Veteran educator and scholarship strategist Lavenre Mickesn, also known as the Scholarship Mama, opens up about the literacy crisis.
Year after year, when veteran educator Larvene Mickens returns to the classroom ahead of her incoming students for professional development, she and her colleagues are given last year’s test scores to review and are asked what they intend to do, particularly where reading is concerned, to improve.
After more than 25 years in the classroom, raising five children of her own alongside her husband, launching a platform, the Scholarship College Mama, to help students apply for scholarships for higher learning, and amid a headline-making literacy crisis plaguing both children and adults, Mickens has a question of her own.
“When are you gonna hold the parents accountable? When are you gonna hold the child accountable for their test score?” she told theGrio by phone on Thursday. “This is not just on me. I just met this kid. He’s 10. You’ve had him 10 years.”
The educator based in Massachusetts described the decline as a “perfect storm” decades in the making, set off by systemic and cultural changes in how reading has been taught, uneven support at home, struggling and underqualified teachers, disengaged students, and education systems that have repeatedly fallen short. Reversing it, she argues, will require looking beyond who is easiest to blame and rebuilding the village around children and literacy.
“Just like I tell people there’s a four-legged stool to success, it’s the same with the decline,” Mickens said.
When she began teaching in 2000, she said schools were moving away from the whole “Hooked on Phonics” era toward whole-language and balanced-literacy approaches that encouraged children to use pictures and context clues to figure out words. That shift, she said, has left generations of students without strong foundational reading skills, while COVID merely exposed and exhausted those gaps.
The latest 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress report shows continued weakness among 12th-grade students, with declines in both reading and math scores. Nearly half of high school seniors—45%—scored below the NAEP Basic level in math, while 32% fell below that benchmark in reading. Meanwhile, in May, scholars at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth analyzed state test scores from third to eighth grade for over 5,000 school districts in 38 states, and they found only five states, plus the District of Columbia, had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025, CNN reported…
