Why Do Some People Say There's No Reading Crisis?

It may have something to do with opposing systematic phonics instruction.

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The Washington Post recently ran an op-ed arguing that, as the headline put it, “There is no reading crisis in the U.S.” While this argument isn’t new, it may be a sign of continuing pushback to the movement for systematic instruction in phonics.

The op-ed, written by a professor of education named Paul L. Thomas, argues that policymakers and journalists have misinterpreted data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which tests American students every two years in reading. They’re confusing NAEP “proficiency” level with “grade level,” Thomas writes, when in fact NAEP proficiency is a higher standard.

It's true those measures are different. For the record, NAEP proficiency is defined as “competency over challenging subject matter.” NAEP “basic,” which is considered equivalent to grade level in most states, is defined as “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade.”

Thomas says NAEP proficiency is an unrealistic standard and therefore we shouldn’t be alarmed that two-thirds of students are falling below it. He contends that we should be looking to the percentage who score below basic instead: around one third. That, he writes, is “a figure that is concerning but does not constitute a widespread reading crisis.”

As I wrote in a letter to the editor of the Post—one of three that were published challenging Thomas’s assertions—I beg to differ. Even if you accept Thomas’s point that NAEP basic is the right standard, the one third of students who score below it constitute a lot of kids—about 16 million, according to my calculations.

We’ve made no progress in decreasing that number in decades, and in recent years it’s even increased, with a full 40 percent of fourth-graders scoring below basic in 2024 (that’s about 1.4 million children). The NAEP is supposed to test reading comprehension, but the evidence we have suggests that many kids in that category are struggling simply to decipher the words. Why is that not a crisis?

Ignoring the Opportunity Gap?

Thomas argues that the focus on NAEP proficiency “has allowed the country to ignore what is urgent: addressing the opportunity gap that negatively impacts Black and Brown students, impoverished students, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities.”

That’s a mystifying claim. In fact, NAEP scores, which are broken down by those categories, have helped focus attention on the fact that students in those groups suffer most from flaws in our education system, whether you use proficient or basic as the standard.

Among Black fourth graders, for example, 83 percent scored below proficient in reading in 2022, as did 79 percent of Hispanic fourth graders. That’s a considerably higher proportion than the 58 percent of white students who fell into that category. The same kind of discrepancy shows up if we use below basic, although the gaps are slightly smaller: 56 percent for Black students and 50 percent for Hispanic students, as compared to 27 percent for white students.

Much of the reporting on NAEP has focused on these racial gaps (although, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the more relevant criterion is level of parental education, where the gaps are similar). How, then, is the focus on proficiency allowing the country to “ignore” them?

It’s hard to figure out what Thomas is arguing for. He thinks it’s a bad idea to require struggling readers to repeat a grade (“grade retention”) and a good idea to use age levels rather than grade levels for reading tests, so that instead of talking about kids reading below “grade level” we would say they’re below “age level.” But it’s not clear how his proposals would help the millions of kids who struggle to read, whether you see them as being below basic, below proficiency, below grade level, or below age level.

Thomas’s claim that there’s no reading “crisis” grabbed people’s attention, but the piece itself is pretty incoherent. Maybe he has an unspoken agenda?

Nothing to See Here

In the past, others have used the same claim about a phony reading crisis to argue that the “science of reading” movement has led to an overemphasis on phonics. Phonics has its place, these commentators say, but kids learn to read in different ways, and teachers need the flexibility to adjust their methods.

The claim that there’s no reading crisis is a way of arguing that schools have been doing an adequate job teaching reading, even if beginning readers are encouraged to guess at words rather than sounding them out—so there’s nothing to see here, folks.

Thomas didn’t explicitly make that argument in his recent op-ed, but he has taken that position in the past. “The SoR [Science of Reading] movement is a bandwagon with its wheels mired in the same muddled arguments that have never been true and silver-bullet solutions that have never worked,” he wrote on Diane Ravitch’s blog in 2021. “In time, almost everyone learns to read, regardless of method.”

Given that Thomas is a former high school English teacher who is now a professor of English and Secondary Education, it’s unclear how much expertise he has in reading instruction. But yes, “almost everyone” learns to read, in the sense that they can sound out, or “decode,” simple words.

