For the most part, public school students have made significant strides in returning to subject proficiency levels from before the pandemic, according to a new study by NWEA. But a disturbing exception is the lowest-achieving students in middle school, whose reading scores have suffered greatly.

The NWEA study finds that, not only have reading scores not stabilized for this group in the six years since the start of the pandemic, they continue to decline significantly. The study draws on data from the MAP Growth National Dashboard and contains test scores from more than 20 million K-8 students from 30,000 schools. NWEA looked at sixth grade reading scores from 2017 to 2025.

This trend is nothing short of “alarming,” says Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA. It raises a significant challenge to educators and state lawmakers on how to reverse the trend.

“The evidence presented here suggests that existing early-literacy reforms, though essential, are not sufficient to support students whose reading difficulties persist in upper elementary and middle school,” the NWEA study says. “Addressing these widening gaps will require state leaders to shift from isolated interventions toward coherent system-level approaches that align curriculum, assessment, instruction, and professional learning across the K-8 continuum.”

But while the NWEA study places emphasis on what lawmakers should do to ease the problem, a true fix ultimately comes down to curriculum, assessment, and intervention measures adopted at the district and individual school level.

Why Many Middle Schoolers Struggle 

The lowest-achieving middle schoolers are still showing pandemic-era losses because the interventions that are driving recovery elsewhere — such as strong K-3 literacy reforms — were built to work at those specific ages, says Deanna Fogarty, vice president and head of reading science at structured literacy provider Wilson Language Training. Those gains are real and worth celebrating. But for students who reach fourth grade still needing support with such foundational skills as decoding and morphology, there isn’t yet an equivalent system waiting for them.

Standards, screening, and educator preparation for grades 4-8 haven’t caught up to what most schools have built for K-3, Fogarty says. So this isn’t a story about a new problem. It’s a reminder that the next stage of literacy reform needs to extend the same coherent approach into the middle grades.

Agreeing with that assessment is Gemar Mills, chief academic officer at College Achieve Public Schools, a public charter school network headquartered in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. He says the lowest-achieving students often keep slipping because their unfinished skills accumulate, while academic demands continue to rise.

“A student who enters middle school with weak decoding or fluency not only struggles in English. The student struggles to access science, history, mathematics word problems, and other subjects that rely on text,” Mills explains.

Schools often respond to low scores without diagnosing the source of the problem, Mills says. A student with weak decoding receives general comprehension practice. A student with a limited vocabulary receives more independent reading without enough direct instruction. The intervention does not match the need, and the gap grows.

“Students who need the strongest instruction also often experience the most fragmented instruction,” Mills adds. “They lose grade-level learning to attend remediation, move between disconnected programs, or receive intervention only after failure becomes severe. The issue is not a lack of ability. The issue is whether schools identify needs early, respond precisely, protect instructional time and maintain high expectations.”

Unique Middle School Intervention Challenges

Middle school reading intervention is uniquely hard because the gaps are longer term, the texts are more complex and responsibility becomes less clear, Mills explains. Students move through several classrooms, and each teacher might assume someone else is responsible for teaching reading.

In the early grades, schools build the foundation for reading. Students learn how sounds connect to letters and words as they develop fluency, vocabulary, knowledge and comprehension. In middle school, educators often have to repair parts of the foundation while students are already expected to read complex grade-level material. Mills says middle school intervention must therefore accomplish two goals at once: addressing unfinished skills, and preserving access to the knowledge and intellectual work that students need now.

Scheduling creates another challenge, Mills explains. Schools need protected intervention time without removing students from science, social studies, electives or other experiences contributing to their knowledge and engagement. They also need teachers trained to determine whether a student struggles with decoding, fluency, vocabulary, language comprehension, background knowledge or several areas at once.

Elementary-Level Foundations Are Key

One such school that builds a strong elementary foundation is Frederick Elementary in Frederick, Oklahoma. As a former seventh-grade English teacher, several factors contribute to the drop in reading proficiency for struggling students in middle school, according to Laura Yeager, principal at Frederick Elementary.

“First, students who struggle with basic decoding skills cannot create meaning from the more challenging texts that are required as students move into middle school,” Yeager explains. “Second, limited vocabulary creates a situation where students either skip words entirely, infer the wrong meaning, or break the flow of the reading if they choose to look up a word, which they usually do not.”

Students then lose pertinent information from the reading, whether it is informational text or narrative. This also leads to a third factor, which is that critical reading skills are lacking, says Yeager. Students are so used to instant information that they often accept it at face value. Critical reading requires stamina for reading and the ability to use higher-order thinking, which is not easily developed, and is hindered by instant information.

Students who are already behind going into middle school are no longer getting extra help in decoding words, phrases, and sentences, adds Danna Akin, reading specialist at Frederick Elementary. The work becomes more challenging, and these students begin to shut down with the struggles they encounter. They tend to get more and more behind because of the high frustration level they are experiencing.

Common ‘Get it Right’ Elements Among Schools

Getting school literacy right has many common elements regardless of the population or location of an individual school. Common elements in a reading program include instruction built around rich texts, complete books, vocabulary, knowledge, discussion and evidence-based writing.

Schools should use diagnostic assessments to identify why individual students may struggle, Mills says. Intervention should match each identified need, and occur during protected time. And it should supplement rigorous instruction, not replace it.

Teachers should receive ongoing training and coaching, Mills says. Leaders should visit classrooms, examine student work, review progress data, and respond when instruction fails to produce results.

The most common thread is disciplined execution, Mills explains. Schools close literacy gaps when every educator understands the plan, possesses the skills to execute the plan, and accepts responsibility for the results. Strong literacy outcomes do not happen by accident. Schools build them deliberately.

Steps Schools Can Take 

Educators should also understand that, while technology has created valuable opportunities to support learners, it has also made it easier for students to rely on text-to-speech tools and other features that can unintentionally reduce reading proficiency, says Jennifer Nakamoto, science chair at online high school Crimson Global Academy.

“These tools have an important place, particularly as accommodations, but they should complement—not replace—the cognitive process of reading,” Nakamoto explains. “Students develop stronger comprehension when they actively decode, question, annotate, and reflect on what they are reading.”

First, for the most challenged students, Yeager says middle schools must screen for issues with basic decoding and multi-syllabic words and address them. Students who cannot decode accurately will consistently struggle with reading to find meaning and give up. 

Second, structured vocabulary programs that explicitly teach Greek and Latin roots, affixes, and suffixes are needed and will help students with vocabulary, Yeager explains.

Third, educators should teach students how to engage with text. All students would benefit from direct instruction on how to use graphic organizers to help track information, ideas, and their own questions about what they are reading.

Yeager says one additional step would be to ensure students build their reading stamina. Giving students the opportunity for reading aloud, paired reading, and silent reading with appropriate grade-level texts will help build student attention and stamina which are necessary for the long passages used on state tests.

“Policy alone does not change outcomes — implementation does,” the NWEA study concludes. “Improving adolescent literacy will require transferring policy into classroom practice through high-quality instruction, targeted interventions, professional learning, and sustained support for educators. State initiatives … demonstrate a growing awareness of the adolescent literacy challenge and an increasing willingness among policymakers to act. These efforts represent important steps toward building the conditions necessary for meaningful and lasting improvement in literacy outcomes for older students.”