How the High School Diploma Can Restore Its Credibility

How does a wealthy nation like the United States, which spends more per K-12 and post-secondary student than almost any of its peers, end up with young adults who cannot reliably read a news article, interpret a workplace memo, or follow written instructions?

One answer is that the link between credentials and skills is broken. Over the last decade, as the country’s leaders have increasingly conflated graduation metrics with academic achievement, the number of diplomas climbed even as literacy plummeted.

As Mark Schneider, the former director of the federal Institute for Education Sciences (IES) and commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, observes, “But even as more money gets poured into our education system, student performance has not improved.”

To see what is being lost, it helps to be clear about what “literacy” means in practice. IES, the federal education research agency, distinguishes between task-based and skills-based definitions of literacy: the former emphasizes the everyday reading demands adults face at work, at home, and in the community, while the latter focuses on the underlying knowledge and abilities required to meet those demands, from basic word recognition to higher-level skills such as drawing appropriate inferences from continuous text.

With those definitions in view, the scale of the problem becomes harder to dismiss. In 2024, IES released an alarming report showing that nearly one in three U.S. adults struggle with basic reading tasks, with the steepest declines concentrated among young adults who most recently completed the K-12 system and entered college or the workforce.

At the K-12 level, the pandemic is often blamed for today’s educational malaise, but the data tell a longer and more troubling story. Reading and math gains made in the early 2000s stalled around 2013 and then reversed course; by 2024, one-third of eighth graders scored “below basic” in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the worst performance since the early 1990s.

That longer timeline is central to Idrees Kahloon’s argument in a recent Atlantic piece titled “America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy.” The decline, he argues, was not simply the result of underfunding or a temporary shock; it reflected a slow erosion of expectations.

Over time, the incentives drifted in a predictable direction: students were promoted without mastering core skills, graduation rates rose even as literacy stagnated, and the system rewarded persistence over proficiency. In that sense, the pandemic did not start the fire so much as expose and intensify problems that had been smoldering for years.

The consequences of that drift are now visible among young adults. In some U.S. counties, more than half of high school graduates read at the lowest measurable level of adult literacy, capable only of performing rudimentary reading tasks.

Who is to blame? Certainly not the victims. By and large, the affected young people did what society asked of them: they graduated from high school and often enrolled in college or workforce training. Yet the credentials they carry no longer reliably signal readiness for adult life, leaving the diploma, in effect, a costume: authentic at a distance, but unconvincing under scrutiny.

Even so, instruction alone cannot explain the decline in literacy. Teachers increasingly report that students struggle to sustain attention on complex texts in a smartphone-dominated culture, making the habits required for deep reading (focus, persistence, and tolerance for difficulty) harder to cultivate amid constant digital distraction.

The weakening also begins earlier than many policy debates presume. Parents are reading less to young children, particularly in low-income households, undercutting one of the strongest predictors of later literacy and allowing small early gaps to compound over time. And when adults seek a second chance, the safety net is thin. Federal programs reach only a small fraction of adults who need help, allowing weak literacy to harden into economic insecurity and civic disengagement.

Policy, at least, has begun to respond. 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented new policies since 2013 based on the science of reading, a research-based approach emphasizing phonics, decoding, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension; when implemented well, structured phonics programs can produce dramatic gains, particularly for early readers and English learners.

But even strong advocates stress a crucial point: this is not just about phonics. Reading comprehension depends on background knowledge, vocabulary, attention, and sustained engagement with complex texts, so a child who can decode words but lacks content knowledge can still struggle to understand what those words mean together.

This gap helps explain why decoding gains alone rarely carry students into true literacy. Knowledge-building that includes systematic exposure to history, science, literature, and ideas is the essential bridge between sounding out words and understanding their meanings.

This also helps explain why early gains often fade. Students who read adequately in third grade can fall behind by middle school as texts become denser and expectations rise, because reading is not learned once and then checked off but reinforced across years and disciplines.

Despite grim national trends, there are genuine reasons for cautious optimism. What has been called the “Southern surge” highlights states such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, where early-grade reading scores have risen following sustained investments in evidence-based instruction and teacher training, a shift New York Times columnist David Brooks calls “The biggest education story of the last few years.”

Similarly, education analyst Chad Aldeman has identified “beat-the-odds” schools across the United States, from Los Angeles to rural Virginia, that consistently outperform expectations despite high poverty and student mobility; these schools share striking similarities, including stable leadership, coherent curricula, relentless teacher coaching, and high expectations for every student.

