Reading performance is falling among American students, while adult literacy has also weakened. The problem is bigger than phones, phonics, or COVID: inconsistent instruction, absenteeism, delayed intervention, weak reading habits, fragmented attention, and advancing struggling readers all deserve scrutiny.
Editorial Note
This is an opinion and analysis article informed by publicly available education data and research. National literacy trends are complex, and no single factor can fully explain changes in reading performance across millions of children and adults.
References to falling literacy in this article primarily concern measured reading performance on assessments such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. NAEP Proficient is a specific achievement level and should not be treated as identical to a state’s definition of grade-level proficiency.
America Has a Reading Problem
America has spent years arguing about how children should learn to read. We have debated phonics and balanced literacy, blamed COVID, worried about phones, criticized schools, questioned parents, argued over curriculum, and increasingly wondered whether technology is making sustained reading harder.
Meanwhile, the reading numbers have continued moving in the wrong direction.
The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that average reading scores for both fourth- and eighth-grade students remained five points below their 2019 levels. Fourth-grade scores fell another two points between 2022 and 2024, and only 31% of fourth-graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level.
The problem does not disappear when students graduate. Federal adult-skills data show that between 2017 and 2023, average literacy performance among U.S. adults ages 16 to 65 declined, while the percentage performing at Level 1 or below increased from 19% to 28%.
Those numbers should concern us, but I do not believe America’s literacy problem can be solved by finding one villain. The deeper problem is that too many struggling readers are identified late, too many students miss too much instruction, too many schools still struggle to provide consistently strong reading instruction, and too many young people spend less time reading deeply enough to build stamina, vocabulary, knowledge, and comprehension.
America has normalized too much reading failure by allowing students to advance while the underlying skill gap remains unresolved. That is the part of the literacy crisis we should be much less willing to accept.
The Pandemic Made the Problem Worse, but It Did Not Create It
COVID deserves part of the blame. Students lost instructional time, schools shifted abruptly between in-person and remote learning, and young children missed foundational instruction at an age when decoding, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension were developing rapidly.
Those disruptions mattered, but blaming the entire literacy decline on the pandemic lets deeper problems off the hook. Fourth-grade reading performance had already begun weakening before COVID, and the latest NAEP results describe a decline that started before the pandemic.
That distinction matters because temporary disruptions require recovery plans, while structural problems require structural changes. If reading performance had been strong in 2019, collapsed during school closures, and then steadily returned to prior levels, we could reasonably treat literacy mainly as a pandemic-recovery problem.
That is not what the data show.
COVID widened and accelerated weaknesses that were already present. It did not invent them.
We Spent Too Long Fighting About How Reading Works
One of the most frustrating parts of the American literacy debate is that we know a great deal about how children learn to read.
Reading is not a natural process in the same way spoken language develops for most children. Students generally need explicit instruction that helps them connect sounds to written language, recognize words efficiently, build vocabulary, develop fluency, understand sentence structures, grow background knowledge, and make meaning from increasingly complex text.
The science of reading is often reduced politically to phonics, but that is too narrow. Phonics matters enormously, especially during foundational reading development, yet decoding a word and understanding a paragraph are not the same skill.
The Institute of Education Sciences emphasizes that skilled reading involves both word recognition and language comprehension. Students need foundational skills, but they also need vocabulary, knowledge, fluency, comprehension, writing, and sustained interaction with meaningful text.
American schools spent years cycling through competing reading philosophies, commercial programs, teacher-training models, and district initiatives that did not always align with the strongest available evidence. States are now rapidly adopting science-of-reading laws and policies, which may help, but legislation alone does not change what happens in classrooms.
Teachers need strong preparation. Curriculum needs to match the training. Assessments need to identify problems early. Interventions need enough time and staffing to work. Administrators need to understand what effective literacy instruction actually looks like.
A state cannot simply mandate the science of reading, buy new materials, hold a few professional-development sessions, and declare the literacy problem solved.
Phonics Matters, but Knowledge Matters Too
The science-of-reading movement is correcting real instructional mistakes, but we risk creating another problem if phonics becomes the entire literacy conversation.
