The 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (NCES, 2025) results have revealed a troubling trend in American education: reading scores for the lowest-performing students have plummeted to historic lows. This decline isn’t sudden. It represents a steady deterioration in performance since 2013, particularly affecting students in the bottom performance tier. Education experts have proposed various explanations for this decline. Some point to changes in classroom technology, others to shifts in teaching methodologies or broader societal factors (Schwartz, 2025).
However, a compelling explanation, not cited by pundits, emerges when we examine the timing: 2013 marked the first year that fourth-grade students had been educated under the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). That same year, a colleague and I (Hiebert & Mesmer, 2013) published a crucial warning: the CCSS approach to text complexity could potentially harm vulnerable readers. Our concern stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding in the CCSS initiative: the assumption that K-12 texts had decreased in complexity over time.
Teachers, believing they were working with substantially harder texts, increased their use of what they considered scaffolds… While well-intentioned, these practices likely resulted in students doing less reading on their own.
This assumption was incorrect. Research showed that first-grade texts were at their highest complexity level in 60 years (Hiebert & Mesmer, 2013). Similar patterns emerged in third-grade texts and even sixth-grade materials that had maintained or exceeded their historical complexity levels from the early 20th century (Gamson et al., 2013).
The emphasis on text complexity may have led to unexpected but consequential changes in classroom instruction (Swanson et al., 2016). Teachers, believing they were working with substantially harder texts, increased their use of what they considered scaffolds, such as reading texts aloud to students, providing digital recordings, or implementing round-robin reading where students take turns reading portions of text. While well-intentioned, these practices likely resulted in students doing less reading on their own. As students progressed through grades with diminished reading practice, reading became increasingly challenging and unappealing for many learners.
The data suggests that, when struggling readers face texts beyond their instructional level and receive less reading practice, they can miss crucial opportunities to build reading fluency and comprehension (Amendum et al., 2016). To address this crisis, state education leaders must fundamentally rethink approaches to text complexity and reading instruction. This means revising guidelines to align with research-based developmental progressions while maintaining high expectations. It requires ensuring struggling readers have access to texts at their reading levels while providing systematic support to help them progress to more complex materials.
The goal of college and career readiness remains essential, but the path to that goal cannot come at the expense of our most vulnerable readers. The 2025 NAEP results serve as a clear call to action: we must align our text complexity policies with research-based understanding of reading development and support struggling readers through authentic reading experiences.
REFERENCES
Amendum, S. J., Conradi, K., & Hiebert, E. (2018). Does text complexity matter in the elementary grades? A research synthesis of text difficulty and elementary students’ reading fluency and comprehension. Educational Psychology Review, 30, 121-151.
Gamson, D. A., Lu, X., & Eckert, S. A. (2013). Challenging the research base of the Common Core State Standards: A historical reanalysis of text complexity. Educational Researcher, 42(7), 381-391.
Hiebert, E. H., & Mesmer, H.A.E. (2013). Upping the ante of text complexity in the Common Core State Standards: Examining its potential impact on young readers. Educational Researcher, 42(1), 44-51.
National Center for Education Statistics (2025). The Nation’s Report Card: NAEP Reading Assessment.
National Governors Association. (2010). Common core state standards.
Schwartz, S. (2025, January 29). Reading scores fall to new low on NAEP, fueled by declines for struggling students. Retrieved from: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-scores-fall-to-new-low-on-naep-fueled-by-declines-for-struggling-students/2025/01