What many of these higher-performing schools also share is a commitment to discipline in execution, especially curriculum coherence and fidelity. Rather than encouraging constant improvisation, successful systems reduce variation, adhere to a shared instructional approach, and allow time for implementation.

"Reversing the nation’s literacy decline will require patience, persistence, and a willingness to do unglamorous work year after year."

Taken together, these examples demonstrate that literacy failure is not inevitable while underscoring how difficult it is to scale success, especially because many early gains fade without continued support. Middle and high school reading outcomes remain uneven, and the conditions that sustain improvement (time, stability, and institutional patience) are often in short supply.

For that reason, no single reform will fix the nation’s literacy problem. The scale and persistence of the decline make clear that this is not simply a matter of choosing the right program or passing the right law; what is needed instead is a coherent, multi-stage response, less a checklist than a set of guiding principles sustained over time.

That distinction matters because literacy reform has entered a new phase. In many states, the right policies are now on the books, and what remains is the harder work of implementation, ensuring that what is adopted is practiced consistently and well in classrooms, a challenge the Fordham Institute has emphasized. Five guiding principles can anchor that effort.

First, early childhood matters far more than we often acknowledge. Long before children encounter phonics lessons or reading assessments, they absorb language by hearing stories, building vocabulary, and learning how words work, which is why reading aloud in the early years remains one of the most potent and low-cost literacy interventions available. Yet reports show that parents are reading less to young children, particularly in low-income households, squeezed by time, work, and digital distractions, so reversing this trend will require support rather than scolding, including home-visiting programs, guidance from pediatricians, libraries that function as community anchors, and public signals that early language exposure is a shared social priority rather than a private luxury.

Second, elementary instruction must be explicit, evidence-based, and taken seriously as a craft. The shift toward the science of reading is a necessary correction, but it will succeed only if implemented carefully, because teaching children to decode words is not intuitive and requires specialized knowledge and sustained practice. That reality calls for substantial investments in teacher preparation and ongoing coaching, not one-day workshops or curriculum swaps; it also means screening for reading difficulties should be routine rather than stigmatized, with swift and targeted interventions.

Third, literacy must extend beyond the early grades rather than quietly disappear. One of the system’s most persistent failures is treating reading as something students “finish” by third grade, even though the demands of reading intensify over time as students are expected to interpret dense texts, weigh evidence, and write analytically. Literacy must therefore become a shared responsibility across disciplines: history teachers teach students how to read primary sources, science teachers teach students how to parse technical explanations, and writing and comprehension are reinforced throughout the curriculum rather than relegated to English class alone.

Fourth, adult literacy must be treated as a workforce policy, not a charitable endeavor. Millions of adults who left school without strong reading skills now navigate a labor market that increasingly demands them, yet adult education remains marginal, underfunded, fragmented, and poorly aligned with economic opportunity. A more serious approach would embed literacy instruction into community colleges, apprenticeship programs, and employer-based training, recognizing that in an economy that requires reading, writing, and continuous learning, adult literacy is not remediation but infrastructure.

Finally, credentials must regain meaning. A high school diploma should once again signal readiness for adult life, not simply time served, and while that does not require a return to high-stakes testing for its own sake, it does require greater honesty. States and districts should be transparent about literacy outcomes and clear about what graduates can actually do, because when credentials lose credibility, trust in institutions erodes; restoring that trust means aligning expectations, instruction, and outcomes while resisting the temptation to confuse compassion with complacency.

Taken together, these principles point toward a long-term commitment rather than a quick fix. Like most things worthwhile, literacy improves only through repetition and reinforcement, shaped by schools, families, workplaces, and culture itself. Reversing the nation’s literacy decline will require patience, persistence, and a willingness to do unglamorous work year after year. But the alternative–continuing to graduate students who cannot read well enough to participate fully in economic and civic life–is far more costly.

Literacy does not yield to quick fixes. Cultivating it requires sustained attention, cultural reinforcement, and institutional patience, as demonstrated by the Southern states.

The greater danger now is reform fatigue. In too many places, initiatives are abandoned just as they begin to take hold, replaced by the next promising idea, even though literacy improvement depends less on novelty than on staying the course longer than political and institutional cycles typically allow.

The question is not whether the United States knows what to do. It is whether it is willing to do it long enough, because a society that cannot read deeply will struggle to think deeply, work productively, or govern itself wisely. The nation’s literacy crisis can be easy to overlook, but its consequences will not be.

Bruno V. Manno is a senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute, where he leads the What Works Lab. He previously served as a United States Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy.