Historically, Washington’s primary approach to improving literacy has been grantmaking. Congress appropriates money. The Department of Education launches a new initiative with a name like Reading First, which eventually gives way to Striving Readers, which is followed by Comprehensive Literacy State Development grants. Advocates lobby feverishly over curricula and methods. States compete for funding. Then we all wait for the next round of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results to learn whether any of it worked.

In most cases, little of it has. Reading achievement has fallen for students of all ages. In 2024, 40 percent of fourth graders performed below the NAEP Basic level, a benchmark for functional literacy. In 2015, that figure was just 32 percent. Among eighth graders, the share of readers below the Basic level rose during the same period from 24 percent to 33 percent. Among high school seniors, it increased from 25 percent to 32 percent. Millions of young people are graduating from our schools without the reading skills necessary to thrive in college, careers, or civic life.

The next President should reject the idea that literacy is just another issue for sloganeering and photo ops. It is a democratic fundamental. Citizens must be able to evaluate competing arguments, distinguish facts from misinformation, understand laws, and participate thoughtfully in public discussions and elections. Reading is the foundation upon which self-government rests.

The next administration should make literacy its defining education priority—not by creating another federal grant competition or prescribing a national curriculum, but by changing what national leadership looks like. The President should set clear goals for fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade reading; report progress to the country every year; publicly recognize states and communities that make exceptional gains; and build the information infrastructure needed to understand why reading achievement rises or falls. Washington should not tell every teacher how to teach. It should make literacy impossible to ignore, success impossible to miss, and failure impossible to explain away.

Literacy Is a Democratic Imperative

American presidents have long used the White House to define our national ambitions. John F. Kennedy challenged us to land on the moon. Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Ronald Reagan promised a new era of economic growth. More recently, presidents have rallied the country around cancer research, domestic manufacturing, and energy independence.

Literacy belongs on that list.

Compared to just a decade ago, our country has many more struggling young readers. They will likely grow into adults who struggle to identify locations on a map, understand instructions to report for jury duty, or follow steps to fast before a medical test. They will live in fear of being asked to read in front of others. They will know some words by sight but will be unable to read sentences fluently.

Reading is often framed in economic terms. Strong literacy improves earnings, expands opportunity, and strengthens the workforce. On the other hand, over 40 percent of low-literacy adults live in poverty. But beyond ensuring its people can earn a living, a constitutional republic relies on an even more demanding premise: Ordinary citizens must be capable of governing themselves.

The founders understood this. Thomas Jefferson argued that an educated citizenry was indispensable to liberty. Horace Mann later described education as the “great equalizer.” They shared a belief that democracy works only when citizens possess the intellectual tools to exercise judgment.

Reading is the most critical of those tools. Civic participation requires more than decoding words. Informed voters must compare claims from different sources, recognize when evidence supports a conclusion, and distinguish reporting from advocacy. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)—a test of how well 15-year-olds can apply reading, math, and science knowledge to real-world problems—defines the highest-performing readers as those able to comprehend lengthy texts and distinguish fact from opinion using cues about content and sources. Only 14 percent of American students demonstrated that level of performance on the 2022 exam.

Strong literacy does not guarantee good civic judgment. But without it, citizens will be poorly equipped to recognize when, for instance, a seemingly legitimate piece of writing has been generated by artificial intelligence specifically to manipulate them. This will be an even larger problem in 2029 as material produced or refracted by AI becomes cheaper and easier to proliferate at a large scale.

The next President will inherit a country drowning in information. Opportunities to mistake propaganda for truth will abound. Literacy will be our first defense against manipulation.

Peer Democracies Have Elevated Literacy

The United States is not starting from zero. On PISA 2022, American students scored above the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average in reading. But having an “above average” score compared to other member countries in the international group is not the proper ambition for the world’s first constitutional democracy. If our GDP were merely “above average,” our economic heft would be closer to Italy’s than to what it is today. We can aim higher. We can seek to become the world leader in literacy.

