September 22, 2026
Statement of Jannelle Kubinec, CEO, WestEd
Earlier this month, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores for 2025 were released, and the results were not only discouraging—they were alarming. Conducted every 3 years, PISA provides critical information about 15-year-olds’ ability to understand, learn, and navigate increasingly complex information by reading. U.S. reading scores, in particular, were at their lowest level since the United States began participating in PISA. Just 74 percent of U.S. 15-year-olds demonstrated at least baseline reading proficiency, meaning that roughly one in four is struggling with reading skills they will need in school, work, and life.
Dire as these findings are, there is some reason for hope: research. In a news release on the latest scores, the U.S. Department of Education asserted that it has “made literacy a central priority” and pointed to the importance of evidence-based approaches to literacy in helping our nation’s students recover the ground they have lost. In particular, the Department pointed to its investments in programs like Education Innovation and Research (EIR) as evidence of its commitment to supporting states in researching, implementing, and scaling effective literacy practices.
WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship for Academic Literacy Learning (RA4ALL) is one of those EIR-funded literacy interventions, and it is meeting the moment. RA4ALL was designed specifically for 8th and 9th graders reading below grade level, and it directly addresses the adolescent literacy challenges highlighted by the PISA results. Early research findings indicate that it is helping students make meaningful gains in reading.
Preliminary Year 1 results from the first cohort show that the intervention has had a positive impact on reading fluency, comprehension, and broader reading achievement, with students in RA4ALL schools gaining nearly 12 percentile points on an assessment of silent reading ability and about 5.5 percentile points on a test that measures students’ reading growth, vocabulary, and comprehension compared to students who did not receive the intervention. While these preliminary results are still under review, they are encouraging.
At a moment when reading scores nationally (and worldwide) are cause for great concern, RA4ALL offers early, real-world evidence that a research-backed intervention can reverse that trend and help those students who most need support to thrive.