Utah Children Struggle With Reading Proficiency Opinion Deseret News

Leo Migdal

-Dec 12, 2025, 12:27 PM

utah children struggle with reading proficiency opinion deseret news

Sen. Ann Millner: Building an Education Foundation for Utah Students One of the reasons I love being a professor is that I get a front row seat to students’ successes in and out of the classroom. I’ve watched students become contributing members of society and leaders in our community. I get to admire and observe how their creativity and contributions make Utah a better place to live. However, not all students are lucky enough to pursue such opportunities because they lack foundational skills developed early on in their education.

One of those foundational skills is reading. Reading is essential to ensuring every child has the opportunity to succeed. It promotes self-confidence, builds independence and boosts critical and creative thinking skills. As we head into a new school year, the Utah Legislature has taken steps to help students develop better reading abilities. Right now, 50% of students in Utah are not at grade-level reading by the third grade. Consequently, students who are unable to read proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma.

Not to mention, third grade literacy levels are a strong indicator of a student’s academic success or failure throughout the student’s education experience. Dec 10, 2024, 8:00 PM | Updated: Jan 30, 2025, 9:27 am Third grade teacher Nereida Lopez talks to one of her students before The Great Utah ShakeOut earthquake drill at Heartland Elementary School in West Jordan on Thursday, April 18, 2024. (Kristin Murphy, Deseret News) SALT LAKE CITY — Utah’s third grade students are falling behind on their reading skills. But the Utah Legislature has set a goal to reach a higher standard.

The state legislature set a mandate in 2022 to raise the reading proficiency up to 70%. Third grade teachers have until 2027 to improve the reading proficiency of their students. Reading assessments are taken 3 times a year. The latest assessment shows third grade reading proficiency is at 48%. 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. In my public school years, I knew a guy who was a year older than me. We were in the same class because somewhere in the early grades, he had been held back a year. I was aware of this, although I can no longer remember how I knew it.

I didn’t know the exact reason he was held back, or the subjects for which he was held back. It never mattered to me. We were friends and that was good enough. The subject didn’t come up. This probably sounds very old-fashioned to today’s school-age generation (we were also paddled occasionally by the principal, but that’s another column for a different time). I didn’t grow up in Utah, but schools here and in most of the nation have, for years now, automatically passed kids to the next grade, regardless of how well they mastered subjects in...

My ears perked last Tuesday when Gov. Spencer Cox told the Deseret News editorial board he would urge the Legislature next month to implement “retention,” as it’s known, for Utah third graders who haven’t learned to read on grade level. Assessing Utah students’ overall performance on a recent national test is akin to countless parent-teacher conference reports: doing well overall — but some areas need improvement. Earlier this week, results from The National Assessment of Educational Progress 2024 scores — aka “The Nation’s Report Card” — were released, revealing mostly steady performance for Utah fourth- and eighth-grade students who participated... In fact, only three states or jurisdictions outperformed Beehive State students. But the decline in Utah’s eighth grade reading scores — reflecting national trends in declining reading performances — caught the attention of the state’s education leaders.

“More children are falling below the proficient level, underscoring the critical need to double down on effective reading interventions and support for our students,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sydnee Dickson in a... As a reading volunteer for the last two years, I have seen a disaster unfold in reading competency at our elementary school. I assume a similar situation has occurred in every public school statewide. I read with first and second grade students who don’t know the alphabet and associated sounds. One teacher indicated that there are 15 of 28 students in her class below grade level. Approximately 20% of registered students did not participate remotely during the 2020-21 school year and some kindergarten-aged children did not enroll.

As a result, there are more students now than previously who are failing to read at grade level. We simply cannot expect our dedicated school teachers to bear the load of bringing these children back up to grade level. Every concerned citizen, especially grandparents with school-age children, who want the best for our youth should step up and volunteer. The window for attaining reading proficiency is small. Students who do not gain the ability to read by second grade will require significantly more help to succeed in school. Contact your local school principal or district and volunteer.

These children are precious. Bella Vista Elementary kindergarten teacher Tamara Coombs began her 13-year education career in the library — the place “where you really plant seeds of loving to read,” she told the Deseret News. Coombs later made the switch to teaching first grade and eventually pivoted to teaching kindergartners, whom she has taught for the past two years. Coombs, who won the “Teacher of the Year” award for the 2022-23 school year at Bella Vista, an elementary school in Canyons School District, is known for passing on her love of reading to... “One area of strength has been her ability to foster a deep love of reading,” Bella Vista’s site says of Coombs. “Mrs.

Coombs had such a positive influence on my daughter and helped her develop her love of reading. Mrs. Coombs encouraged my daughter to read new and different genres. She encouraged her to push herself and read books that might otherwise have seemed above her grade level,” a parent said. Coombs is not alone in fostering a passionate reading environment in her classroom, as hundreds of kindergarten teachers have helped to boost their students’ reading scores throughout Utah, which was ranked the second-best state... News & World Report.

The Utah State Board of Education recently announced significant improvement in reading proficiency among Utah’s kindergartners, according to data from Acadience Reading, an assessment tool utilized throughout the United States that measures basic early... Utah remains one of the most literate states in the country, with an average of 9% illiterate compared to the national average of 14.7%. Literacy rates often reflect the quality of a state’s education system, which can have a notable impact on long-term success. However, there are nuances to the ways the scores are presented. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) is a standardized assessment for fourth and eighth-graders that tests reading ability. Katherine O’Donnell, an assistant professor in the Educational Psychology department’s Literacy, Language and Learning program, explained the potential flaws in NAEP’s data.

“Utah tends to score higher in the U.S., which is great, but the struggle is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are hitting really high benchmarks,” O’Donnell said. “So it’s not like we’re having 75% of our students reading at proficient or above [standard levels]; it just means that we are doing better than other states.” Less than half of Utah children in grades 1-3 were reading at the expected grade level during the 2022-2023 school year. According to NAEP, the average score in the eighth grade had lowered by four points between 2022 and 2024. Additionally, 36% of Utah’s fourth graders are reading at or above the proficient level. This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story. SALT LAKE CITY — Children in Utah are faring better than their peers when it comes to general well-being, but a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation analyzing how children are performing in a post-pandemic society points to areas for improvement when it comes to test scores and absenteeism. "Utah tends to do pretty well each year. This year, we're third, and last year we were second, but there are still some concerns within being third," said Martín Muñoz, Kids Count director at Voices For Utah Children.

One of these concerns is Utah student proficiency when it comes to math and reading scores, according to the Kids Count National Data Book. In 2022, 63% of Utah's fourth graders were not proficient in reading, an increase from 60% in 2019. The numbers for math proficiency are also less than encouraging: in 2022, 65% of eighth graders were not proficient in math, an increase from 63% in 2019.

Utah Children Struggle With Reading Proficiency Opinion Deseret News

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