Why are U.S. literacy rates declining?

We're telling our students reading is important. You need to be literate, but when do we actually model that? Literacy rates in the US have been declining for a while now. Researchers have turned various assessments to figure out why. There have been questions about the role of curricula, teacher training, and classroom best practices. But at the end of the day, we want to figure out how do we help our kids read better? (upbeat music) Welcome to Harvard Thinking, a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, we're joined by. - Marty West, I'm academic dean and a professor of education here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. - He's also the deputy director of the program on education policy and governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. Serves on the state board of elementary and secondary education in Massachusetts, and his vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the nation's report card. Then. - Phil Capen, I am an assistant professor and a reading researcher located at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. - He also leads the Bridges Lab, which focuses on bridging research and practice as it relates to reading instruction. And our final guest. - I'm Pamela Mason. I am the co-chair of the Teaching and Teacher Leadership Program here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. - She's also the chair of the Literacy and Languages Concentration and is involved in the committee against censorship at the National Council of Teachers of English. And I'm Samantha Liny-Perfoss, your host and a writer for the Harvard Gazette. Today, we'll dive into literacy rates in the US and how to best support our students and their quest to become better readers. Just as at the stage, what is the state of literacy in the US and how do we fare when compared to other countries? - There are two different international assessment programs that American students participate in regularly. And both of those show that American students score in roughly the middle third of countries among developed democracies. And that's actually a little better than we perform in math. But I think what has really drawn a lot of attention to this issue in recent years is data from our own national assessment, the national assessment of educational progress. And what we see there is that American students' literacy skills peaked in roughly the middle of the last decade and has fallen significantly since that time. And so I think it's really that decline in literacy skills that is drawing concern. There are proficiency targets that the national assessment governing board on which I serve sets. And I actually prefer to look at the percentage of students who are failing to meet even the basic level of proficiency. And that share is much higher than we want it to be about 40% of fourth graders, about a third of eighth graders. - Is that something that predated COVID or is the pandemic one of the reasons that it's been in decline? - So the pandemic certainly didn't help, but in particular when you're looking at reading skills, it's actually hard to make a case that the pandemic is the most important factor. Reading scores for American students peaked in 2015 in grade four and in 2013 actually in grade eight. In grade eight, the scores have been falling steadily since 2017. And if I showed you a graph of that decline, you wouldn't be able to pick out the years in which school closures took place and the pandemic was raging. Rather, it looks like just a steady linear decline over now close to a decade. - One thing I would add is that Marty's right that there has been a decline in recent years for both students reaching the basic level and the proficient level. But I think if you step back a bit, the scores, for instance, 40% of students did not reach the proficient level in 2024, right? But if you look back even to the highest numbers, which Marty alluded to in the 2010s, the number is still about one third, right? And so I think we should wonder whether we're okay with that. Are we okay with about a third of students performing at what the name considers to be the basic level? And so I guess I'm trying to point to this idea that the scores have declined in the more recent years, but I would say that the scores have been relatively stable over time and not high enough. We also measure by this assessment. And so one can also question, what is this assessment actually assessing and what kinds of reading is it assessing and is that the kind of reading that's happening in our schools? As Marty mentioned, we're doing pretty okay internationally. In most countries, there is a national curriculum, national textbooks and national teacher preparation. Hearing the United States, we have a variety of state-by-state and even sometimes district by district on what the curriculum is, what the materials are. So when we are here and the United States are measuring our national assessment, all things are not equal in terms of the types of materials that are being used to teach literacy and the type of techniques and the professional development that's offered to teachers in each school district, in each classroom, in each state. - Does the data get to that granular level? The main nape assessment, what we refer to as the nation's report card, does produce results not just for the nation as a whole, but for each state. And you are able to identify some states that have been more successful in raising literacy skills over time. In recent years, a lot of people have paid attention to Mississippi as a state that placed a lot of emphasis on improving early grades, and has had considerable improvement over the past decade. I'll be it from a very low level. Its neighbor, Louisiana, is the only state right now with reading scores that exceed where it was in 2019, just prior to the pandemic. So