools, which makes the decline that began around 2013 “appear more striking and anomalous,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic,” says Reardon. “In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s been just a steady kind of decline regardless of the pandemic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What might have triggered that decline?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The Scorecard’s trigger theories\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Scorecard researchers offer two possible explanations for the beginning of schools’ learning recession:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. The fade-out of test-based accountability\u003c/strong>: Remember the much-maligned federal education law, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/08/458844737/no-child-left-behind-an-obituary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">No Child Left Behind (NCLB)\u003c/a>, that took a tough-love approach with schools to improve student performance? The law, implemented in 2003, threatened a host of sanctions, including school closure, if student test scores didn’t rise, but its standards were seen by many to be not just unrealistic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/10/11/354931351/it-s-2014-all-children-are-supposed-to-be-proficient-under-federal-law\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">but unattainable\u003c/a>. By 2013, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to free states from the law’s consequences. According to the Scorecard, 38 states were granted relief in the 2012-13 school year. Eventually, Congress replaced NCLB with a new federal law that de-emphasized test-based accountability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around 2013, Kane says, “school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the Scorecard researchers don’t draw a direct, causal connection between the declines of test-based accountability and student scores, it’s clear that the nation’s learning recession began at roughly the same time states and schools stepped back from the punishing consequences of NCLB.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. Students’ social media use:\u003c/strong> It turns out, 2013 also marks a period of explosive growth in teenagers use of social media. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pew Research\u003c/a> study found that in 2014-15, roughly 1 in 4 teens said they used the internet “almost constantly.” By 2022, it was nearly half of teens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers also point to international testing data that shows that lower-achieving students are the heaviest users of social media. Students who spend more time (7+ hours per day) on social media score below students who spend less (1-3 hours). And this gap, between the highest and lowest performers, began growing before the pandemic, not just in the U.S. but in many other countries too.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The end of the learning recession?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard devotes considerable analysis to what’s been happening in schools since the end of the pandemic, from 2022 through the spring of 2025. There are signs that the nation’s learning recession may be turning around, albeit slowly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In that span of time, most of the states covered by this year’s Scorecard showed students making meaningful improvement in math, with Washington D.C. coming in as the clear winner there. Only five states failed to make gains in math: Georgia, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading, though, remains a cause for concern. While D.C., Louisiana, Maryland and five other states did experience meaningful improvement between 2022 and 2025, most states continued to stagnate or, as in Florida, Arizona and Nebraska, further declined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also worth noting, while schools are once again, on average, regaining ground in math and slowly turning the corner in reading, the declines that began around 2013 have been so steep and lasting that only one state, Louisiana, has returned to 2019 performance levels in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No state has returned to 2013 levels, according to Reardon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s easy to be sort of doom and gloom,” he adds, “but when you look at the period from the ’90s through 2013, we made enormous gains. And we actually narrowed achievement gaps between racial groups. That says we can actually improve our schools in ways that also improve equality of opportunity. We just haven’t been doing it for the last decade. But we could do it again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The U-shaped recovery\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard reveals a fascinating phenomenon in schools from 2022 to 2025: a U-shaped recovery. Meaning, schools with the least amount of poverty, alongside schools with the most poverty, saw similar gains in math and similarly small losses in reading achievement. That’s while the schools in the middle of the income spectrum, at the bottom of this U, improved the least in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why? One theory is that the highest-poverty districts got the most help from Congress in the form of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/06/18/nx-s1-5010963/schools-aid-students-pandemic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">federal COVID relief dollars\u003c/a> — money they could spend on interventions such as tutoring and summer school. Districts with the lowest poverty rates got little help from the federal government but were already well-positioned financially. It was the middle-income districts that needed more help but didn’t qualify for full federal support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If it hadn’t been for the federal pandemic relief,” says Kane, “we estimate there would have been no recovery on average for the highest-poverty districts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The science of reading effect\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>There’s been an important wild card in the effort to improve students’ reading skills: A movement among states to change their approach to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">teaching reading to young children\u003c/a> by \u003ca href=\"https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">embracing the \u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.apmreports.org/story/2025/10/16/legislators-reading-laws-sold-a-story\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“science of reading.”\u003c/a> As of March, the Scorecard says, most states had passed new literacy laws, including doubling down on the importance of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">teaching phonics\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard authors note that all seven of the states (plus D.C.) that saw reading gains between 2022 and 2025 had put comprehensive science of reading reforms into place. Of the states that had not by January 2024, none saw improvement. The connection between these reforms and improved results isn’t necessarily causal, they warn, but there’s clearly a link.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With most states struggling to make reading gains, one district-level success story highlighted by the Scorecard stands out: Baltimore City Public Schools. In spite of the challenges posed by poverty — most students there qualify for free or reduced-price meals — Baltimore students have been making striking reading gains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under CEO Sonja Brookins Santelises, the district reformed its approach to literacy. It embraced \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/06/02/nx-s1-4916590/some-states-are-adopting-a-new-form-of-reading-instruction-to-combat-falling-scores\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the science of reading\u003c/a> even before the pandemic and years ahead of the national wave of state-based literacy legislation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Brookins Santelises took the lead in Baltimore in 2016, she says she quickly embraced the science of reading districtwide and its emphasis on phonics, as opposed to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/03/11/591504959/rethinking-how-students-with-dyslexia-are-taught-to-read\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">whole language approach\u003c/a>, which teaches children to guess at words using cues from a text’s pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember gathering the [district’s] literacy department. And I said, ‘If you want to do whole language, there are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City. I respect you, but you cannot stay here. I’ve been ferocious about it ever since.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘Kiss your brains!’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The benefits of these changes appear to have been twofold. During the pandemic, the Scorecard shows Baltimore schools lost far less ground in reading than schools with similar levels of poverty. Then, in 2022, with those practices firmly in place, the city’s reading scores began to skyrocket, erasing pandemic-era losses and rising back around 2017 levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baltimore’s successful approach to teaching literacy was on full display on a recent May morning, in veteran teacher Kimberly Lowery’s kindergarten class at Johnston Square Elementary. Lowery sat at the front of a rainbow-colored reading rug, running through a series of phonics-based games that her kindergarteners seemed to genuinely enjoy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was letter-sound bingo, guess-the-sound flashcards and even a visit from a special spelling helper — a toy owl, named Echo, who lives at the end of a yardstick. If the kids’ laughter and cheering isn’t sign enough that they’re learning, district data shows that, by the end of last year, three-quarters of Lowery’s students were reading at or above grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lowery told the children to kiss their brains and asked, “You guys are super-duper what?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In unison, the children hollered, “Smart!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes you are,” Lowery answered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: Nirvi Shah and \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/6576424/steve-drummond\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Steve Drummond\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348775569/la-johnson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEILA FADEL, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A report out today shows that big losses in reading and math scores did not begin with the pandemic. Researchers say they started more than a decade ago. NPR’s Cory Turner has more on what they call a learning recession and what some states are doing about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORY TURNER, BYLINE: The report, called the Education Scorecard, comes from researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth. Let’s start with that headline about the nation being stuck in a learning recession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEAN REARDON: Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Stanford researcher Sean Reardon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>REARDON: In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s been just a steady kind of decline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Reardon argues this learning recession began around 2013, after a quarter century of learning gains he calls astonishing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>REARDON: The average fourth-grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth-grader could in 1990.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: And that matters, Reardon says, because as bad as things are now, it means America’s schools have done incredible things before and can do them again. To stop this learning recession, though, we need to know not just when it started, but why. Tom Kane at Harvard says there are at least two possible explanations. One, schools stopped worrying about a tough federal law that punished them for low test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TOM KANE: Under No Child Left Behind, school leaders every year had to be nervous the day that their test results were being announced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: But Kane says around 2013, that law was essentially abandoned. So that’s one theory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KANE: The other one is the rise in social media, which happened about the same time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Turns out, reading and math scores also started falling as teens’ social media use skyrocketed. What really caused the declines, though, it’s too early to know. Now, let’s jump to the present and some good news. Last year, students in most states showed improvement in math, offering fresh hope for an end to this learning recession. Reading’s been a tougher slog, but there’s hope there, too. The few states that have improved all have something in common.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: C. Cat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: They’ve doubled down on phonics and the science of reading, including Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KIMBERLY LOWERY: C-L-oud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KIMBERLEY LOWERY AND UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: C-L-oud. Cloud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: You guys are super-duper what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: Kiss your brain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Baltimore City Schools have made big gains in reading. Last year, teacher Kimberly Lowery helped three-quarters of her kindergartners become grade-level readers or better. Her top boss, Sonja Brookins Santelises, has been Baltimore City Schools’ CEO for the past decade and says she came in determined to improve the district’s approach to literacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SONJA BROOKINS SANTELISES: The first thing that it did mean was that we all learn together how young people learn to read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Brookins Santelises decided to move away from an approach known as whole language and toward the science of reading. So she told her literacy staff…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BROOKINS SANTELISES: There are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Then, during the pandemic, Baltimore students lost far less ground than kids in schools with similar levels of poverty. And by 2022…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: The city’s reading scores were shooting up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: All righty. Raymond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Back in Mrs. Lowery’s kindergarten class, the kids have the giggles after a fun game of breaking down word sounds. Mrs. Lowery asks them one more time – you guys are super-duper what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cory Turner, NPR News, Baltimore, Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF ROBERT GLASPER’S “RECKONER”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The pandemic-era backslide in math and reading scores for students across the U.S. was not a sudden catastrophe but the continuation of a brutal, decade-long “learning recession” that began years before COVID-19’s arrival. That’s according to the latest \u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/about/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Education Scorecard\u003c/a>, an annual deep-dive into student data from The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new Scorecard, released Wednesday and in its fourth year, offers several revelations for families, educators and policymakers looking for clarity — and hope — at a time when public education has been blamed and battered for those persistent declines in student performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Among the report’s takeaways: Most states are finally making gains in math; federal relief dollars likely helped the lowest-income districts mount a hearty comeback; and, while most states have yet to make gains in reading, those that have all made legislative changes to how it’s taught in their schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before we dive in, one caveat: The annual Education Scorecard includes data from the vast majority of states and Washington D.C. drawn from their own state tests — as opposed to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5526918/nations-report-card-scores-reading-math-science-education-cuts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nation’s Report Card\u003c/a>. But some states were excluded for various reasons, including if their state assessments had changed recently (Illinois, Kansas), if test opt-out rates were too high (New York, Colorado) or if a state didn’t publish district-level data with enough detail.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘The learning recession’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For nearly a quarter-century, from 1990 to 2013, math achievement among fourth- and eighth-graders “rose steadily,” according to the Scorecard’s analysis. So steadily that “the average fourth grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth grader could in 1990. That’s enormous progress,” says Stanford University’s Sean Reardon, one of the Scorecard’s authors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading gains weren’t quite as eye-popping, but they were gains nonetheless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These sustained gains “may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about,” says Harvard’s Thomas Kane, one of the Scorecard’s authors. “Racial gaps were narrowing too. We just need to get back on that track.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short, much was right with America’s schools, which makes the decline that began around 2013 “appear more striking and anomalous,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic,” says Reardon. “In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s been just a steady kind of decline regardless of the pandemic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What might have triggered that decline?