On a crisp, sunny morning in late January, retired broadcast journalist Martin Fletcher stood before a crowded assembly of students at secondary school Lic. Leobino Zavala Camarena in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. As a renowned war correspondent, Fletcher for decades ventured into the most dangerous places in the world, dodging bullets, observing famine, and reporting on HIV-positive children, many themselves orphaned by AIDS.
No such peril greeted Fletcher at Leobino Zavala, but his visit did address a crisis: Convincing teenagers and elementary students that regular reading — books, not screens — would change the course of their lives.
In January, Fletcher gave a writing workshop to students of secondary school Lic. Leobino Zavala Camarena in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
He had his work cut out for him. Just a smattering of hands shot up when Fletcher asked how many students regularly read more than 15 minutes a day.
Fletcher caught students’ interest with some attention-grabbing video clips of his work, explaining that what set his storytelling apart was his focus on the “little story” inside the “big story.” In other words, when a news network assigned him to cover a big event like an invasion or a mass displacement of refugees, he made it a point to include the little stories of everyday people impacted by the event — like the little girl in a red dress he described wandering alone as hurled rocks and bullets rained down during an Israeli-Palestinian clash.
Students gasped as Fletcher matter-of-factly shared that he reads at least four hours every day. He told them it’s what fueled his Pulitzer and Emmy award-winning reporting, and his authorship of an impressive number of fiction and nonfiction books.
Fletcher’s pep talk with the Mexican students would be equally as relevant north of the United States-Mexico border.
The latest United States’ NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores and Mexico’s 2022 PISA scores (Programme for International Student Assessment) reveal a stark reality: the United States and Mexico are failing to provide their students with the literacy skills needed to thrive in a modern world.
On the 2022 PISA exam, Mexican students ranked 49th internationally in reading, scoring 415 points — well below the OECD average of 487. This places Mexico among the lowest-performing countries globally, with one-third of students at the lowest proficiency levels.
Today’s Special Edition of The New Reality Roundup is out, focused on the release of the 2024 NAEP scores.
“The news is not good,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told Chalkbeat. “Student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic… pic.twitter.com/MBWZqtnJpF
— 50CAN (@FiftyCAN) January 29, 2025
At the same time, their American neighbors’ NAEP scores fell to historic lows in 2024, with a widening gap between high and low-performing students.
In Mexico, one in three third-grade students cannot comprehend what they read. In the U.S., 40% of fourth-grade students fail to meet even basic grade-level reading standards. In reading on the PISA test, 20% of American 15-year-olds read at a 10-year-old’s level.
Globally, top-performing nations like Singapore and Japan consistently surpass 500 points in PISA assessments, demonstrating that the literacy crises in the U.S. and Mexico are indicative of policy failures.
Literacy is foundational for economic opportunity, informed citizenship and personal well-being. Without urgent reforms and investments in evidence-based practices, millions of students in both countries will remain unprepared for the challenges of adulthood. Skilled workers are in short supply in key sectors on both sides of the border. This is not just an education issue — it’s a societal crisis. The time for complacency has passed.
To align Plan México − President Claudia Sheinbaum’s new, ambitious six-year strategy to turn around Mexico’s industrial policy and reduce Chinese imports into North America − with Mexico’s literacy crisis and job creation goals, some of the Plan’s $277 billion-dollar investment should be allocated to improving literacy rates and basic education.
The Plan’s goal to train 150,000 professionals annually should include integrating literacy and foundational skills into technical education programs. This would ensure that workers are equipped for specialized manufacturing and strategic industries like AI and green technology.
Sheinbaum wants to make Mexico 10th largest economy in the world with ‘Plan México’
In the U.S., uncertainty about the future of the federal Department of Education could compound the literacy crisis.
But the nascent Trump administration — among its otherwise shocking activities — has already eased onerous Biden-era administrative rules designed to suppress public charter school growth. Public charter schools are popular with Hispanic families in the United States. In fact, they represent the largest enrollment growth in the sector, increasing by more than 200,000 students from 2019 to 2024 — a staggering growth rate of 18.69%. That’s likely because charter schools are subject to greater accountability for student achievement than traditional state-run schools.
Because the U.S. vests so much of its education policy to the states, parents would do well to learn which states are investing in teacher professional development in phonics-based “science of reading” curricula and English language learner skills. (Hint: Those that do not are mostly on the West Coast and in the Northeast).
Finally, there is also a role for the private sector.
Fletcher’s visit honored the school because it was a winner in the annual “Great Reading Tournament” sponsored by a company called 311 Literacy. The tournament engages students on both sides of the border to engage in as many minutes of reading, in English and/or Spanish, as they can during a month-long contest held twice a year.
