Countries in the South Improve Early Learning, But Stagnate in Middle School

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

Literacy researchers and advocates point to a common answer: early learning changes that focused on sounds, which helped students break down words, but phonics alone is not enough for reading fluency in middle school, when words get longer and sentences more complex.

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 exactly sounds,” he said. Teachers need to break down multi-syllable words, teach root words and odd spellings, and find time to read extensively to build fluency in 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.

Research evidence is sometimes confusing on how to help older students with reading comprehension. There is widespread agreement that background knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension strategies are all important. But experts and lawyers disagree about their relative importance and how much time should be spent on them.

Many literacy advocates strive to overemphasize background knowledge because it is difficult to grasp an unfamiliar topic. For example, even if I had a list of names, a medical topic involving genetic analysis would not be lost on me. The researchers also say that many low-income children are not exposed to as much art, travel and politics at home as wealthy children, meaning that many of the topics in books are unfamiliar and difficult to read.

Other studies have shown promising improvements in literacy from children’s knowledge building. Harvard researchers found some success with specially designed social studies and science courses (not reading courses). But a 2024 meta-analysis found no short-term learning benefits from knowledge-building units in classrooms. It may take years for these subjects to develop reading comprehension. And that long arc of progress is hard for researchers to track.

“There’s no question that knowledge plays a role in understanding,” Shanahan said. But it’s been difficult to figure out how that information can come out.” In other words, if you teach children about goldfish, that may improve their understanding of other goldfish texts, but will it have any other effect?”

There is also debate about the value of asking students to read comprehension questions, the kinds that might appear on standard tests, such as finding the author’s main point.

Carl Hendrick, a prominent proponent of explicitly teaching children background knowledge and vocabulary, and a professor at the 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 research literature that there are diminishing returns to strategic instruction after 10 hours. “When a student can’t grasp the main idea of ​​a passage, the problem is almost never a lack of ‘strategy,'” Hendrick wrote in a March 2026 newsletter. “The problem is that they don’t understand the words well enough.”

Too much screen time may be a factor. “Kids aren’t learning as much anymore,” said Sarah Webb, executive director at Great Minds, a curriculum maker. Cell phones and video games have replaced books. And the less time children practice reading, the less likely they are to get better at it. The March 2026 white paper, “Students Are Learning Slower and Losing Resilience: Why Continuous Learning Is More Important Than Ever,” highlights the growing decline in reading among teenagers and young adults.

Meanwhile, the widening gap between fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores in the South has teachers questioning whether middle school students can read, Webb said.

“They used to say that to continue in school you learn to read and then you learn to learn,” Webb said. Now people realize that it should take a long time for both. ‘Learning to learn’ must begin early, and ‘learning to read’ must continue past the third grade.”

This story is about reading in the eighth grade was produced by The Hechinger Reporta non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up Evidence Points and so on Hechinger newsletters.