It’s not alarmist to say that middle school literacy today is in a state of crisis. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 70% of American fourth-graders—at least 2 million kids—are unable to read proficiently. This alarming figure is up from 66% in 2019. The latest Long-Term Trend Assessment results from NAEP found that 9-year-olds’ reading scores had improved by 4 points since 2022, but 13-year-olds’ scores had remained stagnant.
Middle and high school students who lack key literacy skills also lack the tools they need to succeed in school and life. These students face a steep uphill battle: in secondary school, they will have few resources, opportunities, or structures available to help them become stronger readers. For this reason, low 4th-grade literacy skills not only prevent a student from succeeding in middle school; they also predict their larger life outcomes. Non-proficient 4th-grade readers are four times less likely to graduate from high school, and six times more likely to end up in prison or on welfare. A 2020 study from the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy found that low adult literacy costs the American economy $2.2 trillion a year. This is not a problem that only impacts teenagers, their teachers, and their families. This is a problem that affects all of us.
A variety of interconnected factors have contributed to the current decline in middle school literacy, including:
- The balanced literacy era;
- Core curriculum standards;
- A traditional school model that focuses on literacy only in K-3;
- An increase in newcomers;
- The disruption caused by COVID-19;
- Poverty;
- Gaps in teacher education;
- Lack of funding; and
- The distraction of smartphones and social media.
There is no silver bullet that will address all of these challenges at once. Breaking the cycle we’re in will require contributions from teachers, administrators, teacher prep programs, curriculum providers, policy makers, and funders. Here’s my vision of what those contributions should be.
How Middle School Teachers Can Help Struggling Readers Today
Middle school presents a unique opportunity to solidify a foundation of literacy that is rooted in student agency. In elementary school, literacy is baked into every part of the curriculum and every part of a student’s day. In middle school, students are starting to emerge as independent thinkers, and with the right approach, educators can capitalize on that self-efficacy to “hook” students on reading in a way that creates a lifelong love of reading.
Even before schools, districts, and states get on board to enable this work at scale, middle school teachers can transform reading for the students in their own classrooms. Here are several ways we can advocate for struggling readers, empower student growth, and pioneer new approaches on the ground.
- Center relevance and engagement. Unlike K-3 students, older students who struggle with reading need to be “won back” or “won over” in the first place. This means that the first step is to help students identify reading as something that they can do and can want to do. Start with the student: What do they love? What interests them? And provide opportunities for students to engage in achievable reading activities that explore those topics and themes.
- Identify key student skill gaps through a tiered assessment approach. Use student data to place students into interventions and inform core curriculum instruction through differentiated access points.
- Make every learning activity a literacy opportunity to encourage and enable meaningful reading practice.
- Make growth visible and enable students to take ownership of their own progress.
These steps can help students in classrooms today, but long-term success requires the attention and support of education leaders.
The Role of Principals and District Leaders in Solving the Middle School Reading Crisis
School principals and district leaders have the power to lead the way to enacting change for older striving readers by:
- Making literacy a school-wide priority: Leaders can create a culture where every educator thinks of themself as a literacy teacher.
- Rethinking structures and schedules to ensure teachers and students have ample time in the school day to dedicate to literacy instruction and practice.
- Looking at core curriculum and literacy in concert: Identifying opportunities to reinforce disciplinary literacy skills across subject areas strengthens interdisciplinary literacy in every class in a student’s schedule.
- Evaluating secondary interventions to ensure that they are relevant and responsive to the interests and experiences of older students, then providing students opportunities to connect foundational literacy instruction to the core curriculum.
- Pairing funding with smart policy: A new wave of funding for schools and districts to spearhead 3-12 literacy in earnest will be an important piece of this puzzle. The funding should support schools and districts directly, with clear guidance on its purpose.
In recent months, we have seen a backlash regarding the use of digital programs in schools. To me, this is another debate that relies on nuance for true engagement: Personally, I believe that all reading is good reading for adolescents who have fallen behind. I also recognize the risks of a scaffold-reliant approach for student reading, and the distractions that technology adds to the mix.
