How To Solve The Literacy Crisis The Fairfield Mirror

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the world – but especially the United States – has been plagued by stunning decreases in literacy and comprehension among students. The 2025 National Report Card index displayed the lowest levels of literacy since 1992, with a widening gap between the best and worst performing students. The pandemic confining students to a precarious learning environment and failures to adjust likely form part of this phenomenon, but could there be a deeper institutional cause? Throughout the 2000s up to the mid-2010s, the state of Mississippi consistently placed last in education, literacy and reading comprehension in national experiments. This phenomenon was so renowned that it coined a jeering phrase across other low-scoring states: “Thank god for Mississippi!” In recent years, however, there’s been a turnaround which some have called the “Mississippi Miracle”. The reintroduction of phonics-based education caused Mississippi to jump from the 49th worst state for student reading comprehension, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2013, to the 21st best in 2022.

Phonics is the practice of teaching children language by having them sound out parts of a word as they write to build a connection between the spoken word and the written language at an... Among educators, there’s been a longstanding debate over whether phonics or “whole language” practices, which is the notion that language is a maturational feature that comes naturally to humans and doesn’t need to be... Around the 1990s, many schools abandoned phonics in favor of the more concise whole language approach, but ever-worsening reading scores indicate they made the wrong gamble. There have been a myriad of consequences of “whole language” learning: students struggling to transfer the written word to their brains develop limited capacity for reading or understanding texts, hindering academic performance later in... If a child declares that they hate reading, it might be because their teachers have failed to provide them with the capacity to understand the text. This has also negatively impacted media literacy, as if one struggles to transfer the latent text to their conscious mind, how can they pick up on deeper themes, literary conventions, or subliminal meanings in...

Challenges to literacy have also shown themselves in changes to everyday speech. Various malapropisms have become mainstream in not only online discourse but even esteemed publications. The word “infamous”, which refers to someone or something well known for negative qualities, has seen interchangeable use with its antonym “famous”. The word “bemused” has been used as a synonym for “amused”, when it’s actually a synonym of “confused”. In August of this year, the magazine Variety had to delete a tweet reading that “Guillermo del Toro casted Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein” following a cavalcade of tweets bemoaning the increasing use of the... The reading crisis in the United States is among the most solvable problems of our time, but as we commit to the work of solving it, let’s understand how we arrived at the current...

That galvanizing reality check gets even more stark when we reckon with the proficiency figure for black American kids: just 18 percent are proficient by fourth grade. The primary driver of the reading crisis is a disconnect between the overwhelming scientific evidence on reading, affirmed by researchers across decades of studies, and the still-widespread practices that have shaped what teachers know... As more and more teachers discover the research evidence and square it with what actually happens with the students in their classrooms, many find that they have to move through some guilt, and overcome... Most refocus to find renewed hope of fulfilling their calling to open up learning for a better future when they learn that 95% of students can learn to read with structured literacy methods. It’s not the kids. It’s not the teachers.

It’s the approach, and it can be changed, and the sooner, the better. Ethical individual teachers and school leaders supporting cohorts of educators have become an unstoppable movement toward reading justice for all our kids. Parents are learning what the families of dyslexic learners have known for years: it’s not enough to assume that teachers know how to teach reading or, when it’s not working, to take comfort in... Too many do not, as the 8th-grade national scores in reading make clear. Parents, teachers, and community activists are advocating for kids whose reading potential is underserved and underestimated through racial and socioeconomic inequality, coming together to insist that reading is an undeniable civil right of our... Every child deserves the joy of learning through literacy, and the denial of that right amounts to preventable harm.

Some of you reading this know, while some of you will have to imagine, what it feels like sitting through year after year of school knowing that your inability to decode words must mean... Choosing to act out behaviorally, to withdraw anxiously, to cheat elaborately, to leave altogether, becomes all too common—because these things provide a shield from the slowly unspooling trauma of being the kid who never... We at the Stern Center embrace our role as catalysts in a hopeful yet insistent change movement of parents, teachers, and leaders who are waking up to the powerful opportunity to make a difference... Teachers are bringing their own experiences, instructional wisdom, and commitment to their students to a growing recognition of how discredited methods and implicit biases have left too many students behind. The statistics below make it plain as day: race and socioeconomic status are too often used as an excuse for reading failure, but we who embrace equity of opportunity can commit to a shared... While the pandemic has challenged literacy development and outcomes for many students, that doesn’t mean America is currently in a literacy crisis.

