The State of Education in 2026: Literacy Challenges, Teacher Demands, and Opportunities for Student Support
Updated: Oct 8
Education is constantly changing, but some of the most important questions facing families today are surprisingly simple:
Are students learning what they need to learn? And when they aren't, are they receiving the support they need to catch up?
Several years after the major educational disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, conversations about education have moved beyond school closures and emergency learning. Students are back in classrooms, teachers are teaching in person, and schools have had time to implement recovery efforts. Yet significant academic challenges remain.
Recent national reading data, ongoing concerns about teacher well-being, differences in students' individual learning needs, and growing access to supplemental instruction all point to the same reality: supporting students in today's educational environment requires collaboration among schools, educators, families, specialists, and communities.
It truly takes a village.
For families of struggling readers in particular, understanding the current educational landscape can help parents make informed decisions about when their child may need additional support.
Reading Achievement Remains a Concern
When this article was originally written in January 2025, unfinished learning following the pandemic was still a major part of the national education conversation. However, research confirms that those concerns were not unfounded.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of 42 studies across 15 countries found significant learning deficits during the pandemic, with greater effects among students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (Betthäuser et al., 2023).
However, it would be too simple to attribute today's reading challenges entirely to the pandemic.
The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides a broader and concerning, picture of reading achievement in the United States.
In 2024, the average reading score for fourth-grade students declined by two points compared with 2022 and by five points compared with 2019 (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2025). Only 31% of fourth graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level, while 40% performed below NAEP Basic (NCES, 2025).
It is important to note that NAEP Proficient does not mean “reading at grade level.” NAEP specifically cautions against interpreting its achievement levels that way. Instead, the results provide one national measure of students' performance on challenging reading tasks. Still, the overall trend deserves attention.
The question is no longer simply whether students experienced learning disruptions several years ago. The question is: What are we doing now when a student continues to struggle?
A Classroom Teacher Cannot Always Provide Individualized Intervention
Teachers do incredibly important work. They are also responsible for classrooms filled with students who may enter the same grade with very different skills. One student may need intensive support with phonemic awareness. Another may struggle with decoding multisyllabic words. Another may read accurately but lack fluency. Another may decode well but struggle with vocabulary, morphology, or reading comprehension. And another may be reading above grade level and need greater challenge. All of those students can be sitting in the same classroom.
Differentiated classroom instruction is important, but there are practical limits to how much individualized instruction one teacher can provide while simultaneously teaching an entire class, managing curriculum requirements, assessing students, communicating with families, documenting progress, and addressing students' social and academic needs.
That does not represent a failure of teachers.
It represents the reality that whole-class instruction and individualized intervention serve different purposes.
A child who needs targeted reading intervention may require more explicit instruction, additional practice, smaller instructional groupings, or more frequent corrective feedback than can reasonably be provided during regular classroom instruction alone.
Teacher Well-Being Matters, Too
The demands placed on educators are also part of the conversation about the state of education. Teacher burnout is not simply a workplace issue. Research suggests that it can have implications for both teachers and students.
A systematic review involving 5,311 teachers and more than 50,000 students found evidence of an association between teacher burnout and poorer academic achievement and student motivation, although the researchers also emphasized the need for additional rigorous research in this area (Madigan & Kim, 2021).
Another systematic review found that teacher burnout was consistently associated with several indicators of poorer physical health among educators (Madigan et al., 2023).
More recent meta-analytic research examining teacher well-being across 173 studies and nearly 90,000 participants further demonstrates the importance of the resources, motivation, coping strategies, and working conditions surrounding educators (Zhou et al., 2024).
Supporting teachers and supporting students should not be competing priorities. Healthy educational systems need both.
Personalized Support Can Help Fill Instructional Gaps
One opportunity within today's educational landscape is increased recognition that students do not all need the same thing at the same time.
Personalized instruction allows an educator to begin with the student's current skills rather than relying exclusively on the expectations associated with the student's grade. That distinction is particularly important in reading.
A fifth grader who has difficulty decoding does not stop needing decoding instruction simply because the fifth-grade curriculum has moved on to more advanced comprehension tasks.
Likewise, a student who can decode accurately but struggles with comprehension does not necessarily need more basic phonics instruction.
Effective intervention begins with identifying the actual area of need.
Research on tutoring supports the value of targeted supplemental instruction. A large systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental studies found consistent positive effects of tutoring on PreK–12 student learning, with particularly strong effects in earlier grades and when tutoring was delivered by teachers or paraprofessionals (Nickow et al., 2020).
More recent research continues to examine how tutoring outcomes change when programs are implemented at larger scale, reinforcing an important point: simply labeling something “tutoring” does not guarantee a particular outcome. Program design, implementation, instructional quality, frequency, and student participation matter (Kraft et al., 2026).
In other words, more instruction is not automatically better instruction. The support should match the student's needs.
Technology Has Expanded Where Learning Can Happen
Another significant change in education is that specialized instruction is no longer necessarily limited by geography.
Online learning has made it possible for students to work with educators and specialists who may not live in their city or even their state.
For families seeking specialized reading support, this can substantially expand their options.
