Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2025 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “What needs to happen next—at the state, district, and school levels—for the science of reading revolution to fulfill its promise and ensure that far more children learn to read well?” Learn more.
The science of reading movement transformed how the public talks about early reading education and outcomes, spurring robust conversations between educators, policymakers, and parents. However, the movement’s most significant omission was its limited consideration of students in grades six and above. Many students—particularly those from low-income, multilingual, and historically marginalized communities—struggle to read in middle school and graduate high school nonproficient. This oversight has real consequences, as adolescents not only encounter more text, but that text is also widely diverse. Building on the early literacy momentum, the next movement’s phase must widen the aperture to assessment and instruction for adolescents, while leveraging implementation science to sustain effective practice, fulfilling the promise to students, their families, and their communities. Such change requires coordinated action across the system that catalyzes assessment into instructional change.
Better outcomes begin with better data
The future of reading assessment should move away from solely measuring reading skills in grades 3–12 and expand into secondary reading screeners and disciplinary literacy. Districts should provide secondary reading screeners. Most middle and high school reading assessments today prioritize comprehension. So, for many students, reading difficulty shows up as a comprehension problem, potentially masking ineffective decoding skills, weak reading fluency, lack of grammar understanding, a limited vocabulary, or dyslexia. That means adolescents who need targeted intervention may not be appropriately identified or supported. Additionally, state assessments can learn from the 2026 NAEP Reading Framework, which now acknowledges the criticality of background knowledge for comprehension, and disaggregates reading in literature, social studies, and science instead of by literature and informational text.
Secondary-level educators need reliable, valid assessments along with aligned coaching in how to interpret a body of data insights to inform instruction. Educators need reading screening data to determine which students need intervention and discipline-specific reading comprehension data for regular instruction. One way forward is to broaden existing screeners and interim assessments to include multisyllabic word reading and reading fluency in grades six and above. By sixth grade, students should be decoding multisyllabic words, but for many, this is arduous and impedes their ability to not just read discipline-specific texts, but also to write with increasing sophistication. Concomitant to multisyllabic word reading is reading fluency; both inform comprehension. Without quality assessment data in both multisyllabic decoding and reading fluency, teachers are left without clear direction, targeting comprehension when students may need more fundamental support. But no amount of data will help without supporting those interpreting it with data literacy professional learning. States, districts, and schools must collaborate in building a data literacy system alongside a revised assessment one.
Adolescents still need literacy instruction
We need to foster stronger connections between reading and writing. Literacy is both a skill and a set of processes that help students comprehend and create, in increasingly discipline-specific ways. Improving reading outcomes requires teaching students to write widely with increasing sophistication. All adolescents, not just those receiving interventions, need ongoing reading and writing instruction across disciplines. If reading is a science, writing is an art: Beyond the execution of specific reading skills, adolescents also must learn how to discern meaning and shades thereof, understand nuance and tone, distinguish facts from mis- and disinformation, and write in ways that are compelling and clear. Literacy is a complex, multifaceted endeavor that necessitates active participation from both students and educators, and across educational strata.
In revising standards, states should include literacy expectations in the discipline and grade-appropriate foundational skills. Though adolescent literacy spans across the school day, in many state standards, reading standards live in Language Arts. States can learn from North Carolina, which has taken a critical step in designing a framework for Literacy Instruction Standards, setting expectations for teaching grade level literacy across disciplines. Standards for multisyllabic decoding and morphology are also warranted. Districts assume the responsibility of understanding literacy expectations and providing ongoing literacy professional development to teachers across disciplines prepares teachers to meet the literacy expectations.
Teachers need disciplinary literacy training and support. Teachers must be experts in their discipline’s literacy practices and facilitate students’ literacy development. While adolescent literacy is often associated with language arts, reading and writing practices underpin every discipline. Each discipline has unique practices for how experts gather, read, interpret, and present information; this should be incorporated into instruction across the school day. Reading comprehension is not a wholly transferable skill: what a reader brings to the text impacts how much information they take from the text.
Sea change requires ongoing reading and writing instruction—from poetry and prose in language arts, to primary and secondary source documents, maps, graphs and political cartoons in social studies, and graphs, data, and research in science. Many reading skills like summarization and analysis are transferable. However, discipline-specific texts require readers to take different approaches that are not easily transferable. Without reading instruction in the disciplines where they build requisite knowledge for comprehension, students will struggle to read and write with nuance and sophistication. As students move up the grades, so does the depth and content precision of the text, requiring students to read with increasing sophistication. Reading The Old Man and the Sea is different from The Gettysburg Address, and both are different from reading a scientific article on cell division.
Finally, it’s time to bring back grammar. For years, comprehension has been two-dimensional: vocabulary and whole text. While necessary, they are insufficient. Readers must also comprehend sentences, requiring a deft understanding of syntax—the formation of sentences and their associated grammatical rules, and the relationship between words and phrases in a sentence. Applying syntactical knowledge provides the reader access to sentence meaning, essential to paragraph and whole text comprehension. Syntax helps the reader access the semantics of a sentence. Many texts’ sentences are structurally complex; navigating such complexity requires the reader to track subjects, predicates, and modifiers. If comprehension is the destination, syntax is the roadmap.
Adolescents deserve investment
Realizing a literate future for adolescents requires adequate funding. A landscape scan reveals scant policy and almost nonexistent funding for adolescent literacy, though the literacy demands are persistent. Patchworked, underfunded systems are resulting in uneven adolescent literacy systems across states, districts, and schools.
The proper investments will help drive much needed momentum in the secondary grades. Improved literacy outcomes require both force and momentum to evolve assessment and instruction. Yet, these alone are not enough and should be considered as part of a suite of changes. Preservice and inservice teacher preparation to include disciplinary literacy, improvement science protocols to situate research in any individual context, improved parent and community communication and resources for literacy, and a rethinking of accountability systems are also an imperative. To create lasting change across states, districts and schools, we must use implementation science to guide targeted, sustained actions that contextualize theory, research, and policy to each individual setting. This means aligning policy, leadership, and practice to ensure that all students benefit from what research makes clear about how students learn to read and write. Only through intentional, research-informed alignment can we ensure that every student graduates with the literacy skills they need to create the future they desire.
