While educators scramble to get kids caught up, technology creates challenges for younger generations who are reading more online captions and comment threads than books.
Read the full transcript below:
Molly Anderson: This is Northeast Notebook. I'm Molly Anderson.
Rose Else-Mitchell: I think we've been experiencing a literacy crisis for a long time, unfortunately.
Molly Anderson: In New York, over 40% of elementary students are reading at or below grade level, and teachers are having to adapt.
Chloe Walters: The students are reporting back either through conversation or structured journaling, ‘We're not really seeing a huge priority with literacy with this teacher or with this school.’
Molly Anderson: And while educators scramble to get kids caught up, technology creates challenges for younger generations who are reading more online captions and comment threads than books.
Kathleen Moore: So, you don't see, perhaps, as much of the handing kids, you know, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Instead, they're on their Chromebook where they're reading an excerpt of it.
Molly Anderson: So, where does childhood literacy stand today, and what is being done to improve it?
Kathleen Moore: In 2026, 43% of third graders statewide were tested as proficient. That's a drop of 11 percentage points.
Molly Anderson: Kathleen Moore is the education reporter for the Times Union in Albany. In August, she reported on a steep decline in New York elementary students' reading scores.
Kathleen Moore: Interestingly, last year the reverse happened. Third graders went from 43 to 54%, like the exact 11% difference.
Molly Anderson: And whether you're talking about an increase or a decrease, Kathleen says an 11% change begs suspicion.
Kathleen Moore: Because an 11% increase is unprecedented. I mean, that's like those kids would have had to fail. I mean, like all of them.
Molly Anderson: Kathleen spoke to Emily Oster, an economist and founder of Parent Data. She analyzes testing in every state, and she thinks it came down to human error.
Kathleen Moore: She thinks that an incorrect file was uploaded when they scored the third, fourth, and fifth graders.
Molly Anderson: Despite the suggestion that an error was made, the New York State Department of Education stood by the 11% increase in 2024 to 2025, and a decrease in the same amount a year later. The difference came after New York again began requiring phonics-based learning statewide. Some say that requirement is the reason for the decrease. And learning a new teaching curriculum could bring challenges for both educators and students.
Chloe Walters: I'm talking with people in the field who are receiving teacher candidates or newly certified teachers who either feel ill-equipped to teach literacy or just are but might not realize it.
Molly Anderson: Chloe Walters is a lecturer in the Department of Modern languages at SUNY Cortland. She's part of their educator preparation program. Chloe shared the realities of teaching literacy during a panel discussion at the Science of Reading Summit in Albany.
Chloe Walters: I'm talking to professors at my school and elsewhere who are sending teacher candidates out, and the students are reporting back either through conversation or structured journaling, “We're not really seeing a huge priority with literacy with this teacher or with this school.”
Molly Anderson: The panelists talked about the importance of planning and scheduling curriculum, and streamlining the language that teachers can use to talk about the literacy programs in place. But as students move from one grade to the next, more is expected of them.
Serena Troiani: The complexity of the text is the new thing that they're struggling with.
Molly Anderson: Serena Troiani is an adjunct assistant professor at Queens College and teaches fifth grade in Port Washington, New York. She says her students are having a hard time with exposure to nuanced reading material.
Serena Troiani: They're reading more historic documents that were not written recently, so the language that they're reading is a lot more complex than they're used to.
Rose Else-Mitchell: Whether it's last year's data or this year's data, you know, somewhere between 46 and 52% of kids are not reading at grade level.
Molly Anderson: Rose Else-Mitchell is the executive director of the Science of Reading Center based at SUNY New Paltz. The Science of Reading Center launched in 2022.
Rose Else-Mitchell: One in every two children in this state is not able to read or function in a way that is going to be successful for their ongoing schooling and for their life.
Molly Anderson: And in addition to hosting the recent summit in Albany, the center offers events, webinars, and courses to help teachers improve literacy outcomes.
Rose Else-Mitchell: I think in education we're prone to expecting miracles. There's a district that I'm aware of that has been very focused on the supporting of teachers and their growth in terms of understanding knowledge building, vocabulary, and of course foundational skills. They've implemented new curriculum, they've done professional learning, and their scores even went down.
Molly Anderson: Kathleen Moore's reporting on plummeting reading scores covered grades three through five, but as Rose explains, time is of the essence.
Rose Else-Mitchell: By third grade, we've missed some significant moments of understanding whether students are at risk for reading failure or reading problems. So early intervention really needs to happen in kindergarten and first grade. We know from assessments like the RAN - Rapid Automized Naming - and other kinds of language assessments, as well as word reading, we really know what kinds of risks there are, and those risks don't go away without intervention.
Molly Anderson: By third grade, Rose says, students become more aware of the gap between where their reading skills should be and where they are.
Rose Else-Mitchell: You know, as soon as you get beyond third grade, the work is much harder. You're helping students who already feel disenfranchised because they know that reading generally is a standard. It's a behavior. It's something that happens in classrooms, and that they don't have access to that.
Molly Anderson: But what students do have access to is screens. Whether it's an iPad, a Chromebook, or a desktop, technology is part of the classroom. And yet, you still need to be able to read to use these devices.
Kathleen Moore: Screens require reading. I mean, for example, social media. You have to be able to read the words. So, society has become more literacy-required, you know?
Molly Anderson: But reading a caption on an Instagram post is not the same as reading a novel, and Kathleen says students' abilities for endurance reading, like tackling chapter books, is where experts are ringing alarm bells.
Kathleen Moore: They're saying, "Hey, young people are becoming so used to reading a whole complex political argument summed up in one tweet, and they're no longer interested in an entire essay or a whole book.”
Molly Anderson: And the experience of being assigned a physical book to read is becoming less common in schools.
Kathleen Moore: There are a lot fewer actual paper books that schools are buying for kids. So, you don't see perhaps as much of the handing kids, you know, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Instead, they're on their Chromebook where they're reading an excerpt of it. There has been a long, long debate about whether the books one reads in school are turning kids off of reading because they're just not perhaps as interesting.
Molly Anderson: But Kathleen Moore thinks the ability to read at all far outweighs the entertainment factor.
Kathleen Moore: If you're struggling to decode every word, pretty much no book is going to be interesting enough to keep it up.
Molly Anderson: And keeping it up is really what's at stake going forward.
Rose Else-Mitchell: If you're not a reader and you have kids, you're not going to read to your kids. It's really a social crisis in the sense that literacy unlocks health, it unlocks well-being, it unlocks opportunity. There's literacy in everything that we do, and so even if there was one child that couldn't read, that's a crisis for that child and that family. I mean, you're a reader. I'm a reader. We have access to things in our lives that children who can't read will never be able to do if we don't do something about this.
Molly Anderson: Northeast Notebook is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It was produced by me, Molly Anderson. Our executive producer is Lucas Willard. Our editor is Diane DeVore. Music by Eduardo Rivera. Consider subscribing to Northeast Notebook wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like the show, take a second to rate and review. It really does help others find us. Thanks for listening.
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