Lee never forgot the reading difficulties she witnessed while teaching fifth and sixth graders. 

“It becomes clear pretty quickly how they’re struggling,” says Lee, now a senior research associate at the Florida Center for Reading Research. Beyond test scores, she says the struggle was also evident in the questions her students would ask their classmates in response to assigned reading: “It’s often not because of content areas; it’s because they can’t read.” 

Lee was not the only education leader grappling with older students’ lack of reading skills. Rebecca Kockler saw similar issues when she worked as the assistant superintendent of academic content at the Louisiana Department of Education. Recently, the state was the second most improved in the nation for fourth-grade reading results, rising from the 50th in 2019 to the 16th in 2025, with high scores measured in 2024. But, despite the strides Kockler’s fourth-grade students were making, it was all but erased by the time they hit eighth grade.

“It was just, ‘What is going on?’” says Kockler, now the executive director at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund’s Reading Reimagined program. “What was frustrating for me was that I could not touch my middle school reading results.”

According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress results, only 30 percent of eighth-grade students are reading at a NAEP “proficient” level. Fourth-grade students had similar scores, at 31 percent. Both fourth and eighth- grade scores were not significantly different from when the data collection first began in 1992. 

Many states, similarly to Louisiana, are focusing on deploying research-backed reading programs for their younger students. But, despite a stagnant reading comprehension rate for older students, they are continually left out of the conversation about improving literacy.