Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, released a report Tuesday morning sounding the alarm on dismal child literacy scores and the “ineffective” tools used to teach students to read.
The report, reviewed by the Washington Examiner, highlighted the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress review, showing two-thirds of fourth and eighth graders and 63% of 12th graders lacking proficiency in reading. Fourth graders reached a more than 20-year low, while eighth and 12th graders are at around a 30-year low.
“It is clear that the Biden administration’s prolonged COVID school closures caused massive harm to our children. Students are entering high school who cannot read,” Cassidy told the Washington Examiner. “If we don’t improve literacy back to and above pre-pandemic levels, the consequences will be dire. We must act to ensure all students are able to read proficiently.”
Cassidy’s report also cited other assessments showing reading scores being stagnant since 2000, according to the Program for International Student Assessment, and the College Board recently announcing the average composite ACT score being at a 32-year low, seeing its sixth consecutive year in declining scores overall and in each subject area the exam covers.
Only 40% of students met the college readiness benchmark in reading, declining 5% since 2019.
Further, by the fall of 2023, only four states — Iowa, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee — were able to surpass pre-pandemic proficiency in reading, but Cassidy points to several specific factors that might have contributed to their successes.
For Iowa, 80% of schools offered in-person learning during the pandemic, while the other three schools used reading instruction techniques called “science of reading,” which Cassidy advocated in the report as a solution to many of the literacy woes. The report noted that as of January 2024, Louisiana and Illinois also surpassed pre-pandemic reading proficiency levels, and Louisiana was an early adopter of the “science of reading” technique.
“If we do not act, the long-term implications will be dire,” Cassidy wrote in the report. “While states continue taking meaningful steps in the right direction to improve literacy instruction, more must be done to ensure that students are reading proficiently.”
According to the report, however, the “science of reading” technique has been met with backlash from teachers and teachers unions “because it is a more challenging instructional framework to implement and goes against the status quo.”
The teaching style adopted by many states and school systems is called “three-cueing,” according to the report, which was intended as a part of a “whole-language” or “balanced literacy” theory of learning that “encourages educators to teach students to guess words they do not know rather than teach them how to decode them.”
“In practice, this looks like a student coming to a word they do not know in the text and a teacher encouraging them to guess what the word might be based on the first letter of the word, what the picture shows, or what might work given the rest of the sentence,” the report stated, noting a distinction with using context clues to find meaning. “Often, this leads to students memorizing specific words rather than being given the tools to decode any unknown word they might come across in the future.”
Sixty percent of education professors cite the style as the proper way to teach, and 75% of early elementary and special education teachers use the tool that has been shown to employ techniques “used by poor readers, undermines sound-spelling relationships, obscures phonemic awareness, and hinders students’ progress,” the report stated.
“Literacy — the basic ability to read — is at the heart of all other learning. If students do not learn to read, they cannot read to learn in other subjects,” Cassidy wrote in the report. “We are at risk of having an entire generation of children, those who were in their prime learning years during the COVID-19 pandemic, fail to become productive adults if reading proficiency does not improve.”
The Louisiana Republican offered a cost analysis breakdown using a 1999 National Reading Panel report detailing the cost of illiteracy to taxpayers and businesses, noting that literacy rates were better when the report was published.
At the time, adult illiteracy cost taxpayers $224 billion annually, or $409 billion in today’s money, and $40 billion to businesses annually, or $73 billion today.
“Illiteracy also presents concerns for global competitiveness and national security. When students cannot read, they cannot master advanced concepts and topics — especially in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields,” Cassidy wrote. “If we do not improve literacy instruction and get students reading proficiently, we have no hope as a country to compete in a global marketplace where the STEM labor force is vital.”
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Literacy scores plummeted 13 percentage points in the military as well, compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Cassidy posed 17 questions to stakeholders looking at policy-based solutions, as well as parental and educator support systems, to find a way forward in improving literacy.