something it's doing has helped it weather that storm. So there are places we can go to to look at for ideas about what we might be able to do to change these trends. - Do we know what they're doing that's different? - For Mississippi, they really had a laser focus on early literacy, K to three. They had a lot of money put into teacher professional learning in terms of getting them high quality instructional materials. And then they instituted also literacy coaching. So you got new materials and new curriculum. You were given the initial how to implement it, but then you had your ongoing coaching so that they were finding that it was a combination of efforts. It was not one thing that the state of Mississippi did that improved their outcomes. - So then on the flip side of that coin for some of the states where they are seeing rates decline, do we know why they're in decline? What has changed in those places? - So I think we need to be careful in particular when using the data source that I've been referring to, which is much better about telling us what's happening to student achievement in the US than why. But I think there are some things we can use to begin to try to rule out and rule in potential explanations. And one of them is that one of the more troubling aspects of recent trends is that these declines and average achievement have been much more pronounced among low performing students, those at the 10th and the 25th percentile than they are among high performing students. In fact, students at the 90th percentile in the distribution of reading achievement despite the pandemic are doing just about as well as ever. So we should be looking for factors that would influence learning especially for students who are already struggling. What we haven't yet talked about is that there's a huge gap between students based on socioeconomic factors, for instance. And the children that come from low SES families, low socioeconomic status families, are much less likely to perform well in reading than students that come from high SES. And that, I think, is due to many factors. But one of the primary factors is related, I think, to funding that in our country funding is tied in many places to property taxes, which leads to inequitable levels of funding for different students. And so students that come from low SES backgrounds are more likely to go to under-resource schools, as well as to receive less supports outside of school. I think there's something seductive about being able to point to one solution to this large problem. And I think there's many factors that are contributing to the declining literacy rates that we're seeing. I mean, there's been a tremendous amount of legislation that's been passed. So something like 175 laws have been passed in 49 states. And so we don't yet know exactly it. And I don't think maybe we'll ever be able to use the nape to fully disentangle which policies are leading to which changes. We have to be careful about that. Could you give me an example of how some of this legislation might impact outcomes? Let me try to make the argument that it's possible that some of these changes could have an impact in the future on students that are at the 10th percentile for those students that have difficulties. So what we know for those students is that they really benefit from more direct instructional approaches. It's a learning to read. It involves understanding the alphabetic code in English. it also involves developing oral language and vocabulary and reading comprehension. And so many of these policies are based in research that is aligned to this idea of providing more explicit instruction. And so I think we've had these policy shifts because the general public has had discontent about the level of reading performance in our country. And I think we need to pay attention to that. There's a clear call for change and I don't think we yet know whether these improvements will impact student learning or how they may and for whom. But I think to the extent that those policies derive and align to empirical research and evidence-based practices, I think they can lead to positive change for students. I agree with Phil that we need to be more explicit around how English works and how reading works and how to make what most children see as we go online when they're four years old towards and meaning and engagement. So teachers are using screeners and diagnostic instruments and progress monitoring so that we are trying to keep our learners moving on through the literacy development process. When you start not being good at something, then you feel like I'm not good at this. This isn't for me. And then you start to assume a self-concept because you're trying to protect yourself even at five years old about well, it's silly, it's stupid, it's not important. And so then they kind of withdraw from leaning into their learning edges and having some productive struggle. So really having this data that helps teachers intervene at an early stage before students develop this negative attitude about themselves as learners and about literacy in general. We haven't talked about this a lot yet but we've touched on curriculum and one of the things that I saw is there is a little bit of a debate between two approaches to teaching reading. There is balanced literacy which is a more organic, less structured approach that focuses on it and stilling a love of reading first and then there is the science of reading approach which is a more research based explicit teaching of phonics and other literacy skills. I am curious to hear what those two approaches offer and what works, what doesn't work. Jean-Charl and 1967, learning to read the great debate, said that phonics instruction at the early grades is really scientifically research proved and I think we've seen our research agendas through a decade since then really point to, we've gone a little bit to the