Indiana students’ English language arts scores have remained essentially unchanged for five straight years despite major state investments in literacy, although math scores grew over the same time period, new test results show.

The 2025 ILEARN results released Wednesday show that overall, 40.6% of students scored proficient or better on the English language arts portion of the state test, which is administered in grades 3-8.

That’s a decline of around half a percentage point from last year, and about the same percentage of students who reached proficiency as in previous years going back to 2021.

Since the 2022-23 school year, Indiana has overhauled its reading instruction in early grades to better align with the . This has included  earmarked for placing literacy coaches in schools and evaluating teacher training programs, as well as a new law to third graders who don’t pass the state reading test, the IREAD.

IREAD scores are expected in August.

In this year’s ILEARN results, the share of third grade students proficient in English language arts improved 1.6 percentage points over last year. But their proficiency rate has risen by only 1.7 percentage points since 2021, due to a decline in performance in 2023 and 2024.

In fourth grade, around 41.4% of students were proficient in English language arts in 2025, a .4 percentage point drop since last year, but a 1.8 percentage point improvement over 2021.

Meanwhile, Indiana students’ math proficiency has increased since 2021, when around 36.9% of all students were proficient in math. In 2025, 42.1% of students tested proficient, an increase of around 1.2 percentage points over 2024.

Notably, math performance in third grade has steadily declined since 2023.

Under passed in 2025, math instruction will see changes similar to the science of reading shift, beginning with a math skills screener for younger students in 2026-27.

Overall, 31.2% of all Indiana students scored proficient in both English language arts and math in 2025. Indiana students recently posted improved scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, in .

‘An urgent need to support middle school students’

The bifurcation in math and English language arts performance is most prominent in grades 6-8, where some of the greatest declines in English language arts proficiency and greatest increases in math proficiency occurred this year.

In seventh grade, for example, math proficiency improved 2 percentage points over last year, and 5.4 percentage points since 2021. But in English language arts, proficiency has fallen 3.9 percentage points since last year and 3.2 percentage points since 2021.

State education officials have been highlighting the in these grades since 2022.

This year, they’ve linked the state reading overhaul to the difference in scores, with a board presentation pointing out that older students would not have benefitted from the changes in reading instruction that began in 2022-23.

“While we are positively moving and improving in math, there is an urgent need to support middle school students in English/language arts,” said Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner in a news release about the scores.

“These are our students who intermittently came to school during the pandemic,” said board member Pat Mapes of older students. “They’re going to constantly be catching up.”

Scores among different student racial, ethnic, and social groups have remained relatively flat, with some notable exceptions.

For example, Black students’ proficiency in both English language arts and math has grown each year since 2021, with around 21.8% of Black students now proficient in English and 19% proficient in math — an increase of around 4.4 and 7.4 percentage points, respectively. Black students and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students were the only student groups to improve in English language arts proficiency since last year.

Math proficiency among English learner students has improved by 4.2 points since 2021, but English proficiency has fallen from a peak of 13.9% in 2022 to 12.7% — around the same rate as in 2021.

Proficiency rates for students who are eligible for free and reduced-price meals have increased from 22% in 2021 to 28.6% this year.

See how students at your school did on the ILEARN test using the table below:

The 2024-2025 school year was the first year that schools could choose to administer the ILEARN at several checkpoints throughout the year, with the goal of giving educators more data on student performance. Around 75% of schools participated in this pilot.

Beginning next year, all students and schools will participate in the checkpoint model. Department of Education officials said that beginning next year, the state will roll out portals for parents to view the results.

SAT reading scores improve, math scores flat

The state also released SAT scores Wednesday in a presentation to the State Board of Education.

Though not required for graduation, the SAT currently serves as the state’s federally mandated high school assessment, and students can use them to meet one of the state’s graduation pathways.

