the big ideas

Much Ado About Literacy

Let's talk (and read!) about the US literacy crisis - what the real causes are & how to fix them.

chorui halim

27 Aug 2025 — 17 min read

The US literacy crisis is a hot topic - regarding both adults and children. There's lots of discussion about how bad the problem is and what the long-term impacts are. And there's especially a focus on iPad babies, COVID babies, Gen Alpha - basically the argument of "kids these days spend all their time on social media and that's why they can't read." The problem apparently also extends to Australia, the UK, Canada, Argentina, Brazil... though we'll focus on the US context in this article, it's clear that this concern is global.

It's true that many kids are struggling to read. But blaming screen time and using that as an excuse to pass draconian laws doesn't come close to dealing with the core causes. As always, this problem is exacerbated by classism, racism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination, but even that doesn't explain the full situation. Today, let's talk about youth literacy: why kids are struggling to read, how they learn vs. how they're taught, and how we should actually address literacy problems on a broad scale.

Why Kids Are Struggling

Reading isn't an innate skill like walking, breathing, or speaking. Some people can learn how to read just from passively absorbing material and figuring out the rules for decoding and comprehending words themselves, but that isn't the case for most people. Most people need to be systematically taught to read. On top of that, most people need to be given enough opportunities to achieve reading success: small wins in terms of comprehending, finishing, and enjoying a book that can snowball into a more consistent reading practice. People need both of these elements to be able to read fluently.

Put simply, kids struggle to read when:

They aren't taught to read in a way that aligns with how the brain processes written information.
They lack an environment where they can consistently experience those moments of reading success.
Both of these things apply.

So to effectively combat literacy issues, we need to understand how people learn to read fluently, and give them endless opportunities to practice, prioritize, and enjoy reading.

How People Learn to Read

There are a lot of different models in cognitive science that try to explain what's going on in people's brains when they are reading fluently. We'll cover three of them: the Simple View of Reading, Scarborough's Rope, and the Active View of Reading.

The Simple View of Reading

The Simple View of Reading (Gough and Tumner 1986) is, well, pretty simple. It goes:

Reading = Decoding + Linguistic Comprehension

Decoding is the ability to "read isolated words quickly, accurately, and silently." Comprehension is the ability to understand what's being read. The idea behind the Simple View of Reading is that both of these parts are important to reading fluency - a weakness in one or both parts will lead to a weakness in overall reading ability.

Scarborough's Rope

Scarborough's Rope (2001) is basically an expanded version of the Simple View of Reading. Instead of decoding, it identifies recognition as one of the two main parts. Scarborough's Rope also breaks the main parts further down into their component pieces:

Recognition
- Phonological Awareness
- Decoding
- Sight Recognition
Language Comprehension
- Background Knowledge
- Vocabulary
- Language Structures
- Verbal Reasoning
- Literacy Knowledge

Scarborough, H. S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook for research in early literacy (pp. 97–110). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Each of the little strands twist together and form the two main strands of the rope, which are then also woven together to form the overall reading ability. The level of detail in Scarborough's Rope helps break down all the independent skills that need to be developed and combined.

The Active View of Reading

The Active View of Reading (Duke and Cartwright 2021) is the newest of these models. It rejects the dualistic view of reading: the idea that reading ability can be broken down into two separate, completely independent parts. Instead, it identifies bridging processes that combine concepts from both the "word recognition" category and the "language comprehension" category, as well as adding some more specific details regarding what is covered by each concept.

The final component of the Active View of Reading - not present in the Simple View of Reading or Scarborough's Rope - is active self-regulation. This involves the processes that the reader uses to stick with reading even when it might be difficult. These self-regulation strategies affect each of the three other parts of reading.