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The Scorecard’s trigger theories\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Scorecard researchers offer two possible explanations for the beginning of schools’ learning recession:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. The fade-out of test-based accountability\u003c/strong>: Remember the much-maligned federal education law, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/08/458844737/no-child-left-behind-an-obituary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">No Child Left Behind (NCLB)\u003c/a>, that took a tough-love approach with schools to improve student performance? The law, implemented in 2003, threatened a host of sanctions, including school closure, if student test scores didn’t rise, but its standards were seen by many to be not just unrealistic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/10/11/354931351/it-s-2014-all-children-are-supposed-to-be-proficient-under-federal-law\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">but unattainable\u003c/a>. By 2013, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to free states from the law’s consequences. According to the Scorecard, 38 states were granted relief in the 2012-13 school year. Eventually, Congress replaced NCLB with a new federal law that de-emphasized test-based accountability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around 2013, Kane says, “school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the Scorecard researchers don’t draw a direct, causal connection between the declines of test-based accountability and student scores, it’s clear that the nation’s learning recession began at roughly the same time states and schools stepped back from the punishing consequences of NCLB.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. Students’ social media use:\u003c/strong> It turns out, 2013 also marks a period of explosive growth in teenagers use of social media. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pew Research\u003c/a> study found that in 2014-15, roughly 1 in 4 teens said they used the internet “almost constantly.” By 2022, it was nearly half of teens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers also point to international testing data that shows that lower-achieving students are the heaviest users of social media. Students who spend more time (7+ hours per day) on social media score below students who spend less (1-3 hours). And this gap, between the highest and lowest performers, began growing before the pandemic, not just in the U.S. but in many other countries too.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The end of the learning recession?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard devotes considerable analysis to what’s been happening in schools since the end of the pandemic, from 2022 through the spring of 2025. There are signs that the nation’s learning recession may be turning around, albeit slowly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In that span of time, most of the states covered by this year’s Scorecard showed students making meaningful improvement in math, with Washington D.C. coming in as the clear winner there. Only five states failed to make gains in math: Georgia, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading, though, remains a cause for concern. While D.C., Louisiana, Maryland and five other states did experience meaningful improvement between 2022 and 2025, most states continued to stagnate or, as in Florida, Arizona and Nebraska, further declined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also worth noting, while schools are once again, on average, regaining ground in math and slowly turning the corner in reading, the declines that began around 2013 have been so steep and lasting that only one state, Louisiana, has returned to 2019 performance levels in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No state has returned to 2013 levels, according to Reardon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s easy to be sort of doom and gloom,” he adds, “but when you look at the period from the ’90s through 2013, we made enormous gains. And we actually narrowed achievement gaps between racial groups. That says we can actually improve our schools in ways that also improve equality of opportunity. We just haven’t been doing it for the last decade. But we could do it again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The U-shaped recovery\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard reveals a fascinating phenomenon in schools from 2022 to 2025: a U-shaped recovery. Meaning, schools with the least amount of poverty, alongside schools with the most poverty, saw similar gains in math and similarly small losses in reading achievement. That’s while the schools in the middle of the income spectrum, at the bottom of this U, improved the least in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why? One theory is that the highest-poverty districts got the most help from Congress in the form of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/06/18/nx-s1-5010963/schools-aid-students-pandemic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">federal COVID relief dollars\u003c/a> — money they could spend on interventions such as tutoring and summer school. Districts with the lowest poverty rates got little help from the federal government but were already well-positioned financially. It was the middle-income districts that needed more help but didn’t qualify for full federal support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If it hadn’t been for the federal pandemic relief,” says Kane, “we estimate there would have been no recovery on average for the highest-poverty districts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The science of reading effect\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>There’s been an important wild card in the effort to improve students’ reading skills: A movement among states to change their approach to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">teaching reading to young children\u003c/a> by \u003ca href=\"https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">embracing the \u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.apmreports.org/story/2025/10/16/legislators-reading-laws-sold-a-story\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“science of reading.”\u003c/a> As of March, the Scorecard says, most states had passed new literacy laws, including doubling down on the importance of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">teaching phonics\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard authors note that all seven of the states (plus D.C.) that saw reading gains between 2022 and 2025 had put comprehensive science of reading reforms into place. Of the states that had not by January 2024, none saw improvement. The connection between these reforms and improved results isn’t necessarily causal, they warn, but there’s clearly a link.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With most states struggling to make reading gains, one district-level success story highlighted by the Scorecard stands out: Baltimore City Public Schools. In spite of the challenges posed by poverty — most students there qualify for free or reduced-price meals — Baltimore students have been making striking reading gains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under CEO Sonja Brookins Santelises, the district reformed its approach to literacy. It embraced \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/06/02/nx-s1-4916590/some-states-are-adopting-a-new-form-of-reading-instruction-to-combat-falling-scores\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the science of reading\u003c/a> even before the pandemic and years ahead of the national wave of state-based literacy legislation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Brookins Santelises took the lead in Baltimore in 2016, she says she quickly embraced the science of reading districtwide and its emphasis on phonics, as opposed to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/03/11/591504959/rethinking-how-students-with-dyslexia-are-taught-to-read\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">whole language approach\u003c/a>, which teaches children to guess at words using cues from a text’s pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember gathering the [district’s] literacy department. And I said, ‘If you want to do whole language, there are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City. I respect you, but you cannot stay here. I’ve been ferocious about it ever since.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘Kiss your brains!’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The benefits of these changes appear to have been twofold. During the pandemic, the Scorecard shows Baltimore schools lost far less ground in reading than schools with similar levels of poverty. Then, in 2022, with those practices firmly in place, the city’s reading scores began to skyrocket, erasing pandemic-era losses and rising back around 2017 levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baltimore’s successful approach to teaching literacy was on full display on a recent May morning, in veteran teacher Kimberly Lowery’s kindergarten class at Johnston Square Elementary. Lowery sat at the front of a rainbow-colored reading rug, running through a series of phonics-based games that her kindergarteners seemed to genuinely enjoy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was letter-sound bingo, guess-the-sound flashcards and even a visit from a special spelling helper — a toy owl, named Echo, who lives at the end of a yardstick. If the kids’ laughter and cheering isn’t sign enough that they’re learning, district data shows that, by the end of last year, three-quarters of Lowery’s students were reading at or above grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lowery told the children to kiss their brains and asked, “You guys are super-duper what?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In unison, the children hollered, “Smart!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes you are,” Lowery answered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: Nirvi Shah and \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/6576424/steve-drummond\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Steve Drummond\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348775569/la-johnson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEILA FADEL, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A report out today shows that big losses in reading and math scores did not begin with the pandemic. Researchers say they started more than a decade ago. NPR’s Cory Turner has more on what they call a learning recession and what some states are doing about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORY TURNER, BYLINE: The report, called the Education Scorecard, comes from researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth. Let’s start with that headline about the nation being stuck in a learning recession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEAN REARDON: Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Stanford researcher Sean Reardon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>REARDON: In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s been just a steady kind of decline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Reardon argues this learning recession began around 2013, after a quarter century of learning gains he calls astonishing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>REARDON: The average fourth-grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth-grader could in 1990.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: And that matters, Reardon says, because as bad as things are now, it means America’s schools have done incredible things before and can do them again. To stop this learning recession, though, we need to know not just when it started, but why. Tom Kane at Harvard says there are at least two possible explanations. One, schools stopped worrying about a tough federal law that punished them for low test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TOM KANE: Under No Child Left Behind, school leaders every year had to be nervous the day that their test results were being announced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: But Kane says around 2013, that law was essentially abandoned. So that’s one theory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KANE: The other one is the rise in social media, which happened about the same time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Turns out, reading and math scores also started falling as teens’ social media use skyrocketed. What really caused the declines, though, it’s too early to know. Now, let’s jump to the present and some good news. Last year, students in most states showed improvement in math, offering fresh hope for an end to this learning recession. Reading’s been a tougher slog, but there’s hope there, too. The few states that have improved all have something in common.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: C. Cat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: They’ve doubled down on phonics and the science of reading, including Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KIMBERLY LOWERY: C-L-oud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KIMBERLEY LOWERY AND UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: C-L-oud. Cloud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: You guys are super-duper what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: Kiss your brain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Baltimore City Schools have made big gains in reading. Last year, teacher Kimberly Lowery helped three-quarters of her kindergartners become grade-level readers or better. Her top boss, Sonja Brookins Santelises, has been Baltimore City Schools’ CEO for the past decade and says she came in determined to improve the district’s approach to literacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SONJA BROOKINS SANTELISES: The first thing that it did mean was that we all learn together how young people learn to read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Brookins Santelises decided to move away from an approach known as whole language and toward the science of reading. So she told her literacy staff…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BROOKINS SANTELISES: There are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Then, during the pandemic, Baltimore students lost far less ground than kids in schools with similar levels of poverty. And by 2022…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: The city’s reading scores were shooting up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: All righty. Raymond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Back in Mrs. Lowery’s kindergarten class, the kids have the giggles after a fun game of breaking down word sounds. Mrs. Lowery asks them one more time – you guys are super-duper what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cory Turner, NPR News, Baltimore, Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF ROBERT GLASPER’S “RECKONER”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>When Mississippi reformed its reading curriculum in 2013, scores for the state’s elementary school students soared. Inspired by the “Mississippi miracle,” other Southern states followed suit. But the miracle has hit a wall: middle school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have seen notable improvements in fourth grade reading over the past decade, but far smaller gains in eighth grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mississippi led the way by retraining teachers in the science of reading — which emphasizes phonics and other basic literacy skills — and sending coaches into schools. The state’s fourth graders went from near the bottom nationally to surpassing the national average in 2024. Many called it the “Mississippi miracle.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Mississippi moved a mountain in fourth grade,” said Dan McGrath, a retired federal education official who oversaw the NAEP assessments. High- and low-achieving students both made gains. But when these fourth graders reached eighth grade, their progress stalled. By 2019, \u003ca href=\"https://danmcgrath2.substack.com/p/did-mississippis-success-in-reading?r=4apj92\">more eighth graders\u003c/a> were scoring at the bottom than in 2013. Scores dipped further during the pandemic, and by 2024, only higher achieving eighth graders recovered a bit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When should we see the Mississippi miracle reach eighth grade? Why haven’t we seen it yet?” McGrath asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee started reforms later and may need more time. But McGrath’s question remains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers and literacy advocates point to a common answer: early reading reforms focused on phonics, which helped students decode words, but decoding alone is not enough for proficient middle school reading, where the words are longer and the sentences are more complicated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Timothy Shanahan, a veteran reading researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said reading instruction must continue after students learn to read. “It’s not phonics exactly,” he said. Teachers need to break down multisyllabic words, teach word roots and odd spellings, and find time to read extensively to build fluency with complex texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan thinks schools should teach students how to read grade-level texts, even if they are challenging, and provide guidance on vocabulary, syntax and sentence structure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The research evidence is sometimes murky on exactly how to help older students with reading comprehension. There’s widespread agreement that background knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension strategies are all important. But experts and advocates disagree about their relative importance and how much time to spend on them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many literacy advocates argue for more emphasis on background knowledge because it’s hard to grasp an unfamiliar topic. For example, even if I had a glossary of words, a technical medical article involving genetic analysis would be lost on me. Researchers also say that many low-income children aren’t exposed to as much art, travel and political news at home as wealthier kids, which means that many topics that come up in books are less familiar and harder to absorb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some research has shown promising literacy improvements from building children’ s knowledge. Harvard researchers found \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-learning-science-might-help-kids-read-better/\">some success\u003c/a> with specially designed social studies and science lessons (not reading lessons). But a \u003ca href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385720711_Reading_Comprehension_A_Meta-Analysis_Comparing_Standardized_and_Non-Standardized_Assessment_Results\">2024 meta-analysis\u003c/a> didn’t find short-term reading benefits from knowledge-building units in classrooms. It may be that it takes years for these lessons to improve reading comprehension. And that long arc of progress is difficult for researchers to track.