Reading remedies: Schools assess pandemic鈥檚 effect on literacy
Andrea Yon is used to helping students in need. At the Williston-Elko Middle School in rural South Carolina, where she has taught for seven years, more than 3 out of every 4 students are for free or reduced-priced lunch. Before the pandemic, some of her struggling seventh and eighth graders read at a fifth or sixth grade level.
鈥淭hey鈥檙e now reading at a third and fourth grade level,鈥� Yon says.
Yon used to hold silent reading time in her classroom; students could read whatever they wanted for 20 minutes. 鈥淣ow,鈥� she says, 鈥渢hey鈥檙e looking up after three to five minutes.鈥�
Why We Wrote This
Reading scores in the U.S. were an issue even before the pandemic. Understanding the cause is a key to helping students recover from the education disruptions of the past two years. Newsrooms across the country collaborated here to offer a snapshot of what classrooms look like today 鈥� and to share what solutions are being tried to support struggling readers.
Teachers across the country are seeing more and more students struggle with reading this school year. Pandemic school closures and remote instruction made learning to read much harder, especially for young, low-income students who didn鈥檛 have adequate technology at home or an adult who could assist them during the day. Many older students lost the daily habit of reading. Even before the pandemic, were unable to read at grade level. Scores had been for several years.
The pandemic made a bad situation worse.
More than a have documented that students, on average, made sluggish progress in reading during the pandemic. Estimates of just how sluggish vary. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company calculated that U.S. students had lost the equivalent of. An analysis of test scores in California and South Carolina found that students had lost almost in reading. A national analysis of the test scores of 5.5 million students calculated that in the spring of 2021 students in each grade on a widely used test, the Measures of Academic Progress or MAP, than they did in 2019.聽
Reading achievement has even fallen in the state that ranks the highest in the nation in reading: Massachusetts. Students in grades 3 through 8 in reading on state tests in the spring of 2021 compared to 2019.
Mackenzie Woll, a second grade teacher at Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, said diagnostic tests at the start of the year revealed that most of her students were reading at a kindergarten or a first grade level. In previous years, some students would come in reading above grade level; this year, no one in her class did.聽
Woll now reviews kindergarten-level phonics with her second graders. On a recent day, a student held up flashcards at the front of the class and led her peers in a call and response chant through the alphabet. 鈥淎, apple, ah!鈥� she said. Her classmates echoed the sounds back to her.聽
In a normal year, the exercise would have been scaled back by this point, Woll says. 鈥淏ut because of the pandemic, I鈥檓 still doing those letter sounds every day.鈥�
Teaching aide Hannah Chancey faces the same problem in second grade classrooms at Rehobeth Elementary School in a small low-income community in southeastern Alabama, a state with reading scores near the bottom nationally.
鈥淭hey couldn鈥檛 read; they couldn鈥檛 identify letters,鈥� says Chancey, clutching a clipboard with the names of children who need extra instruction. 鈥淲e couldn鈥檛 have enough help.鈥�
Widening gaps
Nationwide, test scores for younger students, who are just learning to read, dropped far more than for older students. The average third grader鈥檚 reading score fell 6 percentile points on the MAP test,. In a separate pandemic study of in 100 school districts, Stanford University researchers found that although teachers had figured out how to teach reading remotely during the 2020-21 school year, students didn鈥檛 catch up.
鈥淭hey鈥檙e still behind,鈥� says Ben Domingue, an assistant professor at Stanford who was one of the authors. Domingue said reading gaps in younger children could 鈥渕utate鈥� into future academic problems. Students need to read in order to learn other subjects, from science to history.
Parents of young children are worried.聽
Before the pandemic, Albalicia Espino often took her 6-year-old daughter Sara to the West Dallas Library. On special occasions, they鈥檇 make the trip to downtown Dallas, where the towering library building has a dedicated children鈥檚 floor.
The pandemic halted those treasured visits.
鈥淚 didn鈥檛 want her to get started on the wrong foot and lose a lot of those basic things,鈥� Espino says. She worries Sara didn鈥檛 get enough practice learning letter sounds and other foundational reading skills.聽
Sara is back at school in person for first grade, trying to learn the elements of language from behind a mask. Her Dallas elementary school extended its school year in an effort to help students make up for lost time. Sara is also getting extra help in reading through a nonprofit organization in her neighborhood.
During the pandemic, students in low-income districts, already lagging, fell even further behind students from wealthier districts. In high-poverty schools, where more than three-quarters of students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch, the drop in reading scores on the MAP test was often more than three times as large as it was in low-poverty schools, where a quarter or fewer students qualify for the lunch program.聽
Racial and ethnic gaps worsened too. Reading scores on the MAP test fell almost twice as much for Black and Hispanic students as they did for white and Asian students.
Researchers worry that the drop in reading achievement during the pandemic may be even worse than their figures indicate. All the estimates rely on some sort of test, but many low-income students didn鈥檛 take any tests in 2021. For the same reasons that many low-income students struggled to learn remotely during the pandemic, it was also hard, if not impossible, for students to take an online assessment of their progress.
鈥淲e鈥檙e seeing it everywhere鈥�
Even before the pandemic, reading achievement was in a slump. In 2016, U.S. fourth graders slid seven points on an international reading test, the. Then, fourth and eighth graders 鈥� particularly eighth graders 鈥� posted lower scores on the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a benchmark test that is taken every two years by both age groups.聽
Analysts noted that reading scores of the, and that the 2019 losses 鈥� especially steep among low performers 鈥� had erased 30 years of progress. In previous tests, the gains of the highest achieving students had offset the losses at the bottom, leaving the national average steady. But in 2019, the reading performance of all students deteriorated.
