Chicago's Fourth Graders Reveal a Staggering Literacy Crisis in New Test Results

Chicago sits among the wealthiest cities in the United States, yet its fourth graders tell a grim story. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card, only 23% of these students scored proficient or higher in reading. The rest fared poorly. A staggering 53% landed below the basic level. That calculation is brutal. Three out of four fourth-graders could not demonstrate a solid command of reading skills. More than half lacked even partial mastery.

The trajectory offers no comfort. From fourth to eighth grade, proficiency rose by a mere four percentage points, climbing from 23% to 27%. Despite holding these damning statistics, educators and parents raised no alarms. The few who improved were the exception, not the rule. I have touched on youth literacy in previous Rooftop Revelations, and it remains the most pressing issue for the young people I serve. Real humans sit behind those test scores. Notice that I have not brought race into this discussion yet. Those numbers represent all of Chicago’s students. We are all affected by this decline in education standards.

The consequences are severe. A child who cannot read proficiently by the end of third grade is four times more likely to fail to graduate from high school on time than a proficient reader. The odds turn even worse for children living in poverty. What kind of quality of life can these children expect as adults? Common sense tells us that adults with limited literacy face higher unemployment and lower earnings over their lifetimes. They are literally shut out of any job that requires literacy as a skill.

I witness the damage from this illiteracy epidemic on the South Side of Chicago every day. I see young people who cannot fill out a simple job application. They come by my church for help. I see it in parents who cannot read medical reports that determine what help their children receive. I have even had to assist people who graduated from high school without being able to read, leaving them unable to understand a lease or a text message from a supervisor.

No American should need help with these simple tasks in 2026. It is no wonder why so many stay trapped in the same cycle of poverty or end up in prison. Reading is the one skill that opens the door to the wider world. It can lift anyone from poverty because it enriches the reader with knowledge, spirit, and know-how. Without this skill, how can one pursue economic opportunity, personal freedom, and one’s dreams?

America’s massive labor crisis started in the classroom, not the workplace. This high level of illiteracy is a disease within our city, yet we treat it like background noise. We assign higher priority to other issues, like homelessness and immigration. I am not discounting those problems at all. I am simply making the point that this illiteracy crisis should rank up there, but it doesn’t. And that is why we continue to fail over and over on the one skill that gives children the real key to a better future: the ability to read.

I have kids of my own. I am a very busy man with a congregation that depends on me at all hours of the day. But I know that teaching a child to read is not complicated. The science of reading has been settled for decades. It starts with phonics. Each letter is sounded out, and we teach the kids how to blend those sounds into words. We do this at home every night before bedtime. We read to our children and then challenge them to sound out the words back to us.

We do this every day. Schools that use these structured literacy programs see results. But somewhere along the way, our schools decided that the fundamentals were too simple. They believed children needed something more sophisticated than learning to sound out words. They were wrong. The children paid for it. We must put the blame where it belongs, and most of it belongs at the feet of the parents. Do not have a child if you do not have the time to read to him or her every night before bed.

The excuses end here. Blame falls squarely on schools that promote students to higher grades while they still cannot read at grade level. Anyone who labels these children as the future yet fails to prioritize literacy is part of the problem. We need to become ruthless in our pursuit of literacy. No exceptions.

That is why I am partnering with the Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center to open my own school. This institution will set a new standard for the community. Academic excellence will be the expectation, not the exception. We will teach parents how to read to their children every single night. Once they witness the impact it has on their kids, they will spread the word to other parents. That is how a movement begins. When children arrive at kindergarten already knowing their sounds and letters, teachers will see what is possible. They will want more of it.

I believe this can change the spirit of our community from the ground up. I can envision it. I am building it.