Today’s 9-year-olds are significantly better readers than 9-year-olds were a half-century ago. Today’s 13-year-olds are not.

That’s the troubling lesson from the latest long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results suggest that America has made real progress helping young children build foundational skills — the problem is that too many students stop building on those gains as they move into adolescence.

Since the 1970s, the NAEP’s long-term trend test has looked at reading and math performance among American 9- and 13-year-olds. The idea is straightforward and age-appropriate, dealing with fundamental skills. Can a child find the average of three numbers? Can they find the main idea in a story passage?

On the one hand, the latest batch of NAEP long-term national data shows 9-year-olds are making progress in reading and math compared to 2022, a welcome sign showing our youngest learners are on the right track.

Not so for 13-year-olds.

While 9-year-olds show broad long-term progress, 13-year-olds show little overall progress. Only the highest-performing adolescent readers outperform their peers from the 1970s. Most other students show little measurable change.

This is a problem the adults in charge need to reconcile.

The pandemic did not create this problem, but it appears to have made an existing one worse. Before COVID hit, 13-year-olds had made modest gains compared with the 1970s, though those gains lagged well behind the progress made by younger students. Then came school closures and learning disruptions that hit today’s 13-year-olds at a particularly vulnerable age. The result was a sharp decline across the achievement spectrum, with scores falling at every reported percentile.

During COVID, we remember countless grownups uttering that kids are resilient as we tried to allay our deepest fears about what the prolonged impact of school closures would have on our kids.

The long-term numbers suggest we were right to be concerned.

Kymyona Burk, who’s on the board of the National Assessment Governing Board and a senior policy fellow of early literacy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, shared her perspective on the data and the story they tell more broadly, which was doubly interesting given she spent years as a teacher working with adolescents in middle and high school.

“Look at where these kids were, these 9-year-olds were about 4 during the pandemic,” Burk told us. “But the 13-year-olds, their time in school was interrupted. Those students, depending on where they were in the country, in some cases they were in school but others were out of school.”

Burk also pointed to growing investments in early literacy as a reason for stronger performance among 9-year-olds.

For many of these students, educators in their states’ public school systems were part of a reading renaissance that shifted the approach to teaching reading back to the basics. We’ve written about those states, including Mississippi and Louisiana, which have made notable gains since changing their approach.

In some ways, it’s a story of right place, right time — and vice versa, if you were older.

Burk said many secondary educators understandably focus on content knowledge rather than continuing to teach reading skills. She likened reading to athletics. A talented high school football player won’t become an NFL prospect without continued practice and development. Reading works the same way.

“We can’t stop teaching reading skills in the early grades and still expect students to be proficient readers, with more difficult tasks, by the time they’re 13,” she said.

Another difficult truth is that reading habits have collapsed.

Just 14% of 13-year-olds report reading for fun almost every day, the lowest level ever recorded by NAEP. In 1984, 35% of 13-year-olds read for fun daily.

Think about the change in dynamic.

In 1984, far more adolescents read books, magazines and comics.

A 13-year-old today — with a phone or tablet — is more likely to watch TikTok, YouTube or Snapchat, if they’re not gaming or texting. That doesn’t prove causation, but it is difficult to imagine reading achievement improving when reading itself has become a far less common pastime.

These numbers aren’t just datapoints, they’re warning signs. Reading underpins nearly every other academic discipline, and students who don’t master the skill see their options shrink.

The next frontier in education may not be teaching children to read, but that they keep reading.