Two pieces on reading landed today, and they're worth looking at side by side.

In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch argues that America isn't facing an illiteracy crisis. It's becoming postliterate. People can decode words; they've stopped reading them. Fewer than half of American adults read a book of any kind in 2022, and the share of 13-year-olds who say they rarely or never read for fun has more than tripled since 1984. Her point is that reading was never natural to begin with, and a society that stops practicing it loses more than a pastime.

Meanwhile at The 74, Chad Aldeman looks at what happens after the science of reading wins. Massachusetts just signed a sweeping literacy law, and early screening data nationally is the best it's been since before the pandemic. But Aldeman's caution is the right one: states can mandate phonics and ban three-cueing, but vocabulary, background knowledge, and the will to read are harder to regulate from a state capitol. Compliance isn't the same as success.

Read together, they frame the next decade of literacy work. The instructional fight is largely settled. The harder question is what comes next, starting with what happens after third grade. Kymyona Burk laid that out in Education Week last month: learning recovery is showing up in younger students while teens fall further behind. Burk also moderated a recent TeachSOR webinar on where educator preparation stands, with new findings from NCTQ's 2026 Teacher Prep Review and implementation lessons from the Alabama Reading Initiative and Morgan State University. And for a view from the classroom, the Reading Realities podcast from SUNY New Paltz's Science of Reading Center talks each week with a teacher making these instructional shifts: what they've tried, what worked and what didn't, and what it takes to change your own practice.

On a separate note: in Fortune, Tim Knowles of the Carnegie Foundation makes the case that the last time technology wiped out millions of jobs, America's answer was to build high schools — one per day, for thirty years. With AI bearing down on entry-level work, he argues states like Alabama are starting the same rebuild. Worth the read.

— Thomas

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