As the new school year starts, educators find themselves in uncharted waters — teaching students whose reading comprehension skills were impacted by the pandemic and, thanks to politically charged book bans in some states, fewer resources to help them.
For example, Gen Alpha, the generation born between 2010 and the end of this year, have been raised more online than any other generation. Most have not known life without smartphones or social media and their educational experience has been most shaped by school closures and remote learning implemented during lockdown. According to the latest educational reports, the Alphas are struggling.
Every four years the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) publishes the “Nation’s Report Card” reflecting the reading and math scores of fourth, eighth, and 12th graders across the country. NAEP’s 2022 report, its most recent, revealed that just one-third of students in these grades are proficient in reading, reflecting a downward turn from pre-pandemic results. For fourth graders, the average reading score was the lowest it’s been since 2005, and for eighth graders this was the lowest since 1998.
In a press release, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) officials said the results reflected how the pandemic impacted students’ learning achievement.
“The results show the profound toll on student learning during the pandemic, as the size and scope of the declines are the largest ever in mathematics,” said NCES commissioner Peggy G. Carr. “But academic recovery cannot simply be about returning to what was ‘normal’ before the pandemic, as the pandemic laid bare an ‘opportunity gap’ that has long existed. It also showed how every student was vulnerable to the pandemic’s disruptions. We do not have a moment to waste.”
Per the report, low-income and BIPOC kids had it worse. About 56% of Black, 50% Latino, and 57% of American Indian or Alaskan Native fourth graders are not meeting basic benchmarks in reading.
This is the reality today’s students face from coast to coast.
Health Sciences High and Middle College, a charter high school in San Diego, is combatting their literacy issue by integrating reading lessons into classes of every subject. For example, their chemistry teacher spends 20 of 80 minutes of class time engaging students in breaking down the prefix, suffix, or root word of scientific terms like “intermolecular,” the Hechinger Report reported in August.
“Many students struggle at the secondary level with decoding, typically multisyllabic words. Those longer words that they’re encountering in science text, for example, or in social studies text,” Jade Wexler, a special education professor at the University of Maryland told the Hechinger Report. “We also have a lot of our kids that can decode these words at decent levels and with fluency but they still struggle to comprehend the text that they’re reading.”
Across the country, in New York, over 60% of Black and Latino middle schoolers were not proficient in this year’s state reading exams, with 37% of middle school boys in the Bronx, scoring at the bottom level and not mastering even part of the skills expected for their age group, according to the New York Times.
While the state is implementing a $10 million plan to improve reading proficiency, including training 20,000 teachers in “the science of reading” — research-based teaching that stresses phonics, word recognition, fluency and more in early literacy — educators argue there are no interventions aimed at older students.
“They’re always an afterthought,” Susan Neuman, a former U.S. assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education told the New York Times last week.
If students do not catch up as they age, they risk joining an even larger literacy crisis. According to a Dec. 2023 ProPublica report, almost one-fifth of American adults, 48 million people, struggle to read, citing Appalachia, the Southern Black Belt, the Central Valley of California and the Texas-Mexico border as low adult literacy hotspots with few resources to help them to improve. As literacy is correlated to income and employment levels, Gallup research and the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy predict low adult literacy costs the U.S. economy $2.2 trillion a year.
“This research clearly shows that investing in adult literacy is absolutely critical to the strength of our nation, now and for generations to come. It proves that what Barbara Bush said more than 30 years ago is still true today: ‘Literacy is everyone’s business. Period,’” British A. Robinson, president and CEO of the Barbara Bush Foundation told Forbes.
Book bans further cutting back student’s reading opportunities
In the backdrop of a literacy crisis, some school boards are cutting students’ reading options. As Reckon reported in April, PEN America found that over 4,000 books were banned in the first half of the last school year alone, with books depicting sexual violence and LGBTQ+ identities especially impacted.
Florida is at the forefront of this battle as a group of publishers and authors including Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Harper Collins have now filed a lawsuit against state board of education officials over a law that requires schools to remove books that depict sexual content, but which advocates say allows for vague censorship of literature. That law was driven by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty and Gov. Ron DeSantis last year.
“We’re not talking about Playboy magazine, you know, we’re talking about ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘War and Peace,’” Judi Hayes, a Florida mother who joined the lawsuit, told CBS this week.
According to Newsweek, some of the removed books include Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” as well as titles by Judy Blume and Stephen King.
Florida officials argue that the law gives parents the power to object to “obscene” materials in the classroom.
“There are no books banned in Florida,” Nathalia Medina, the state’s Department of Education press secretary said in a statement. “Sexually explicit material and instruction are not suitable for schools.”
Regardless of the intent behind the legislation, reports show that minimizing diversity in reading materials is harmful to young readers. A 2023 study by Ed Trust found that when students read culturally diverse texts or see themselves represented in books, they are more likely to become engaged readers. It also limits youth’s opportunity to explore their identities and values through reading or conversations about books, Harvard University senior lecturer Pamela Mason wrote in a guide to help educators navigating book bans.
Harvard librarian and director of Gutman Library Alex Hodges argues that censorship prevents youth from developing critical thinking skills over time.
“If books are challenged successfully, and then censored or banned, individuals — on their own terms and stages of literacy development — lose the right and the ability to analyze, deconstruct, and decode the writing, history, logic, illustrations, and symbols that make up much of the wide diversity of our cultural and social systems,” he told the Harvard Graduate School of Education last year.
PEN America reports that last school year Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina implemented the most book bans. According to NAEP, the percentage of students who performed at or above the proficient level in these states was 23% in Texas, 39% in Florida, 30% in Missouri, 36% in Utah, and 32% in South Carolina.