Those of us who are avid readers often acknowledge the ways that physical books offer certain benefits that screens do not. But more importantly, when kids at school are “reading” on screens, they are not necessarily truly reading. Today’s students are quite technologically savvy, and able to find work-arounds to avoid assignments when the reading happens on a digital screen. A physical book requires clear attention, removes a layer of distractions, and offers the benefits of a more tactile experience. Turning pages, holding a book in your hand, flipping backwards to revisit a powerful sentence, and underlining or writing in the margins when the moment strikes are all ways to supercharge student progress.
As the larger systems grapple with issues like this one in their effort to catch up to the current reality, teacher prep programs can build for the future by training all teachers—not just K-3 teachers or ELA teachers—in foundational literacy instruction.
Why Teacher Education Programs Need to Adapt
Traditionally, K-3 teachers were responsible for early literacy instruction. When the Science of Reading movement took hold, teacher education programs were one of the first things to be revamped. Today’s aspiring elementary teachers are often given strong evidence-based guidance in effective literacy instruction. This is a great first step.
Secondary teachers, on the other hand, are typically not trained in early reading instruction. The assumption in teacher education programs is that their future students will read on grade level. As the statistics above show, this is not true for a majority of students. Therefore, the immediate next step for teacher education programs is to provide every single teacher with the knowledge, skills, and curriculum to address early reading.
The Role of Curriculum Providers in Supporting Struggling Middle School Readers
Curriculum providers have not typically addressed early literacy skills in 3-12 programs. As adolescent literacy becomes more visible as a need and more supported as a crucial area of focus, the big curriculum players are starting to launch “middle school intervention programs.”
However, if you look behind the curtain, many of these “new” programs tend to be primarily early elementary programs that have been reskinned for older kids. To solve the middle school reading crisis, curriculum companies must act with integrity and intellectual honesty. Lest we forget, the goal of education, and therefore curriculum, is to educate our students in the best and most expansive way possible. Curriculum companies should not disguise a 1st-grade program as a 6th-grade one at the expense of the students they claim to serve.
At Storyshares, our coaching offers schools powerful and practical solutions to support their older striving readers in strengthening their literacy skills. We work with educators to address structured literacy, student reading identities, targeted instructional routines, relevant text choices, and curricular coherence. We partner with administrators to create a culture of reading that fosters schoolwide systems of literacy support, growth, and empowerment. We work with schools, districts, and community-based organizations to transform both the way older students read and the way older students view reading. We also strive to always highlight bright spots in adolescent literacy transformation.
Highlighting the Bright Spots to Stay Motivated
In its inaugural year, many educators who taught with our Literacy Intervention for Teens (LIFT) shared that their students both developed stronger foundational literacy skills and gained more confidence in themselves as readers.
- Melissa Whitmore, an educator from Belleville School District, noted that her students went from shared reading to wanting to read to her to show off their skills. Melissa believes that her students' reading confidence blossomed because of LIFT.
- Kasey Slattery, Literacy Coach from Rise Prep Academies, who taught at an after-school program, shared a similar sentiment. She mentioned that one scholar in the LIFT program raised his hand and volunteered to read aloud in front of the class—something he had never done before. She also noted that his teacher observed his fluency improving and demonstrated stronger prosody and confidence when reading.
- Jamie Class, a special education teacher from Montebello School district, also spoke to this literacy skill growth. She shared that many of her students in her LIFT fluency group jumped 2+ years in reading level, according to their iReady scores.
These bright spots remind us that change is hard, but it is possible. Storyshares began as a book publisher, but we have expanded our work to encompass every piece of the adolescent literacy puzzle. We are currently looking closely at secondary coherence, working to deepen ties between literacy interventions and core curricula to create more connected and empowering learning experiences for older students and their teachers. Inspired by the dedicated educators and administrators we speak with every day, we will continue to build on what works to drive meaningful change in the adolescent literacy field.
Want to learn more? Listen to the Adolescent Literacy Podcast.