Here's how it breaks down, followed by the graphical representation:

Active Self Regulation
- Motivation and engagement
- Executive function skills
- Strategy use
Word Recognition
- Phonological awareness
- Alphabetic principle
- Phonics knowledge
- Decoding skills
- Recognition of words at sight
Bridging Processes
- Print concepts
- Reading fluency
- Vocabulary knowledge
- Morphological awareness
- Graphophonological-semantic cognitive flexibility (letter-sound-meaning flexibility)
Language Comprehension
- Cultural and other content knowledge
- Reading-specific background knowledge
- Verbal reasoning
- Language structure
- Theory of mind

Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the Simple View of Reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rrq.411

All of these pieces contribute to reading ability, as well as others still not covered by this model in detail: which text is being read, what task the reader is attempting by reading that particular text, and what the sociocultural context is.

So as the Science of Reading continues to develop and refine itself, we continue to gain a more detailed and nuanced view of everything that is going on in the brain as we're reading. How does this square with how reading is taught in schools?

How Kids Are Taught to Read

Many schools have been using reading programs that are completely incompatible with the Science of Reading. Journalist Emily Hanford has done some of the most thorough reporting on these programs and their impacts on literacy outcomes. From her 2022 article in The New York Times:

As many as a quarter of elementary schools use Units of Study, the curriculum her son’s school was following. Far more schools teach the same word-reading strategies as part of an approach to teaching reading broadly known as balanced literacy. In a 2019 survey by Education Week, 72 percent of elementary special education and K-2 teachers said their schools used balanced literacy.

These word-reading strategies are a crutch, kind of like training wheels, that allow children to “read” books without knowing how to actually read the words. They’re based on the belief that most children will eventually figure out how to read words and spell them if they spend enough time with books.

Approaches like balanced literacy have led many, many kids to struggle with reading, as Hanford goes on to point out:

But all kinds of kids, from all kinds of families — rich, poor and middle class — need more help with reading than they’re getting in school. On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, 65 percent of fourth graders scored basic or below basic in reading.

To learn more about balanced literacy, whole word learning, Reading Recovery, and other approaches to reading instruction that have contributed to poor literacy outcomes, I'd highly recommend Hanford's podcast Sold a Story, produced by APM Reports. It definitely blew my mind when I first listened to it. Not that it's perfect - it often glosses over the social requirements of literacy development and leaves out some of the major problems with the Science of Reading branding, as experienced teacher Nick Covington points out in this critical article.

How do we fix it?

Improving literacy outcomes isn't as easy as saying everyone should switch back to phonics-based curricula and calling it a day. First of all, schools are highly decentralized and it's very difficult to implement a new curriculum across the board. Second, while phonics knowledge is a critical part of reading, it's only one part of the highly complex process - as we can see in the Active View of Reading. There's a lot more we need to deal with if we want to truly fix this problem, such as:

Metrics-based education
School funding structures
Meeting children's basic needs
Providing individualized support

Metrics-Based Education

The current trend of metrics-based education is a result of the neoliberal push for school privatization - the logic behind that is kind of a winding road. Here's a step-by-step breakdown, as simply as I can manage:

Growing neoliberalization of the economy under the Reagan administration
A Nation at Risk (1983) published
Growing concern about the declining/poor quality of public schools
Market-based solutions presented as the answer
No Child Left Behind (2001) passed
Push towards adopting all kinds of different market-oriented curricula, training/development, etc., spearheaded by philanthropic foundations
Metrics-based education proposed as a way to track teacher behavior and student outcomes
Proliferation of assessment and benchmarking metrics to hold public schools "accountable" for their students' success

A Nation at Risk was a report published under the Reagan administration that sounded the alarm about the declining quality of state-funded schools causing poor student outcomes. It kicked off a full panic about how to improve the quality of schooling so that children would grow up better prepared to work in a rapidly changing & globalizing postindustrial economy. Of course, it was the Reagan administration, so the proposed solutions were to "run school like businesses" - the idea being that bringing neoliberal market logic to the education system would force schools to improve their student outcomes quickly or risk closing.