Other countries have shown that prioritizing stronger literacy outcomes can improve performance. For example, in 2011, Ireland adopted a ten-year national literacy and numeracy strategy with explicit performance targets, changes to curriculum and teacher support, and regular national measurement. On PISA 2022, Irish 15-year-olds scored 516 out of 1,000 in reading, tying for second among 81 participating education systems and placing first among European Union countries.

Estonia is another success story. Since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, it has built a coherent national system that combines a demanding national curriculum with unusually high levels of school and teacher autonomy. Estonia’s 15-year-olds scored 511 in reading on PISA 2022, 29 points above the OECD average and among the strongest results in Europe. Just as importantly, strong performance is nearly ubiquitous. Estonia has one of the smallest gaps in achievement between schools of any country in the world.

Ireland and Estonia do not offer a blueprint the United States can simply copy. But they do demonstrate that democratic nations can decide literacy is a national priority, organize around improving it, and achieve better results than the United States has today.

America Needs National Literacy Goals

While the nuts and bolts of reading instruction belong to teachers, schools, states, and districts, presidents define our national priorities—and the executive branch can lead the country toward better results.

Already, the federal government tracks unemployment monthly. Inflation and economic growth are measured quarterly. Public health agencies monitor disease outbreaks in real time. These indicators determine government action. Our federal assessment of literacy, on the other hand, is given just once every two years.

The next administration should treat literacy as seriously as it treats the economy. It should establish clear national goals for fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade reading. By fourth grade, children should be independent readers. By eighth grade, they should be able to comprehend more complex academic material. And by twelfth grade, young adults should be leaving school prepared for college, careers, and citizenship.

The targets should be ambitious enough to inspire action while remaining tethered to what high-performing states and school systems have already demonstrated. They should include progress at the top and the bottom: more students reaching true proficiency, fewer students trapped in functional illiteracy, and narrower gaps based on family income.

Every January, the President should release a plain-English Presidential Literacy Report Card and devote five minutes during the State of the Union to updating Congress and the country on the reading progress of America’s elementary, middle, and high school students. That report card should include readiness across grades, gaps by income, the states making the most progress, and leading indicators that help explain whether the country is moving in the right direction.

This information would be much easier for the public to understand than debates over funding formulas or competing philosophies about phonics. It would create organic accountability without prescribing exactly how states or districts should improve.

Just as importantly, presidents should celebrate success. Winning strategies should become national case studies rather than local news. This would be an inversion of the typical role of federal education policy, which has often focused on chastising failure and requiring intervention in jurisdictions whose progress lags. Let’s build something more like a lunar landing and less like the IRS.

We Know More About Orange Juice Than Young Readers

A critical weakness in America’s literacy strategy is a shortage of timely information.

This void is especially noteworthy because federal agencies produce astonishingly detailed data about nearly every other important sector of American life. We know how many jobs the economy created last month. We know whether inflation rose by one-tenth of a percentage point or two-tenths. We have data on crop yields, housing starts, consumer confidence, manufacturing output, retail sales, and warehouse inventories. We can estimate how much orange juice is likely to cost months from now.

Yet we cannot answer basic questions about reading instruction in America’s schools. What literacy curricula are schools using? How much sustained reading are students doing inside and outside the classroom? How are teachers being prepared to teach reading? Which professional learning models are most effectively improving classroom practice? Which students are receiving timely intervention when they fall behind? Which states are best at implementing literacy instruction—and how do they do it?

Without answers to these questions, federal policymakers often operate like physicians attempting to treat patients without access to their vital signs. The NAEP eventually tells us whether achievement has risen or fallen, but it does not tell us enough about why.

No President would accept that level of blindness in economic policy. It would be impossible to lead. We should not accept it for literacy either.

Build a National Literacy Intelligence System

The next administration should create America’s first National Literacy Intelligence System. The phrase may sound technocratic, but the purpose is simple: help the country learn faster, not comply harder.

In practice, this means a public dashboard that reports on both outcomes and leading indicators. Measures could include NAEP results; student and teacher surveys; state implementation trends; curriculum-use maps; data on teacher preparation, intervention access, and attendance patterns; and other indicators that predict future reading achievement.