left, we've gone a little bit to the right but really focusing on phonics and foundational skills is most effective for most students. The thing about phonics is that it is a means to an end. It is not an end in and of itself and it's a means to unlocking words, unlocking sentences, unlocking meaning and to really just focus on the phonics without having some continuous text that is meaningful is not necessarily going to come up with the results that we want in terms of children who can read and who want to read. One of my literacy interns had a student in the third grade and was really recalcitrant and all found out that he liked science and as soon as she brought in narrative books about scientists, informational books about science, poems about science, he was all in and he really engaged in some productive struggle around decoding words and applying his phonic skills because he was motivated to read that science, whatever it was, poem, narrative, informational text. I think foundational skills, the science of reading really has reminded us the importance of phonics but also pushing us toward okay to what end. The example you just gave of those science books makes me think about comprehension and how it's important in addition to phonics. Should there be more of a focus on comprehension? We talked about in the early grades helping students to learn to read is critical and that is connected to reading comprehension right? If you can't read the words off the page it's very unlikely you'll be able to understand what you read but reading words is a necessary but insufficient step in being able to read with understanding. Reading comprehension requires the coordination of many skills coordinating your ability to read words off the page with your understanding of the meanings of the words. Also it really relies on your background knowledge. It's very difficult to understand a text if you don't have significant background knowledge and we do have a lot of information to bring to bear on the best ways to support reading comprehension. It's helping students to read words, it's helping students to build their knowledge of the world, it's helping students to engage actively in comprehending a text. We've all gone through this and sometimes you're reading a text and if you're not actively engaged it'll just keep reading and they go oh wait I forgot what I was reading about and so you have to go back and read. For some students they don't naturally do that they need some support and medical admission. I do this exercise in my graduate class think of the word run are you in? How many ways can you use the word run and as you do that you think of all the different disciplines and areas of expertise that word shows up in with very different meanings. One time we came up with 27 uses of the word run. Let's say you do a computer run you have a run in a baseball game you run an errand your nose runs it's the same word but again your background knowledge and your comprehension if you've seen this word use many times in different contexts then you're of that mindset to say okay this is not the definition of run that I was thinking of let me reread and try to figure out how this particular text is using this same word. One of the trends that I've been struck by is the really dramatic decline in the share of students who report that they read for fun on their own time so among 13 year olds the share of students who report that they read for fun on their own time almost every day fell almost by half from 27% in 2012 to 14% in 2023. The shares say they never hardly ever read for fun on their own jumped from 22% to 31% over that same period and what could be driving that trend I don't think we have smoking gun evidence that the rise of screen-based childhood is a direct contributor to the literacy trends that we're seeing but I'm willing to put it very high on my list of potential suspects. I think I agree with you Marty but I also think we're telling our students reading is important you need to be literate but when do we actually model that when do our children see us reading for pleasure see us laugh at something we've read see us engage like don't bother me right now I'm in the middle of this chapter I'll talk to you later even in schools when we have drop everything in read time the teachers should be reading rather than using that time to grade so I think that it's both the the screen and the technology time but also it's the modeling that literacy is important in our daily lives. I certainly agree and I also think the data that's looking at adult literacy we're seeing big drops among adults and so we see more adults are performing at the lowest level of literacy on adult literacy assessments and so I think there is a lot of signal here both in the recent decline and in the general underperformance in reading that we're seeing in our country. There are a lot of kids and even adults who are very resistant to reading and that makes me very sad as a book lover. Marty you mentioned the rise in screen-based childhoods could you talk more about that and I'm also wondering if there are other suspects as to why people are reading less. So I definitely don't know of any evidence that would tell us exactly what's going on my sense though is that the value of reading and the pleasure that students would get from it has not changed significantly over time so my hunch is that readings decline because it's facing growing competition from other forms of media consumption that may offer students more immediate gratification. I think we have a lot of evidence to support the extent to which technology can be a distractor when students are engaged in learning processes and that ability to distract to compete for attention could also lead to diminished appetite for persistence in reading on their own. For me I don't really enjoy things I'm not good at and I think that if we are able