US Kids Fall Behind in Reading Skills

The United States is experiencing a “reading recession,” with test scores continuing to decline across the country. Researchers analyzed state test scores from third to eighth grade for over 5,000 school districts in 38 states, allowing comparisons across school districts and states in a national Education Scorecard.

Only five states plus the District of Columbia had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025, according to the analysis. Nationally, students remain nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic reading scores and only slightly better in math.

Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor who helped create the Education Scorecard, stated that the pandemic was the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion in achievement.

Schools have focused on catching kids up since the Covid-19 pandemic upended education, but reading test scores have been falling since 2013 for eighth graders and 2015 for fourth graders, according to the National Assessment for Educational Progress.

Some states and school districts are making progress, largely by shifting toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support for struggling readers. The picture is also brighter in math, with almost every state in the analysis seeing improvements in math test scores from 2022 to 2025.

Reading Instruction Reforms

States that improved reading scores, such as Louisiana, Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana, all had one thing in common: they ordered schools to teach with a phonics-based approach known as the “science of reading.”

For years, schools taught reading using approaches that de-emphasized phonics and encouraged strategies such as guessing words based on context clues. As reading scores declined over the past decade, parents, scholars, and literacy advocates pushed for teaching methods that align with decades of research about how kids learn to read — largely by sounding out words. They advocated for changes in reading instruction, which led to improvements in some states.

Nancy Barajas, a teacher in Modesto, California, said her school district revamped reading instruction during the pandemic, and math a couple years earlier. The district created a new department to help students who are still learning English, and schools ramped up teacher training, paying educators $5,000 to complete an extensive “science of reading” program.

Success Stories

In Modesto, reading instruction was revamped, and math a couple years earlier. The district’s test scores grew enough to represent an extra 18 weeks of learning in math and 13 weeks in reading. Nevertheless, the district still has a way to go: overall scores remain far below grade level.

In Detroit, a focus on reading has also improved scores, but so have efforts to get kids in school more consistently. For years, the large urban district struggled with deplorable school conditions, leading to a 2016 lawsuit in which students argued they’d been denied the “right to read.” The lawsuit ended in a settlement of over $94 million, money that helped move the needle. While the district is still far below the national average, student test scores have grown faster than in similar urban districts in Michigan.

Nikolai Vitti, Detroit Superintendent, said “it took a lot to rebuild systems, and now kids are learning at higher levels, but I’m still not satisfied. And I think that’s the next challenge: continuing to motivate, inspire and change things.”

Louisiana and Alabama were the only states where math scores were higher in 2025 than pre-pandemic.
Louisiana is also the only state that beat its pre-pandemic average in reading, with 87 percent of traditional public school students attending a district where scores are higher than in 2019.

Researchers are still debating the reading recession’s causes, but one possible factor is the rise of social media on smartphones and corresponding declines in kids’ recreational reading. They also note that states have backed off on strict consequences for schools whose students fail to make progress on standardized tests. However, the states that improved reading scores all had one thing in common: they ordered schools to teach with a phonics-based approach, which is a key factor in their success.