A child can decode every word in a paragraph and still have little understanding of what the paragraph means. Consider a student reading about the legislative branch, photosynthesis, the Great Depression, plate tectonics, or an unfamiliar culture. The student may pronounce the words correctly while lacking enough vocabulary or background knowledge to make sense of the ideas.
Reading comprehension is partly built through reading, but it is also built through knowing things.
That means strong literacy instruction cannot live only inside the reading block. Science matters. History matters. Geography matters. Art matters. Conversation matters. Writing matters. The more students know about the world, the more knowledge they can bring to unfamiliar texts.
A serious literacy strategy should therefore protect content-rich education instead of gradually shrinking elementary school into reading and mathematics test preparation. The irony is that cutting science and social studies to create more reading time can eventually weaken the knowledge students need to comprehend what they read.
Too Many Students Are Missing Too Much School
We cannot discuss literacy honestly without discussing attendance. Students cannot benefit from excellent reading instruction if they are not consistently present to receive it.
Chronic absenteeism remains far above pre-pandemic levels in many parts of the country. Students who miss large amounts of school do not simply miss isolated worksheets or assignments; they miss sequences of instruction that build on one another.
That is particularly damaging in reading. A phonics lesson builds on previous sound-spelling relationships. Fluency develops through repeated practice. Vocabulary accumulates over time. Background knowledge grows across subjects, and teachers identify misconceptions by listening to students read and explain what they understand.
When a student misses enough of that sequence, the gap becomes harder to repair during normal classroom instruction.
Attendance problems also compound. A student misses school, falls behind, becomes frustrated, feels less successful, and may become less motivated to return consistently. Schools need expectations around attendance, but blaming families alone will not solve transportation problems, housing instability, health issues, bullying, mental-health challenges, disengagement, or other barriers.
Literacy policy and attendance policy should not be treated as separate conversations.
No Child Should Be Allowed to Struggle Anonymously
One of the most damaging phrases in education is some version of “let’s give the student more time.”
Sometimes children genuinely develop at different rates, and not every temporary struggle requires intensive intervention. But waiting becomes dangerous when a student shows clear signs of a reading difficulty and adults repeatedly hope the problem will resolve itself.
A first-grader struggling with phonemic awareness and decoding deserves attention. A second-grader who cannot read basic text fluently deserves attention. A third-grader who still guesses at unfamiliar words rather than decoding them deserves attention.
The goal is not to label children unnecessarily. It is to prevent small difficulties from becoming years of academic frustration.
Reading struggles become increasingly damaging as students get older. The fourth-grader notices classmates reading more easily. The sixth-grader avoids reading aloud. The eighth-grader learns how to complete assignments without really reading the text. By high school, some students have internalized the belief that they are simply “bad at school.”
At that point, educators are not only remediating literacy. They are trying to rebuild years of damaged academic confidence.
Early screening, targeted intervention, tutoring, special education when appropriate, and frequent progress monitoring require money and trained people. Waiting costs more in the long run.
No child should be allowed to struggle anonymously.
We Keep Promoting Students Without Repairing the Skill Gap
American education has an uncomfortable promotion problem.
A student can struggle with reading in third grade and still move into fourth grade, then fifth, then middle school. Eventually secondary teachers encounter students whose reading skills are several years behind the texts they are expected to understand.
Secondary teachers are often told that every teacher is a teacher of reading. There is truth in that. A science teacher should help students navigate scientific text, and a history teacher should teach students how to analyze primary sources.
But a seventh-grade social studies teacher cannot reasonably be expected to reconstruct years of missing foundational literacy instruction while also teaching the seventh-grade curriculum.
At some point, schools have to confront the gap directly through intensive tutoring, intervention periods, smaller groups, specialized reading teachers, summer support, or redesigned schedules.
What does not work is allowing the skill deficit to travel from grade to grade while the student continues receiving enough credit to advance.
Moving the student forward does not move the reading skill forward with them.
Students Need Time to Actually Read
Improving literacy ultimately requires people to spend substantial time reading.
Not simply answering multiple-choice questions about short passages, watching video summaries, listening to someone else explain the chapter, or asking software to summarize what they were assigned.
Students need experience staying with a text long enough to build meaning, tolerate confusion, learn unfamiliar vocabulary, visualize ideas, recognize arguments, and connect information across paragraphs and pages.
