The Reading Slump Blamed on COVID Started Years Before Schools Closed

When did the reading slump start?

The best answer we have is around 2013. That date comes from the Education Recovery Scorecard. It is a project from Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth. It put the state test results of millions of students on one national scale. Its 2026 report says the U.S. entered a “learning recession” in 2013. That was years before any school closed for COVID.

Here is the part that stopped me. Look at reading from 2017 to 2019. The average loss each year was as large as the loss during the pandemic. Those were ordinary years. Schools were open. Teachers were in their rooms.

We are not saying COVID did no harm. The pandemic years were hard on reading too. But COVID did not start the slide. It hit a slide that was already under way.

The national test, NAEP, shows the drop is real. Look at its 2024 results for the oldest students it tests. They read below where that group stood in 1992. The National Assessment Governing Board said who drove the drops. It was the students who scored lowest, not the top readers.

The people who run NAEP add a warning. Here it is in the government’s own words. NAEP “is not designed to identify the causes of performance differences.” The scores tell us reading fell. They do not tell us why. And a score is never the whole story of a good education.

If COVID did not start it, what did?

Nobody knows yet. That is not me dodging the question. It is what the people who study this say. In a 2025 paper, education researcher Jim Wyckoff weighed five possible causes:

• Weaker test-based accountability after No Child Left Behind.
• School funding cuts after the 2008 recession.
• The rollout of Common Core.
• The spread of smartphones and social media.
• Changes in the number of English learners and students with disabilities.

Here is his conclusion. “No single factor explains the pre-pandemic learning loss.” He adds that there is too little evidence to rank them. Phones are on that list. They are one candidate among several. Nobody has pulled them apart from the rest.

The Scorecard points at the same puzzle. It names two things that line up with 2013. One is the end of strict test-based accountability. The other is the rise of social media among young people. It picks neither one, and neither do we.

Here is why that matters to you. Schools are working hard to get back to normal. But reading was sliding before 2020. And no one has named the cause. Nobody is coming with a fix for a problem no one has diagnosed.

So we will say it plainly. Our view is that a parent should not wait for the system to recover. We hold that view firmly.

What should I do instead of waiting?

Start with your own child, not the national average. A national trend is about millions of kids. It does not say which reading skill your child needs next. Notice how the question changes. It stops being “When will things go back to normal?” It becomes “What does my child need next?”

If reading was already hard for your child, this matters most for you. The national drop was driven by the students who scored lowest. To us, that makes waiting the wrong plan.

Waiting has never taught a child to read. Teaching does. Here are three small steps for this week:

• Listen for five minutes. Have your child read aloud to you. Note where they stop. Is it a sound, a long word, or what the sentence means? Reading is several jobs at once, and the Reading Skills Map lays them out.
• Ask the teacher two plain questions. What reading skill are you teaching my child right now? How will we both know it is working?
• Ask in writing if you are worried. In the U.S., a parent has the right to ask the school for an evaluation. It is free to your family. Here is how asking for an evaluation works.

That evaluation matters. Only a professional evaluation leads to an IEP or 504 plan. The same goes if you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause. You do not have to wait for it to start helping at home. You get to do both.