Is immigration behind the decline in reading scores?
And what can we do to improve the situation?
Last week, we got some of the worst news yet about standardized test scores for U.S. K-12 students: Not only are they declining, but the decline started in 2013 – not during COVID – and has touched almost all states.
The analysis was from Education Scorecard, a Stanford and Harvard research collaboration. The report concludes that the “learning recession” began around 2013. Figure 2 is really stunning:
The declines (orange bars) for reading (lower graph) are especially striking, because the declines were nearly equal 2017-19 (before the pandemic), 2019-2022 (during the pandemic) and 2022-24 (pandemic recovery). Only from 2024 to 2025 was there any post-pandemic recovery, and it paled in comparison to the large declines since 2013. Clearly this is not just COVID — something else is going on.
On X, I posted a figure from the New York Times story covering the report and the declines in reading scores, which show up in nearly every state:
This graph is especially tragic because it shows just how large the decline in reading proficiency has been—nearly an entire grade level in many states. It also shows how pervasive the decline has been. This is not a regional problem; this is a national problem. (Except, go Mississippi!)
The question, of course, is why. When I posted this graph, the immediate response from many on X was that the slide in reading scores must be caused by demographic shifts, especially increases in immigration. Here’s a representative example:
Others posted some variation of “this is what happens when you let in a flood of immigrants.”
If I’m understanding it correctly, the argument is this:
Large numbers of immigrants entered U.S. schools between 2015 and 2025. English wasn’t their first language and/or they came from disadvantaged circumstances, so they did considerably worse on standardized tests of reading, and that’s why reading scores went down so much.
So is that why?