That kind of sustained attention increasingly competes with an environment built around speed and interruption. Notifications arrive instantly, videos get shorter, feeds refresh endlessly, and information is increasingly summarized before people have to work through the original source.
Artificial intelligence adds another layer. Used well, AI can support literacy by explaining unfamiliar vocabulary, creating practice questions, helping students access difficult text, or providing feedback. Used poorly, it can help students bypass reading almost entirely by summarizing chapters, interpreting sources, or generating responses without meaningful engagement with the text.
The educational question is not whether students should ever use technology or AI. It is whether those tools support reading or replace it.
A student who uses AI to clarify an unfamiliar term while continuing through a difficult text is still doing intellectual work. A student who submits a machine-generated summary without reading the original material is practicing something very different.
Schools need to protect productive struggle because some of that struggle is where literacy develops. Convenience is not always learning.
Families Matter, but Schools Cannot Outsource Literacy to Parents
Parents absolutely influence literacy. Children benefit from hearing language, seeing adults read, having access to books, being read to when they are young, visiting libraries, discussing ideas, and growing up in environments where curiosity is encouraged.
But telling families to “read more with your kids” is not a national literacy strategy.
Some parents work multiple jobs. Some struggle with literacy themselves. Some speak languages other than English. Some cannot afford extensive home libraries. Others do everything educators recommend and still have a child with dyslexia or another learning difficulty.
Public education exists partly because academic opportunity should not depend entirely on what happens inside a student’s home.
Families should be partners, but schools cannot outsource their literacy responsibility. If a child has few books at home, school should provide more reading opportunity, not less. If parents cannot afford tutoring, intervention should still be accessible. If adults in a family struggle with literacy, communities should offer adult-learning opportunities without shame.
Literacy problems can cross generations. Breaking that cycle requires support rather than blame.
Adult Literacy Makes This an Economic Problem Too
The adult literacy numbers deserve far more attention than they receive.
NCES reports that between 2017 and 2023, average literacy scores among U.S. adults ages 16 to 65 declined across every age category measured. The share of adults performing at Level 1 or below increased from 19% to 28%.
That is not merely an education statistic. Literacy affects employment, job training, financial decisions, contracts, workplace technology, parenting, health information, government services, and the ability to evaluate information.
Modern life is becoming more text-dependent, not less. Adults are expected to compare health insurance plans, understand loan documents, evaluate online claims, complete digital applications, navigate workplace procedures, recognize scams, and distinguish credible information from misinformation.
Those tasks require strong literacy.
A country becoming more technologically complex while a growing share of adults struggles with basic literacy faces a serious economic and civic problem.
Teachers Cannot Fix This Without Capacity
Whenever reading scores fall, attention naturally turns toward classrooms. Teachers matter enormously, and instructional quality matters.
But blaming teachers for national literacy decline ignores the conditions surrounding them.
A classroom teacher may be responsible for students reading several grade levels apart, English learners, students with disabilities, children who have missed weeks of school, behavioral challenges, large class sizes, and curriculum requirements that leave little flexibility. The same teacher may also lack enough intervention staff, reading specialists, or tutoring support to address every gap.
Then society asks why every student is not reading proficiently.
Teachers should be accountable for strong instruction, but accountability without capacity becomes theater.
If lawmakers want evidence-based literacy instruction, teacher-preparation programs need to teach it well. If districts want early intervention, they need qualified interventionists. If schools want meaningful tutoring, they need enough tutors and enough time. If administrators want teachers to use assessment data, those assessments need to produce information educators can actually act on.
Reform cannot consist of demanding different outcomes while leaving the underlying conditions largely unchanged.
New To Education Perspective: Stop Looking for One Villain
America loves simple education arguments because simple arguments create obvious sides.
Phonics versus whole language. Teachers versus parents. Phones versus books. Public schools versus school choice. COVID versus everything that came before it.
Literacy does not care about our teams.
A child struggling to read needs adults to identify what is actually preventing progress. For one student, the problem may be decoding. For another, vocabulary. Another may have dyslexia. Another may understand spoken language well but have missed too much school. Another may read accurately but lack enough background knowledge to understand the text. Another may be fully capable but rarely reads long enough to develop stamina.
Those students do not need identical interventions.