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is no question that knowledge plays a role in comprehension,” said Shanahan. “But it has been difficult to find how such knowledge could generalize. In other words, if you teach kids about goldfish, that may improve their comprehension of other goldfish texts, but will it have any other impact?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is also a debate about the value of drilling students in reading comprehension questions, the kinds that are likely to come up on standardized tests, such as figuring out an author’s main point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carl Hendrick, a prominent proponent of explicitly teaching children background knowledge and vocabulary, and a professor at \u003ca href=\"https://www.academica-group.com/en/how-teaching-and-learning-happens-e-learning-course\">Academica University of Applied Sciences\u003c/a> in Amsterdam, agrees that a small amount of strategy instruction can be helpful, such as having students practice writing a summary after reading something. But Hendrick concludes from the research literature that there are diminishing returns to strategy instruction after \u003ca href=\"https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/reading-comprehension-is-not-a-skill\">10 hours\u003c/a> of it. “When a student cannot grasp the main idea of a passage, the problem is almost never that they lack a ‘strategy,’” Hendrick wrote in a \u003ca href=\"https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/reading-comprehension-is-not-a-skill\">March 2026 newsletter\u003c/a>. “The problem is that they do not understand enough of the words.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Too much screen time may also be a factor. “Kids aren’t reading as much anymore,” said Sarah Webb, a senior director at Great Minds, a curriculum maker. Cellphones and video games have replaced books. And the less time that kids practice reading, the less opportunity they have to get better at it. A March 2026 Scholastic white paper, “\u003ca href=\"https://education.scholastic.com/content/dam/education/resources/why-sustained-reading-matters_march-2026.pdf\">Students Are Reading Less and Losing Stamina: Why Sustained Reading Matters More Than Ever\u003c/a>,” highlights the growing decline in reading among preteens and teenagers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the growing gap between fourth and eighth grade reading scores in the South is prompting teachers to question the assumption that middle schoolers already know how to read, Webb said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They used to say the progression in school was you learn to read and then you read to learn,” Webb said. “Now people realize it needs to be both for much longer. ‘Reading to learn’ should start earlier, and ‘learning to read’ must continue well past third grade.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-8th-grade-reading/\">\u003cem>eighth-grade reading\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>When Mississippi reformed its reading curriculum in 2013, scores for the state’s elementary school students soared. Inspired by the “Mississippi miracle,” other Southern states followed suit. But the miracle has hit a wall: middle school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have seen notable improvements in fourth grade reading over the past decade, but far smaller gains in eighth grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mississippi led the way by retraining teachers in the science of reading — which emphasizes phonics and other basic literacy skills — and sending coaches into schools. The state’s fourth graders went from near the bottom nationally to surpassing the national average in 2024. Many called it the “Mississippi miracle.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Mississippi moved a mountain in fourth grade,” said Dan McGrath, a retired federal education official who oversaw the NAEP assessments. High- and low-achieving students both made gains. But when these fourth graders reached eighth grade, their progress stalled. By 2019, \u003ca href=\"https://danmcgrath2.substack.com/p/did-mississippis-success-in-reading?r=4apj92\">more eighth graders\u003c/a> were scoring at the bottom than in 2013. Scores dipped further during the pandemic, and by 2024, only higher achieving eighth graders recovered a bit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When should we see the Mississippi miracle reach eighth grade? Why haven’t we seen it yet?” McGrath asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee started reforms later and may need more time. But McGrath’s question remains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers and literacy advocates point to a common answer: early reading reforms focused on phonics, which helped students decode words, but decoding alone is not enough for proficient middle school reading, where the words are longer and the sentences are more complicated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Timothy Shanahan, a veteran reading researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said reading instruction must continue after students learn to read. “It’s not phonics exactly,” he said. Teachers need to break down multisyllabic words, teach word roots and odd spellings, and find time to read extensively to build fluency with complex texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan thinks schools should teach students how to read grade-level texts, even if they are challenging, and provide guidance on vocabulary, syntax and sentence structure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The research evidence is sometimes murky on exactly how to help older students with reading comprehension. There’s widespread agreement that background knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension strategies are all important. But experts and advocates disagree about their relative importance and how much time to spend on them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many literacy advocates argue for more emphasis on background knowledge because it’s hard to grasp an unfamiliar topic. For example, even if I had a glossary of words, a technical medical article involving genetic analysis would be lost on me. Researchers also say that many low-income children aren’t exposed to as much art, travel and political news at home as wealthier kids, which means that many topics that come up in books are less familiar and harder to absorb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some research has shown promising literacy improvements from building children’ s knowledge. Harvard researchers found \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-learning-science-might-help-kids-read-better/\">some success\u003c/a> with specially designed social studies and science lessons (not reading lessons). But a \u003ca href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385720711_Reading_Comprehension_A_Meta-Analysis_Comparing_Standardized_and_Non-Standardized_Assessment_Results\">2024 meta-analysis\u003c/a> didn’t find short-term reading benefits from knowledge-building units in classrooms. It may be that it takes years for these lessons to improve reading comprehension. And that long arc of progress is difficult for researchers to track.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is no question that knowledge plays a role in comprehension,” said Shanahan. “But it has been difficult to find how such knowledge could generalize. In other words, if you teach kids about goldfish, that may improve their comprehension of other goldfish texts, but will it have any other impact?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is also a debate about the value of drilling students in reading comprehension questions, the kinds that are likely to come up on standardized tests, such as figuring out an author’s main point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carl Hendrick, a prominent proponent of explicitly teaching children background knowledge and vocabulary, and a professor at \u003ca href=\"https://www.academica-group.com/en/how-teaching-and-learning-happens-e-learning-course\">Academica University of Applied Sciences\u003c/a> in Amsterdam, agrees that a small amount of strategy instruction can be helpful, such as having students practice writing a summary after reading something. But Hendrick concludes from the research literature that there are diminishing returns to strategy instruction after \u003ca href=\"https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/reading-comprehension-is-not-a-skill\">10 hours\u003c/a> of it. “When a student cannot grasp the main idea of a passage, the problem is almost never that they lack a ‘strategy,’” Hendrick wrote in a \u003ca href=\"https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/reading-comprehension-is-not-a-skill\">March 2026 newsletter\u003c/a>. “The problem is that they do not understand enough of the words.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Too much screen time may also be a factor. “Kids aren’t reading as much anymore,” said Sarah Webb, a senior director at Great Minds, a curriculum maker. Cellphones and video games have replaced books. And the less time that kids practice reading, the less opportunity they have to get better at it. A March 2026 Scholastic white paper, “\u003ca href=\"https://education.scholastic.com/content/dam/education/resources/why-sustained-reading-matters_march-2026.pdf\">Students Are Reading Less and Losing Stamina: Why Sustained Reading Matters More Than Ever\u003c/a>,” highlights the growing decline in reading among preteens and teenagers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the growing gap between fourth and eighth grade reading scores in the South is prompting teachers to question the assumption that middle schoolers already know how to read, Webb said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They used to say the progression in school was you learn to read and then you read to learn,” Webb said. “Now people realize it needs to be both for much longer. ‘Reading to learn’ should start earlier, and ‘learning to read’ must continue well past third grade.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-8th-grade-reading/\">\u003cem>eighth-grade reading\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has spent his career evaluating education research and helping teachers figure out what works best in the classroom. A leader of the National Reading Panel, whose 2000 report helped shape what’s now known as the “science of reading,” Shanahan has long influenced literacy instruction in the United States. He also served on the National Institute for Literacy’s advisory board in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan is a scholar whom I regularly consult when I come across a reading study, and so I was eager to interview him about his new book, “\u003ca href=\"https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9798895570036/leveled-reading-leveled-lives/\">Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives\u003c/a>.” (Harvard Education Press, September 2025). In it, Shanahan takes aim at one of the most common teaching practices in American classrooms: matching students with “just-right” books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65926\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 512px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65926\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan.jpg 512w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan-160x120.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Book cover credit: Harvard Education Press. Photo courtesy of Timothy Shanahan.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>He argues that the approach — where students read different texts depending on their assessed reading level — is holding many children back. Teachers spend too much time testing students and assigning leveled books, he says, instead of helping all students learn how to understand challenging texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“American children are being prevented from doing better in reading by a longstanding commitment to a pedagogical theory that insists students are best taught with books they can already read,” Shanahan writes in his book. “Reading is so often taught in small groups — not so teachers can guide efforts to negotiate difficult books, but to ensure the books are easy enough that not much guidance is needed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Comprehension, he says, doesn’t grow that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The trouble with leveled reading\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Grouping students by ability and assigning easier or harder books — a practice known as leveled reading — remains deeply embedded in U.S. schools. A 2018 Thomas B. Fordham Institute \u003ca href=\"https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/reading-and-writing-instruction-americas-schools\">survey\u003c/a> found that 62 percent of upper elementary teachers and more than half of middle school teachers teach at students’ reading level rather than at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That may sound sensible, but Shanahan says it’s not helping anyone and is even leading teachers to dispense with reading altogether. “In social studies and science, and these days, even in English classes,” he said in an interview, “teachers either don’t assign any readings or they read the texts to the students.” Struggling readers aren’t being given the chance — or the tools — to tackle complex material on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, Shanahan believes all students should read grade-level texts together, with teachers providing more support for those who need it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I’m recommending is instructional differentiation,” he said in our interview. “Everyone will have the same instructional goal — we’re all going to learn to read the fourth-grade text. I might teach a whole-class lesson and then let some kids move on to independent work while others get more help. Maybe the ones who didn’t get it, read the text again with my support. By the end, more students will have reached the learning goal — and tomorrow the whole class can take on another text.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>27 different ways\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Shanahan’s approach doesn’t mean throwing kids into the deep end without help. His book outlines a toolbox of strategies for tackling difficult texts, such as looking up unfamiliar vocabulary, rereading confusing passages, or breaking down long sentences. “You can tip over into successful reading 27 different ways,” he said, and he hopes future researchers discover many more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He is skeptical of drilling students on skills like identifying the main idea or making inferences. “We’ve treated test questions as the skill,” he said. “That doesn’t work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is widespread frustration over the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\">deterioration of American reading achievement\u003c/a>, especially among middle schoolers. (Thirty-nine percent of eighth graders cannot reach the lowest of three achievement levels, called “basic,” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.) But there is little agreement among reading advocates on how to fix the problem. Some argue that what children primarily need is \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/\">more knowledge to grasp unfamiliar ideas\u003c/a> in a new reading passage, but Shanahan argues that background knowledge won’t be sufficient or as powerful as explicit comprehension instruction. Other reading experts agree. Nonie Lesaux, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education who specializes in literacy in her own academic work, endorsed Shanahan’s argument in an \u003ca href=\"https://calendar.gse.harvard.edu/en/36YmkP6/g/QjQ0gt02WZ/gutman-library-virtual-book-talk-leveled-reading-leveled-lives-4a5YUYbVxh/overview\">October 2025 online discussion of the new book. \u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan is most persuasive in pointing out that there isn’t strong experimental evidence to show that reading achievement goes up more when students read a text at their individual level. By contrast, a 2024 analysis found that the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tntp-effective-schools/\">most effective schools\u003c/a> are those that keep instruction at grade level. Still, Shanahan acknowledges that more research is needed to pinpoint which comprehension strategies work best for which students and in which circumstances.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Misunderstanding Vygotsky\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers often cite the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” to justify giving students books that are neither too easy nor too hard. But Shanahan says that’s a misunderstanding of Vygotsky’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vygotsky believed teachers should guide students to learn challenging things they cannot yet do on their own, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He offers an analogy: a mother teaching her child to tie their shoes. At first, she demonstrates while narrating the steps aloud. Then the child does one step, and she finishes the rest. Over time, the mother gradually releases control and the child ties a bow on his own. “Leveled reading,” Shanahan said, “is like saying, ‘Why don’t we just get Velcro?’ This is about real teaching. ‘Boys and girls, you don’t know how to ride this bike yet, but I’m going to make sure you do by the time we’re done.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan’s critique of reading instruction applies mainly from second grade onward, after children learn how to read and are focusing on understanding what they read. In kindergarten and first grade, when children are still learning phonics and how to decode the words on the page, the research evidence against small group instruction with different level texts isn’t as strong, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Learning to read first – decoding – is important. Shanahan says there are rare exceptions to teaching all children at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a fifth grader still can’t read,” Shanahan said, “I wouldn’t make that child read a fifth-grade text.” That child might need separate instruction from a reading specialist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advanced readers, meanwhile, can be challenged in other ways, Shanahan suggests, through independent reading time, skipping ahead to higher-grade reading classes, or by exploring complex ideas within grade-level texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The role of AI — and parents\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to rewrite texts for different difficulty levels. Shanahan is skeptical of that approach. Simpler texts, whether written by humans or generated by AI, don’t teach students to improve their reading ability, he argues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, he’s intrigued by the idea of using AI to help students “climb the stairs” by instantly modifying a single text to a range of reading levels, say, to third-, fifth- and seventh-grade levels, and having students read them in quick succession. Whether that boosts comprehension is still unknown and needs to be studied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI might be most helpful to teachers, Shanahan suspects, to help point to a sentence or a passage that tends to confuse students or trip them up. The teacher can then address those common difficulties in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan worries about what happens outside of school: Kids aren’t reading much at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He urges parents to let children read whatever they enjoy — regardless if it’s above or below their level — but to set consistent expectations. “Nagging may not be effective,” he said. “But you can be specific: ‘After dinner Thursday, read the first chapter. When you’re done, we’ll talk about it, and then you can play a computer game or go on your phone.