Hello, from Chalkbeat’s national desk — Lily and Erica, coming at you with the education news you want to know. Today’s big story is about the continuing slide of reading scores across the country — and the promising strategies an outlier is using to improve.

But stick around for more about the big political “power grab” happening in Memphis, the pressure lobbed at Democratic governors around whether to opt into the new federal education tax credit, and why you should never text incriminating information. Especially if you’re in charge of spending taxpayer dollars.

Researchers say the United States is in a learning recession, one that’s gone on for over a decade with reading scores on a downward slide since 2013 for eighth graders and 2015 for fourth graders. 

A new data analysis out today from researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth analyzed test scores from third to eighth grade for over 5,000 school districts in 38 states. This analysis, the Education Scorecard, found more of the same sobering takeaways we’ve been hearing about test scores for years now: Only five states plus the District of Columbia showed meaningful growth in reading scores from 2022 to 2025.

The news in math is a little brighter, with almost every state showing improvement in math from 2022 to 2025.

There’s a lot of speculation about what started this spiral in the data. Ineffective reading curriculums? Rising chronic absenteeism? The use of tech in classrooms? Some researchers posit the rise of social media and cell phones hurt achievement, but there’s no hard evidence.

But there are positive outliers. Detroit Public Schools Community District is one of them. Detroit’s test scores in both math and reading have grown faster than in similar urban districts in Michigan. The district’s proficiency rates remain much lower than the state and national average, but district leaders say they want to rapidly catch up.

They also have some ideas around why students are showing this kind of growth. Superintendent Nikolai Vitti believes it has a lot to do with improved student attendance, a better reading curriculum, and the more than 250 academic interventionists deployed to help students in small groups.

Read the full story here.

And read about Detroit’s strategies for growth here.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul plans to opt the Empire State into the federal tax-credit scholarship program. It’s a major win for school choice supporters lobbying blue state governors to participate. Meanwhile, Michigan’s state education board passed a resolution urging that state’s Democratic governor not to participate, and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis defended his position that scholarship-granting organizations should be exempt from anti-discrimination laws.

Federal student data is deteriorating as major databases have not been updated since January 2025. Compiling basic facts about American students and schools is one of the most basic functions of the U.S. Department of Education, and in theory it should be apolitical. But after DOGE canceled numerous data collection contracts, we don’t know how many students are going to college after graduation, how many principals are leaving the profession, what teachers think about their schools, and much more.

There’s a lot of talk about not everyone needing to go to college and the great jobs in the trades. States are throwing out their exit exams and implementing dozens of graduation pathways, many of which lean on industry-recognized credentials to show students are ready for the workforce. 

But as Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s Rebecca Redelmeier recently reported, sometimes those industry credentials are not very high quality. One popular choice in Philly is ladder safety, something many employers in fields involving ladders are legally required to provide for free.

This week, Chalkbeat convened Monica Hawk of One Bright Ray Community High School, sociology professor Matt Giani, and Sean Vereen of the nonprofit Heights Philadelphia to discuss how to make this system work better for students. Here are some key takeaways:

The whole conversation is worth your time. You can watch it here.

Pencil — a person in a pencil costume who insists they are running as a pencil — is a write-in candidate against Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek and a slate of Republicans hoping to make it to the governor’s office. 

Pencil’s agenda is education, and specifically the alarming reading scores coming out of Oregon’s schools, putting the state behind nationally. J. Schuberth, Pencil’s government name, is a former college professor who has championed literacy in the state for a long time. Worried about Oregon falling behind, Schuberth has donned the pencil costume in order to, as NPR put it, make a point.

That’s a text message that Hong “Grace” Peng, a former manager in Los Angeles Unified School District’s information technology services department, is alleged to have sent to Gautham Sampath, the CEO of Innive, a technology company that sold the district a student information management system that really didn’t work out. 

In a civil suit seeking $22 million in damages, the district alleges Peng steered contracts to the company in exchange for kickbacks, the Los Angeles Times reports. The purported text message exchange was included as evidence in the lawsuit.