Kids Are in a 'Reading Recession,' and We Should Stop Pretending Otherwise

A new Education Scorecard from researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth analyzed state test scores for over 5,000 school districts in 38 states. The picture it paints of U.S. reading instruction is bleak: students remain nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic norms, and only five states plus the District of Columbia showed meaningful reading growth between 2022 and 2025.

The story, reported by the Associated Press with Chalkbeat and republished by The Hechinger Report this week, calls it a “reading recession.” We think that framing is correct, and we think the pandemic gets too much of the blame.

This trend started long before COVID

Here is the part of the data that should change how we talk about this: reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been falling since 2013 for eighth graders and since 2015 for fourth graders. The pandemic accelerated a decline that was already well underway. Whatever happened to American reading instruction did not start in March 2020.

That matters because the recovery playbook — tutoring, summer school, intervention blocks — assumes there is a recent baseline to return to. There may not be. The honest version is that we have a deeper, slower problem and a shallower, more recent one, stacked on top of each other.

What is actually working

The reporting highlights Modesto, California, where teacher Nancy Barajas builds confidence with rituals before testing and where elementary scores have moved in the right direction. The detail buried in the broader research is more important: districts that adopted a single, coherent core curriculum and trained teachers on it consistently are the ones moving the needle. A separate Hechinger piece from earlier in May reported that Brockton Public Schools in Massachusetts went from 12 percent of middle schoolers meeting math expectations in 2021 to dramatically higher scores after adopting a districtwide curriculum, with 93 percent of teachers using it by 2025.

The opposite pattern — every teacher choosing their own materials, every grade a fresh start — correlates with the worst results. That is the part most parents can act on. Ask your child’s school whether there is a single reading curriculum used across grades, and whether teachers got training in it.

What we'd push back on

One thing in the broader conversation around the reading recession is starting to feel off. There is a growing impulse to blame screens for everything — phones in particular, but increasingly any digital tool. That framing is convenient and partly true, but it also lets curriculum and training decisions off the hook. The countries that out-read us on international assessments are not technology-free. They use technology selectively and they invest heavily in teacher preparation. The lesson is structural, not just behavioral.

If you want to dig further, our guide on phonics for parents covers the foundational layer the research keeps coming back to, and why reading aloud matters walks through the at-home habit with the strongest evidence base.