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Too often, he says, parents back down when kids resist. “They are the kids. We are the adults,” Shanahan said. “We’re responsible. Let’s step up and do what’s right for them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-shanahan-leveled-reading/\">\u003cem>reading levels\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has spent his career evaluating education research and helping teachers figure out what works best in the classroom. A leader of the National Reading Panel, whose 2000 report helped shape what’s now known as the “science of reading,” Shanahan has long influenced literacy instruction in the United States. He also served on the National Institute for Literacy’s advisory board in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan is a scholar whom I regularly consult when I come across a reading study, and so I was eager to interview him about his new book, “\u003ca href=\"https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9798895570036/leveled-reading-leveled-lives/\">Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives\u003c/a>.” (Harvard Education Press, September 2025). In it, Shanahan takes aim at one of the most common teaching practices in American classrooms: matching students with “just-right” books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65926\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 512px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65926\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan.jpg 512w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan-160x120.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Book cover credit: Harvard Education Press. Photo courtesy of Timothy Shanahan.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>He argues that the approach — where students read different texts depending on their assessed reading level — is holding many children back. Teachers spend too much time testing students and assigning leveled books, he says, instead of helping all students learn how to understand challenging texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“American children are being prevented from doing better in reading by a longstanding commitment to a pedagogical theory that insists students are best taught with books they can already read,” Shanahan writes in his book. “Reading is so often taught in small groups — not so teachers can guide efforts to negotiate difficult books, but to ensure the books are easy enough that not much guidance is needed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Comprehension, he says, doesn’t grow that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The trouble with leveled reading\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Grouping students by ability and assigning easier or harder books — a practice known as leveled reading — remains deeply embedded in U.S. schools. A 2018 Thomas B. Fordham Institute \u003ca href=\"https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/reading-and-writing-instruction-americas-schools\">survey\u003c/a> found that 62 percent of upper elementary teachers and more than half of middle school teachers teach at students’ reading level rather than at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That may sound sensible, but Shanahan says it’s not helping anyone and is even leading teachers to dispense with reading altogether. “In social studies and science, and these days, even in English classes,” he said in an interview, “teachers either don’t assign any readings or they read the texts to the students.” Struggling readers aren’t being given the chance — or the tools — to tackle complex material on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, Shanahan believes all students should read grade-level texts together, with teachers providing more support for those who need it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I’m recommending is instructional differentiation,” he said in our interview. “Everyone will have the same instructional goal — we’re all going to learn to read the fourth-grade text. I might teach a whole-class lesson and then let some kids move on to independent work while others get more help. Maybe the ones who didn’t get it, read the text again with my support. By the end, more students will have reached the learning goal — and tomorrow the whole class can take on another text.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>27 different ways\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Shanahan’s approach doesn’t mean throwing kids into the deep end without help. His book outlines a toolbox of strategies for tackling difficult texts, such as looking up unfamiliar vocabulary, rereading confusing passages, or breaking down long sentences. “You can tip over into successful reading 27 different ways,” he said, and he hopes future researchers discover many more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He is skeptical of drilling students on skills like identifying the main idea or making inferences. “We’ve treated test questions as the skill,” he said. “That doesn’t work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is widespread frustration over the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\">deterioration of American reading achievement\u003c/a>, especially among middle schoolers. (Thirty-nine percent of eighth graders cannot reach the lowest of three achievement levels, called “basic,” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.) But there is little agreement among reading advocates on how to fix the problem. Some argue that what children primarily need is \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/\">more knowledge to grasp unfamiliar ideas\u003c/a> in a new reading passage, but Shanahan argues that background knowledge won’t be sufficient or as powerful as explicit comprehension instruction. Other reading experts agree. Nonie Lesaux, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education who specializes in literacy in her own academic work, endorsed Shanahan’s argument in an \u003ca href=\"https://calendar.gse.harvard.edu/en/36YmkP6/g/QjQ0gt02WZ/gutman-library-virtual-book-talk-leveled-reading-leveled-lives-4a5YUYbVxh/overview\">October 2025 online discussion of the new book. \u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan is most persuasive in pointing out that there isn’t strong experimental evidence to show that reading achievement goes up more when students read a text at their individual level. By contrast, a 2024 analysis found that the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tntp-effective-schools/\">most effective schools\u003c/a> are those that keep instruction at grade level. Still, Shanahan acknowledges that more research is needed to pinpoint which comprehension strategies work best for which students and in which circumstances.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Misunderstanding Vygotsky\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers often cite the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” to justify giving students books that are neither too easy nor too hard. But Shanahan says that’s a misunderstanding of Vygotsky’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vygotsky believed teachers should guide students to learn challenging things they cannot yet do on their own, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He offers an analogy: a mother teaching her child to tie their shoes. At first, she demonstrates while narrating the steps aloud. Then the child does one step, and she finishes the rest. Over time, the mother gradually releases control and the child ties a bow on his own. “Leveled reading,” Shanahan said, “is like saying, ‘Why don’t we just get Velcro?’ This is about real teaching. ‘Boys and girls, you don’t know how to ride this bike yet, but I’m going to make sure you do by the time we’re done.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan’s critique of reading instruction applies mainly from second grade onward, after children learn how to read and are focusing on understanding what they read. In kindergarten and first grade, when children are still learning phonics and how to decode the words on the page, the research evidence against small group instruction with different level texts isn’t as strong, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Learning to read first – decoding – is important. Shanahan says there are rare exceptions to teaching all children at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a fifth grader still can’t read,” Shanahan said, “I wouldn’t make that child read a fifth-grade text.” That child might need separate instruction from a reading specialist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advanced readers, meanwhile, can be challenged in other ways, Shanahan suggests, through independent reading time, skipping ahead to higher-grade reading classes, or by exploring complex ideas within grade-level texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The role of AI — and parents\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to rewrite texts for different difficulty levels. Shanahan is skeptical of that approach. Simpler texts, whether written by humans or generated by AI, don’t teach students to improve their reading ability, he argues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, he’s intrigued by the idea of using AI to help students “climb the stairs” by instantly modifying a single text to a range of reading levels, say, to third-, fifth- and seventh-grade levels, and having students read them in quick succession. Whether that boosts comprehension is still unknown and needs to be studied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI might be most helpful to teachers, Shanahan suspects, to help point to a sentence or a passage that tends to confuse students or trip them up. The teacher can then address those common difficulties in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan worries about what happens outside of school: Kids aren’t reading much at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He urges parents to let children read whatever they enjoy — regardless if it’s above or below their level — but to set consistent expectations. “Nagging may not be effective,” he said. “But you can be specific: ‘After dinner Thursday, read the first chapter. When you’re done, we’ll talk about it, and then you can play a computer game or go on your phone.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Too often, he says, parents back down when kids resist. “They are the kids. We are the adults,” Shanahan said. “We’re responsible. Let’s step up and do what’s right for them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-shanahan-leveled-reading/\">\u003cem>reading levels\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "a-new-nations-report-card-shows-drops-in-science-math-and-reading-scores",
"title": "A New Nation's Report Card Shows Drops in Science, Math and Reading Scores",
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"headTitle": "A New Nation’s Report Card Shows Drops in Science, Math and Reading Scores | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>New test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, show eighth-graders’ science scores have fallen 4 points since 2019 and 12th-graders’ math and reading scores have fallen 3 points in the same time period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tests were administered between January and March 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is the first NAEP score release since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department. Those cuts, included \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5325854/trump-education-department-layoffs-civil-rights-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">laying off more than half the workers\u003c/a> at the Institute of Education Sciences, IES, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After those cuts, the department also \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fewer-subjects-students-data-points-feds-to-scale-back-naep/2025/04\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">canceled about a dozen\u003c/a> national and state assessments of student progress through 2032 — about half those tests were planned for 12th-graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NAEP, which provides data for the Nation’s Report Card, is mandated by Congress and is the largest nationally representative test of student learning. NAEP tests were first administered in 1969.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the assessments in math and reading are given every two years to a broad sample of students in fourth and eighth grades; 12th-graders receive them every four years. NAEP also administers voluntary assessments in other subjects outside the congressional mandate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What to make of the test scores\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Reading scores dipped for 12th-graders, except among the highest-achieving students, compared with 2019, the last time this test was administered. Compared with NAEP’s first 12th-grade reading assessment, in 1992, today’s average score is 10 points lower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows — continued declines that began more than a decade ago,” Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, told reporters. “My predecessor warned of this trend, and her predecessor warned of this trend as well. And now I am warning you of this trend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2024 assessment tested students for reading comprehension skills and surveyed them about opportunities to learn and engage with reading in and outside school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twelfth-grade math scores dropped the same amount as reading scores and were 3 points lower than in 2005, the first time this version of the math test was administered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted, focused action to accelerate student learning,” Soldner said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among eighth-graders, the average science score dropped 4 points compared with 2019. Student scores decreased across the board, for low- and high-performing students alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to measuring students’ academic achievement, NAEP also surveys things like students’ comfort level with certain subjects and their attendance. In those surveys, a smaller share of eighth-graders indicated high levels of confidence in their science skills compared with their counterparts in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And nearly one-third of 12th-graders reported missing three or more days of school in the month prior to taking the assessment in 2024, an increase from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How changes at the Education Department are impacting student assessments\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Legally, the federal government \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/02/04/nx-s1-5286311/trump-schools-education-department-funding-cuts-congress-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has no power\u003c/a> over what is taught in schools. So while Tuesday’s release measured student achievement under President Biden, experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The federal government is in a unique position with these test scores to be the scoreboard of American education, to tell us what’s happening and for whom,” says Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “[That] doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But behind the scenes, federal changes \u003cem>have \u003c/em>had an impact on how the Nation’s Report Card is administered, according to a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the cuts to the U.S. Education Department left only two senior staffers assigned to NAEP and said that NCES relied on additional support from colleagues in other departments to get the new release out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NCES confirmed that, in order to meet congressional testing mandates in 2026 and 2028, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has approved a waiver to add at least eight staff positions before the end of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marty West is on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and is vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which sets NAEP policy. He says he’s confident in the department’s ability to meet NAEP deadlines moving forward: “The preparation for the tests that will be administered in early 2026, for example, really began as much as five years ago and were pretty far down the road by the spring of 2025.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There will also be fewer deadlines to meet. This spring, the NAGB slashed about a dozen planned assessments — for fourth-grade science, 12th-grade U.S. history and writing across fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders — that were scheduled to be administered over the next seven years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was not too unusual in terms of the history of the program,” West says of restructuring the assessment schedule. “We felt [it] was an important step so that we could allow our colleagues at NCES to focus their energies on the tests that we felt were most important.” Among them are the tests for math and reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The NAGB is an independent, nonpartisan organization made up of state and local representatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are no federal officials on the National Assessment Governing Board, and that’s by design,” West says. “Although it is a federal assessment … it is designed and administered in a way that meets the needs of state and local governments and the broader public.