America’s literacy crisis didn’t happen overnight. This veteran educator says everyone shares responsibility
TheGrio...
Veteran educator and scholarship strategist Lavenre Mickesn, also known as the Scholarship Mama, opens up about the literacy crisis.
Year after year, when veteran educator Larvene Mickens returns to the classroom ahead of her incoming students for professional development, she and her colleagues are given last year’s test scores to review and are asked what they intend to do, particularly where reading is concerned, to improve.
After more than 25 years in the classroom, raising five children of her own alongside her husband, launching a platform, the Scholarship College Mama, to help students apply for scholarships for higher learning, and amid a headline-making literacy crisis plaguing both children and adults, Mickens has a question of her own.
“When are you gonna hold the parents accountable? When are you gonna hold the child accountable for their test score?” she told theGrio by phone on Thursday. “This is not just on me. I just met this kid. He’s 10. You’ve had him 10 years.”
The educator based in Massachusetts described the decline as a “perfect storm” decades in the making, set off by systemic and cultural changes in how reading has been taught, uneven support at home, struggling and underqualified teachers, disengaged students, and education systems that have repeatedly fallen short. Reversing it, she argues, will require looking beyond who is easiest to blame and rebuilding the village around children and literacy.
“Just like I tell people there’s a four-legged stool to success, it’s the same with the decline,” Mickens said.
When she began teaching in 2000, she said schools were moving away from the whole “Hooked on Phonics” era toward whole-language and balanced-literacy approaches that encouraged children to use pictures and context clues to figure out words. That shift, she said, has left generations of students without strong foundational reading skills, while COVID merely exposed and exhausted those gaps.
The latest 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress report shows continued weakness among 12th-grade students, with declines in both reading and math scores. Nearly half of high school seniors—45%—scored below the NAEP Basic level in math, while 32% fell below that benchmark in reading. Meanwhile, in May, scholars at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth analyzed state test scores from third to eighth grade for over 5,000 school districts in 38 states, and they found only five states, plus the District of Columbia, had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025, CNN reported.
“You got to think,” Mickens continued, “Are there people benefiting off of us not knowing how to read, not being literate, not being successful? These curriculum companies are making millions, if not billions. They’re not helping. These big box curricula are not helping. So who’s benefiting from us not being knowledgeable, not being able to read?”
However, the curriculum is only one piece of this “perfect storm” described. Disengaged students, parents who may be unable or unwilling to reinforce learning at home, unqualified or ineffective teachers, the fact that less than 6% are Black, and school systems and policymakers that have failed to provide the right support, are all part of the issue. Plus, culturally, the heyday of “Reading Rainbow” and “PBS Kids,” Pizza Hut reading challenges that put reading in the cultural zeitgeist for an entire generation, died down. (Though “Reading Rainbow” is gearing up for a comeback, and Pizza Hut still hosts Book It!)
Reversing the decline will require the same village she believes allowed it to take hold, with parents, students, teachers, schools, and communities all taking responsibility. In addition to Book It being live and well, many local libraries and communities still host their own annual reading events and challenges, though families may have to be more proactive in finding them.
“I know schools nationwide have intervention programs,” she explained. “They spend millions of dollars on tutoring. They spend money on summer school. They have night school. They have intervention programs. They have wraparound services.”
She continued, “They have every program you can think of to try to get these kids on track. The kids have to buy into it. The parents have to help. The teachers have to partner with the families, and then districts need to make sure they’re spending and allocating the money in the right places. The systems are there.”
For parents in particular, Mickens says introducing reading should begin as early as “in the womb.” Parents should talk and read to their children from birth, continue reading with them as they grow, get them library cards, and seek out free resources and programs that make reading engaging. Most importantly, she argues parents cannot rely on teachers alone to educate their children.
“It takes a village,” she expressed. “It takes all of us to do this.”
The discussion around U.S. literacy rates picked up this week online after the online food personality and now teacher, Darius Cooks, resurfaced with an account about working with high school students he claimed couldn’t read or write. Mickens waded into the waters by offering a response to his video, but it wasn’t about him specifically. She was motivated by how serious this issue is and the fact that it is far from new.
“It’s sad because reading used to be outlawed,” Mickens said of the former anti-literacy laws such as the Negro Act of 1740, that made it illegal to teach enslaved Black people to read and write.
“It used to be illegal for us to learn how to read, and we fought so hard to be able to,” she continued. “And now, you know, two or three generations later, what’s going on?”