After an initial reading assessment, students choose age-appropriate, literacy-level appropriate books from a library of more than 9,000 titles. They read on a specially designed platform that records how many minutes they read. There’s no cost to the student, and the winners get prizes — good ones, like tablets and laptops.
Secondary school Lic. Leobino Zavala Camarena won for the most minutes read in both Spanish and English combined. Overall, participating students in the U.S. and Mexico read for more than one million minutes in the November 2024 tournament. The next one starts tomorrow, March 1.
So, start with government investment, incentivized by initiatives like Plan México. Add public-private partnerships where businesses benefiting from tax incentives collaborate to fund educational initiatives, particularly in underdeveloped regions. Advocate for policies that ensure parents have quality choices to send their children to a rigorous school that is a good fit for them. Mix in some private innovations like The Great Reading Tournament − simple, yet effective strategies that motivate students and school communities to get reading — and we might make real headway on solving the literacy crisis.
Mexico has great potential to meet the challenges of the 21st century. In times of crisis, it has shown it can galvanize its people and lead. This moment requires such leadership to step up and prioritize literacy for its citizenry, especially for the next generation. Hopefully, the U.S. will find such leadership as well.
Tressa Pankovits is a lawyer and education policy expert with over a decade of experience in domestic and international education reform, management, and operations. Formerly Co-Director of the Reinventing America’s Schools project at the Progressive Policy Institute, she is a national advocate for autonomous school models that promote educational equity.
Wonderful Article – Spot on
More attention needs to be placed on the basics. Many schools, especially in rural or more isolated communities, don’t have electricity, running water or basic equipment. Teachers are inadequately prepared (normal school teacher preparation) and what compounds the problem is too- large class sizes, which makes it impossible for teachers to give students the individual attention they require.
While I agree with the gist of your piece, there are several important areas of fundamental disagreement here, though they do not detract from your main point. To compare charter schools to public schools is unfair. Nor is there strong evidence that they do better than public schools. Nevertheless Charter schools have a fundamental advantage. They can discriminate who they take and retain and can easily expel challenging students. Public schools cannot. Further, they have in many places in the country become little more than segregation academies, making themselves inaccessible to poorer families by setting themselves out of town and leaving the poorer students in city schools whose funds and scores dwindle as aa result. North Carolina is an good example of this. It has been a right wing project for decades to defund public education, and charter schools are part of this ongoing effort.
Second, “evidence-based” programs may draw on the basic science of reading as their rational, but the basic research cannot say how the elements of reading are best conveyed to students. Politicians and publishers have jumped on the science of reading movement, ignoring what experienced teachers know–especially those who have developed expertise in moving low performing kids–to force feed a particular methodology to all levels and types of readers. There are multiple pathways to solid word recognition, fluency, comprehenson and critical thinking skill. This is movement is part of the classic 20 year cycle where ambitious politicians and self-styled experts generate hysteria about lagging reading skills and are then led by the nose by powerful publishing houses that will leap to produce any materials for the “reforms” politicians demand as long as they sell.. What didn’t work before is renamed and pushed into the curriculum. Remember Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read? The cycle continues.
from the article . . . test scores “demonstrating that the literacy crises in the U.S. and Mexico are indicative of policy failures . . . ” policies are put into practice by people . . . in the USA teachers have that influence, and if subject policies are hurting the children / students, someone needs to speak up. It is NOT just happending in the US apparentlty . . .
((( a teacher neighbor of mine said she “had” to pass a young girl to the next grade – the little girl was so so cute !!! I thought HOW CRUEL OF YOU . . . you are sentencing that “cute girl” to a world in which wolves will devour her . . . )))
what ever happened to the teachers? Seems it has become an Adult JOBS PROGRAM . . . to heck with those little girls and little boys . . .
There are administrative and state pressures on teachers to pass kids due to financial considerations. I don’t know anything about the teacher you mention, but to paint all teachers as Adult Jobs recipients is unfair and equally cruel. Most teachers are hardworking and dedicated and highly underpaid. They take on tasks–teaching a class of 25-30 kids all reading and writing at different levels of attainment and motivation, for example–and work under unbelievable pressure from politicians (who know nothing about teaching), administrators, and parents. (Try just one day as a substitute teacher in a 3rd or 4th grade class, say, just get a taste of how challenging it is. The classroom teacher will provide you with a lesson plan, so all you will have to do is carry it out. Good luck!)
I wonder how much of this on both sides of borders is due to technology.