Around 54.8% of 11th grade test-takers met the college-ready benchmark for reading and writing in 2025, an increase of around 2.7 percentage points over 2024. Math proficiency remained flat, with around 25.4% of students meeting the benchmark.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Kids like her daughter Clara, a second grader, glommed on to its rich characters; she’s especially fond of Lily, who wears her black hair in a short bob and has a collection of plush toy lions. Fellow teachers, meanwhile, like that it “hits everything” students need to be strong readers.

“It slowly builds, introducing more and more sounds, and then it jumps right into blending those sounds into little words,” Morrison said. At least two independent link the program to “significant positive” results.

But that winning combo initially wasn’t enough for °żłóžą´Ç’s education department to put Superkids on its list of approved . Morrison homed in on a likely culprit: , a nonprofit that for nine years has operated as a kind of “Consumer Reports” for the K-12 publishing industry. At the time, Ohio leaders approved only programs that won the organization’s coveted green rating. Superkids earned a more modest yellow.

“How EdReports can be the sole basis of this process is astounding,” Morrison, also a local school board member, wrote to the state. Ohio trains teachers in the , she said, but “this list takes us three steps backward.”

Ohio ultimately relented after Zaner-Bloser, which publishes Superkids, appealed. Temporary as it was, the episode demonstrated the outsize power of EdReports in the world of high-stakes curriculum decisions — a power that has come under increasing scrutiny as more parents embrace the phonics-laden science of reading. Critics of the nonprofit say it has continued to award green ratings to reading programs that might still accommodate balanced literacy — a discredited philosophy in which teachers encourage kids to learn to read by surrounding them with books— and has slapped effective programs with yellow ratings.

In interviews with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, EdReports officials say they’ve gotten the message.

Starting in June, its reviews of early reading materials will reflect a fuller embrace of the science of reading. “Phonics and fluency are now non-negotiables” for a green rating, said Janna Chan, EdReports’ chief external affairs officer.  

Reviewers will also no longer use “three-cueing” — a practice associated with balanced literacy that encourages students to identify unfamiliar words by picking up clues from text or pictures. Since 2021, at least 10 states have .

An internal memo sent to EdReports staff in February and obtained by ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ acknowledged growing doubts about the organization’s credibility as states pass new reading laws. CEO Eric Hirsch wrote that the organization is “most vulnerable to criticism around our reviews” of comprehensive English language arts programs called basals or “big box” curricula — programs that some have attacked for being “” and giving lip service to the science of reading. Hirsch wrote the memo in response to a that critiqued the organization and highlighted newer groups providing alternatives to its reviews.

EdReports contracts with a network of over 600 reviewers, many of them current or former teachers who earn up to nearly $3,000 per review. Working in teams of five for an average of four to six months, they if curriculum products meet standards and are easy for teachers and students to use.

Evidence of the organization’s considerable influence isn’t hard to find.  A 74 analysis of , a data service that stores recordings of public meetings, reveals that since January 2021, EdReports has been mentioned over 100 times during school board meetings. District leaders and staff frequently invoke its ratings when making budget recommendations.

The “end-all, be-all for curriculum review” is how Bill Hesford, an assistant superintendent in the Bayfield, Colorado, district described the organization during a January discussion of a new math program.

That same month, T.C. Wall, assistant superintendent of the Bolivar, Missouri, schools, assured her board that all reading programs up for consideration had earned the organization’s highest rating.

“We’re starting with quality stuff,” she said.

Financially, there’s much at stake for both districts and curriculum companies. Fueled by a one-time infusion of federal relief funds, school systems spent roughly on curriculum in the 2021-22 school year alone. Due to the time and expense such reviews require, districts typically wait as long as six years before revamping their offerings.

Pressure to ‘conform’ 

For many publishers, EdReports’s green stamp of approval is a valuable marketing tool they trumpet in .

Others lost trust in its reviews years ago. 

Collaborative Classroom, a curriculum provider, publishes four literacy programs based on the science of reading used by hundreds of districts. One of them underwent four reviews in three years because, in Hirsch’s view, new features warranted a fresh examination. But the process left Kelly Stuart, the publisher’s president and CEO, exhausted and disillusioned.

