Photo: Matt Brown, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — a school library interior.
American students' reading skills keep slipping, and education researchers at Harvard say the slide has reached a tipping point. They also say it can be reversed, if schools act on reading support early and sustain it for longer.
According to the Harvard Gazette, U.S. reading scores have trended downward since 2013 for eighth graders and since 2015 for fourth graders, a decline that began before the pandemic. On the 2025 PISA test, U.S. 15-year-olds were outperformed in reading by peers in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Estonia, Australia and the United Kingdom.
According to Bean Town Brief, summarising the Gazette report published October 29, only 31% of fourth graders were reading at the proficient or advanced level in the 2024 Nation's Report Card. The share of eighth graders who read for fun almost every day fell from 27% in 2012 to 14% in 2025.
The Gazette points to several causes, including pandemic disruption, chronic absenteeism, fewer resources for struggling readers, and the rise of smartphones and artificial intelligence. Harvard experts proposed school-based accountability, universal pre-K, and reading support that continues past third grade.
What happens next depends on whether schools and districts adopt those longer-term supports rather than treating reading as a problem solved in the early grades. No single policy fix has been announced in this report, and the experts' proposals are recommendations, not confirmed national policy.