The ability to read is a skill that’s easy for many adults to take for granted. Perhaps buried somewhere in our memory is the struggle to recognize letter shapes, learn their names, learn their sounds and then master all the additional sounds that the letters (and different combinations thereof) can make. It’s a complex skill.
Reading is the key to learning everything else—which is why the dismal reading scores recently published by the National Center for Education Statistics are so concerning. According to its National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report, just over 30% of the nation’s 8th graders are reading at ‘below basic reading levels.’ This number jumps to 40% of 4th graders reading at ‘below basic’ levels.
Reading proficiency is now at a three-decade low. And unless major steps are taken, the inability to read well will follow these students into their adult lives and careers. The ‘Reading Wars’ rage on, but it’s the students who are losing.
To understand the forces behind America’s lost ground in reading ability, I connected with David Adams, CEO of the Urban Assembly nonprofit that runs 22 public schools in New York City in primarily underserved/underrepresented communities and offers services to hundreds of schools across the country and locally.
Here’s what we covered.
Low scores are no surprise
While the NAEP scores are disheartening, for many they were not unexpected. “Learning is a social, emotional, and cognitive process. Reading is closely associated with language exposure,” says Adams. “Isolating students at home during the pandemic school closures deprived them of the language rich environments that classrooms offer and the supportive teachers who motivate young people to power through the productive struggle required to learn.”
Because of this, students furthest from opportunity had the largest losses in reading. “This tells us what we already know: First, that remote learning has a negative impact on high needs learners, and second that high quality teaching makes the most impact for this same group,” says Adams.
In other words, the impact of the lockdowns will continue to be felt until more students have access to high-quality, in-person instruction.
Helping kids read better
Adams has some time-tested advice for schools to improve students’ reading skills:
- Focus on the science of reading.
- Create supportive relationships to help students master phonics and develop fluency. “This is hard work,” he says. “Teacher responsiveness helps students get it done.”
- Create spaces for students to have choice in their text, read frequently, and in groups so they can develop meaning through collaboration.
- Ensure that students have reading assessments and interventions available at every grade.
While all of this is sound, I was most interested in the school-career connection that Adams champions. Like myself, he advocates for education to be experienced in light of the larger context of a student’s future.
The skills to succeed
As adults, we easily see the connection between academic learning and students’ future lives. But somehow, this connection has not always been made for students themselves. If they don’t see a purpose in what they’re learning, there is no purpose.
“Students need to understand how their learning in school helps them to be ready for college, career and community,” stresses Adams. “When students have access to work based learning experiences they can connect the skills they are developing to real problems that need to be solved for in the world.”
Too many students think that their real life starts once they get out of school—rather than seeing their education as a crucial part of their success as adults. Adams believes our education system has unwittingly fostered this perspective.
“Work based programs aren’t more prevalent because education is too siloed,” he says. “Most educators graduated high school, went to college and then began teaching, so they are not connected to the workforce outside of the educational context.”
This is not to diminish in any way the hard work that teachers are doing, but to note that most students aren’t going to stay in the classroom as a career; they’re going to enter the wider workforce. Academic effort—like learning to read proficiently—is often undervalued by these young people, who don’t see how these skills are relevant to their future work. As a society, we haven’t connected those dots well enough.
Adams argues that we have a solution ready to hand: career and technical education (CTE). “We can solve this by building out more CTE programs, which bring industry and workforce professionals directly into the classroom so that students have more insight into how their skills will translate into life after high school,” he says.
This is the strategy of Urban Assembly, with eight CTE schools where students consistently express the value of gaining practical skills they can apply to real-world workplace challenges. “Beyond learning technical skills, it is essential for students to practice applying them under the pressures of a professional environment,” says Adams.
Such programs empower young people with skills beyond academic knowledge and technical competency: they also learn vital professional skills. “Success in these settings requires not only cognitive abilities,” says Adams, “but also social-emotional skills that enable effective teamwork and problem-solving.”
A new motivation
In light of the low NAEP reading scores, schools will likely allocate more resources toward earlier reading interventions and other programs to improve reading ability. And that’s great—but it may not be enough for a generation that demands a real, relevant answer for everything we ask them to do.
Today’s young people need to see how learning to read proficiently is not just something they have to do to make their teachers happy; it’s a key ingredient in their ability to create the fulfilling life they want to lead as adults. In one word, the motivation for learning is lifestyle.
Lifestyle is a new motivation, not based on negative consequences (“you’ll never make it in life if you can’t read!”) but rather based on a positive light at the end of their educational tunnel that they actually want to reach. Helping students see, taste, touch, and imagine their desired lifestyle as an adult—and then connecting that lifestyle to their effort in school today—may be the missing motivation that this generation needs.
This article first appeared at Forbes.com on February 25, 2025. Read here.