In today’s issue:

More parents are figuring out that report card grades don’t tell the whole story. According to The 74’s recent review of a national Learning Heroes survey, the share of parents who believe their child reads at or above grade level fell 5 points in less than five years. Parents who sense that their child is behind are acting on it, too: they’re more likely to ask for assessments beyond report cards and to seek extra help.

But more data still doesn’t always clear things up. What families are told about reading depends heavily on where they live. Some states require schools to explain a reading concern in detail. Others leave parents with a label or a letter grade. Either way, scores only give a general idea of where your child stands, without telling you what to do next. It’s no wonder that uncertainty lingers. Only 30% of parents say they’re extremely confident they know what their child should have mastered by now, and 1 in 5 admit they wouldn’t recognize grade-level work if they saw it.

At the Institute of Reading Development, we take care to assess how reading actually looks and sounds for individual students. And we show unsure parents how to do the same in our free Reading Skill Mastery guide. As your child builds any new reading skill, the work they do sits at one of three levels. “Struggle” shows up as avoidance, frustration, and frequent errors. “Effortful success” means getting it right, but slowly and with visible strain. “Mastery” looks smooth and easy. If you know what to watch for, you can observe how your child is really handling grade-level skills. And that opens a path forward: spotting real gaps and bringing meaningful questions to your next parent-teacher conference.

Surprisingly, your simple observations at home can be more illuminating than numbers printed in a report.

Many schools give every young student a reading “screener.” It is a quick check, often just a few minutes long, that flags who might need extra help. In New Mexico, a new law spells out what happens when a screener flags a difficulty. There’s written notice to parents within 30 days, monthly progress reports, and a home reading plan aimed at the specific skills a child is missing.

Unfortunately, many parents don’t get that level of explanation or support. The good news is you don’t really need reams of monthly data to see where your child’s foundational skills stand. In the early grades, screeners mostly check decoding, the work of matching letters to sounds and blending them into words. Here’s what to listen for as your child reads aloud:

At your conference, ask: Which phonics patterns is my child strong in, and which still need work?

Help your early reader turn effort into easy reading →

State tests often sort students into performance levels, and in Colorado, one of them sounds reassuring: “approaching expectations,” the level just below meeting grade-level standards. But as Chalkbeat reported, the state’s own explanation is that these students can read grade-level text yet may struggle to consistently show they understand it.

That can sound worrying, but it describes what we recognize as “effortful success,” and effort is a good sign. Around 4th grade, reading shifts from sounding out words to learning from them, and a child might read every word on the page while still working hard to grasp what it means. If they keep trying and achieve small wins, they’re learning, even if they need extra support to reach mastery. Here’s what you can listen for as your child retells a chapter:

At your conference, ask: Where does comprehension break down for my child: vocabulary, the main idea, or making inferences?

Help your late elementary student move from effort to mastery →

For teens, the distance between grades and skills can quietly widen. A recent ACT research report estimates that about 28% of 2024 high school graduates earned grades well above what their test scores would predict. Over the past decade, average GPAs rose while average ACT scores fell.

Parents rarely see it coming, partly because the checks thin out with age. The tests older students take don’t pinpoint what a reader is struggling with, and in an Education Week survey, only about a third of high school teachers said they had screening tools that could. But you can still spot the signs at home. By now, reading is how teens learn every subject, so a teen who gets the work done only by pushing hard is showing you effortful success. Here’s what you can watch for as your teen tackles assignments:

At your conference, ask: Which kinds of texts are hardest for my child, and how does the school check?

Help your teen tackle complex texts with confidence →