The goal should not be federal control over classrooms. States and districts would continue making instructional decisions. The federal government would focus on creating a better understanding of what is happening across the country and why.

Fortunately, much of the necessary infrastructure already exists. The NAEP regularly measures student achievement through national student samples. The National Center for Education Statistics administers large-scale surveys. Federal agencies possess deep expertise in data collection, sampling, and reporting. The challenge is modernizing and synthesizing an outdated architecture.

Student surveys, for example, should be updated to provide richer information about reading habits, digital media consumption, independent reading, and instructional experiences. Teacher surveys should collect more granular information about preparation, curriculum implementation, professional learning, instructional materials, and classroom practice.

States should have opportunities to report which literacy initiatives they have adopted and how implementation is progressing. Curriculum use should be measured systematically rather than anecdotally. Teacher preparation programs ought to report how candidates are being equipped to teach reading. The next administration should explore making that reporting a requirement for receiving federal funding.

Modern data infrastructure means much of this information could be collected digitally at far lower cost than was possible even a decade ago. Regular releases would help the country identify patterns. For example, if independent reading suddenly declines nationwide, leaders should know within months, not years. If implementation of a promising curriculum accelerates achievement in multiple states, policymakers should help other states learn from that success promptly. Conversely, if warning signs arise across multiple indicators, leaders should not have to wait for the next generation of students to pay the price before recognizing the problem.

Not a National Curriculum

Any serious federal literacy agenda must respect the reality that schools are local institutions. Washington should not attempt to turn reading instruction into another national compliance exercise. But respecting federalism does not require national indifference. The federal government can set goals without dictating methods. It can collect information without interfering in classrooms. It can identify success without requiring every state to copy the plans of higher-performing peers.

The most useful role for the federal government is to create conditions that accelerate learning. When a state like Mississippi makes extraordinary gains—its ranking on the fourth-grade NAEP improved from forty-ninth to ninth between 2013 and 2024 after the state launched initiatives to improve curriculum, instruction, and student support—others should know what changed. When implementation falls apart and results suffer, leaders should be able to correct course before millions more children pass through broken systems.

The United States does not need another decade in which every literacy debate begins from scratch. Research and practice have already given us substantial guidance about how children learn to read, where schools often struggle, and what kinds of support teachers need. The urgent challenge is not simply to win another argument. It is to produce better results at national scale.

Better Literacy Will Strengthen Democracy

The world’s top PISA performer is Singapore, with a 2022 reading score of 543. Imagine the benefits that would accrue to the United States if we matched or exceeded that figure. It would mean higher earnings for workers and fewer Americans trapped in cyclical poverty. Today, we have more very poor readers (approximately one in five students) than advanced readers (one in seven). By raising our PISA score to 543, we would flip that relationship, meaning more students would be able to understand complex documents, succeed in college without remedial courses, and complete advanced workforce training.

More importantly, we would substantially increase the share of Americans with the tools for democratic judgment. Fluent readers can comprehend most of what they consume. But only advanced readers can skillfully scrutinize arguments and compare validity across multiple sources and perspectives—exactly what we need our citizens to do.

A Presidency Measured in Readers

For generations, presidents’ education legacies have been measured by landmark legislation such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and No Child Left Behind in 2002. The next great accomplishment in education should not be a sweeping law. It should be establishing literacy as a defining national imperative and creating the public infrastructure to pursue it successfully.

In 2029, our next President will inherit a country drowning in words but starving for understanding. AI will make text easier to produce—and harder to trust. Public debate will be faster, louder, and more polluted with machine-generated material. In that world, literacy is a prerequisite for democratic survival.

Washington does not need to overstep its bounds to improve literacy. It needs to do what only the federal government can do: Set a national ambition, tell the country the truth about progress, make success visible, and build the public information infrastructure that allows states to learn from one another at the speed children deserve.

America should aspire to become the most literate country in the world. That begins with a President willing to say so—and to be measured by whether it happens.