Every Teacher Is a Reading Teacher: The State of Reading in Middle and High School

Nearly one in three.

That is the share of eighth graders in the United States who are not reading at even a basic level, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data from 2024. Not proficient. Not grade level. Basic — the lowest of three achievement benchmarks on the nation’s most trusted educational assessment. One in three eighth graders cannot meet it. And that is the largest percentage ever recorded.

These are children who should be reading complex subject-matter texts as well as preparing for the academic demands of high school and beyond. Instead, many of them are quietly falling further behind — and the system around them was not built to catch them.

We have a reading crisis in middle and high school. It is finding its way into the national conversation. But the urgency has not caught up to the scale of the problem.

This Is Not a Pandemic Story

The first thing to understand about the adolescent literacy crisis is that COVID-19 did not cause it. The pandemic made it worse. But the decline started long before 2020. Reading scores peaked around 2012 and have been falling steadily since.

The students who are now in middle and high school were in the early grades during a period when reading instruction was still dominated by whole language and balanced literacy approaches that the science of reading (SOR) has since shown to be insufficient. The SOR reforms happening now in elementary schools across the country are necessary and important. But they are happening for today’s elementary school students. The students who needed them ten years ago are now in seventh grade. They are in tenth grade. And most of them are still carrying the same gaps.

This is not a criticism of their teachers. It is a structural problem. The system was built on an assumption that learning to read was finished by the end of elementary school. But for far too many students, it wasn’t.

The Wrong Assumption

American secondary schools were designed around a belief that is so embedded in how we structure education that most people have never thought to question it: by middle school, children know how to read. They are ready to should use their reading skills to learn using complex thinking. The job of a seventh grade English teacher, a ninth grade history teacher, a tenth grade biology teacher is to teach their subject — not to teach reading.

That assumption was always only partially true. And for a significant portion of students, it was never true at all.

What it means in practice is that secondary teachers were trained as content specialists, not necessarily as literacy instructors. A middle school science teacher knows how to teach photosynthesis. They may not be trained to help a student who cannot read the word “photosynthesis,” let alone the paragraph it appears in. A high school history teacher knows the causes of World War I. They may not be trained to scaffold the reading of a primary source document for a student whose reading level is three years below grade.

The result is a gap that nobody officially owns. Reading instruction lived in elementary school. Secondary teachers teach content. And somewhere in between, millions of students who never fully cracked the code of reading arrive in sixth grade and begin to disappear into that gap.

Every Teacher Is a Reading Teacher

Here is the reframe that could change everything: reading is the means by which we learn. It is how students access every subject. And that means every teacher — in every classroom, at every grade level — is already a reading teacher. The problem is that was never the expectation.

A history teacher who helps students understand the structure of an argument in a primary source document is teaching reading. A science teacher who front-loads the vocabulary of a chapter before students open their textbooks is teaching reading. An English teacher who asks students to notice how an author’s word choices shape meaning is teaching reading. This is not a literacy add-on. It is just good teaching.

The science of reading does not stop at third grade. It continues through every year of school, in every subject. The skills that look different in secondary school — morphology, academic vocabulary, text structure, and close reading of complex texts — are extensions of the same foundation built in the early grades. When that foundation is shaky, secondary teachers are the ones who can shore it up. Not by teaching phonics in the way an elementary teacher would, but by teaching the advanced word work and comprehension strategies that adolescents need.

What the Research Says Works

The good news is that the research on adolescent literacy is not just a catalogue of problems. It is also a guide to solutions. And the solutions are not as complicated as the scale of the problem might suggest. So what does that actually look like in practice?

Build background before reading. Students cannot comprehend what they do not already know something about. Before opening a text, give them what they need to make sense of it: ask questions to activate prior knowledge, discuss key concepts, introduce essential vocabulary, show images or a brief video clip, provide context for the historical or scientific period. E.D. Hirsch spent decades arguing that knowledge is the foundation of literacy. Content-area teachers are uniquely positioned to act on that argument. A history teacher who builds background on the Civil War before students read a primary source is making reading comprehension possible.

Create conditions for engagement. By the time many struggling readers arrive in middle school, they have spent years learning — in the most visceral way possible — that reading is hard and that they are bad at it. A student who avoids reading because it is difficult and embarrassing falls further behind every year. The research on adolescent reading motivation is consistent: choice, relevance, and feeling competent matter. They are the conditions under which adolescents rebuild their relationship with reading. A student who finds one book they love in seventh grade is a different reader in eighth.

Teach vocabulary explicitly and repeatedly. Academic vocabulary — the words that appear across subject areas and in complex texts — is one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension. Students who encounter a word once in a text will not learn it. Students who encounter it multiple times, in multiple contexts, with explicit instruction, will. Teach the words that matter. Return to them. Use them in discussion and writing.

Teach text structure. Different texts are organized differently. A scientific report, a historical argument, a literary essay, a news article — each has its own structure and its own way of signaling what matters. Students who understand text structure can navigate complex material more effectively. Every content-area teacher can teach this within their own subject, using the texts students are already reading.

It Is Not Too Late

The research is clear on one more thing: it is never too late to improve a student’s reading. Adolescents can make significant gains with appropriate instruction. The window does not close in elementary school. It does not close in eighth grade. It does not close in twelfth grade.

What it requires is teachers who understand that teaching reading is their job too, schools that build the infrastructure to support struggling readers at every level, and a willingness to stop pretending that the problem belongs to elementary school alone.

One in three eighth graders cannot read at even a basic level. That number should stop us in our tracks. And then it should move us to act.

Your Turn

If you are a secondary teacher, what does reading instruction look like in your content area? If you are a parent of a middle or high schooler, what do you wish more people understood about what your child is navigating?

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