Professor Catherine Snow, a pioneer with decades of research in language and literacy development, says she’s puzzled by the public discourse about a literacy crisis. “I am … struck by the degree to which people are willing to invoke a literacy crisis, when the data do not support anything like a literacy crisis,” Snow says. “NAEP scores, over the last 10, 15 years have grown — slowly, but they have gotten better in literacy.” There are many districts that weathered the storm of COVID. Snow cautions that it’s important to remember the negative impacts on children’s reading test scores is not evenly distributed, and in time we will have a better understanding of its impact on literacy development. In the meantime, Snow reminds educators to remain steadfast with balanced literacy instruction.

“What worries me about the post-pandemic instruction is that people are particularly under the influence of these worries about phonics are retreating to a stance of, ‘Oh my gosh. They've missed the phonics instruction. We've got to do that more and more and better and better,’” she says. “And the fact of the matter is that yes, they need phonics instruction. But they don't need an hour and a half a day of phonics instruction. Fifteen minutes a day, in the context of opportunities to read and practice and play with language, is probably more effective than overloading literacy instruction with phonics in order to repair the ravages of...

In this episode of the EdCast, Snow discusses the current state of American literacy, and how despite knowing what works, we continue to misinterpret modes of instruction and the science of reading. Our success with students starts with our unique Learning Ability Evaluation. Learn More Oops, looks like your form submission failed. Please try again. On the next screen, you'll have the opportunity to schedule an information call with one of our Lindamood-Bell Center Development Directors.

We offer 30-minute time slots to select from. Please choose the time slot that will work best for you. There are no available appointments. A member of the Lindamood-Bell team will contact you shortly. Our mission is to help all individuals learn to read and comprehend to their potential. Literacy is one of the major civil rights issues of our time.

Our children’s future—and our nation’s democracy—depends on us addressing this crisis now. Frederick Douglass said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” This was true in the 19th century, when he was decrying the notion that enslaved people lacked the intellectual capacity to... There is currently a literacy crisis happening in the U.S., one that disproportionately affects students of color, and that cannot be ignored. Literacy is one of the major civil rights issues of our time, and our children’s future — and our nation’s democracy — depends on us addressing it now. There is overwhelming evidence that nearly all children can learn to read. But in schools across the country, many students — especially students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities — are not yet skillful readers.

Last year, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), “the nation’s report card,” showed that not even half (43%) of fourth graders in the U.S. scored at or above a proficient level in reading. And for marginalized students, the numbers are much worse: just 17% of Black students, 21% of Latino students, 11% of student with disabilities, and 10% of multilingual learners can read proficiently by fourth grade. That any child, let alone the majority of children, goes to school without being taught to read is deeply concerning — and also completely preventable. There are five widely accepted components that are essential to reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Decades of research shows that when students receive explicit and systematic instruction across all of these domains, they will learn to read.

And when students are given access to texts with rich, diverse characters and cultures, seeing people like themselves fully represented in school materials, they will become more engaged readers. So why do we see staggering numbers of children, especially children of color and children from low-income backgrounds, without fundamental literacy skills? That American children are struggling with reading has worked its way into the media conversation at last. It’s about time. First came the “news” that the 2021 post-Covid NAEP (our nation’s report card) reading scores for 4th and 8th graders dropped for the first time in decades: Nearly two thirds of our students don’t read proficiently!

What wasn’t reported is the fact that nearly this same percentage has been the case for some time. Then in the fall of 2022, Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story” podcast recast the eternal Reading Wars. This time, the opposing camps are Lucy Calkins’ Balanced Literacy vs. the Science of Reading. Lucy Calkins’ curriculum did not come out well in this. The media blew up over it, and various states have banned Balanced Literacy’s 3-cueing strategy for figuring out unknown words and poured money into retraining teachers in the Science of Reading, aka Structured Reading,...

Children who do not develop key early literacy skills by the time they start kindergarten are three times more likely to eventually drop out of school. Students who become proficient readers by Grade 4 will likely graduate from high school and be able to go on to college and careers. More than a third of United States fourth graders do not have even a basic level of reading proficiency, and overall reading scores for young students have been essentially stagnant for decades. Literacy is widely recognized as a key determinant of success for individuals and societies as a whole, yet many children and adults do not read well, hampering not only their educational opportunities, but economic... Instructional interventions of the past 30 years have not healed America of its reading malady. The average reading score of fourth graders today is just four points higher than it was in 1992, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

For eighth graders, reading scores have risen by a mere three points.

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