The Reading Reforms That Stopped at Third Grade

The lowest-performing middle school readers aren't just behind, they're falling further behind every year, even as reading scores recover elsewhere. On This Week with EdSurge, NWEA's Megan Kuhfeld shares new research that explains why the K-3 literacy laws that fixed early reading aren't reaching the middle school. Then Dacia Toll, who spent years running schools before co-founding the AI literacy platform Coursemojo, describes what she calls the comprehension wall, the point where a middle schooler can read every word on a page and still miss the meaning, and makes the case for AI tools built to ask questions instead of just answering them. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Megan Kuhfeld's NWEA research shows the same decline at the 10th percentile of middle school reading scores across three separate assessments: NWEA's MAP Growth, i-Ready and NAEP, drawing on data from more than 20 million K-8 students. Dacia Toll's "background knowledge problem" means two students with identical reading skills can perform two full grade levels apart on the same text, depending on how much they already know about the topic. K-3 literacy laws mostly stop at third grade and many didn't take effect until 2022-2024, so they miss students who are already behind by the time they reach middle school. An individual struggling reader typically needs two to three years of above-average growth to catch up to grade level, and building a system that catches every student takes even longer. There's a meaningful difference between "indulgebots," AI tools that just answer a student's question, and purpose-built instructional AI that responds to a wrong answer by sending the student back to a specific sentence or paragraph to work it out themselves. STORIES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Reading Scores Continue to Drop for Many Middle Schoolers by David Weldon AI Can Help One of K-12's Biggest Challenges: Middle School Reading by Dacia Toll STAY CONNECTED Subscribe to EdSurge newsletters at edsurge.com. Find the latest education news at edsurge.com/news. Follow EdSurge on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. HOST AND CONTRIBUTORS Host: Ira Apfel Featuring: Megan Kuhfeld, PhD, Director of Growth Modeling and Data Analytics, NWEA Dacia Toll, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Coursemojo