That is why the national conversation should move away from searching for one explanation and toward building a literacy system with multiple layers: strong foundational instruction, content knowledge, early screening, timely intervention, tutoring, attendance support, sustained reading, writing, family partnership, and adult literacy opportunities.
Reading is too important for ideological shortcuts.
What I Would Change
If America wants better literacy outcomes, I would start with one demanding principle: schools should know exactly which students are struggling, why they are struggling, and what is being done about it.
Early elementary classrooms need systematic foundational reading instruction alongside rich language, stories, science, social studies, and writing. Older struggling readers need actual intervention rather than endless assignment modifications that allow them to work around the missing skill.
Schools should protect time for sustained reading and discussion. Libraries should remain central rather than ornamental. Tutoring should target diagnosed gaps instead of functioning as generic homework help.
Families also need clear information about what their children can and cannot do, written in language that does not require an education degree to understand.
Adult literacy deserves a place in the same national conversation. We cannot build a highly skilled economy while treating reading difficulty as something that matters only in elementary school.
The goal should be simple to describe, even if achieving it is difficult: identify the problem early, provide the right intervention, monitor progress, and do not allow a student to move through years of schooling with a major literacy gap that everyone can see but nobody truly owns.
Key Takeaways
American reading performance has declined, but the evidence does not support reducing the problem to one cause. The 2024 NAEP results show fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores below 2019 levels, while federal adult-skills data also show weaker literacy performance among U.S. adults.
COVID worsened the problem but did not create all of it. Strong foundational instruction matters, but literacy also requires fluency, vocabulary, knowledge, comprehension, writing, regular attendance, and substantial experience reading meaningful text.
Delayed intervention, persistent skill gaps, chronic absenteeism, weak reading stamina, and the growing ability to bypass difficult reading through digital shortcuts all deserve attention.
The solution is not finding one group to blame. It is building a system that identifies why individual students struggle and responds before those difficulties become part of adulthood.
FAQ
Are literacy rates actually falling in America?
Several major assessments show declining literacy performance. The 2024 NAEP found lower fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores than in 2019, while the 2023 PIAAC adult-skills assessment found lower average U.S. adult literacy performance than in 2017.
Does 31% NAEP Proficient mean only 31% of fourth-graders can read at grade level?
No. NAEP Proficient is a specific achievement standard used by the National Assessment Governing Board and is not identical to a state’s definition of grade-level performance. It is useful for tracking national trends, but it should not be described simply as the percentage of children who can read.
Is poor reading instruction the main cause?
Instruction matters substantially, but national trends cannot reasonably be attributed to one cause. Attendance, student background knowledge, socioeconomic conditions, learning disabilities, intervention access, reading habits, instructional quality, and other factors interact.
Is the science of reading just phonics?
No. Phonics and foundational skills are important components, but skilled reading also depends on fluency, vocabulary, language comprehension, background knowledge, and the ability to understand increasingly complex text.
Can tutoring help struggling readers?
Yes, when it is targeted to the student’s actual need. A student struggling with decoding needs a different intervention from a fluent reader struggling with comprehension. Effective tutoring begins by identifying the gap rather than simply assigning more practice.
Final Thoughts
Literacy decline should be treated as one of the most serious education problems in America because nearly every other academic subject eventually depends on reading.
Students read mathematics problems, science explanations, historical documents, job applications, college textbooks, contracts, financial information, medical guidance, laws, and news. When reading becomes difficult, the rest of life becomes harder too.
America does not need another literacy culture war. It needs a system that notices reading problems early, responds effectively, gives students enough time to actually read, and refuses to accept years of preventable struggle as normal.
That requires strong teachers, evidence-based instruction, engaged families, functioning libraries, meaningful content, regular attendance, early intervention, tutoring, and enough sustained reading to build real skill.
There is no single villain because there is no single solution.
But there should be one nonnegotiable standard: a student should not be able to spend thirteen years in American schools and leave without the literacy needed to understand the world independently.
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Sources
The Nation’s Report Card — 2024 NAEP Reading Results
National Center for Education Statistics — 2023 U.S. PIAAC National Results
Institute of Education Sciences — The Importance of Comprehension in the Science of Reading
Institute of Education Sciences — Unpacking the Science of Reading