鈥淲e鈥檝e never seen a significant decline like this before,鈥� says Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which has been monitoring and releasing data on student achievement for decades. 鈥淎ll the tests are showing these patterns. We鈥檙e seeing it everywhere.鈥�
The reason for the pandemic鈥檚 toll on reading achievement is obvious: It鈥檚 hard to learn when schools are closed. But the reason that reading scores fell before the pandemic is less straightforward. Educators and researchers are weighing three theories on what is responsible for the decline: money, instruction, or reading itself.聽
After the 2008 recession, schools across the country cut spending by $600 per student, on average, and laid off thousands of teachers. It took state and local governments to restore their tax bases, muster the political will to approve spending increases and send the money to schools.
鈥淲hat鈥檚 causing these trends is no mystery,鈥� Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank, posted on Twitter. 鈥淚t鈥檚 almost surely the spending cuts that happened in the wake of the Great Recession. The 13-year-olds who did so poorly in 2019 would have been in grades K-2 during the worst of the cuts, from 2011-14. Those early years matter!鈥澛�
Long before the pandemic, many reading experts argued that young children didn鈥檛 receive enough phonics instruction in kindergarten and first grade to become smooth, fluent readers. More than half of Black fourth graders and 46 percent of Hispanic fourth grade students scored below the lowest level on the NAEP test. For these students, 鈥渋t is likely that if fluency were improved, comprehension would also improve,鈥� a by three prominent reading scholars concluded.
Some educators have tried to respond by emphasizing phonics. The Wenatchee School District in Washington state switched all students to phonics-based reading instruction a few months before the pandemic. The district has long struggled with low reading scores, especially among its English learners, who make up nearly a quarter of the enrollment.
Superintendent Paul Gordon recalled a moment during a visit to a fourth grade classroom that underscored why the district needed to move quickly.聽
鈥淚 asked the kids what they found challenging and fun,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e had a lot of stories about lunch and recess. But I will never forget at the very end, a little girl raises her hand and says, 鈥業 can鈥檛 read. When I go out to recess, I feel like everyone is laughing at me because I don鈥檛 know how to read.鈥欌�澛�
Allison Hurt, a first grade teacher who has taught at Lincoln Elementary School in Wenatchee for 20 years, says the switch required a complete overhaul of the way she taught 鈥� and thought 鈥� about reading.
鈥淚 didn鈥檛 realize that there is actually a sequential order in phonology that students should be learning their sounds 鈥� biggest to smallest,鈥� Hurt says. 鈥淭hey have to be able to break a sentence apart into words, and chunk them apart into syllables.鈥�
By the end of the first full year of teaching this way, Hurt says 80% of her class had aced a phonology test 鈥� a rate she hadn鈥檛 seen before.
Not every student has improved as dramatically, but Hurt says this structured method has made it easier to catch students who are stuck.
Many scholars are concerned that phonics alone won鈥檛 help children read proficiently as they get older. Elena Forzani, a reading specialist at Boston University, thinks the recent slide in eighth grade test scores could reflect ineffective teaching practices.
鈥淲e tend to take those kids and throw lower-level instruction at them,鈥� Forzani says. 鈥淭hey get these rote phonics programs. It鈥檚 all focused on learning to read. They鈥檙e not having complex discussions about a text. At the same time, we鈥檙e also taking away science and history instruction where kids can develop knowledge and where they can put comprehension strategies into practice. We鈥檙e teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum.鈥�
Researchers are also zeroing in on changes in home reading habits. In student surveys that accompanied the NAEP reading assessments, the percentage of eighth聽graders who said they read 30 minutes or more a day, excluding homework, declined by 4 percentage points from 2017 to 2019. They were less likely to say they talked about books, went to the library, or considered reading one of their favorite activities.
It鈥檚 too soon to blame the distraction of texting, TikTok, and Minecraft. More time reading doesn鈥檛 necessarily produce strong readers. Researchers sometimes find instances, such as in Mississippi, where students read less but their scores actually. In other states, such as Rhode Island, reading habits were more stable but scores slid.聽
Getting books in hands
The root of America鈥檚 reading problem could take years to unravel. In the meantime, teachers have to help the students sitting in front of them right now.
Back in South Carolina, Yon is trying to get her seventh and eighth graders to re-engage with literature by giving them physical books. She finds they read better if they are looking at an actual page instead of a screen.
On Saturdays, her students can get one-on-one tutoring. Yon was surprised by the high turnout at recent sessions. It鈥檚 a sign, she says, that things will eventually improve.
Editor鈥檚 note: This story about was produced by , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with 海角大神 and the Ed Labs at AL.com, The Dallas Morning News, The Post and Courier, and The Seattle Times.聽
The newsrooms in the collaboration also investigated solutions to the issues outlined in this story. Follow the links below to learn more about efforts to support students and reading instruction. The public is also invited to a on the topic on Nov. 16.聽
聽(The Hechinger Report)
Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have said they鈥檒l to train teachers or change the way they teach reading. Four states, ,,, wrote the 鈥渟cience of reading鈥� into state law this year.
聽(The Hechinger Report)
A law in North Carolina will require every elementary teacher in the state to be trained 鈥� or retrained 鈥� in how to teach reading with scientifically based methods.
聽(The Fresno Bee)
A small school in central California has made big gains in reading after making universal a program originally designed to help English language learning students.
(AL.com)
Many states and schools have long relied on classroom aides and tutoring to assist in reading instruction, but it can be tough to measure effectiveness of those interventions. One school in Alabama says its increased training and integration of Title I aides into instructional teams has helped them weather the pandemic.
(The Dallas Morning News)
A new Texas law requires districts to intervene quickly for students who are behind in reading, including focused tutoring or being matched with a highly rated educator. Yet some worry about the feasibility of the mandate. Here鈥檚 how one school helps kids through targeted intervention.
