In today’s issue:

In September, the country got a report card no parent would want to see come home. The reading scores of American 15-year-olds on PISA, a global exam taken in 91 countries and economies, fell to near their lowest point in 25 years. The most telling detail: across participating countries, the share of “hasty readers,” students who skimmed a text and then answered incorrectly, nearly doubled since 2018. They appeared to get through the words without understanding what the words meant.

Raising scores like these is an important goal that has sparked legislation in more than 40 states. At a national level, the U.S. House even passed the Science of Reading Act. Giving beginners a strong start is vital. But we can’t be so focused on locking in foundational skills that we forget to keep reinforcing those skills in later grades. And we can’t pretend that skills stop with decoding. We must actively teach the higher-order skills that deep comprehension requires, like drawing inferences, following an argument, and connecting ideas. If we don’t do that work, PISA scores won’t move, despite all our investment in early reading.

At the Institute of Reading Development, we call the continuous process of mastering and retaining learned skills, even as kids move on to the next ones, the “Reading Advantage Cycle.” As our CEO, Doug Evans, explains, consistent skill practice leads to repeated success, which inspires the confidence and the motivation to read more and more, creating totally new skill-building opportunities along the way. The cycle should keep turning, grade after grade, as kids grow into lifelong readers.

The early grades are where the ‘Science of Reading’ push is showing its clearest results. In Louisiana, the share of K–3 students reading on or above grade level rose from about half to two-thirds during the 2025–26 school year. Kindergartners made the biggest leap, from 29% to 69%. But compare the grades in order, and the gains shrink steadily, from nearly 40 points in kindergarten to just 5 in third grade. A strong start only carries a child so far.

Ohio tells a similar story. Third-grade proficiency ticked up to 63% last spring, the first year every school was required to use science-of-reading instruction. Yet the share of third graders at the very lowest level crept up, to 21% from about 19% in 2023. For those children, the Reading Advantage Cycle clearly isn’t in place.

Foundational skills are being taught more effectively than ever, but are kids getting the ongoing practice they need to make phonics and decoding automatic? Only then is a child’s attention freed up to learn deeper comprehension skills and unlock the meaning of stories.

Get ongoing skill practice for your early elementary student →

By fourth grade, texts get longer and denser, and kids are expected to understand them in every subject. A University at Buffalo study shows what can happen when instruction rises to meet those demands. Over 11 weeks, 320 fourth and fifth graders kept practicing skills from earlier grades, like word recognition and fluency, while being explicitly taught new ones, like how informational texts are organized. By the end, they had made significant gains in both word recognition and reading comprehension.

That’s the layering this stage requires: reinforcing foundational skills while adding nonfiction skills like finding the main idea and drawing inferences. Both need to be taught directly.

Reading educators writing for the International Literacy Association describe comprehension skills like making inferences as targets for explicit teaching, just as decoding is. When the challenge is right, they note, students succeed, success builds confidence, and confidence motivates them to keep reading. For a 10-year-old facing their first real textbook, that cycle can be the difference between bracing for a chapter and diving into it.

Give your late elementary student new skills and soaring confidence →

In Tennessee, nearly 45% of third graders met reading expectations this year, the highest rate in nearly a decade. But proficiency slipped as students moved up, and fewer than one in three eighth graders met the standard, with an especially steep drop between sixth and seventh grade.

Part of the reason is that the reading itself changes. Teens must follow an argument across many pages, weigh evidence, and juggle several ideas at once. Those skills grow through sustained practice with whole texts, and that practice is getting rarer. In a New York Focus investigation, English teachers described classrooms trading full novels for excerpts, largely to match state standards and tests. One veteran teacher said that when she assigns a two-page article, about half the class stops reading within three minutes.

Many teens who stall can read the words just fine (remember the PISA results?). What they need is explicit instruction in how to analyze what they read, plus time with longer texts to practice until it sticks. One seventh-grade teacher in the same report got her students through eight books in a year, with the class helping choose the books. That’s the kind of instruction that keeps the Reading Advantage Cycle turning for life!

Help your teenager build academic and study skills for lasting success →