to develop and support students to become more confident readers that they're going to enjoy it more and so I think sometimes we'll draw this distinction between reading to become more fluent or to enjoy the process more and I think those things you can't really disconnect them and in my research I want students to engage with interesting texts with complicated ideas and I want them to be able to choose books that align to their interests. I also though really think if I want students to enjoy reading I really got to help them to more easily read books and to more easily read the words off the page to know the meanings of the words and to connect the different ideas within the text. As a parent I would encourage and always have encouraged, reading aloud. I know that sounds very old fashioned, but we all like podcasts here. We all like ebooks, we like people reading to us. So our young people really still enjoy having a significant adult, read aloud to them, whether it's before bedtime or just some quiet time and everybody just needs to decompress from our very hurried lives. Is reading aloud and even reading aloud the same book over and over again. And the adult can say, okay, I'm gonna make a mistake, on this page so that we're keeping our children engaged and they're making sense, they're listening to the words, they're doing all the things that good readers do, and then they catch us making an intentional mistake. No, no, no, that's not the right word. That doesn't make any sense. So they're building their comprehension skills. So they're really merging their oral language skills and applying it to their literacy. And again, brings us back to bonding across generations and some joy in literature and words in books. So I put that out there for all the hurried and harried parents that it is time, well spent, and you probably need that decompressing time just as much as your young people do. - This is changing years a little bit, but I wanted to revisit what policies have been successful in addressing some of the issues that are resulting in the declining rates. I think it's gonna be a while before we can know, for sure, which, if any of these bundles of policies that Phil described earlier are most effective in improving literacy rates, in part, because they are being implemented generally as a bundle. Hopefully we'll see sort of national indicators move in the right direction, but I think it's gonna be very hard to assign credit to discrete elements. I can tell you, though, the policy makers still are going to have to make decisions, even without definitive evidence. Here in Massachusetts, the Healey administration designed a program called Literacy Launch to try to make Massachusetts one of the states that succeeds in reversing these trends. It's centered around grants to school districts to purchase high quality curricular materials and literacy screeners they can do to try to identify and intervene with students who are on track for difficulty. It has ramped up professional development for teachers and then it has resources that the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is using to really speed up its review of teacher education programs to make sure that those teacher ed programs are grounding the preparation of teachers in a comprehensive understanding of the science of reading. So those are some of the sort of bets that we're making here in Massachusetts and hopefully we'll have a successful story to tell in the next several years. - As we begin this new school year, what should we all be thinking about? - I'm thinking about how teachers are starting out their school year. A lot of them aren't being given new curricula and are they being well supported in the implementation of that curricula? And are they able to build good literacy skills that are tied to research that we know is effective for implementation and also to show their joy in reading and writing and sharing that joy with their learners and engaging parents and families also in this literacy learning journey. - I think for me as a reading researcher, there's lots of questions that I'm interested in asking and trying to answer related to the best ways to provide instruction and to organize our schools to better support students who may be at risk for reading difficulties. I think the other thing I'm interested in is what I'm noticing is that the conversations about literacy are more mature and sophisticated, both among teachers and school administrators and researchers than they've been in the past. And I think we've had plenty of pendulum swings in the past and I'm hopeful that we can continue to focus on aligning practice with research and that we can develop and support teachers and educational leaders to be good consumers of the curriculum materials that they're adopting and the choices they're making and that we can avoid another pendulum shift and that this effort to align research and practice can be longstanding. - I think for policymakers, the big question they face is how to take advantage of this uptick in concern about literacy and interest in improving literacy rates. How to turn that into an opportunity to better align what's going on in American classrooms and American homes with a rich understanding of the science of reading. - Well, thank all of you for sharing your thoughts with us today. - Thanks for the opportunity. - Thanks for listening. If you'd like to see a transcript of this episode or listen to other episodes, visit Harvard.edu/thinking. If you want to support this podcast, you can do so by rating us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or sharing this episode with a friend or colleague. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Liny Purfas, with editing and production support from Sarah Lamati, editing by Ryan Mulkei, original music and sound design by Noel Flat, produced by Harvard University, copyright 2025.