Still, untold numbers of kids are held back at higher grade levels because they never got enough instruction to enable them to decode fluently, especially when reading longer and more complex words. They have to devote so much mental effort to decoding the words that they don’t have the cognitive capacity to understand what they’re reading. Maybe Thomas never taught at high schools like those serving the lowest-income students, where it’s not uncommon for many ninth-graders to test at or below a third-grade reading level.

It may seem like the science of reading movement has gained universal support among educators, but there are pockets of resistance where arguments like Thomas’s continue to be made. One ed school professor told me that when she recently submitted an article to an academic journal focused on literacy, the editor told her she couldn’t use the phrase “reading crisis” because there wasn’t one.

Similarly, I was startled to discover a “proofreading” change in an article I wrote for an education publication. My original version read, “One significant reason for … struggles with decoding is that the widely used balanced literacy approach has teachers encourage children to guess at unfamiliar words.” In the published article, “significant” had been changed to “suspected.” (I convinced the publication to restore the original wording in the online version.)

And Ed Week recently ran an opinion piece by an elementary teacher, Dana Palubiak, defending Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study curriculum, which has been criticized for its unsystematic approach to phonics. Calkins, wrote Palubiak, “has become a lightning rod for literacy criticism,” much of which—she claimed—“is likely spurred by low scores” on the NAEP. Despite those low scores, Palubiak maintained, “I can tell you my students were deeply engaged with the content.”

Palubiak seems to be saying that low NAEP scores don’t mean anything as long as students are engaged in what they’re reading. But Palubiak’s classroom, in an apparently affluent suburb, isn’t exactly a scientific sample. Students in other classrooms, who are struggling to decode words, may be a lot less engaged. Not to mention that it wasn’t just low NAEP scores that prompted criticism of Calkins’ curriculum. It was also the fact that her approach to teaching kids how to decipher words conflicted with voluminous evidence from cognitive science about how children learn to read.

Drill and Kill

This pushback stems from the longstanding fear that schools will overdo phonics and kill students’ desire to read—in other words, “drill and kill.” Palubiak says that when she substitute-taught in a second-grade classroom and announced that it was time for the required 40 minutes of phonics—which, according to her, the kids didn’t need—she was greeted with boos.

Kids who don’t need instruction in phonics shouldn’t have to sit through 40 minutes of it. One problem, though, is that it can be hard to tell who needs phonics instruction and who doesn’t. It can look like kids are reading, especially with leveled texts that rely heavily on repetition of the same words. Kids can easily guess at the words rather than sounding them out.

Still, it’s certainly possible to overdo phonics, and 40 minutes of whole-class instruction is likely too much. Experts recommend no more than 20 to 30 minutes, but I’ve heard of schools that spend 90 minutes or more on it. At the same time, many are sticking with an approach to reading comprehension that puts skills like “making inferences” in the foreground, having kids read a brief text to “practice the skill” rather than allowing them to dive into a whole book.

Not only does that fail to equip kids to read more complex text, it’s pretty boring. Critics of the science of reading movement worry about “drill and kill” when it comes to phonics, but many appear blind to the fact that it’s just as likely to happen with that kind of skills-focused comprehension instruction. If you want to show kids the joy of reading, read aloud to them from engaging texts that introduce them to a new topic or from a novel that transports them to another world.

Science Requires More than Phonics

In his op-ed, Thomas cites a study showing that grade retention has only a short-term positive effect on reading outcomes, which he relies on as part of his argument against the practice. In fact, that study showed that the benefits of any early literacy policy focused on foundational reading skills fade out by middle school.

Phonics skeptics might say those findings prove phonics doesn’t work. But what they really show is that phonics instruction, while essential, isn’t enough to ensure success at higher grade levels.

To enable students to read complex text—and to resolve the seemingly endless battles over reading instruction—we need to realize there’s a lot of science related to reading beyond the evidence supporting phonics instruction. If the science of reading is interpreted to just mean “more phonics,” as it too often is, many schools will unintentionally give ammunition to phonics skeptics.

If, however, we can communicate the message that science also supports ample time for engaging, content-rich read-alouds, lively class discussions about that content, and explicit writing instruction grounded in that content, phonics advocates and phonics skeptics should be able to find common ground.

And people who ostensibly care deeply about the most vulnerable children in our society wouldn’t feel compelled to make the startling argument that when millions of them are unable to read at the level expected for their grade level—or age level—that doesn’t constitute a crisis.