“We play in this world as a nonprofit,” she said. “But if we were a for-profit company, there would be a tremendous amount of pressure on us to conform and meet all green.”  

In a world so contentious its seminal debates are called “,” critics have been — including those who initially welcomed EdReports. 

Karen Vaites, a literacy expert and advocate, once led marketing efforts for Open Up Resources, a nonprofit that offers free curriculum materials to districts. Declaring that “excellence is now easy to find,” she was among the first to in 2018.

In recent years, her views have taken a 180.

“EdReports is no longer an effective guidepost,” said Vaites, who founded the in January to essentially compete with the organization. One of its first projects is to review , an Open Up Resources program that earned a yellow from EdReports, but has showing effectiveness and won from districts that use it.

Vaites said she no longer has a financial relationship with Open Up Resources. But having once been an EdReports “fangirl,” she said she feels “doubly obliged to let people know that they need to look beyond” the site.

If loving memes about curriculum is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

But seriously, enough with districts adopting pricey curricula that bomb reviews.

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites)

Hirsch declined to address her specific criticisms, but said he and his team plan to gather feedback from researchers, as well as district and state leaders, to respond to critics’ concerns. By the end of the summer, the organization expects to update guidelines for all three of the content areas it reviews — English language arts, math and science — and apply them to next year’s reports. 

Hirsch told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ the pivot is in keeping with its mission as an organization geared toward — and staffed by — teachers.

“You’re not a great teacher if you can’t reflect on practice,” he said.

‘No counterbalance’

With backing from major foundations, Hirsch founded EdReports in 2015 to help guide districts toward materials that satisfied the then-relatively new , a set of guidelines in math and language arts that most states still follow. In an attempt to tap into the booming market, many publishers touted their products as “Common Core-aligned” even when their commitments were tenuous at best. Experts say a third-party reviewer was sorely needed. 

“Some publishers had a vice grip on the whole curriculum thing,” said Kareem Weaver, an Oakland literacy advocate featured in , a documentary about the push to provide low-income and minority students with high-quality reading instruction. “Before EdReports, there was no counterbalance to publishers’ claims of being ‘high-quality.’ ”

Now with an $11.5 million annual budget, Hirsch called the organization “amazingly transparent,” without “taking a dime from publishers.” But Weaver thinks EdReports would have a greater impact if its reviews factored in evidence of effectiveness. 

“Don’t just treat kids like guinea pigs,” he said. “Parents have to know if their kid is actually going to get the things they need in regular classroom instruction.”

Hirsch responded that solid, independent evidence of a specific curriculum’s effectiveness . When it does exist, publishers typically offer it in response to reviews. But he conceded that EdReports could make the information easier to find. 

‘Bloated’ materials

Evidence is also important to state leaders, who increasingly to adopt reading programs based on research. But some experts say publishers are responding to new mandates by “overstuffing” their products — adding structured, phonics-based lessons without removing the older ones.

Vaites points to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s , one of the three programs approved as part of — a two-year effort to overhaul literacy instruction in the nation’s largest school district. EdReports gave it a green rating, despite complaints about its overabundance of units, lessons and worksheets. 

“As a novice teacher, you’re going to get overwhelmed when you see four pages that go along with one lesson,” said April Rose, an instructional coach at P.S. 132Q in Queens, who works with the United Federation of Teachers to support staff transitioning to the program.  With such wide offerings, some teachers struggle to find assignments for students that match the standards they’re trying to teach, she said, or hop from one skill to the next without giving students deep practice.

Jim O’Neill, a general manager at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said Into Reading is designed to let teachers “grow while teaching with the program.” The broad range of lessons and activities, he added, is also intended to support students at multiple levels in one classroom.   

“Coming out of the pandemic, there are two things we have — students with different needs, but also new teachers who are just beginning to teach reading,” he said. “Having carefully crafted lesson plans can help them get up and going with the right resources for the right students at the right time.” 

Hirsch acknowledged bloat is a problem, but said publishers are reluctant to remove features some teachers prefer. 

