A recent article in The Atlantic suggested that America is sliding toward illiteracy while making it clear that the decline in literacy rates pre-dated the COVID pandemic.
National reading data indicate that 70% of Colorado’s eighth-grade students failed to achieve proficient reading in 1998. This was pre-pandemic. In 2024, 65% of Colorado’s eighth-grade students failed to achieve a proficient level of reading on the NAEP assessment. This compares with 71% of the nation’s eighth-grade students not reading at a proficient level.
These data indicate that there is an adolescent literacy crisis in Colorado.
While conducting literacy screenings to identify students’ reading strengths and weaknesses, I observe the literacy crisis up close. An 11-year-old fifth-grade student wrote the following:
the walk home: Brian and his dog Carmel were take a walk. Dering (during) that walk Brian legs hurt so he took a seat Brains legs hurt because he had a football game after. He was perpuring Carmel started barking, they both heard loud nosise (noises)they ran as fast as they can. It was a car crash the man who crashed was Jerry and Brian asked if he was scared and his foot sliped (slipped) and Brain and Jerry had a coversion (conversation)
Like 40 other states, Colorado enacted legislation to improve reading outcomes in grades K-3, providing guidance for instruction, assessment, and curriculum through the Colorado Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act, or READ Act. The focus on adolescent literacy or on students in grades 4-8 is excluded.
The act states, “it is more cost effective to invest in effective early literacy education rather than to absorb costs for remediation in middle school, high school, and beyond,” with state legislators choosing to focus on a comprehensive approach to early literacy. Admittedly, as stated in the READ Act, “The state recognizes that the provisions are not a comprehensive solution to ensuring that all students graduate from high schools ready to enter the workforce or postsecondary education.”
Only two states in the U.S., Virginia and New Mexico, have amended their literacy laws to focus on older students. Virginia’s 2023 literacy laws were revised to focus on students in grades K-8. New Mexico now requires English Language Arts teachers in grades 6 through 12, special education teachers, teachers of multilingual learners, and literacy coaches to complete training in reading research and effective language and literacy practices for adolescents.
Colorado is part of the 96% of states who have not created or adapted legislation to address its adolescent literacy crisis. The range of students without the gifted and talented designation who met or exceeded proficiency in Colorado in grades fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth respectively on 2025 Colorado Measures of Academic Success was 36%, 41.6%, 36.8%, 41.8%, and 36.7%. Each grade level had more than 58% not meeting proficiency.
The 2025 CMAS data show a decline in proficiency from seventh grade to eighth grade. There is a wide literacy gap between gifted and talented and non-gifted and talented students (roughly 50 percent points at each grade level) suggesting we have a literacy hierarchy in the state that needs to be interrupted while still improving the literacy rates of the highest performing students.
As part of the effort to address the adolescent literacy crisis, the Literacy Research Center and Clinic at MSU Denver will begin conducting the Colorado Early Adolescent Literacy Impact research study funded by a six-figure grant from the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Foundation. The goal is to accelerate the reading achievement of struggling and non-struggling readers, multilingual learners, and special education students with individualized education plans in Colorado. The aim is to use in-state research to advocate for literacy legislation that includes adolescents.
This must be one effort of many across the state’s 178 school districts to bolster, not just proficient, but advanced levels of reading and writing among Colorado’s students.
With more than 300,000 students in grades 4-8, or 35% of the overall Colorado student population of 881,000 students, it is time to ring the alarm bell for Colorado legislators to expand the state’s reading legislation.
We must join other states that are moving in this direction. If we do not, the adolescent illiteracy crisis will be ours to own without a clear rationale to provide to 9-13-year-olds on why the state neglected to give their literacy development the attention it deserves.
Alfred W. Tatum, of Thornton, is the executive director of the Literacy Research Center and Clinic at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the past president of the Literacy Research Association.
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