Reading remedies: Schools assess pandemic’s effect on literacy
Andrea Yon is used to helping students in need. At the Williston-Elko Middle School in rural South Carolina, where she has taught for seven years, more than 3 out of every 4 students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. Before the pandemic, some of her struggling seventh and eighth graders read at a fifth or sixth grade level.
“They’re now reading at a third and fourth grade level,” Yon says.
Yon used to hold silent reading time in her classroom; students could read whatever they wanted for 20 minutes. “Now,” she says, “they’re looking up after three to five minutes.”
Teachers across the country are seeing more and more students struggle with reading this school year. Pandemic school closures and remote instruction made learning to read much harder, especially for young, low-income students who didn’t have adequate technology at home or an adult who could assist them during the day. Many older students lost the daily habit of reading. Even before the pandemic, nearly two-thirds of U.S. students were unable to read at grade level. Scores had been getting worse for several years.
The pandemic made a bad situation worse.
More than a have documented that students, on average, made sluggish progress in reading during the pandemic. Estimates of just how sluggish vary. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company calculated that U.S. students had lost the equivalent. An analysis of test scores in California and South Carolina found that students had lost almost in reading. A national analysis of the test scores of 5.5 million students calculated that in the spring of 2021 students in each grade on a widely used test, the Measures of Academic Progress or MAP, than they did in 2019.
