A new national analysis from researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth suggests that the U.S. isn’t dealing with a temporary COVID-era academic hangover. It’s facing a longer-running “reading recession” that began years before the pandemic and is still weighing on students across much of the country.
The researchers examined state test results from more than 5,000 school districts across 38 states and found that reading had been sliding for about a decade, with only a handful of places showing meaningful recent gains.
The big headline from the new Education Scorecard, a government-backed data tool that tracks how well schools and education systems are performing, is that most states aren’t seeing sustained reading improvement. Meanwhile, nationally, kids remain almost half a grade level behind pre-pandemic reading performance, although math has begun to rebound more broadly.
Where Reading Scores Are Improving—and Where They’re Not
The latest Education Scorecard highlights just how uneven the reading recovery has been across the U.S.
Only five states plus the District of Columbia posted meaningful gains in reading scores between 2022 and 2025, according to the analysis.
Alongside the District of Columbia, southern states—namely Louisiana, Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana—showed stronger-than-average progress in reading in recent years. This is often tied to early literacy reforms, such as phonics-based instruction—also known as the “science of reading”—which teaches kids how letters and sounds connect with each other.
The majority of states, however, either stagnated or declined in reading outcomes over the same 2022-2025 window, reinforcing the report’s conclusion that the U.S. remains in a broader “reading recession.”
Why Are Reading Scores Getting Worse?
COVID-19 is part of the story, but it’s not the entire story. Researchers from the Education Scorecard argue that the U.S. entered a “learning recession” around 2013, when progress in both reading and math stalled and then began to decline.
They point to evidence that, in reading, the annual losses between 2017 and 2019, just before the pandemic, were comparable to the losses during the pandemic period of 2019-2022—a sign that the system was already weakening before the arrival of lockdowns and remote learning.
Harvard professor Thomas Kane, who helped create the Education Scorecard, said, “The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement.”
That said, pandemic disruption clearly intensified the problem. Separate national data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that reading scores remain below pre-pandemic levels, with a growing share of students failing to hit even basic benchmarks—an indication that many children are still missing key foundational skills.
NAEP reporting also ties weak performance to a cluster of post-pandemic realities, including chronic absenteeism and broader student well-being challenges.
Beyond COVID, the scorecard and related reporting highlight several plausible long-term drivers:
- Weaker “early warning” test-based accountability: Researchers say the downturn coincides with a dismantling or softening of test-based accountability, which may have made declines harder to spot early and harder to correct quickly.
- Social media-reduced attention spans: Researchers also point to the rapid rise of social media and smartphone use as another reason. It could be a contributing factor to how much time children spend reading and their stamina for long-form texts.
Why This Is a Big Problem
Reading is a gateway skill that determines whether students can access everything else. Patrick Kelly, a member of NAEP’s governing board, framed it bluntly last January, “Reading is foundational to all subjects, and failure to read well keeps students from accessing information and building knowledge across content areas.”
Why Are Some States Worse Than Others?
The scorecard suggests that state averages are shaped by a mix of policy choices and local conditions, and that’s why the map looks patchy.
One major divide is early literacy policy. In its summary of the new findings, Harvard reports that the states showing reading improvement between 2022 and 2025 were implementing comprehensive “science of reading” reforms, while states that had eschewed literacy reforms did not show the same gains in that period.
Another driver is what the Harvard researchers are describing as a “U-shaped recovery”: The biggest post-2022 improvements have appeared in the highest-income and highest-poverty districts, while middle-income districts have improved the least.
The report said federal pandemic relief funding played a substantial role in boosting recovery in districts with the highest poverty. Many middle-income districts did not receive support at the same level, which could explain why poorer districts sometimes recovered faster than middle-income ones.
And then there’s the on-the-ground reality: Absenteeism trends, staffing stability, tutoring capacity and curriculum quality vary widely across states and districts—producing different outcomes even among places that look similar on paper.
What Can Schools Do To Turn Things Around?
States and districts making progress are described as doing so “largely by shifting toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support for struggling readers,” the Associated Press reported.
Schools can also lean on recovery strategies such as these:
- Extra tutoring and support, especially for students below the benchmark
- Attendance and reengagement work because absenteeism is still elevated and closely tied to stalled recovery
- Teacher training that’s aligned to the “science of reading” methods
What Can Families Do To Turn Things Around?
Families can’t single-handedly solve systemic issues, but they can materially boost reading growth, especially when schools are stretched.
A practical playbook for families to promote reading development includes the following:
- Build daily reading time (even 15-20 minutes), mixing easier books with slightly challenging ones to build stamina. The wider concern in expert discussions is that children are reading less long-form text; rebuilding the habit matters.
- Treat attendance as an academic intervention: The scorecard points to absenteeism as a major brake on recovery; simply being in class more consistently is one of the highest-impact no-cost moves.
- Ask schools what approach they use to teach reading. If a district is adopting evidence-based literacy reforms, families can reinforce that work at home with decoding practice and fluency-building, rather than relying only on “guess the word from context” strategies.
What Does the Future Look Like If Things Don’t Improve?
If reading doesn’t rebound, the near-term risk is straightforward: More students moving through grades without the literacy skills needed to learn independently, making every other subject harder.
But the long-term risk is societal: Lower literacy can translate to weaker job readiness, reduced civic participation and deeper inequality—especially if recovery remains uneven and concentrated among students with more support.
Plus, in an AI-heavy future, being able to verify, interpret and question text may become even more valuable as the volume of content increases.
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