Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee started reforms later and may need more time. But McGrath’s question remains.
Literacy researchers and advocates point to a common answer: Early reading reforms focused on phonics, which helped students decode words, but decoding alone is not enough for proficient reading in middle school, where words are longer and sentences are more complex.
Timothy Shanahan, a veteran reading researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said reading instruction should continue after students learn to read. “It’s not exactly acoustics,” he said. Teachers need to break down polysyllabic words, teach word roots and odd spellings, and find time to read extensively to build fluency with complex texts.
Shanahan believes that 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 murky about exactly how to help older students with reading comprehension. There is widespread agreement that background knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies are important. But experts and advocates disagree about their relative importance and how much time to devote to them.
Many literacy advocates argue that more emphasis should be placed on basic knowledge because it is difficult to understand an unfamiliar topic. For example, even if I had a dictionary of words, a technical medical article involving genetic analysis would be lost on me. Researchers also say that many low-income children are not exposed to as much art, travel and political news at home as wealthier children, meaning many topics that appear in books are less familiar and harder to absorb.
Some research shows promising improvements in literacy from children’s knowledge building. Harvard researchers found some success with specially designed social studies and science lessons (not reading lessons). But a 2024 meta-analysis found no short-term benefits of reading from knowledge-building modules in classrooms. It may take years for these lessons to improve reading comprehension. And this long arc of progress is difficult for researchers to trace.
“There’s no question that knowledge plays a role in understanding,” Shanahan said. “But it was difficult to find how such knowledge could be generalized. In other words, if you teach children about goldfish, it may improve their understanding of other texts about goldfish, but will there be other effects?”
There is also debate about the value of teaching students about reading comprehension questions, the kinds that are likely to appear on standardized tests, such as figuring out an author’s main point.
Carl Hendrick, a prominent proponent of explicitly teaching children basic knowledge and vocabulary and professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam, agrees that a little strategic instruction can be helpful, such as having students practice writing a summary after reading something. But Hendrick concludes from the research literature that there are diminishing returns to strategic instruction after that 10 o’clock from him. “When a student cannot grasp the main idea of a passage, the problem is almost never that he lacks a ‘strategy,'” Hendrick writes in March 2026 Newsletter. “The problem is that they don’t understand enough of the words.”
Too much screen time can also be a factor. “Kids don’t read as much anymore,” said Sarah Webb, senior director at Great Minds, a curriculum developer. Cell phones and video games have replaced books. And the less time kids practice reading, the less likely they are to get better at it. A March 2026 Scholastic white paper, “Students are reading less and losing stamina: Why extended reading is more important than ever,” highlights the growing decline in reading among teens and tweens.
Meanwhile, the widening gap between fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores in the South has teachers questioning the assumption that middle school students already know how to read, Webb said.
“It used to be said that progress in school was learning to read and then reading to learn,” Webb said. “Now people realize that it needs to be both for a much longer time. ‘Reading to learn’ needs to start earlier, and ‘learning to read’ needs to continue beyond third grade.”
This story about eighth grade reading is produced by The Hechinger Reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Evidence points and others Hechinger Bulletins.
