Our Solutions Our Solutions For Disrupting The U S Literacy Crisis

Reading levels dropped to historic lows during the pandemic. Now parents, teachers and tech companies are hoping AI can help solve America’s literacy crisis. America’s literacy challenge has been building for years, with reading scores sliding even before the pandemic pushed them to their lowest levels in decades. Educators said potential factors include children’s increased screen time, shortened attention spans and a decline in reading longer-form writing. Mississippi, Louisiana and other states have experimented with shaking up reading curricula and passing laws aimed at improving childhood literacy. But the rise of artificial intelligence is creating another opportunity to reimagine how students learn to read.

Across the US, parents, educators, and community groups are trying AI-powered tutors that listen as children read, correct mistakes in real time and adapt lessons to each student’s reading level — though questions remain... Denver Public Schools made headlines in recent years for embracing AI products, both as teaching tools and as teacher supports. The system of roughly 200 schools began working with Amira Learning, a company that specializes in AI reading tutors, in January. According to studies by the National Literacy Institute in 2024, 21% of American adults are illiterate. The National Assessment for Adult Literacy found the literacy rate for American adults in 1870 was a gross total of 11.5% from census data. In 1979, that number was at 0.4%.

With most early estimations for literacy and education heading into the 21st century pointing towards an even further downwards trend of illiteracy, we are seeing the highest rates in 155 years. In a study done by the Kutest Kids Early Intervention organization, illiteracy accounts for $2.2 trillion dollars in taxpayer losses throughout the year. These losses come in the form of welfare, unemployment and incarceration rates; three out of every four welfare recipients are unable to read, 50% of the unemployed between 16 and 21 years old are... By Michelle Torgerson, CEO of Raising a Reader The latest national assessment of educational progress results reveal a sobering reality: American children’s reading skills have reached new lows with little sign of post pandemic recovery. As reported in The New York Times, 40% of 4th graders and 33% of 8th graders now perform at a below basic level in reading and dash the highest percentages in decades.

The implications of this literacy crisis are profound impacting students academic success future job prospects and overall well-being At Raising a Reader, we see this as a call to action for over 25 years we have worked to support families educators and those serving young children in fostering early literacy skills helping... The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results reveal a sobering reality: American children’s reading skills have reached new lows, with little sign of post-pandemic recovery. Our success with students starts with our unique Learning Ability Evaluation. Learn More Oops, looks like your form submission failed.

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Our mission is to help all individuals learn to read and comprehend to their potential. 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... 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 Silent Crisis: Unpacking America’s Literacy Struggle For a nation that prides itself on innovation and global influence, the United States faces a paradox: Millions of students graduate from its schools without mastering basic reading skills. Nearly one in five American adults struggles to read a newspaper article or fill out a job application, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. This raises urgent questions: Why does illiteracy persist in a country with vast resources, and what systemic failures allow this problem to thrive? 1. The Funding Disparity Dilemma Education in America is a tale of two systems.

Wealthy suburban districts often boast well-stocked libraries, small class sizes, and specialized reading coaches. Meanwhile, underfunded urban and rural schools scramble to provide outdated textbooks, let alone individualized literacy support. A 2023 report by the Education Trust revealed that schools serving low-income students receive $2,000 less per pupil annually than those in affluent areas—a gap that directly impacts reading intervention programs. Teachers in struggling districts frequently face overcrowded classrooms, making it impossible to address the unique needs of students who fall behind. “When you have 30 kids reading at six different grade levels, differentiation becomes a fantasy,” says Marisa Thompson, a veteran elementary teacher in Detroit. Without early and consistent support, students who start behind rarely catch up.

2. The Reading Wars: A Battle of Philosophies For decades, educators have clashed over how to teach reading. The “whole language” approach—which emphasizes context and storytelling—dominated classrooms until brain imaging studies proved its inefficacy for many learners. Neuroscience now confirms that explicit phonics instruction (linking letters to sounds) is critical for building reading pathways in the brain. Yet curriculum updates lag behind the science.

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