Five years since COVID, Louisiana's readers are thriving. This is their secret.

Mar 31

By: Jonaki Mehta, NPR

This country has a big problem: its children are not good readers.

Five years after the pandemic first closed the nation's schools, national test scores show students backsliding in reading all over the United States.

There was one exception: Louisiana. In 2019, Louisiana's fourth graders ranked 50th in the country for reading. Now, they've risen to 16th.

According to an even more granular analysis, Louisiana is the only state that has not only made a "full recovery" from the pandemic in both math and reading, but has improved upon its reading scores since 2019. Nearby Alabama has done the same in math. Those results come from the Education Recovery Scorecard, a joint venture by researchers at Harvard and Stanford.

Five years since COVID, Louisiana's readers are thriving. This is their secret.

For So Many Children, This Is What Reading Feels Like