Florida’s Reading Scores Fell. Honest Report Cards Won’t Teach Kids to Read.

What did Jeb Bush say about Florida’s reading scores?

Jeb Bush was the 43rd governor of Florida. He now chairs ExcelinEd, a national education nonprofit. On October 5, 2026, he wrote an op-ed for The 74. Its title calls for bringing back strong accountability. His case starts with a gap. Florida’s own report cards look good. He says over three-quarters of Florida schools got an A or B. The exact share depends on which school year you check. The national reading test tells a different story. Bush wrote:

“Experts call that the honesty gap. Official ratings send one message, while student results send another.”

That national test is NAEP. In 2024, Florida eighth graders averaged 253 in reading. That was down from 260 in 2022. Florida’s 1998 score was 255. The NAEP report finds no significant difference between 2024 and 1998. Fourth graders averaged 218 in 2024, down from 225 in 2022. That is still above the national public school average of 214. Their slide started before the pandemic. Fourth-grade scores peaked in 2017 and had dipped by 2019.

Trust is sliding too. In September 2026, Gallup found 32% of Americans satisfied with K-12 education. That is a new low in Gallup’s 27-year trend. Bush wants accountability systems that tell parents the truth. Not everyone agrees with his answer. Jennifer Poon of the Center for Innovation in Education wrote a reply. She argues tests show only part of the truth. She wants accountability built with communities, not handed down.

Will a more honest grade help a child learn to read?

Bush is right that parents deserve the truth. He also writes that teachers need support to teach the fundamentals. We agree. But his title asks for accountability. A grade is a measuring tool. It tells you where students are. It does not change how they were taught. Measuring a problem and solving it are two different jobs. We push back on the idea that the first one does the second.

So what does reading look like when it works? Rayner and colleagues (2016) reviewed research on how skilled adults read. Skilled readers look at most words, one after another. They skip mainly short, common or predictable words. Context helps them move faster past words they expect. The review does not show them guessing words from context instead of looking. Many children were taught a different way, called three-cueing. A child stuck on a word is taught to guess it. She uses the picture, the sentence and the letters together. Timothy Shanahan is a literacy researcher. In 2017 he wrote that three-cueing “is descriptive of how poor readers read rather than how good ones do.” The EdWeek Research Center surveyed teachers in fall 2019. Of K-2 and special education teachers, 75% said they teach it. That is what teachers reported, not a count of classrooms. Our view is that children guess when sounding out is still too hard. To us, guessing from a picture only looks like reading.

Here is the part the accountability debate skips. Florida already acted. A State Board rule limited three-cueing in 2022-23. Then a 2023 law, HB 7039, banned it for teaching word reading. Florida law now names phonics as the main way to teach word reading. That law sits in Florida Statutes, section 1008.25. Florida moved early. At least 11 states had banned three-cueing by April 2025, Education Week reported. Now look at the calendar. A fourth grader tested in 2024 started kindergarten around 2019. An eighth grader started around 2015. Most of their early reading lessons came before Florida’s new rules. So the 2024 scores mostly reflect teaching from before the change. They do not tell us yet whether the ban works. We also do not know how those children were taught. No study we hold ties three-cueing to Florida’s drop.

So the change in how reading is taught is already underway. The talk about grades has not caught up to it. Researchers still argue over how strong the phonics evidence is. Bowers (2020) started one round of that argument, and others replied. Our page on phonics and whole language covers that debate. It names no winner.

What should you watch for with your own child?

A school’s grade will not show you how your child reads. Her reading out loud will. Sit with her for a few minutes and listen. Notice what she does at a word she does not know. Does she try the sounds? Or does she glance at the picture and guess?

Then ask her school a few plain questions:

• How do you teach a child to read a word she has never seen?
• What do you tell a child who is stuck on a word?
• How do you check each child’s reading, besides state tests?
• How will you tell me if reading is getting harder for her?

Strong accountability has a real upside. It tells you when a school is struggling. Its limit is that a score comes after the teaching is done. Is extra reading help not working? Our page on missed teaching versus dyslexia lists what to ask for.

Florida’s newest readers have not reached the national test yet. Their scores will be an early look at the new rules. Until then, teaching is what counts. You don’t need a credential to be your child’s first teacher. You already are one. The only question is whether you have the right tools.