Almost twenty years later, under the George W. Bush administration, No Child Left Behind passed. This marked the beginning of neoliberal education reform at the federal level. This included establishing strict testing and benchmarking requirements. From page 109 of Making Workers by Katharyne Mitchell:

The NCLB era became known as the time of "high-stakes testing" because of the extreme material consequences brought to bear on schools if students did not measure up on the rapidly proliferating forms of assessment. Poor ongoing results in any subject area were met with increasingly drastic sanctions. After five years of inadequate (and largely unattainable) progress, for example, a school was required to restructure, which meant a series of choices, all involving major changes to staffing, governance, and/or the form of the school itself. One of the choices was conversion to a charter school, and another was conversion to private management. In many cases principals were replaced, often in favor of more reform-oriented candidates.

This is what metrics-based education is - the implementation of all these testing and data collection methods as a result of the neoliberal push for education reform. The claim behind this change is that these systems offer a more detailed look at how schools are teaching kids & how student outcomes are changing as a result. This information, supporters said, would improve the quality of education in public schools and reverse the decline in student outcomes.

There are two huge problems with this. (Well, definitely more, but let's start with two.)

First, this approach doesn't help students learn reading comprehension or critical thinking. Metrics are meant to be analyzed at scale, which is easier to do the more standardized they are. That means more multiple-choice or true/false questions or highly structured essays that can be graded via rubric. These types of assessments discourage creativity and experimentation, and they don't challenge students in a way that promotes growth. They also require many teachers to "teach to the test" instead of exploring a larger variety of topics, examples, and applications. Most importantly, doing well on tests like these doesn't mean that a student necessarily understands the material and can apply it in a variety of situations. It means the student is good at taking standardized tests, which is a completely different skill. (Sidenote: here's an interesting history of standardized testing in the US.)

Second, and more importantly, this approach doesn't deal with any of the core problems causing poor educational outcomes. It often makes them worse. Poor educational outcomes in the US are very, very highly correlated with other racial and class disparities. That isn't because poor or Black kids are inherently less able to learn - it's because of the differences in school funding that end up affecting so many aspects of education. Neoliberal education reform required schools to manage these massive required changes to their operations without the increases in funding necessary to make them happen. Then, instead of using school budgets to serve students and teachers, administrators had to reallocate a lot of it toward implementing these expensive changes instead - or risk school restructuring or closure.

Activists, sociologists, and other experts and laypeople have known this entire time what the core issues are behind the academic achievement gap. We knew that these reforms were never going to fix the real problems. Instead, the reforms were a cover for widespread school privatization efforts - converting many public schools into for-profit businesses. To actually fix children's literacy issues, especially those from low-income and Black communities where the need is highest, we have to undo this whole process as well as restructure the entire way we fund schools in the first place.

School Funding Structures

Most schools in the US are funded through property taxes. Right off the bat, this means that school districts where property values are higher will get more funding. Not surprisingly, these districts are also whiter and richer than those with lower property values. (Even if Black parents wanted to choose to move to wealthier neighborhoods, historical practices like redlining still continue under the radar today, despite being outlawed. These practices make moving to certain areas difficult or impossible even if they have the money & ability to move.)

This funding structure was highly inequitable from the start. That was kind of the point of it. But again, the children who have the most difficulty with literacy are from low-income and racially marginalized communities. If we want to fix that issue, we have to structure school funding in a much more equitable way, so that the money actually reaches those students.

No market-oriented solution will work as well on a population level. Market solutions to this issue essentially insist that only the students whose families can pay for services can excel academically. It creates winners and losers among students - among children - because that is how market logic works. Furthermore, this is how it will continue to work unless for-profit schools are eliminated. (Not that crazy. Finland's done it - and we should go a step further and abolish private schools entirely.) Otherwise, the material incentive will always be to pursue privatization - in order to redirect that public funding into private pockets.

Meeting Children's Basic Needs

Children have a harder time learning when they're hungry. They have a harder time learning when they don't have stable housing. They have a harder time learning when they have unaddressed medical problems. They have a harder time learning when they're being abused or neglected. This is Psych 101 stuff - specifically, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

I've argued before in favor of a system where children can get their basic needs met independently from their family - in that case, to address the core cause of child abuse. But I strongly believe that same system would also help improve educational outcomes. I think a system like that should be available independently from school as well, but having free breakfast/lunch programs, clinics, and housing assistance resources available at school would be a great first step.

