Southern States Boost Early Reading, But Gains Stall in Middle School

Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee started reforms later and may need more time. But McGrath’s question remains.

Researchers and literacy advocates point to a common answer: early reading reforms focused on phonics, which helped students decode words, but decoding alone is not enough for proficient middle school reading, where the words are longer and the sentences are more complicated.

Timothy Shanahan, a veteran reading researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said reading instruction must continue after students learn to read. “It’s not phonics exactly,” he said. Teachers need to break down multisyllabic words, teach word roots and odd spellings, and find time to read extensively to build fluency with complex texts.

Shanahan thinks schools should teach students how to read grade-level texts, even if they are challenging, and provide guidance on vocabulary, syntax and sentence structure.

The research evidence is sometimes murky on exactly how to help older students with reading comprehension. There’s widespread agreement that background knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension strategies are all important. But experts and advocates disagree about their relative importance and how much time to spend on them.

Many literacy advocates argue for more emphasis on background knowledge because it’s hard to grasp an unfamiliar topic. For example, even if I had a glossary of words, a technical medical article involving genetic analysis would be lost on me. Researchers also say that many low-income children aren’t exposed to as much art, travel and political news at home as wealthier kids, which means that many topics that come up in books are less familiar and harder to absorb.

Some research has shown promising literacy improvements from building children’ s knowledge. Harvard researchers found some success with specially designed social studies and science lessons (not reading lessons). But a 2024 meta-analysis didn’t find short-term reading benefits from knowledge-building units in classrooms. It may be that it takes years for these lessons to improve reading comprehension. And that long arc of progress is difficult for researchers to track.

“There is no question that knowledge plays a role in comprehension,” said Shanahan. “But it has been difficult to find how such knowledge could generalize. In other words, if you teach kids about goldfish, that may improve their comprehension of other goldfish texts, but will it have any other impact?”

There is also a debate about the value of drilling students in reading comprehension questions, the kinds that are likely to come up on standardized tests, such as figuring out an author’s main point.

Carl Hendrick, a prominent proponent of explicitly teaching children background knowledge and vocabulary, and a professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam, agrees that a small amount of strategy instruction can be helpful, such as having students practice writing a summary after reading something. But Hendrick concludes from the research literature that there are diminishing returns to strategy instruction after 10 hours of it. “When a student cannot grasp the main idea of a passage, the problem is almost never that they lack a ‘strategy,’” Hendrick wrote in a March 2026 newsletter. “The problem is that they do not understand enough of the words.”

Too much screen time may also be a factor. “Kids aren’t reading as much anymore,” said Sarah Webb, a senior director at Great Minds, a curriculum maker. Cellphones and video games have replaced books. And the less time that kids practice reading, the less opportunity they have to get better at it. A March 2026 Scholastic white paper, “Students Are Reading Less and Losing Stamina: Why Sustained Reading Matters More Than Ever,” highlights the growing decline in reading among preteens and teenagers.

Meanwhile, the growing gap between fourth and eighth grade reading scores in the South is prompting teachers to question the assumption that middle schoolers already know how to read, Webb said.

“They used to say the progression in school was you learn to read and then you read to learn,” Webb said. “Now people realize it needs to be both for much longer. ‘Reading to learn’ should start earlier, and ‘learning to read’ must continue well past third grade.”

This story about eighth-grade reading was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.