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New national test scores are out today, measuring eighth-grader science skills, and for 12th-graders, it was math and reading. The scores are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress – also known as the Nation’s Report Card – and they come after massive cuts to the U.S. Education Department. It oversees the national assessment, which is required by Congress. NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo has been following this. So, Sequoia, what do the new test scores show us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: So these tests were taken in spring of 2024. So this is the first report for these students since the pandemic. And a few things stood out. In 12th-grade math, scores dropped about 3 points from pre-pandemic levels, while eighth-graders followed a similar pattern with a 4-point average drop in science. These might not sound like huge drops, but I want to note something. In both science and math, drops happened across all achievement levels. So both low and high-performing students dropped this cycle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading scores also dipped for nearly all 12th-graders compared to the last test in 2019. But one important thing to note here is when you compare today’s scores to the first Nation’s Report Card for 12th-grade reading more than 30 years ago, today’s average score is 10 points lower. I talked to some of the folks who oversee these tests, and they said this report follows a pattern, one we’ve known about for a while. Scores from the lowest-performing students are at a historic low, and they’re continuing on a decline that started more than a decade ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: I’ve been hearing some Republicans say that Biden policies are to blame for the low scores because the students took these tests during the Biden administration. So how much does federal policy influence what happens in the classroom?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: The federal government is not allowed to dictate what is taught in the classrooms at all. So experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration. Also these are trends. Like I said, they go back several presidential administrations, well before the pandemic. The tests are drawn up by a bipartisan group of local and state education leaders. They include teachers and principals. The assessment is supposed to show people what is happening to students in classrooms, not why it’s happening. Nat Malkus is deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He explains the role of the U.S. government as somewhat of a scoreboard for the country’s education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NAT MALKUS: The federal government is in a unique position to tell us what’s happening and for whom. Just because the federal government is good at being that scoreboard doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: You know, back in March, the Education Department cut almost half of its staff. Do we know how all of that impacted the release?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: So a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics, who oversee this test, briefed reporters on condition of anonymity that there are currently only two senior staffers left working on the Nation’s Report Card. In order to get today’s results out, they had to rely on workers from other teams within the department. But that is about to change. The same senior officials said they recently received a waiver from the education secretary to hire for eight more positions being added before the end of the year, so that the department can meet its goals in 2026 and 2028 under Congressional mandate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: That’s NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo. Thank you for educating us on this report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: (Laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF DO MAKE SAY THINK’S “GOODBYE ENEMY AIRSHIP”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>New test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, show eighth-graders’ science scores have fallen 4 points since 2019 and 12th-graders’ math and reading scores have fallen 3 points in the same time period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tests were administered between January and March 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is the first NAEP score release since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department. Those cuts, included \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5325854/trump-education-department-layoffs-civil-rights-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">laying off more than half the workers\u003c/a> at the Institute of Education Sciences, IES, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After those cuts, the department also \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fewer-subjects-students-data-points-feds-to-scale-back-naep/2025/04\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">canceled about a dozen\u003c/a> national and state assessments of student progress through 2032 — about half those tests were planned for 12th-graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NAEP, which provides data for the Nation’s Report Card, is mandated by Congress and is the largest nationally representative test of student learning. NAEP tests were first administered in 1969.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the assessments in math and reading are given every two years to a broad sample of students in fourth and eighth grades; 12th-graders receive them every four years. NAEP also administers voluntary assessments in other subjects outside the congressional mandate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What to make of the test scores\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Reading scores dipped for 12th-graders, except among the highest-achieving students, compared with 2019, the last time this test was administered. Compared with NAEP’s first 12th-grade reading assessment, in 1992, today’s average score is 10 points lower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows — continued declines that began more than a decade ago,” Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, told reporters. “My predecessor warned of this trend, and her predecessor warned of this trend as well. And now I am warning you of this trend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2024 assessment tested students for reading comprehension skills and surveyed them about opportunities to learn and engage with reading in and outside school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twelfth-grade math scores dropped the same amount as reading scores and were 3 points lower than in 2005, the first time this version of the math test was administered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted, focused action to accelerate student learning,” Soldner said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among eighth-graders, the average science score dropped 4 points compared with 2019. Student scores decreased across the board, for low- and high-performing students alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to measuring students’ academic achievement, NAEP also surveys things like students’ comfort level with certain subjects and their attendance. In those surveys, a smaller share of eighth-graders indicated high levels of confidence in their science skills compared with their counterparts in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And nearly one-third of 12th-graders reported missing three or more days of school in the month prior to taking the assessment in 2024, an increase from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How changes at the Education Department are impacting student assessments\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Legally, the federal government \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/02/04/nx-s1-5286311/trump-schools-education-department-funding-cuts-congress-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has no power\u003c/a> over what is taught in schools. So while Tuesday’s release measured student achievement under President Biden, experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The federal government is in a unique position with these test scores to be the scoreboard of American education, to tell us what’s happening and for whom,” says Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “[That] doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But behind the scenes, federal changes \u003cem>have \u003c/em>had an impact on how the Nation’s Report Card is administered, according to a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the cuts to the U.S. Education Department left only two senior staffers assigned to NAEP and said that NCES relied on additional support from colleagues in other departments to get the new release out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NCES confirmed that, in order to meet congressional testing mandates in 2026 and 2028, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has approved a waiver to add at least eight staff positions before the end of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marty West is on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and is vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which sets NAEP policy. He says he’s confident in the department’s ability to meet NAEP deadlines moving forward: “The preparation for the tests that will be administered in early 2026, for example, really began as much as five years ago and were pretty far down the road by the spring of 2025.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There will also be fewer deadlines to meet. This spring, the NAGB slashed about a dozen planned assessments — for fourth-grade science, 12th-grade U.S. history and writing across fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders — that were scheduled to be administered over the next seven years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was not too unusual in terms of the history of the program,” West says of restructuring the assessment schedule. “We felt [it] was an important step so that we could allow our colleagues at NCES to focus their energies on the tests that we felt were most important.” Among them are the tests for math and reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The NAGB is an independent, nonpartisan organization made up of state and local representatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are no federal officials on the National Assessment Governing Board, and that’s by design,” West says. “Although it is a federal assessment … it is designed and administered in a way that meets the needs of state and local governments and the broader public.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New national test scores are out today, measuring eighth-grader science skills, and for 12th-graders, it was math and reading. The scores are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress – also known as the Nation’s Report Card – and they come after massive cuts to the U.S. Education Department. It oversees the national assessment, which is required by Congress. NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo has been following this. So, Sequoia, what do the new test scores show us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: So these tests were taken in spring of 2024. So this is the first report for these students since the pandemic. And a few things stood out. In 12th-grade math, scores dropped about 3 points from pre-pandemic levels, while eighth-graders followed a similar pattern with a 4-point average drop in science. These might not sound like huge drops, but I want to note something. In both science and math, drops happened across all achievement levels. So both low and high-performing students dropped this cycle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading scores also dipped for nearly all 12th-graders compared to the last test in 2019. But one important thing to note here is when you compare today’s scores to the first Nation’s Report Card for 12th-grade reading more than 30 years ago, today’s average score is 10 points lower. I talked to some of the folks who oversee these tests, and they said this report follows a pattern, one we’ve known about for a while. Scores from the lowest-performing students are at a historic low, and they’re continuing on a decline that started more than a decade ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: I’ve been hearing some Republicans say that Biden policies are to blame for the low scores because the students took these tests during the Biden administration. So how much does federal policy influence what happens in the classroom?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: The federal government is not allowed to dictate what is taught in the classrooms at all. So experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration. Also these are trends. Like I said, they go back several presidential administrations, well before the pandemic. The tests are drawn up by a bipartisan group of local and state education leaders. They include teachers and principals. The assessment is supposed to show people what is happening to students in classrooms, not why it’s happening. Nat Malkus is deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He explains the role of the U.S. government as somewhat of a scoreboard for the country’s education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NAT MALKUS: The federal government is in a unique position to tell us what’s happening and for whom. Just because the federal government is good at being that scoreboard doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: You know, back in March, the Education Department cut almost half of its staff. Do we know how all of that impacted the release?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: So a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics, who oversee this test, briefed reporters on condition of anonymity that there are currently only two senior staffers left working on the Nation’s Report Card. In order to get today’s results out, they had to rely on workers from other teams within the department. But that is about to change. The same senior officials said they recently received a waiver from the education secretary to hire for eight more positions being added before the end of the year, so that the department can meet its goals in 2026 and 2028 under Congressional mandate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MARTÍNEZ: That’s NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo. Thank you for educating us on this report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: (Laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF DO MAKE SAY THINK’S “GOODBYE ENEMY AIRSHIP”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Why do so many students struggle to understand what they read, even after they learn how to read?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a topic of hot debate among reading researchers. One camp has been arguing that schools have been going about it all wrong. These critics say that instead of drilling students on the main idea (similar to questions students will see on annual state exams), teachers should spend more time building students’ background knowledge of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/\">theory\u003c/a> is that the more familiar students are with science, history, geography and even art, the easier it will be for students to grasp new ideas when reading. Many educators are embracing this theory, and knowledge building lessons have been spreading rapidly across the country, from Baltimore to Mississippi to Colorado.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/\">evidence\u003c/a> for this approach is still emerging, and some reading researchers urge caution. They worry that sometimes, too much time is being spent on background knowledge rather than \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reading-comprehension-classroom/\">actually reading\u003c/a> and discussing texts. These skeptics argue students aren’t going to magically understand what they are reading just from knowing more about the world, and they need to be explicitly taught how to identify the main idea and how to summarize.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Debates like this are common in education as new research addresses unresolved issues, such as exactly how to teach reading once students have learned phonics and how to decode the words on the page.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Early research showed that background knowledge plays a part,” said Kausalai Wijekumar, a professor of education at Texas A&M University, who has been studying reading instruction and recently produced a study that sheds more light on the debate. “People with good background knowledge seem to be able to read faster and understand quicker.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For some children, particularly children from affluent families, she said, background knowledge is “enough” to unlock reading comprehension, but not for all. “If we want all the children to read, we have proven that they can be taught with the right strategies,” said Wijekumar. She has a body of research to back her position.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wijekumar agrees that drilling students on the main point or the author’s purpose isn’t helpful because a struggling reader cannot come up with a point or a purpose from thin air. (She’s also not a fan of highlighting key words or graphic organizers, both common strategies for reading comprehension in schools.) Instead, Wijekumar advocates for a step-by-step process, conceived in the 1970s by her mentor and research partner, Bonnie J.F. Meyer, a professor emeritus at Penn State.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first step is to guide students through a series of questions as they read, such as “Is there a problem?” “What caused it?” and “Is there a solution?” Based on their answers, students can then decide which structure the passage follows: cause and effect, problem and solution, comparisons or a sequence. Next, students fill in blanks — like in a Mad Libs worksheet — to help create a main idea statement. And finally, they practice expanding on that idea with relevant details to form a summary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wijekumar analyzed the story of Cinderella for me, using her approach. The problem? Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters. We learn this because she’s forced to do extra chores and isn’t allowed to attend the ball. The cause of the problem? They’re jealous of her. That’s why they take away her pretty clothes. Finally, the solution: A fairy godmother helps Cinderella go to the ball and meet Prince Charming. Students can then put all these elements together to come up with the main idea: Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters because they are jealous of her, but a fairy godmother saves her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a formulaic approach and there are certainly other ways of seeing or expressing the main idea. I wouldn’t have analyzed Cinderella that way. I would have guessed it’s a story about never giving up on your dreams even if your life is wretched now. But Wijekumar says it’s a helpful start for students who struggle the most.