INTRODUCTION Literacy—the ability to read, write, and comprehend—is a formidable linchpin to school, work, and life success. Numerous studies provide powerful evidence that early reading achievement is strongly and positively associated with high school completion, college attendance, increased earnings, and better health: • Kindergarten reading scores predict later earnings, higher education completion, home ownership, and retirement (Chetty et al., 2011). • Children who do not read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school by age 19 than their proficient peers (Hernandez, 2011). • Individuals with lower literacy rates are less likely to receive regular preventative healthcare (Bennett et al., 2009). • People who read books live almost 23 months longer than non-literate people (Bavishi et al., 2016). Though cognitive research suggests that 95 percent of the U.S. school population can learn to read when exposed to effective curriculum and instruction (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2022; Moats, 2020; Vaughn & Fletcher, 2020), data from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate that only 33 percent of fourth graders and 31 percent of eighth graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level (U.S. Department of Education, 2022). This performance was two and three percentage points lower than in 2019—the largest drop in scores since 1990. While these declines spanned students’ race, income level, school type, and location, high-poverty and high-minority districts saw a sharper score decline. The COVID-19 pandemic had psychological and economic repercussions on families and students alike, making it harder for young people to focus on school. Erin Fahle and colleagues (2023) demonstrated that declines in reading test scores were higher in communities that had more remote learning, more restricted social activities (e.g., going out to dinner or meeting a friend in public), more reported anxiety and depression, and higher COVID death rates. School leaders are searching for solutions to accelerate learning, even as they accept that the road to pandemic recovery and equity will be long and challenging. As Meghan Kuhfeld and Karen Lewis (2022) point out, Grades 3–8 students only recovered 10 to 25 percent of their pandemic reading loss in the 2021–22 school year. Accordingly, returning to pre-pandemic achievement levels could take at least four years (Kane & Reardon, 2023). Scholastic Education (SE) recognizes that schools do not have time to waste as they consider paths to accelerate student learning. Teachers and students need a more carefully curated collection of evidence-based resources that effectively and efficiently targets kids where they are and gets them to where they need to be. The Scholastic Literacy Framework identifies the core principles critical to improving student learning and presents guidelines that unite SE products and services. The framework is designed to identify our core priorities and be a blueprint to inform future work. It also serves as a resource for grounding what is most critical to SE’s’ collective work.
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