I suspect that having these resources available for children independently of the family form would narrow the academic achievement gap. I can't back up my suspicions with hard data, because to my knowledge, no country has a system like that. But we do have data surrounding universal meal programs, and they do help.

Providing Individualized Support

As we can see with Scarborough's Rope and the Active View of Reading, reading is a complex process with a lot of variables. It's very difficult to teach it effectively in a classroom setting, since every student is working within a different context - home environment, level of reading engagement from their caregivers, effective learning styles, disabilities, and more. Naturally, this means that students will struggle with different things as they learn to read.

We can't adequately address everyone's difficulties when we have one teacher in charge of 20+ children. It just isn't possible. And we can't rely on parents to fill the gaps - there are too many other pressures (job stress, money issues, housework, etc.) to handle, and most parents don't have the training how to teach reading effectively in the first place. If we try to wash our hands of the problem by saying that teachers should be providing generalized instruction while parents should be providing more specialized support, children will always fall through the cracks.

There is a simple answer - train and hire more support staff. If every classroom had a group of literacy tutors each in charge of small groups of students (or even individuals!), it would be so much easier for them to identify points of weakness as well as methods of addressing them. Having many more paraprofessionals in each classroom would also solve so many of the other problems teachers face today in terms of classroom management, outsized workloads, long hours, etc. It sounds like an expensive solution (because it is) but it's important to realize that this basically already happens since many affluent families enroll their children in extracurricular tutoring to help them get ahead - all at increasingly exorbitant costs. Hiring more paraprofessionals to operate within the regular classroom would make the existing instructional time more efficient, hopefully reducing or eliminating the need for extra tutoring. Most importantly, it ensures that all students have access to high-quality, individualized academic support - not just the rich ones.

Hiring more support becomes especially important for remedial learners: people who didn't learn to read fluently in early childhood and need extra help as a result. This could be due to learning disabilities or, as we saw earlier, outdated and ineffective reading curricula. Remedial learners have often developed all sorts of techniques and habit to get by without full literacy, which is a resilient and adaptive response to inadequate reading instruction. However, it takes individualized, one-on-one support to narrow in on the aspects of reading that they are struggling with the most, because they differ with every person. This is especially true considering the overwhelming stigma against illiteracy/pre-literacy; many people in this situation struggle with the feeling of shame, and it makes it harder for them to seek help and clarification. In these cases, group settings make it hard to speak up - nonjudgmental and individualized instruction is critical.

Lastly, reading support should be available in whatever languages the child uses the most, not just English. The process for teaching reading can be different in various languages. For example, Spanish is much more orthographically regular than English is, which means that the way that Spanish words sound is usually much closer to how they are written. In practice, this means that English learners have to spend a lot more time learning all the "exceptions" where words are pronounced differently from how they're spelled. Spanish learners, on the other hand, might spend more time on practicing suffixes, tenses, and verb conjugations until the reader can recognize them on sight.

Conclusion

Literacy instruction has never been as easy as hoping children pick it up through exposure. It's a complicated and difficult process, and we have more cognitive science research to inform our approach than ever. Even considering all the advances in cognitive reading models, there still isn't enough focus on the social aspects that can make or break reading instruction. If we're truly serious about improving literacy outcomes, we have to look far beyond the reader or even the classroom. We have to fix the longstanding issues of deeply inequitable funding structures of school systems, inadequate staffing and support of basic needs, and the ongoing neoliberalization of education.

These problems are huge, but they are also entirely fixable. The truth is that we already spend so much time, energy, and money trying to tackle these problems on an individual basis. It's a deeply inefficient way to go about it - and it's disproportionately benefiting well-resourced families while everybody else continues to be left behind. Just like with every other social and economic issue, it's going to take a massive organizing effort by the working class to achieve better educational conditions and outcomes.