Rif Our Solutions For Disrupting The U S Literacy Crisis

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.

Compleat® is a real ally for those who require tube feeding. It does not just feed, it nourishes lives. Parenting our Parents: guiding families on how to ensure their loved ones’ health needs are met, including appointing a healthcare proxy, keeping medication lists updated, and encouraging regular checkups. A delicious range of products packed with the nutrition your furry friend deserves. Founded by food scientists, PawCo believes that better food means better lives—for dogs, their families, and the planet. This following blog post is a transcript of Storyshares founder and CEO Louise Baigelman's TEDxBostonCollege Talk.

Watch the TEDx Talk here. In the fall of 2009, an 11-year-old girl started her first day of middle school just north of here, in Lynn, Massachusetts. She had recently moved to the United States from Haiti. In her short time in the US, she had developed strong verbal communication skills in English. But when it came to reading, she had fallen behind. And let’s face it, life as a middle schooler can be challenging under the best of circumstances.

But imagine starting 6th grade while only being able to read at around a 1st grade level. And imagine your teacher hands you Hop on Pop because you can’t read the stories written for kids your age – the books you might be interested in reading. Ruth was clever, brilliant, and wise beyond her years. In many ways, she was like any other teenager. But when she arrived in my classroom at KIPP Academy Lynn, her literacy skills were holding her back. 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... Christine is the co-founder of the Clark and Christine Ivory Foundation. She is the mother of five children and grandmother to seven children.

Reading is no longer intuitive. We reach for phones instead of books. Less than half of Utah’s third grade students (48%) are reading on grade level, an astounding fact published by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. One out of two children in the state of Utah cannot read proficiently. For the past five years, that percentage has basically remained steady.

Out of Utah’s 852 public schools this year, the Utah State Board of Education celebrated 60 schools that have achieved a reading rate of 70%. While this is a positive trend, all of our schools should at the very least hit this minimum requirement. This quiet reading crisis in our state and across the nation will eventually explode into unskilled workers faced with limited possibilities. National data shows that only 31% of students are reading at or above grade level. An illiterate population will cost our state and our nation financially and fundamentally. Life will change for all of us if more than half our citizens can no longer read.

A literate workforce has long been the propelling force of America’s middle class. Our democracy relies on literate people who can think and reason for themselves. Impending AI and illiteracy is a combination that will be difficult to weather.

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