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A version of this essay originally appeared on Robert Pondiscio’s .

The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results delivered a familiar gut punch: Just 30% of eighth graders read at or above the proficient level, a number that鈥檚 barely budged in decades. Even in states like Mississippi and Louisiana, which have earned national attention thanks to literacy reforms that have smartly lifted fourth-grade scores in recent NAEP cycles, early gains tend to plateau or evaporate by eighth grade. A substantial number of U.S. students simply seem to run out of gas as readers as they move from upper elementary to middle school and beyond. 

A compelling explanation may lie in something called the decoding threshold. Teachers often assume that once students master decoding in early elementary school, they鈥檙e set to shift from learning to read to reading to learn. However, in 2019, researchers at the Educational Testing Service published a that measured foundational literacy skills 鈥� like decoding 鈥� in students from upper elementary through high school. Most reading tests in the older grades focus solely on comprehension; they don鈥檛 offer much insight into whether students have mastered the basic skills necessary to read fluently. The findings showed evidence of a troubling phenomenon: Students with weak decoding skills consistently performed poorly on comprehension tasks, while those who surpassed a certain level of decoding ability tended to understand texts much more effectively. In other words, although decoding isn鈥檛 the only skill older students need to succeed in reading, those who haven鈥檛 yet mastered it are likely to struggle with understanding complex material.

A follow-up study three years later confirmed it: Those below the decoding threshold stagnated, while those above the line advanced 鈥� offering tantalizing evidence to explain why eighth-grade NAEP scores plateau even as fourth-grade numbers rise. A put the matter succinctly and starkly: 鈥淚f children do not have adequate word-recognition skills, their reading comprehension often won鈥檛 get better no matter how much direct support for comprehension they receive.鈥� 

The tripwire that appears to be holding kids back is multisyllabic decoding. Students who can decode simple words like “cat” and “bed” with relative ease may still struggle to break down longer, more complex words into smaller, manageable parts to read them correctly. Imagine two eighth graders reading a science passage that includes the word 鈥減hotosynthesis.” The student above the decoding threshold effortlessly breaks it into 鈥減hoto鈥� and 鈥渟ynthesis,鈥� adjusts the sounds in her head 鈥� like 鈥渟yn鈥� to 鈥渟in鈥� 鈥� and reads it smoothly, quickly grasping it as a plant process she鈥檚 studying. Meanwhile, the student below the threshold freezes at the unfamiliar term and mangles it as 鈥減hoto-sith-esis鈥� or 鈥減hoto-sy-thee-sis.鈥� Struggling to decode the big word, he loses the thread of the sentence, missing the whole idea of plants making energy. 

It鈥檚 another manifestation of cognitive load theory: Brainpower spent decoding multisyllabic words is not available to attend to the meaning of the text. Worse, the decoding threshold fuels a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer phenomenon often referred to as the : Students who are below the decoding threshold stop growing in vocabulary, reading comprehension and knowledge acquisition, while those who are above have what it takes to keep learning and growing, leaving the struggling readers in their wake. 

Worse still, evidence of the decoding threshold reveals a blind spot in common approaches to teaching reading. 鈥淲e basically don鈥檛 teach [multisyllabic decoding] anywhere in the system because it鈥檚 too advanced for second graders. And after second grade, we stop decoding instruction and flip into comprehension and fluency,鈥� observes Rebecca Kockler, a former Louisiana state education leader who now heads , a $40 million initiative of the . 鈥淚f I had a magic wand, I would pull decoding fluency work up almost into seventh or eighth grade,鈥� she says, while pushing down to early elementary grades the building blocks of multisyllabic decoding, such as morphology and etymology. If you teach kids to break words into their smallest meaningful pieces, like 鈥渦n-鈥� for 鈥渘ot鈥� or 鈥�-ness鈥� for a state of being, they鈥檙e more likely to be able to handle 鈥渦nhappiness鈥� by spotting its parts, for example. And by showing them where words come from 鈥� like how 鈥減hoto鈥� in 鈥減hotosynthesis鈥� means 鈥渓ight鈥� from Greek 鈥� they will be better able to infer what words mean.

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. Nor is there simply a lack of appropriate curriculum or materials. A recent RAND of teachers in grades 3 to 8 found that 44% of their students 鈥渁lways or nearly always experience difficulty鈥� reading the content of their instructional materials. The report also found many of those same teachers hold misconceptions about how students develop word recognition skills.

A new nonprofit venture called , a collaborative effort with the fund led by Kockler, has been piloting a set of tech-enabled instructional tools aimed at addressing these issues directly. In a 12-week pilot in grades K-2 across 11 schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, early results were promising, with evidence of impact in only 8 to 12 weeks of use. Student growth was most pronounced, according to Kockler鈥檚 colleagues, among students starting at the lowest levels of proficiency. K-2 may sound early to address a problem that shows up starkly in eighth grade, but it reflects a growing conviction: unless students start building sophisticated decoding skills young, and those skills are reinforced often, too many will continue to hit the wall in middle school and never get back up to speed. 鈥淲e’ve had this belief that we teach kids to read and then they read to learn,鈥� Kockler explains, 鈥渁nd we just fundamentally do not believe that鈥檚 true anymore.鈥澛�

If you had asked her years ago, when she was assistant superintendent of academics with the Louisiana Department of Education, to estimate the percentage of middle schoolers who struggled with decoding to the point that it interfered with their reading comprehension, Kockler would have guessed 7% to 10%. 鈥淲e think that number is more like 30% to 40%,鈥� she now says, 鈥渨hich really mirrors this group of middle schoolers who never ever show growth on state tests or NAEP.鈥� 

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