Scholars at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth 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.
What they found was sobering: Only five states plus the District of Columbia had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025. Nationally, students remain nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic reading scores and only slightly better in math.
While schools have focused on catching kids up since the COVID-19 pandemic upended education, reading test scores have been falling since 2013 for eighth graders and 2015 for fourth graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
“The pandemic was the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion in achievement,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor who helped create the Education Scorecard.
Still, some states and school districts are making progress — largely by shifting toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support for struggling readers.
Researchers are still debating the reading recession’s causes.
One possible factor, researchers say, is the rise of social media on smartphones and corresponding declines in kids'rereational reading. States have also backed off on strict consequences for schools whose students fail to make progress on standardized tests, Kane said.
But the states that improved reading scores — notably 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 tumbled 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.
