A U.S. reading crisis in News stories

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Dana Goldstein, who covers education for The Times, has been hearing from parents concerned that their young children’s language development might have been hindered by masks in the classroom.

After the Omicron variant wave, when some epidemiologists suggested that it was time to start unmasking in schools, concern from parents “reached a fever pitch,” Dana said.

“But when I got on the phone with speech pathologists and phonics experts, they cast a lot of doubts on the correlation,” Dana said. “There’s not rigorous data at this point that would suggest that masks are the cause of the issue.”

“However, I continued down the road of talking to speech and reading experts and heard about a lot of other really big deficits,” she said.

Perhaps most concerning: About a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic, according to a cluster of recent studies. In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, data that the researchers called “alarming.”

Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

“Reading is the building block of human knowledge,” Dana said, “and it’s the all-consuming purpose of elementary academic education in many ways.” Children who read poorly are more likely to drop out of high school, earn less money as adults and become involved in the criminal justice system.

The reasons for the crisis are many. School closures, remote learning and limited social interactions have all played a role.

Those issues are exacerbated by “the larger economic story of the Great Resignation, where you have about half of schools reporting that they have vacancies in core teaching jobs — and the largest category of causes for that is resignation, not retirements,” Dana said.

Teaching reading via remote learning was exceedingly difficult, even if students had access to the necessary tools, like an internet connection (many did not). It was tedious for teachers, and students needed supervision at home from an adult who could walk them through online instruction.

There’s also a common misconception that simply reading to children will teach them how to read. “Reading at home is really important for building interest and motivation to read, but many children need a lot more explicit instruction to learn to read — more than parents are able to provide just by reading to them,” Dana said.

And that’s what was largely missing during the pandemic: explicit, hands-on instruction.

“There was a lot of good work happening across the country on improving reading instruction previous to the pandemic, so ideally the future would look like picking that back up and expanding that movement using the federal stimulus dollars,” Dana said.

“But it is very challenging because you can have great intention to improve early literacy at your school, and you can have money, but if you cannot find college-educated workers to hire — or can’t find enough — it’s going to be hard,” she said.