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s very structured and systematic, and that provides a strong foundation,” Wijekumar said. “This is just the starting point. You can take it and layer on more things, but 99 percent of the children are having difficulty just starting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wijekumar transformed Meyer’s strategy into a computerized tutor called ITSS, which stands for Intelligent Tutoring using the Structure Strategy. About 200,000 students around the world use ITSS. Wijekumar’s nonprofit, \u003ca href=\"http://literacy.io/\">Literacy.IO\u003c/a>, charges schools $40 a student plus teacher training, which can run $800 per teacher, depending on school size.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tutor allows students to practice reading comprehension at their own pace. ITSS was one of only \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-free-no-frills-programs-lead-the-class-in-new-federal-study-of-remote-learning/\">three online learning technologies\u003c/a> that demonstrated clear evidence for improving student achievement, according to a February 2021 report by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Wijekumar has continued to refine her reading program and test it with more students. Her most recent study, \u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-11106-001\">a large-scale replication in high poverty schools\u003c/a>, was highly successful according to one yardstick, but not so successful, according to another measure. It was published last year in the Journal of Educational Psychology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A team of six researchers led by Wijekumar randomly assigned 17 of 33 schools in the Northeast and along the Texas border to teach reading with ITSS, while the remaining 16 schools taught reading as usual. More than 1,200 fifth graders practiced their reading comprehension using ITSS for 45 minutes a week over six months. Their teachers received 16 hours of training in how to teach reading comprehension this way and also delivered traditional analog reading lessons to their students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After six months, students who received this reading instruction posted significantly higher scores on a researcher-designed assessment, which measured students’ ability to write main ideas, recall key information and understand text structures. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups on a standardized test, the Gray Silent Reading Test (GSRT), which measured students’ general reading comprehension. The researchers did not report state test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/edu0000168\">Earlier studies\u003c/a> with wealthier students \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19345747.2013.853333\">showed improvements\u003c/a> on the standardized reading comprehension test. It’s hard to make sense of why this study showed giant benefits using one measure, but none using another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Substantial changes in the instruction were needed for these high-poverty students. Some were such weak readers that Wijekumar’s team had to draft easier texts so that students could practice the method. But the biggest change was 14 hours of additional teacher training and the creation of instructional guides for the teachers. Wijekumar’s strategies directly contradicted what their schools’ textbooks told them to do. At first, the students were confused with the teachers teaching them one way and ITSS another. So Wijekumar worked with the teachers to scrap their textbook instructions and teach her way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I consulted with Marissa Filderman, a respected reading expert who has \u003ca href=\"https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1323802\">reviewed the literature on comprehension instruction for children who struggle\u003c/a> with reading and is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. She said despite the imperfect evidence from this study, she sees Wijekumar’s body of research as evidence that explicit strategy instruction is important along with building background knowledge and vocabulary. But it’s still an evolving science, and the research isn’t yet clear enough to guide teachers on how much time to spend on each aspect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improving reading comprehension is critical, and I’ll be watching for new research to help answer these questions for teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Shirley Liu contributed reporting. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reading-comprehension-main-idea/\">\u003cem>teaching the main idea\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Why do so many students struggle to understand what they read, even after they learn how to read?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a topic of hot debate among reading researchers. One camp has been arguing that schools have been going about it all wrong. These critics say that instead of drilling students on the main idea (similar to questions students will see on annual state exams), teachers should spend more time building students’ background knowledge of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/\">theory\u003c/a> is that the more familiar students are with science, history, geography and even art, the easier it will be for students to grasp new ideas when reading. Many educators are embracing this theory, and knowledge building lessons have been spreading rapidly across the country, from Baltimore to Mississippi to Colorado.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/\">evidence\u003c/a> for this approach is still emerging, and some reading researchers urge caution. They worry that sometimes, too much time is being spent on background knowledge rather than \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reading-comprehension-classroom/\">actually reading\u003c/a> and discussing texts. These skeptics argue students aren’t going to magically understand what they are reading just from knowing more about the world, and they need to be explicitly taught how to identify the main idea and how to summarize.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Debates like this are common in education as new research addresses unresolved issues, such as exactly how to teach reading once students have learned phonics and how to decode the words on the page.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Early research showed that background knowledge plays a part,” said Kausalai Wijekumar, a professor of education at Texas A&M University, who has been studying reading instruction and recently produced a study that sheds more light on the debate. “People with good background knowledge seem to be able to read faster and understand quicker.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For some children, particularly children from affluent families, she said, background knowledge is “enough” to unlock reading comprehension, but not for all. “If we want all the children to read, we have proven that they can be taught with the right strategies,” said Wijekumar. She has a body of research to back her position.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wijekumar agrees that drilling students on the main point or the author’s purpose isn’t helpful because a struggling reader cannot come up with a point or a purpose from thin air. (She’s also not a fan of highlighting key words or graphic organizers, both common strategies for reading comprehension in schools.) Instead, Wijekumar advocates for a step-by-step process, conceived in the 1970s by her mentor and research partner, Bonnie J.F. Meyer, a professor emeritus at Penn State.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first step is to guide students through a series of questions as they read, such as “Is there a problem?” “What caused it?” and “Is there a solution?” Based on their answers, students can then decide which structure the passage follows: cause and effect, problem and solution, comparisons or a sequence. Next, students fill in blanks — like in a Mad Libs worksheet — to help create a main idea statement. And finally, they practice expanding on that idea with relevant details to form a summary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wijekumar analyzed the story of Cinderella for me, using her approach. The problem? Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters. We learn this because she’s forced to do extra chores and isn’t allowed to attend the ball. The cause of the problem? They’re jealous of her. That’s why they take away her pretty clothes. Finally, the solution: A fairy godmother helps Cinderella go to the ball and meet Prince Charming. Students can then put all these elements together to come up with the main idea: Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters because they are jealous of her, but a fairy godmother saves her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a formulaic approach and there are certainly other ways of seeing or expressing the main idea. I wouldn’t have analyzed Cinderella that way. I would have guessed it’s a story about never giving up on your dreams even if your life is wretched now. But Wijekumar says it’s a helpful start for students who struggle the most.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s very structured and systematic, and that provides a strong foundation,” Wijekumar said. “This is just the starting point. You can take it and layer on more things, but 99 percent of the children are having difficulty just starting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wijekumar transformed Meyer’s strategy into a computerized tutor called ITSS, which stands for Intelligent Tutoring using the Structure Strategy. About 200,000 students around the world use ITSS. Wijekumar’s nonprofit, \u003ca href=\"http://literacy.io/\">Literacy.IO\u003c/a>, charges schools $40 a student plus teacher training, which can run $800 per teacher, depending on school size.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tutor allows students to practice reading comprehension at their own pace. ITSS was one of only \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-free-no-frills-programs-lead-the-class-in-new-federal-study-of-remote-learning/\">three online learning technologies\u003c/a> that demonstrated clear evidence for improving student achievement, according to a February 2021 report by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Wijekumar has continued to refine her reading program and test it with more students. Her most recent study, \u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-11106-001\">a large-scale replication in high poverty schools\u003c/a>, was highly successful according to one yardstick, but not so successful, according to another measure. It was published last year in the Journal of Educational Psychology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A team of six researchers led by Wijekumar randomly assigned 17 of 33 schools in the Northeast and along the Texas border to teach reading with ITSS, while the remaining 16 schools taught reading as usual. More than 1,200 fifth graders practiced their reading comprehension using ITSS for 45 minutes a week over six months. Their teachers received 16 hours of training in how to teach reading comprehension this way and also delivered traditional analog reading lessons to their students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After six months, students who received this reading instruction posted significantly higher scores on a researcher-designed assessment, which measured students’ ability to write main ideas, recall key information and understand text structures. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups on a standardized test, the Gray Silent Reading Test (GSRT), which measured students’ general reading comprehension. The researchers did not report state test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/edu0000168\">Earlier studies\u003c/a> with wealthier students \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19345747.2013.853333\">showed improvements\u003c/a> on the standardized reading comprehension test. It’s hard to make sense of why this study showed giant benefits using one measure, but none using another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Substantial changes in the instruction were needed for these high-poverty students. Some were such weak readers that Wijekumar’s team had to draft easier texts so that students could practice the method. But the biggest change was 14 hours of additional teacher training and the creation of instructional guides for the teachers. Wijekumar’s strategies directly contradicted what their schools’ textbooks told them to do. At first, the students were confused with the teachers teaching them one way and ITSS another. So Wijekumar worked with the teachers to scrap their textbook instructions and teach her way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I consulted with Marissa Filderman, a respected reading expert who has \u003ca href=\"https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1323802\">reviewed the literature on comprehension instruction for children who struggle\u003c/a> with reading and is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. She said despite the imperfect evidence from this study, she sees Wijekumar’s body of research as evidence that explicit strategy instruction is important along with building background knowledge and vocabulary. But it’s still an evolving science, and the research isn’t yet clear enough to guide teachers on how much time to spend on each aspect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improving reading comprehension is critical, and I’ll be watching for new research to help answer these questions for teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Shirley Liu contributed reporting. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reading-comprehension-main-idea/\">\u003cem>teaching the main idea\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Nearly a half century ago, \u003ca href=\"https://www.jstor.org/stable/747260\">a landmark study\u003c/a> showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it. Some didn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension. Educators continue to debate how much to emphasize some ideas over others. Although the research on reading comprehension continues, there’s \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/WWC/Docs/PracticeGuide/WWC-practice-guide-reading-intervention-full-text.pdf#page=27\">relatively good evidence\u003c/a> for a collection of teaching approaches, from building vocabulary and background knowledge to leading classroom discussions and encouraging children to check for understanding as they read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That should mean substantial progress toward fixing a problem identified decades ago. But a \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2024.2418582\">paper published in a 2025 issue\u003c/a> of the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Studies of Reading shows that hardly any of these evidence-based practices have filtered into the classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a little bit discouraging,” said Philip Capin, an assistant professor of education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. “There’s debates going on about strategies versus knowledge. But what we often see in classrooms is actually devoid of high-quality strategy instruction or knowledge-building instruction.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Capin is referring to a host of comprehension strategies, such as checking yourself for understanding after reading a paragraph, identifying the author’s main point or summarizing what you have just read. Knowledge building, by contrast, is helpful because it’s easier to comprehend something you are reading if you can connect it to something you already know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Capin led an 11-member team that gathered 66 studies in which reading instruction was observed in real classrooms over the past 40 years. Most of the studies took place after 2000 and included observations of almost 1,800 teachers. The studies not only looked at reading or English language arts classes, but also science and social studies. In some of the studies, researchers recorded hours of instruction and analyzed transcripts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These observations and recordings are just snapshots of what is happening in classrooms. Unfortunately, these observational studies can’t explain why teachers aren’t following the scientific evidence for reading comprehension, and Capin was unable to determine if comprehension instruction had improved most recently with new interest in the science of reading. But he shared a few insights.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Little time spent on reading\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers spend limited time reading texts with children. “The obvious problem is that it’s hard to support reading comprehension if students are not reading,” said Capin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The dearth of reading was especially pronounced in science classes where teachers tended to prefer PowerPoint slides over texts. More time was spent on reading comprehension instruction in reading or English class, but it was still just 23 percent of instructional time. Still, that is a big improvement over the original 1978 study, which documented that only 1 percent of instructional time was spent on reading comprehension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-021-10177-y\">separate survey of middle school teachers\u003c/a> published in 2021 echoes these observational findings that very little reading is taking place in classrooms. Seventy percent of science teachers said they spent less than 6 minutes on texts a day, or less than 30 minutes a week. Only 50 percent of social studies teachers said they spent more time reading in classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s possible that poor reading instruction may beget poor reading instruction,” said Capin. “Teachers frequently report that their students have difficulties reading grade-level texts.” So they avoid reading altogether.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It can seem like a catch-22. Teachers don’t devote more time to reading instruction because students have difficulty reading. But without more time reading, students cannot improve.