It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading

The fallout from the pandemic is just being felt. “We’re in new territory,” educators say.

By Dana Goldstein of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency.

As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.

In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”

In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind."

"From the start of the pandemic, when schools abruptly shuttered in March 2020, math skills were clearly affected, while some early research suggested that students’ reading skills were holding steady, perhaps because more parents read with their children at home than practiced math.

But now, “What we’re seeing is that there are a lot of children who didn’t get the stimulation they need” during the pandemic to adequately develop early speech and reading skills, which are closely linked, Dr. Hogan said."