He suggested that districts adopting a new curriculum view EdReports as just a starting point — and follow up with adequate training and support for teachers. 

Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, agreed. “School districts rely too much on these external reviews without a clear understanding of what they tell you and what they do not,” he said. “They need to give a close look at the programs themselves.”

Disclosure: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to and to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Concerned about lowering standards in Florida’s public high schools, the state House on Thursday voted to stick with the original requirements: Teens must pass statewide Algebra 1 and 10th grade English Language Arts exams to be able to get their diplomas.

The Senate would have to vote on the legislation.

During the first week of this year’s legislative session, the Senate passed a package of bills aimed at “deregulating” Florida public schools through measures such as removing Algebra I and 10th grade ELA exams from the graduation requirements in Florida.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

That became controversial, with House Speaker Paul Renner vehemently opposed to easing the graduation requirements. Republican Rep. Dana Trabulsy of Port St. Lucie, who sponsored the education deregulation bill in the House, took the same stance as Renner, meaning, leaving Algebra 1 and ELA 10 graduation requirements intact.

Maintaining standards

“I feel like lowering the standards can disproportionately affect students from disadvantaged backgrounds and all students as it may lessen the pressure on schools to provide high-quality education to all students regardless of their socio-economic status,” Trabulsy said on the House floor. “In Florida, high standards of education help ensure that students will be adequately prepared for their future, so lowering our standards here is just absolutely not an option, in my opinion.”

Although the bill received bipartisan support, Democratic Rep. Robin Bartleman of Broward County said she hoped some of the provisions, such as removing the graduation requirements, get added back to the bill.

“The Senate removes the barrier to high school graduation from passing a standardized test in ELA and math. This is really important because a lot of kids have testing anxiety and are not good test takers,” Bartleman said. “I personally know one girl who struggled and struggled, ruined her whole senior year … seeing someone to deal with her anxiety, and it was just to pass up high stakes tests.”

Other opponents — such as the Foundation for Excellence in Education (ExcelinEd), the education think tank founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — say allowing students to graduate, even if they don’t pass the Algebra I and 10th grade ELA exams, would decrease the value of high school diplomas.

“Florida has long been a leader in maintaining high standards, strong accountability and robust choice in education. That’s why copying states like Oregon, New York and New Jersey in rolling back student expectations would have been the wrong way for Florida to go. We’re happy the House rejected these elements of the Senate’s proposal,” wrote Patricia Levesque, CEO of ExcelinEd and executive director of the Foundation for Florida’s Future, in a statement.

On the other hand, people in favor of removing high-stakes tests say a single exam doesn’t reflect students’ knowledge.

“We should be focused on teacher and learning and not high-stakes testing. Testing had a role in helping inform teachers in their instructions, but using tests in a punitive way does not help student learning,” Florida Education Association president Andrew Spar wrote to the Florida Phoenix.

Book challenge fees

Originally, Trabulsy’s education deregulation bill included a $100 “processing fee” on subsequent challenges filed by anyone who’s already filed five unmerited challenges in a district where he or she doesn’t have a child enrolled. She wiped the fee or any other restriction on book bans from the bill because another bill () the House passed last week included the same fee. HB 1285 is still pending Senate approval.

Renner and told reporters on Wednesday that they supported efforts to reduce book challenges.

Additionally, parents of students in kindergarten through 2nd grade must have an opportunity to provide input about the decision to retain their kids at their current grade level if they are not proficient in ELA and math.

The deregulation bills have been largely watered down from when lawmakers started talking about the proposals in November. Previously, senators wanted to allow parents to decide whether their 3rd grade student would be held back if they couldn’t read and to allow schools to provide 100 minutes of recess over a week rather than the existing mandate of 20 minutes every day.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

Standards are not curriculum. And yet, far too many ELA curricula in use today have put them at the center of literacy instruction, with disappointing results. How did we get here?

