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It’s often assumed that 13- to 18-year-old students in classrooms across the United States are proficient readers with robust vocabularies and the ability to comprehend texts in their content area classes, but that is frequently not the case. Many of these older students do not learn to read despite advancing through the education system. According to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” 30% of eighth grade students scored below “basic” in reading. Many students who graduate from high school are unable to read their diplomas. These circumstances prompted The Reading League (TRL) to develop a page on its Compass website dedicated to Adolescent Literacy.

Unfortunately, secondary school leaders are often challenged with teaching adolescents to read after they leave elementary school. Explicit, systematic, evidence-aligned reading instruction is needed to close the gaps, but time constraints and other content area instructional priorities after elementary school are realistic challenges to providing it.

Maria Murray. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE READING LEAGUE

Yet, we cannot simply overlook adolescent readers when it comes to reading instruction and intervention, nor continue passing them through school unable to read and write well. If we fail to use highly effective reading interventions with older students, we do a moral disservice to them and society. When a person cannot read, they are less likely to participate in the labor force, more likely to engage in criminal activity, and more likely to face a host of other grim life outcomes.

Older students often struggle with reading due to inadequate foundational literacy skills, limited vocabulary, and insufficient exposure to complex texts—many missed critical foundational aspects during their early reading instruction. Ineffective practices, such as whole word memorization, strategies for figuring out a word based on guessing or looking at the pictures, and classroom workshop models featuring minimal practice opportunities and indirect instruction, have led to many students falling behind. This becomes apparent when texts become more complex in the upper grades. Students are left to guess based on the first few letters when they come to longer words in text or skip them altogether.

Kari Kurto, TRL’s national science of reading project director, aptly points out the following: “Foundational reading instruction that teaches ineffective strategies early on causes the gap in reading proficiency to widen as students advance through the grades.” Even though older students may have developed strategies to get by, science of reading advocates believe adolescence is not too late to intervene.

Critical Opportunities for Secondary School Principals

That said, secondary school principals have an opportunity to build reading proficiency in their schools. The following are key components they can prioritize for success:

1. Invest in Professional Development and Build Support: Train all middle and high school educators to support literacy in their content areas using evidence-aligned practices. Professional development in foundational skills, morphology, sentence structure, and other literacy areas is essential. It must be delivered by experts and ongoing—not via “one-and-done” delivery. Administrators should be the first to say they have continued learning and that they will learn alongside teachers. TRL developed a page on its Compass website exclusively dedicated to guiding administrators in this important work, as well as a page for educators and specialists.

Encourage teachers to view reading instruction as a continuous learning process. Conduct an honest evaluation of current instructional and assessment practices and materials with everyone involved. High expectations for every student to succeed and achieve should be the norm, as should a learn-it-all versus a know-it-all-already mindset. What matters most is providing strategies based on student data to close gaps.

2. Use Data: Establish teams of knowledgeable educators to analyze student data and determine schoolwide approaches to responding to data. Ensure that assessments are aligned with the findings from the science of reading. They must be efficient, reliable, and valid. By making informed decisions about instructional practices, teams can ensure that reading strategies are consistent across different subjects, tiers of instruction, and grade levels.

3. Choose Evidence-Aligned Interventions: Use The Reading League’s Adolescent Reading Intervention Evaluation Guidelines to evaluate existing interventions or select new interventions.

4. Restructure Time: Prioritize reworking your school’s schedule to allow dedicated and sufficient time for interventions. Aligning intervention with Tier 1 class content ensures that students receive consistent support.

5. Implement MTSS: Implement a multi-tiered system featuring intervention tailored to students’ needs to ensure all students receive the intervention they need to learn to read.

The Reading League’s website for Reading Intervention Evaluation Guidelines. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE READING LEAGUE

Engaging Older Students in Reading

Older students are often reluctant readers because it does not come easily to them. While it is essential to provide high-interest, age-appropriate texts, we must remember that it may be extremely challenging for students to read them independently. Instead, high-interest books can become tools to teach the foundational reading skills students are missing. In addition, content area teachers can learn to integrate reading instruction using their science, math, and social studies materials.

In The Reading League’s Adolescent Reading Intervention Guidelines for Students in Grades 4–12, it is noted that “intervention programs alone cannot remedy reading problems for older students. A schoolwide systemic approach including all content area teachers as literacy teachers (e.g., English language arts, social studies, science, mathematics) is necessary. Although it takes additional time, when the strategies and content align across tiers of instruction, student achievement is accelerated.” For example, all teachers can implement the same sentence and paragraph writing routine in their settings, and content teachers can help students navigate complex texts by providing explicit instructional routines to teach upcoming vocabulary.

Reading Achievement Equals Vibrant Communities

Evidence-aligned reading instruction transforms reading achievement for older students, and educators are responsible for teaching every child to read proficiently. Success looks like vibrant communities driven by confident, literate individuals with a limitless future because their education leaders followed the science of reading.

Maria Murray, PhD, is the founder and CEO of The Reading League, a national nonprofit organization based in Syracuse, NY. The Reading League advances the science of reading through advocacy, research, professional development, and community engagement. Learn more at thereadingleague.org.