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>More attention to decoding than comprehension\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Capin said his team found that reading instruction was more focused on word reading skills, what educators call “decoding.” Researchers noticed that teachers were also building students’ knowledge, especially in science and social studies classes. But this knowledge building was mostly divorced from engaging students in text comprehension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We took this approach that reading comprehension instruction is defined by reading and understanding text,” said Capin. That might sound obvious, but Capin said that some advocates of knowledge building criticized his analysis, arguing that knowledge building alone is beneficial for reading comprehension and it doesn’t matter if the teacher uses slides or actual texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Low-level instruction\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Evidence-based reading instruction, as recommended in \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/WWC/Docs/PracticeGuide/WWC-practice-guide-reading-intervention-full-text.pdf#page=27\">teaching guides by the Institute of Education Sciences\u003c/a>, is rare, Capin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, researchers observed “low-level” reading instruction in which a teacher asks a question and students respond with a one-word answer. Capin offered me an example.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teacher: We just read about ancient Egypt. Who were the ancient Egyptian leaders?\u003cbr>\nClass: Pharaohs!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the teacher moves on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A more sophisticated approach might be to ask students about the goals of the pharaohs, or why ancient Egyptians built the tombs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers tended to confirm whether student responses were “right” or “wrong.” Capin said that only 18 percent of teacher responses elaborated on or developed students’ ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Capin said teachers tended to lecture rather than encourage students to talk about what they understand or think. Teachers often read the text aloud, asked a question and then answered the question themselves when students didn’t answer it correctly. He said that leading a discussion might help students better understand the text.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Capin said teachers also often ask generic comprehension questions, such as “What is the main point?” without considering whether the questions are appropriate for the reading passage at hand. For example, in fiction, the author’s main point is not nearly as important as identifying the main characters and their goals. Even evidence-based ways of improving reading comprehension can be poorly executed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some teachers are leading reading discussions in their classrooms. Capin said he visited one such classroom a few weeks ago. But he thinks good comprehension instruction isn’t commonplace because it’s much harder than teaching foundational reading skills. Teachers have to fill in gaps in students’ skills and background knowledge so that everyone can engage. Teacher training programs don’t put enough emphasis on evidence-based methods, and researchers aren’t good at telling educators about these methods. Meanwhile, teachers face pressures to produce high test scores and low-level comprehension strategies can yield short-term results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I also don’t want to pretend that researchers know it all when it comes to reading comprehension instruction,” said Capin. “We are about 20 years behind in the science of reading comprehension instruction compared to foundational reading skills.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Interest in the science of reading has been exploding around the country over the past five years, especially since a podcast, “\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/sold-a-story/\">Sold a Story\u003c/a>,” highlighted the need for more phonics instruction. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another 50 years for comprehension to get better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reading-comprehension-classroom/\">\u003cem>reading comprehension\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Nearly a half century ago, \u003ca href=\"https://www.jstor.org/stable/747260\">a landmark study\u003c/a> showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it. Some didn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension. Educators continue to debate how much to emphasize some ideas over others. Although the research on reading comprehension continues, there’s \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/WWC/Docs/PracticeGuide/WWC-practice-guide-reading-intervention-full-text.pdf#page=27\">relatively good evidence\u003c/a> for a collection of teaching approaches, from building vocabulary and background knowledge to leading classroom discussions and encouraging children to check for understanding as they read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That should mean substantial progress toward fixing a problem identified decades ago. But a \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2024.2418582\">paper published in a 2025 issue\u003c/a> of the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Studies of Reading shows that hardly any of these evidence-based practices have filtered into the classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a little bit discouraging,” said Philip Capin, an assistant professor of education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. “There’s debates going on about strategies versus knowledge. But what we often see in classrooms is actually devoid of high-quality strategy instruction or knowledge-building instruction.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Capin is referring to a host of comprehension strategies, such as checking yourself for understanding after reading a paragraph, identifying the author’s main point or summarizing what you have just read. Knowledge building, by contrast, is helpful because it’s easier to comprehend something you are reading if you can connect it to something you already know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Capin led an 11-member team that gathered 66 studies in which reading instruction was observed in real classrooms over the past 40 years. Most of the studies took place after 2000 and included observations of almost 1,800 teachers. The studies not only looked at reading or English language arts classes, but also science and social studies. In some of the studies, researchers recorded hours of instruction and analyzed transcripts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These observations and recordings are just snapshots of what is happening in classrooms. Unfortunately, these observational studies can’t explain why teachers aren’t following the scientific evidence for reading comprehension, and Capin was unable to determine if comprehension instruction had improved most recently with new interest in the science of reading. But he shared a few insights.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Little time spent on reading\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers spend limited time reading texts with children. “The obvious problem is that it’s hard to support reading comprehension if students are not reading,” said Capin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The dearth of reading was especially pronounced in science classes where teachers tended to prefer PowerPoint slides over texts. More time was spent on reading comprehension instruction in reading or English class, but it was still just 23 percent of instructional time. Still, that is a big improvement over the original 1978 study, which documented that only 1 percent of instructional time was spent on reading comprehension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-021-10177-y\">separate survey of middle school teachers\u003c/a> published in 2021 echoes these observational findings that very little reading is taking place in classrooms. Seventy percent of science teachers said they spent less than 6 minutes on texts a day, or less than 30 minutes a week. Only 50 percent of social studies teachers said they spent more time reading in classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s possible that poor reading instruction may beget poor reading instruction,” said Capin. “Teachers frequently report that their students have difficulties reading grade-level texts.” So they avoid reading altogether.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It can seem like a catch-22. Teachers don’t devote more time to reading instruction because students have difficulty reading. But without more time reading, students cannot improve.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>More attention to decoding than comprehension\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Capin said his team found that reading instruction was more focused on word reading skills, what educators call “decoding.” Researchers noticed that teachers were also building students’ knowledge, especially in science and social studies classes. But this knowledge building was mostly divorced from engaging students in text comprehension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We took this approach that reading comprehension instruction is defined by reading and understanding text,” said Capin. That might sound obvious, but Capin said that some advocates of knowledge building criticized his analysis, arguing that knowledge building alone is beneficial for reading comprehension and it doesn’t matter if the teacher uses slides or actual texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Low-level instruction\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Evidence-based reading instruction, as recommended in \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/WWC/Docs/PracticeGuide/WWC-practice-guide-reading-intervention-full-text.pdf#page=27\">teaching guides by the Institute of Education Sciences\u003c/a>, is rare, Capin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, researchers observed “low-level” reading instruction in which a teacher asks a question and students respond with a one-word answer. Capin offered me an example.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teacher: We just read about ancient Egypt. Who were the ancient Egyptian leaders?\u003cbr>\nClass: Pharaohs!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the teacher moves on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A more sophisticated approach might be to ask students about the goals of the pharaohs, or why ancient Egyptians built the tombs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers tended to confirm whether student responses were “right” or “wrong.” Capin said that only 18 percent of teacher responses elaborated on or developed students’ ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Capin said teachers tended to lecture rather than encourage students to talk about what they understand or think. Teachers often read the text aloud, asked a question and then answered the question themselves when students didn’t answer it correctly. He said that leading a discussion might help students better understand the text.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Capin said teachers also often ask generic comprehension questions, such as “What is the main point?” without considering whether the questions are appropriate for the reading passage at hand. For example, in fiction, the author’s main point is not nearly as important as identifying the main characters and their goals. Even evidence-based ways of improving reading comprehension can be poorly executed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some teachers are leading reading discussions in their classrooms. Capin said he visited one such classroom a few weeks ago. But he thinks good comprehension instruction isn’t commonplace because it’s much harder than teaching foundational reading skills. Teachers have to fill in gaps in students’ skills and background knowledge so that everyone can engage. Teacher training programs don’t put enough emphasis on evidence-based methods, and researchers aren’t good at telling educators about these methods. Meanwhile, teachers face pressures to produce high test scores and low-level comprehension strategies can yield short-term results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I also don’t want to pretend that researchers know it all when it comes to reading comprehension instruction,” said Capin. “We are about 20 years behind in the science of reading comprehension instruction compared to foundational reading skills.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Interest in the science of reading has been exploding around the country over the past five years, especially since a podcast, “\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/sold-a-story/\">Sold a Story\u003c/a>,” highlighted the need for more phonics instruction. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another 50 years for comprehension to get better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reading-comprehension-classroom/\">\u003cem>reading comprehension\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Lately, the internet discourse is about how \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64953/its-not-too-late-to-read-that-entire-book-with-your-students\">students don’t know how to read full books\u003c/a>. And notably, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/59856/6-questions-to-better-understand-math-and-reading-scores\">reading test scores are down\u003c/a>, so it’s no wonder educators are searching for solutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Middle school readers often have momentum from elementary school reading habits — like read-alouds, interactive reading in the classroom and making connections to real life through non-fiction project-based learning. But for high schoolers, developing reading stamina can be difficult because these practices are often discontinued sometime in middle school. However, librarians like \u003ca href=\"https://www.juliaetorres.com/\">Julia Torres\u003c/a> have identified several strategies to get teens excited about reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>High schoolers are “looking to explore more complex subject matter…but a lot of them lack the stamina to be able to see stories through to the end,” said Torres, who is also an educator and activist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teens often enjoy and are more likely to read books that they can relate to in some way, according to Torres, who recommended books like “Long Way Down” by \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55528/teaching-a-new-generation-about-the-history-of-racist-ideas\">Jason Reynolds\u003c/a> because of its engaging subject matter, pacing and relatable language. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64402/how-debunking-myths-about-graphic-novels-and-comics-can-unlock-learning\">Graphic novels can also bridge the gap\u003c/a> between middle and high school level reading because of the more mature subject matter that they offer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in order to read a book, you have to like it. “Nobody’s going to actually read something unless they want to—they’ll find ways around it,” Torres said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finding your reading niche can take time and a lot of trial and error, and growing a love for reading can’t be forced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It can be hard for anybody of any age, but definitely for young people to find that book that they’re really excited about,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationalbook.org/people/siva-ramakrishnan/\">Siva Ramakrishnan\u003c/a>, the director of Young Adult Programs & Services at the New York Public Library (NYPL).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/live/VsCFRveMEG0\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Teens Are Reading, and More \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Something as simple as proximity to books can encourage teens to pick up a book and read. For the NYPL, which serves communities in Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx across 89 locations, physical and e-book circulation was counted at 700,000 for teens alone during the 2023-24 fiscal year. This was an increase from the year before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Contrary to what the recent teen and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64953/its-not-too-late-to-read-that-entire-book-with-your-students\">young adult literacy discourse\u003c/a> might suggest, “young people are going in-person to libraries in greater numbers than in decades before,” said Ramakrishnan. But teens aren’t always going to libraries just to check out books. Public libraries provide space for teens to access Wi-Fi, do homework, socialize and participate in programs like 3D printing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Libraries have become places where young people gather,” said Ramakrishnan.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Banned books\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Books often provide a welcome space for young people to see themselves reflected in what they are reading, but when books are banned, some groups of people can be left behind. While libraries have become a place for teens to congregate during non-school hours, this still does not guarantee access to all reading materials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2023, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data\">4,240 books were banned\u003c/a> from schools and libraries across the nation — a 65% increase from the year prior. “The majority of these banned or challenged books are aimed at materials for young people, and disproportionately these are books that are written by or about people of color or people who identify as LGBTQ+,” said Ramakrishnan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Book bans attack “two really critical components of the reading ecosystem that exist for kids,” said Ramakrishnan — schools and libraries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.ala.org/\">American Library Association\u003c/a> began their \u003ca href=\"https://www.ala.org/bbooks/banned\">Banned Books Week\u003c/a> in 1982, and it still continues today. The NYPL has riffed off of this annual tradition with their year-round \u003ca href=\"https://www.nypl.org/spotlight/freedom-to-read\">Protect The Freedom To Read\u003c/a> initiative, which houses their \u003ca href=\"https://www.nypl.org/spotlight/freedom-to-read/teen-book-club\">Banned Book Club for teens\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our mission is to make knowledge accessible to everybody,” said Ramakrishnan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When options are limited, especially the reading options that might open other students to a viewpoint that is unfamiliar to them, “that makes it harder for a young person to pick up a book and get really excited about it,” Ramakrishnan continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This year, NYPL’s Banned Book Club for teens is reading four titles: “\u003ca href=\"https://www.mikecurato.com/flamer\">Flamer\u003c/a>” by Mike Curato, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57600413-run\">Run: Book One\u003c/a>” by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, “\u003ca href=\"https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250143174/gowiththeflow/\">Go With the Flow\u003c/a>” by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann, and “\u003ca href=\"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602718/the-magic-fish-by-trung-le-nguyen/\">The Magic Fish\u003c/a>” by Trung Le Nguyen. Each book is also paired with a discussion guide, which is accessible to educators and teens across the country, as well as \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/live/VsCFRveMEG0\">online author Q&A\u003c/a> which are led by NYPL teen ambassadors.