Young Readers Leap, Middle Schoolers Sink as Indiana Fights Back From Pandemic
A push to train teachers of young students in the science of reading shows promising gains, but 7th and 8th graders missed out
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Updated Sept. 4, 2025
Five years after the start of the pandemic, young Indiana students have made great leaps in their reading skills, but the state’s middle school students are floundering and sinking.
State tests taken this spring have touched off celebrations of progress with third graders, whose reading proficiency rates had their biggest jump in 12 years, mostly through a state program to train and coach more teachers in the science of reading.
But sagging English scores on state ILEARN tests for middle school students — scores that match results in other states and the decline in 8th grade reading scores from 2022 to 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — have Indiana education officials searching for a way to help older students so their struggles don’t persist into high school and affect their lives.
“The third, fourth, fifth grade (scores) are moving,” state education secretary Katie Jenner told the state school board this summer. “Where we’re seeing the major lag in data are our late middle schoolers, seventh and eighth grade.”
These students, who were in second and third grade when the pandemic hit in spring 2020 — grades in which students learn key reading skills like sounding out and “decoding” what words mean — simply haven’t caught up from schools being closed and most classes forced online for a year. Those grades had a big drop in reading scores from the pandemic and have only fallen further behind since.
The pandemic knocked down the state’s 7th grade English proficiency rate from just under 50% in 2019 to just over 41% in 2021, for example. The decline has continued, with just under 38% of 7th graders scoring as proficient in English this spring.
“We have to remember, these are our students who intermittently came to school during the pandemic,” said state board member Pat Mapes. “We have still not caught up the skill set that they’ve lost during that time. This is kind of just what we’re going to see for a while, until we can get their skills developed.”
The answers won’t be easy. The state has a tight budget, so it may need to seek grants from donors who have already invested heavily in reading for young students. And while there are theories about why older students are having trouble — including the pandemic blocking them from learning to decode and understand words — experts nationally say there are no great examples of schools or states that have helped these students catch up to use as models.
States such as Florida and Virginia are trying to help struggling middle schoolers by creating individualized reading plans, said Casey Taylor, senior policy director of early literacy for ExcelInEd, the education advocacy organization founded by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. She also praised Alabama for piloting more coaching in reading for middle school teachers, but said the efforts haven’t produced enough data to trumpet them as solutions.
“Those are a few of the examples that we’re looking at, but we don’t have a model to point to as a successful approach in full yet,” Taylor said.
Indiana’s education secretary Jenner, though, still pledges to offer a plan soon to help these students, using what limited evidence she can find.
“There’s not a state we can copy and paste, who has figured it out,” she told the state board, while promising, “Our eye’s on that ball. Stay tuned.”
Reading scores in Indiana have been controversial for several years, after they started declining in 2015. Improving reading skills has been a major focus of state officials who required schools to shift to using science of reading strategies in 2023.
The state’s Republican supermajority reinstated in 2024 a requirement to have third graders with poor reading scores repeat third grade that Democrats removed in 2017.
The state also started requiring more second graders to take IREAD exams — the state’s reading-only tests for young students — instead of just in third grade, to give early warning of struggles.
The Lilly Endowment, the charitable foundation created by the founders of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, gave the state $60 million in 2022 to help schools shift to the science of reading for kindergarten through second grade, donations that are still paying for ongoing work.
The Lilly donations and tax dollars are paying for one effort that Jenner and others are crediting for a jump in third grade IREAD scores this year — the Literacy Cadre program that launched in 2022 to help teachers learn and then improve their skills with science of reading.
Marian University and the University of Indianapolis have staffers that help schools with reading strategies and train school staff to then train teachers. The cadre started with 41 schools in 2022 and has grown to 564 today.
All the efforts combined boosted reading proficiency among third graders from 82.5% in 2024 to 87.3% in 2025, a jump the state school board said was the largest since IREAD started in 2013.
Schools in the cadre saw a seven percentage point jump in reading proficiency from 2024 to 2025, nearly twice the 3.6-point increase for non-Cadre schools.
School districts that have received help from the cadre credit the guidance with helping them focus on ways to improve.
“They basically trained us,” said India Williams, a reading coach with the Evansville Vanderburgh school district. “They came and trained myself and the principals, then we went and trained the teachers, and the teachers worked with the students, and the students learned. ”
But the cadre and Lilly’s donations were all focused on young readers — students who mostly started school after the pandemic — not students who had lost time in class when they would typically master reading skills.
Several national experts say many students never learned to “decode” words — to use phonics to figure out what a written word sounds like — a skill that science of reading lessons focus on. They refer to a “decoding threshold” in which students can make sense of words easily enough that their brains can focus on learning from what they read instead of just deciphering the words.
It’s what some call a shift from learning to read to reading to learn.
“If a student is unable to decode longer, more complicated text, all of their attention will be devoted to decoding text, and they won’t be able to comprehend what they’re trying to read,” researcher Rebecca Sutherland said when releasing a study on the issue last fall. “The findings give us a clearer understanding of what supports many older students need to read on grade-level.”
If that’s the issue in Indiana or elsewhere, there’s no quick fix.
“As persuasive as the decoding threshold thesis might be, the wish for a magic wand to wave at curriculum and standards hints at a serious problem: There is no immediate or obvious solution at hand to address the issue,” Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote for 91ɬ in March.
Middle school teachers don’t always know how to teach skills like decoding, since they are often more focused on teaching higher level reading skills like comprehension and interpreting literature, Pondiscio and others noted.
ExcelInEd’s Taylor said bringing some strategies being used for young readers to middle schools could help.
“For most kids, more time and repetition is really what they need, but they need that from equipped educators who are trained in how to identify, how to plan instruction and intervention to fill those gaps,” Taylor said. “We need to carry some of those supports that are present in early literacy policy into secondary or into the middle grades.”
It’s why states, including Indiana, are having teachers at all levels train in the science of reading.
More support for middle school teachers might be needed, however, said Robert Behning, chairman of the Indiana House education committee.
Behning, who also helps lead Marian University’s Center for Vibrant Schools, one of the two organizations helping to train and coach teachers as part of the Literacy Cadre, is working on a reduced version of the Cadre efforts — a “Cadre light” — aimed at middle schools, where students typically have different teachers for each subject, rather than a single teacher.
He cautioned that the state may not have the money for a major effort for middle schoolers, on top of its early grades work. It already had to trim money for schools to buy science of reading materials from the last state budget.
Behning said there may be ways that money Lilly has already committed to literacy efforts, plus another $86 million Lilly is already offering in grants to schools in and around Indianapolis, that can include work with the middle grades.
Whether Lilly would pay for more middle school help is unclear. The organization’s officials say they are encouraged by progress in the younger grades so far, but would not commit to offering more money.
Jenner, however, told the state board last month that she is seeking money to help middle schoolers, as it has younger students.
“We believe wholeheartedly that we’ve solved multiple other challenges and that we are up for the challenge there,” she said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the Lilly Endowment’s name.
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Patrick O’Donnell is a correspondent at 91ɬ, covering the impact of the pandemic on America's education system
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