BROWNSVILLE, Texas — It’s nearly 5 p.m. on a Friday, and Dolores S. Perez is hard at work in the Brownsville Public Library. She’s also one of the people having the most fun.
Perez, known as Ms. D to her pupils, sits at a table with one of the young students she tutors as they clap and sing as part of their lesson. The retired public school teacher stands out in a burnt orange sweater, her curly hair adorned with a soft brown beret.
Perez started tutoring students around the time the COVID-19 vaccine made it safe to meet in-person. What started as a part-time gig for a couple of students in 2021 now keeps her busy six days a week.
When it comes to the youngest students she tutors, those in kindergarten through fourth grade, Perez says they all need help with reading.
It’s not their fault, she says, or their parents’ or even the schools’ fault. It’s just what happened during the early days of the pandemic, when kids were stuck at home and beaming into school through a computer.
“There’s nothing like one-to-one interaction with a human being,” Perez says. “In Zoom class, you’re just a little blot on the screen.”
Perez is likely to stay busy for the foreseeable future, if new federal data about students’ performance in reading is any indicator.
The 2024 results of the nation’s report card, released last week by the National Center for Education Statistics, show that for the third time in a row fourth and eighth grade reading scores have dropped on the biannual assessment. The only score that surpassed 2019 results was Louisiana’s performance in fourth-grade reading.
NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr called the trend “sobering” during a town hall on the results in Washington, D.C.
“The reading story is discouraging, continuing declines that started before the pandemic,” Carr said. “Average scores are at the same level as 30 years ago. Students are not where we need or want them to be.”
Reading By the Numbers
Average reading scores dropped by two points for both fourth and eighth graders in 2024, standing at 215 and 258 respectively. That’s down from a fourth grade high of 223 in 2015 and an eighth grade high of 268 in 2013.
Carr called attention to the widening gaps between the highest and lowest achievers — scores are falling the fastest among students who are struggling the most.
Average reading scores of fourth and eighth graders scoring in the 90th percentile weren’t statistically different from 2022 to 2024, and scores among high flyers in both grades have held fairly steady over the past three decades.
The fourth grade reading average among students in the bottom 10th percentile fell by four points to 158, which is 17 points lower than their best year in 2009.
Eighth graders in the bottom 10th percentile saw their average score fall by five points to 204, the lowest score since 1992 and 19 points lower than their best average.
The percentage of students who are failing to reach the NAEP basic achievement level is growing larger. At the basic level, fourth grade students are able to demonstrate skills like using context to glean the meaning of words and identify a problem described in a passage. Eighth graders should also be able to formulate an opinion based on the text and use details to answer specific questions.
Among fourth graders nationally, 40 percent failed to reach the NAEP basic reading skills. That proportion was even larger for some groups when broken down by race, making up more than half of students who are Hispanic, Black and American Indian or Alaska Native.
Among all eighth graders, 33 percent failed to reach basic reading proficiency. The failure rate among Hispanic, Black and Native students was higher by more than 10 percentage points.
Before and After
Perez’s students come from all walks of life and schools, whether public, private, charter or homeschool.
The third and fourth graders that Perez tutors now would have been in kindergarten or pre-K around the time schools nationwide first went remote due to the pandemic. Those early school years are a critical time for students to learn social skills, self-regulation and generally how to function in a classroom.
Students are also still redeveloping the work ethic needed to do well in school, Perez says. While she wasn’t teaching during the pandemic, she saw friends and family struggle to replicate the way teachers motivate students to work.
“How would you grade a child who is just sitting behind a computer?” Perez says. “Here and there, they got away with just showing up, and you get credit. Everybody got an abbreviated version of learning.”
Perez says her third and fourth grade students catch up quickly with individual support, where she’s able to tailor each lesson to their personal interests depending on whether students are history buffs or go crazy for dinosaurs. But her brand of tutoring services isn’t something that all kids have access to.
“Some parents have the means to get help, but I do think about all the kids whose parents don’t,” Perez says. “They’re further behind, and that’s a big population. You need reading for almost everything in the world, in all other subjects. It affects every aspect of their learning to be behind.”
First and second grade students commonly come to Perez reading at a kindergarten level, she says, and Perez works with them on skills like learning basic letter sounds, how to link words to make sentences and being able to answer, “What did you read about?”
About a quarter of the kindergarten through second grade students she tutors in dual language programs in English and Spanish. These English learners have some extra challenges, Perez says, when learning to read and write in two languages with overlapping alphabets and sounds.
“For the little chiquitos, it’s all muddy, it’s all one language,” she says.
Perez offers an example: She might ask a student to write a phrase like, “See the boy.” A child who grew up speaking Spanish at home may write “si,” using the letter that makes the long E sound in Spanish. Perez will remind them that the twin Es create the vowel sound in “see,” which makes sense until it’s time to spell a word like “happy.”
“It sounds like ‘ee,’ but it’s a ‘y,’” Perez has to explain.
“And they ask me, ‘Why?’” she continues with a laugh. “It becomes funny to them, but that’s where they have to make the dissection between the two languages. If you’ve ever untangled a thin gold chain, that’s what it’s like.”
Early (Childhood) Investment
Steven Barnett, founder and senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, says that the NAEP reading results are not what anyone wanted to see.
“Particularly because, for a while, we had made such good progress,” he says, “and to see scores continue to drop after the efforts were made to try to compensate for impacts of the pandemic, I think, is especially disappointing.”
The federal government funneled millions of dollars into schools up until recently, in hopes of turning the tide of falling scores and keeping students on grade level.
Barnett says there’s another solution, albeit one with a hefty price tag, that can help bolster student achievement — high-quality pre-K programming with small classes and top teaching talent.
He points to the success his organization found coming out of New Jersey’s pre-K system for high-poverty areas of the state. The data shows that children who started the pre-program at age 3 went on to score better on eighth grade standardized tests than past cohorts by about 10 points. That would more than make up for the reading backslide NAEP recorded between 2022 and 2024, Barnett argues.
“This is not a simple or cheap solution,” he says. “It’s almost like adding two more years of school in terms of cost to the system, but it does show that we could turn things around. You look over this period of time when our NAEP scores have been declining, and there’s been almost no change in the number of children who go to preschool, much less high-quality preschool.”
Preschool is also vital at a time when parent engagement is decreasing, Barnett says, with fewer parents saying they read at home with their children over the last five years. Pre-K programs set a foundation for children’s reading, writing and social skills, he adds — it’s where young children grow their vocabularies and learn how to be part of a classroom.
“Concentrating on something that someone else wants you to concentrate on, like a teacher, that’s a skill you have to develop,” Barnett says. “When you talk to teachers about kids, one of the biggest problems is kids don’t have these skills, they don’t have the language. The next cohorts coming onto NEAP have had these at a lower level, so I’m expecting them to do even worse unless we do something to turn this around.”