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Reading is Reading is Reading \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Developing healthy reading habits — such as confidence in navigating knowledge systems like libraries and museums, self-selecting appropriate texts, and distinguishing fact from fiction and opinion — needs to happen before long-term sustained reading can happen, said Torres. And these healthy reading habits need to happen early, between fourth and seventh grades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Torres, adults who are responsible for facilitating healthy reading habits for students must understand that in this day and age, literacy is multimodal. Young people read many things in many different ways. For example, they might read \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/56580/how-fan-fiction-inspires-kids-to-read-and-write-and-write-and-write\">fan fiction\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/46125/listening-isnt-cheating-how-audio-books-can-help-us-learn\">audiobooks\u003c/a>, physical books and anime subtitles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We need to keep in mind that their literacy encompasses so much more than just reading a book cover to cover,” said Torres. These multimodal reading habits shouldn’t be viewed as a threat to the physical book, Torres added, “but something that could be a companion to the physical book.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a student already reads anime subtitles, they might be interested in reading Light Novels — books that translate popular anime into prose, and sometimes include images. From there, an educator might help a student extract the themes or characters that they gravitate towards and recommend another book to read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pretty soon, a student who may not have known where to begin reading has an entire genre that they connect with and can continue reading, while still engaging in the other modalities of literacy that they already practiced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One popular platform that educators and parents can use to help students find books within their interests is \u003ca href=\"https://www.ebsco.com/novelist\">NoveList\u003c/a>, which provides a database of reviews, and informs the reader of a book’s tone. Additionally, “[NoveList] gives you all kinds of helpful ways to pair a book with the next book in a reader’s journey,” said Torres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are also other ways to support students in developing healthy reading habits towards greater reading stamina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Librarians conduct needs assessments for students, or what Torres calls a “Tastes and Habits” interest survey. These assessments evaluate what a reader needs from pacing to complexity, said Torres. Students may also have cultural and life experiences that can inform the type of reading they might gravitate towards.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Developing reading stamina\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>But what about the kids who aren’t at the library every day?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One way to reach students who may not be as immersed in literary spaces is to remind them that “there are many different kinds of reading lives that we can develop,” said Torres. There isn’t one type of reading and it doesn’t have to just look like reading book after book, she continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s to our disservice and the disservice of…young people that we shame them for not being able to sit down and read a 200-page novel from beginning to end,” said Torres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students need to become skilled at more technical reading, facilitators and educators need to teach students to diversify the ways they can dig deep into the text.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because data does suggest that, overall, \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/12/among-many-u-s-children-reading-for-fun-has-become-less-common-federal-data-shows/\">young people are reading less\u003c/a>, it’s important to expand the reach of literary spaces as far as they can reach, said Ramakrishnan. For example, the NYPL places video games next to books about mental health, anime or sci-fi. “We want teens to feel like our library spaces are their own,” said Ramakrishnan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Ramakrishnan, it’s important to remind young people that “you can read for as long as it interests you and you can read the same book again and again for as long as it interests you.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Lately, the internet discourse is about how \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64953/its-not-too-late-to-read-that-entire-book-with-your-students\">students don’t know how to read full books\u003c/a>. And notably, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/59856/6-questions-to-better-understand-math-and-reading-scores\">reading test scores are down\u003c/a>, so it’s no wonder educators are searching for solutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Middle school readers often have momentum from elementary school reading habits — like read-alouds, interactive reading in the classroom and making connections to real life through non-fiction project-based learning. But for high schoolers, developing reading stamina can be difficult because these practices are often discontinued sometime in middle school. However, librarians like \u003ca href=\"https://www.juliaetorres.com/\">Julia Torres\u003c/a> have identified several strategies to get teens excited about reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>High schoolers are “looking to explore more complex subject matter…but a lot of them lack the stamina to be able to see stories through to the end,” said Torres, who is also an educator and activist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teens often enjoy and are more likely to read books that they can relate to in some way, according to Torres, who recommended books like “Long Way Down” by \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55528/teaching-a-new-generation-about-the-history-of-racist-ideas\">Jason Reynolds\u003c/a> because of its engaging subject matter, pacing and relatable language. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64402/how-debunking-myths-about-graphic-novels-and-comics-can-unlock-learning\">Graphic novels can also bridge the gap\u003c/a> between middle and high school level reading because of the more mature subject matter that they offer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in order to read a book, you have to like it. “Nobody’s going to actually read something unless they want to—they’ll find ways around it,” Torres said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finding your reading niche can take time and a lot of trial and error, and growing a love for reading can’t be forced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It can be hard for anybody of any age, but definitely for young people to find that book that they’re really excited about,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationalbook.org/people/siva-ramakrishnan/\">Siva Ramakrishnan\u003c/a>, the director of Young Adult Programs & Services at the New York Public Library (NYPL).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/live/VsCFRveMEG0\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Teens Are Reading, and More \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Something as simple as proximity to books can encourage teens to pick up a book and read. For the NYPL, which serves communities in Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx across 89 locations, physical and e-book circulation was counted at 700,000 for teens alone during the 2023-24 fiscal year. This was an increase from the year before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Contrary to what the recent teen and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64953/its-not-too-late-to-read-that-entire-book-with-your-students\">young adult literacy discourse\u003c/a> might suggest, “young people are going in-person to libraries in greater numbers than in decades before,” said Ramakrishnan. But teens aren’t always going to libraries just to check out books. Public libraries provide space for teens to access Wi-Fi, do homework, socialize and participate in programs like 3D printing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Libraries have become places where young people gather,” said Ramakrishnan.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Banned books\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Books often provide a welcome space for young people to see themselves reflected in what they are reading, but when books are banned, some groups of people can be left behind. While libraries have become a place for teens to congregate during non-school hours, this still does not guarantee access to all reading materials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2023, \u003ca href=\"https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data\">4,240 books were banned\u003c/a> from schools and libraries across the nation — a 65% increase from the year prior. “The majority of these banned or challenged books are aimed at materials for young people, and disproportionately these are books that are written by or about people of color or people who identify as LGBTQ+,” said Ramakrishnan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Book bans attack “two really critical components of the reading ecosystem that exist for kids,” said Ramakrishnan — schools and libraries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.ala.org/\">American Library Association\u003c/a> began their \u003ca href=\"https://www.ala.org/bbooks/banned\">Banned Books Week\u003c/a> in 1982, and it still continues today. The NYPL has riffed off of this annual tradition with their year-round \u003ca href=\"https://www.nypl.org/spotlight/freedom-to-read\">Protect The Freedom To Read\u003c/a> initiative, which houses their \u003ca href=\"https://www.nypl.org/spotlight/freedom-to-read/teen-book-club\">Banned Book Club for teens\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our mission is to make knowledge accessible to everybody,” said Ramakrishnan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When options are limited, especially the reading options that might open other students to a viewpoint that is unfamiliar to them, “that makes it harder for a young person to pick up a book and get really excited about it,” Ramakrishnan continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This year, NYPL’s Banned Book Club for teens is reading four titles: “\u003ca href=\"https://www.mikecurato.com/flamer\">Flamer\u003c/a>” by Mike Curato, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57600413-run\">Run: Book One\u003c/a>” by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, “\u003ca href=\"https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250143174/gowiththeflow/\">Go With the Flow\u003c/a>” by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann, and “\u003ca href=\"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602718/the-magic-fish-by-trung-le-nguyen/\">The Magic Fish\u003c/a>” by Trung Le Nguyen. Each book is also paired with a discussion guide, which is accessible to educators and teens across the country, as well as \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/live/VsCFRveMEG0\">online author Q&A\u003c/a> which are led by NYPL teen ambassadors.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Reading is Reading is Reading \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Developing healthy reading habits — such as confidence in navigating knowledge systems like libraries and museums, self-selecting appropriate texts, and distinguishing fact from fiction and opinion — needs to happen before long-term sustained reading can happen, said Torres. And these healthy reading habits need to happen early, between fourth and seventh grades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Torres, adults who are responsible for facilitating healthy reading habits for students must understand that in this day and age, literacy is multimodal. Young people read many things in many different ways. For example, they might read \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/56580/how-fan-fiction-inspires-kids-to-read-and-write-and-write-and-write\">fan fiction\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/46125/listening-isnt-cheating-how-audio-books-can-help-us-learn\">audiobooks\u003c/a>, physical books and anime subtitles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We need to keep in mind that their literacy encompasses so much more than just reading a book cover to cover,” said Torres. These multimodal reading habits shouldn’t be viewed as a threat to the physical book, Torres added, “but something that could be a companion to the physical book.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a student already reads anime subtitles, they might be interested in reading Light Novels — books that translate popular anime into prose, and sometimes include images. From there, an educator might help a student extract the themes or characters that they gravitate towards and recommend another book to read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pretty soon, a student who may not have known where to begin reading has an entire genre that they connect with and can continue reading, while still engaging in the other modalities of literacy that they already practiced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One popular platform that educators and parents can use to help students find books within their interests is \u003ca href=\"https://www.ebsco.com/novelist\">NoveList\u003c/a>, which provides a database of reviews, and informs the reader of a book’s tone. Additionally, “[NoveList] gives you all kinds of helpful ways to pair a book with the next book in a reader’s journey,” said Torres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are also other ways to support students in developing healthy reading habits towards greater reading stamina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Librarians conduct needs assessments for students, or what Torres calls a “Tastes and Habits” interest survey. These assessments evaluate what a reader needs from pacing to complexity, said Torres. Students may also have cultural and life experiences that can inform the type of reading they might gravitate towards.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Developing reading stamina\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>But what about the kids who aren’t at the library every day?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One way to reach students who may not be as immersed in literary spaces is to remind them that “there are many different kinds of reading lives that we can develop,” said Torres. There isn’t one type of reading and it doesn’t have to just look like reading book after book, she continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s to our disservice and the disservice of…young people that we shame them for not being able to sit down and read a 200-page novel from beginning to end,” said Torres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students need to become skilled at more technical reading, facilitators and educators need to teach students to diversify the ways they can dig deep into the text.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because data does suggest that, overall, \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/12/among-many-u-s-children-reading-for-fun-has-become-less-common-federal-data-shows/\">young people are reading less\u003c/a>, it’s important to expand the reach of literary spaces as far as they can reach, said Ramakrishnan. For example, the NYPL places video games next to books about mental health, anime or sci-fi. “We want teens to feel like our library spaces are their own,” said Ramakrishnan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"pri-the-world": {
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"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"radiolab": {
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"reveal": {
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},
"rightnowish": {
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"title": "Rightnowish",
"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
"info": "Rightnowish digs into life in the Bay Area right now… ish. Journalist Pendarvis Harshaw takes us to galleries painted on the sides of liquor stores in West Oakland. We'll dance in warehouses in the Bayview, make smoothies with kids in South Berkeley, and listen to classical music in a 1984 Cutlass Supreme in Richmond. Every week, Pen talks to movers and shakers about how the Bay Area shapes what they create, and how they shape the place we call home.",
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},
"science-friday": {
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"info": "Science Friday is a weekly science talk show, broadcast live over public radio stations nationwide. Each week, the show focuses on science topics that are in the news and tries to bring an educated, balanced discussion to bear on the scientific issues at hand. Panels of expert guests join host Ira Flatow, a veteran science journalist, to discuss science and to take questions from listeners during the call-in portion of the program.",
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"snap-judgment": {
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"title": "Snap Judgment",
"tagline": "Real stories with killer beats",
"info": "The Snap Judgment radio show and podcast mixes real stories with killer beats to produce cinematic, dramatic radio. Snap's musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another. This is storytelling... with a BEAT!! Snap first aired on public radio stations nationwide in July 2010. Today, Snap Judgment airs on over 450 public radio stations and is brought to the airwaves by KQED & PRX.",
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},
"soldout": {
"id": "soldout",
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