I want to shoulder some of the blame. I served as a co-author of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts, published in 2010. We developed those standards by identifying the progression of specific skills and competencies students should master in each grade across four domains: reading, writing, speaking/listening, and features of language like grammar and vocabulary.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this design had the unintended consequence of standards alignment overpowering nearly all other considerations — including how the standards were being taught. Too often, schools and teachers directed to “meet the standards” responded by teaching ELA as a mechanical series of content-agnostic, skill-based activities. And curriculum vendors retooled their offerings to put standards at the center, especially after reviews by EdReports and others revealed the vast differences among curricula in their alignment to standards.

Those ratings have helped redefine instructional quality and brought a much broader range of curriculum developers to the fore. But they rely on a blunt metric. An ELA curriculum can earn a positive rating if it lines up with discrete, grade-level standards. While valuable, these reviews are incomplete. They fail to account for an important admonition contained in the Common Core State Standards we made sure to include:

In fact, the Standards mention the importance of knowledge-building more than 100 times.

Fortunately, a handful of publishers took this guidance to heart and created a new generation of ELA curricula unparalleled in their potential to drive reading success. They are designed to go deep on content. In the knowledge-based classrooms that use them, students are learning to read through the joyful exploration of reading to learn.

These best-in-class, knowledge-rich reading curricula ground instruction in high-interest topical units, based on that literacy and knowledge go hand in hand. Through coherent, thoughtfully sequenced activities, these curricula teach phonics and core literacy skills while growing student knowledge about the natural and human world. They use complex texts and scaffolding supports that grant all students access to grade-level content. The knowledge they build is like an interest-bearing savings account: the more students know, the faster they learn and the better readers they become.

Systematically growing knowledge is an essential equity investment. Beginning in the earliest grades, knowledge-building is a vital strategy to accelerate learning and grant all students access to grade-level content. And it sets the stage for a lifetime of critical inquiry and analysis.

Sadly, these content-rich ELA curricula are not yet used in enough American classrooms to make a real dent in our national reading crisis — an especially urgent goal given the persistent adverse effects of pandemic-related school closures.

Let me be clear. While standards can and should set the bar for annual learning targets, they shouldn’t be used to define the particulars of daily classroom instruction. Fluent reading is built on skills, yes, but it is ultimately fueled by curiosity and the desire to make meaning. Nobody picks up a text to practice finding the main idea of a paragraph. Rather, they learn to find the main idea by engaging with a text because it’s interesting, opens a window into new knowledge or offers a unique insight. What if, instead of foregrounding skills, students were learning about dinosaurs, butterflies, or the American Revolution, and mastering reading skills along the way?

That’s the crucial difference between high-quality, knowledge-based reading curricula and curricula that are merely standards-aligned and only touch on texts and topics that don’t add up to building a coherent body of knowledge.

A new curriculum review tool, recently published by the Knowledge Matters Campaign, is designed to help states and school districts differentiate between the two. It arrives at an important moment for reading teachers and education leaders nationwide. have passed “science of reading” laws in recent years, most requiring districts to use curricula that have been vetted and approved by their state education departments. While existing tools can be used to assess whether a curriculum covers essential foundational skills, until now nothing has existed to help states and educators identify content richness — the other essential component of literacy.

The Knowledge Matters Review Tool looks at 26 separate criteria across eight dimensions, selected from the rich body of research on what works best in reading classrooms. That includes whether texts are intentionally organized to build topic knowledge and if classroom activities include regular communal readings of rigorous, grade-level texts. It assesses curricula based on the depth of knowledge-building discussions, a volume of reading and writing on conceptually connected texts, and the availability of targeted supports for students who need acceleration to get to grade level.

As a field, we’ve taken significant steps toward providing all students with the excellent, equitable, rigorous reading instruction they deserve. But we’re not there yet. There is real reason for hope and a clear opportunity to improve, with a rising tide of renewed focus, energy, and mandates for change. Better yet, we know more now than ever about the power of high-quality curriculum. And with this new tool, educators can be sure that curricula both meet standards and build student knowledge. If we can get this right, I believe we’re on the cusp of reshaping literacy instruction and supporting a new generation of excellent readers.