Students’ IREAD scores inch up. Indiana’s efforts to combat literacy decline start to show progress

Reading competency among Indiana’s third graders slightly improved from last year, but the overall performance remains close to the lowest level in the past decade and continues to highlight persistent gaps in academic achievement among students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Test results released Wednesday are another indication of the difficulty for children to recover academically from disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. State education leaders touted the overall pass rate incrementally improving every year since 2021, and that recent effort to support teachers in new literacy training is paying off. But the scores remain far behind achievement before the pandemic. Statewide, 82.5 percent of nearly 82,000 third graders at public and private schools passed the 2024 Indiana Reading Evaluation and Determination – or IREAD-3. About 14,300 students did not pass. This is an improvement of 0.6 percentage points over last year’s results. Around 91 percent of students passed the text when it debuted in 2012-13 and in the following years. But the passage rate began to slide and was 87.3 percent before the pandemic.& In response to the state’s literacy decline, state leaders, educators, and philanthropic organizations took swift action. Gov. Eric Holcomb set an ambitious target of...