Instead of limiting the search to Who tutors near me?, families can consider: Who has the expertise my child needs?
Technology also allows instruction to be more flexible. Students may be able to receive support from home, school, or while traveling without requiring another commute in an already busy family schedule.
Technology itself, however, is not an instructional method. A computer cannot replace strong teaching. Whether instruction occurs online or in person, students still need educators who can identify their needs, explicitly teach skills, provide meaningful practice, monitor progress, and adjust instruction based on student performance. Technology is most valuable when it increases access to good instruction.
Parents Remain an Important Part of the Educational Team
Parents do not need to become reading specialists to support their children. But parents are often the first people to recognize that something isn't quite right. Maybe homework consistently takes much longer than expected. Maybe your child guesses unfamiliar words. Maybe they can explain a story beautifully when you read it aloud but struggle to understand the same type of text when reading independently.Maybe spelling is unusually difficult. Maybe your child has begun saying, “I'm just bad at reading.” Those observations matter.
Parents can support their children by communicating with classroom teachers, asking questions about assessment results, requesting information about interventions being provided at school, reading with their children, and seeking additional evaluation or instructional support when difficulties persist.
The goal should not be to create competition between school versus tutoring or teachers versus parents.
Children benefit when the adults supporting them share information and work toward the same goal.
Moving From “Wait and See” to Informed Action
One of the greatest opportunities in education today is access to more information about how children learn to read and what effective reading instruction can look like. We know that struggling readers are not all struggling for the same reason. That means the solution should not automatically be: “Just read more.” A child struggling with phonemic awareness may need explicit instruction in manipulating speech sounds. A child struggling with phonics and decoding may need systematic instruction connecting sounds with written patterns. A child struggling with fluency may need support developing accurate and increasingly automatic word reading. A child struggling with vocabulary and morphology may need explicit instruction in word meanings and meaningful word parts. A child struggling with comprehension may need support understanding, analyzing, and connecting ideas within text. And some students experience difficulty across several areas.
The more clearly we identify the problem, the more intentionally we can respond to it.
Looking Ahead: Challenges and Opportunities Can Exist Together
There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the state of education. National reading performance remains troubling. Educators continue to navigate significant professional demands. Students enter classrooms with wide ranges of academic needs, and schools do not have unlimited time, personnel, or resources. But challenge does not mean hopelessness.
We also know more about learning than we did in previous generations. Families have greater access to specialized educators. Technology has removed some geographic barriers to individualized instruction. Research continues to refine our understanding of effective intervention, and parents have more opportunities to become informed partners in their children's education.
Schools have an essential role.
Teachers have an essential role.
Parents have an essential role.
And when a child needs something beyond what can reasonably be provided within the regular classroom, targeted supplemental support can have an important role as well.
The goal is not to expect one person or one part of the education system to do everything. The goal is to make sure students receive the instruction they need, when they need it.
Need Additional Reading Support?
Tutive® provides personalized online reading tutoring and intervention for students in grades K–12.
We specialize in Structured Literacy and Orton-Gillingham-based instruction, supporting students who need assistance with phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, fluency, vocabulary and morphology, reading comprehension, spelling and encoding, written expression, and dyslexia-related reading difficulties.
Our individualized approach focuses on identifying learning gaps and providing targeted instruction to help students strengthen their literacy skills.
Schedule a free consultation today to discuss your child's reading needs and learn how Tutive® can help.
Individual results vary. Intervention timelines and student outcomes depend on individual learning needs, attendance, instructional frequency, retention, school instruction, and opportunities for practice.
About the Author
Dr. India "Miss India" Barnes is a K–12 Reading Specialist with a Doctor of Education in Leadership and advanced training in Orton-Gillingham and Structured Literacy. Through Tutive®, she has supported 100+ students and provided 2,500+ hours of structured literacy and Orton-Gillingham-informed reading intervention and tutoring. Through personalized 1:1 online instruction and in-person reading labs, she helps students strengthen reading, spelling, writing, foundational literacy skills, and academic confidence.
References
Betthäuser, B. A., Bach-Mortensen, A. M., & Engzell, P. (2023). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence on learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Human Behaviour, 7, 375–385. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01506-4
Kraft, M. A., Schueler, B. E., & Falken, G. T. (2026). What impacts should we expect from tutoring at scale? Exploring meta-analytic generalizability. Review of Educational Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543261446660
Madigan, D. J., & Kim, L. E. (2021). Does teacher burnout affect students? A systematic review of its association with academic achievement and student-reported outcomes. International Journal of Educational Research, 105, 101714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101714
Madigan, D. J., Kim, L. E., Glandorf, H. L., & Kavanagh, O. (2023). Teacher burnout and physical health: A systematic review. International Journal of Educational Research, 119, 102173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2023.102173
National Center for Education Statistics. (2025). NAEP report card: 2024 NAEP reading assessment. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.
Nickow, A., Oreopoulos, P., & Quan, V. (2020). The impressive effects of tutoring on PreK–12 learning: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the experimental evidence (Working Paper No. 27476). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27476
Zhou, S., Slemp, G. R., & Vella-Brodrick, D. A. (2024). Factors associated with teacher wellbeing: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36, Article 63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09886-x
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