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Reading scores are rising, but not in the US

11 December 2017

There's bad news from the US, where reading scores are declining, just when they are making real improvements in many countries across the world.

Basic literacy is at an all-time high across the world and most countries have seen steadily rising reading achievements in the last decade, as is shown by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study.

In the US, while students at schools with poverty rates above 50 percent performed on average at least 20 scale points lower than wealthier schools, the schools with 10 percent to 25 percent poverty had higher average reading scores than the wealthiest schools. It's important to look at this in detail to see what is actually happening.

Of the 58 participating education systems, the United States' average score was higher than 30 countries' systems and equal to 15 of them; 12 systems scored higher. And 16 percent of American 4th graders performed at the advanced level, meaning they could read and interpret complex information from different parts of the text, a higher percentage than the international average, though still significantly below six other countries such as Singapore, Ireland, and the Russian Federation, which had 20 percent of students perform at the advanced level.

But top-performing education systems such as Singapore's had smaller gaps between the best and worst readers. Singapore's students led the world on both the traditional PIRLS and a new digital literacy test-known as ePIRLS-introduced this year in 14 of the countries participating in PIRLS. They and students in most participating countries (the United States included) scored higher on the ePIRLS than the standard test.

A fuller but rather dry account of this can be found in Edweek.

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