PREVIEW: The Friday Edition. - Rebuilding a literate America.

Summary

Tangle Podcast: PREVIEW – The Friday Edition – Rebuilding a Literate America

Host: Audrey Moorhead (Associate Editor)
Date: March 6, 2026
Duration: Preview up to 11:01
Theme: Examining America's modern literacy crisis, reasons for declining reading comprehension, and surprising regional progress in elementary education.

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Episode Overview

In this special Friday Edition preview from the “Tangle” podcast, associate editor Audrey Moorhead delivers a thoughtful, in-depth reflection on the ongoing literacy crisis in America—especially among Generation Z and younger students. Drawing from recent articles, personal academic experience, and national testing data, Moorhead explores why reading comprehension is plummeting, what this means for the fabric of American democracy, and where glimmers of hope can be found in surprising places, especially the American South.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. A Troubling Study of College Students’ Reading Comprehension

• Highlighting Natalie Wexler’s findings (01:35-03:30)

  • Moorhead recounts a study from Wexler’s Substack, "Minding the Gap", involving 85 English majors at two Kansas universities.

  • Students read the opening of Dickens' Bleak House and had to explain it in plain English, with access to dictionaries and phones.

  • Only 4 demonstrated comprehensive understanding; 32 showed competence but understood less than half; the majority could not comprehend the text at all.

  • “Even in this open book environment, only four of the 85 students demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the text.” (Audrey Moorhead, 02:35)

  • Insight: Difficulty was due not just to old-fashioned language, but a deep unfamiliarity with words, phrases, and prose style—students simply gave up trying to understand.

2. Echoes from Elite Institutions

• Reflections on The New Yorker’s “The End of The English Major” (03:30-05:00)
  • Recalling Nathan Heller’s 2023 New Yorker piece, which caused debate across Harvard’s campus, Moorhead points out that even at elite schools, interest and ability in English are waning.
  • Professors discussed undergraduates’ inability to parse 19th-century syntax and more alarming, complete failures elsewhere.
  • “Misunderstanding this archaic syntax is an easier problem to address than... total inability to comprehend Dickens. It’s still likely a symptom of the same underlying condition, a systemic educational failure to teach students to engage with difficult texts.” (03:45)

3. Literacy Crisis: A National Phenomenon

• Generation Z and the “Death of Deep Reading” (05:00-06:30)

  • A wealth of articles and studies suggest Gen Z is reading less and understanding less, with literacy rates in very noticeable decline.

  • “The full breadth of reporting and research depicts an American generation in a full-blown literacy crisis.” (05:50)

  • Societal Impact: Lower literacy rates spell trouble for American democracy and society, undermining the ability to understand laws, foundational texts, and the reasons behind the nation’s successes.

4. Signs of Hope: Surging Success in the South

• Rising Elementary Scores in Unexpected States (06:30-07:30)

  • Moorhead identifies dramatic improvements among elementary students in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee—outpacing per-pupil-spending-heavy states like California and Vermont.

  • Mississippi’s turnaround was so pronounced their state superintendent was recruited to help Maryland.

  • “Elementary schoolers in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee are improving in reading scores at astonishing rates, outpacing states like California and Vermont.” (07:02)

  • Significance: These stories offer hope, suggesting the literacy crisis can be reversed.

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Deep Dive: The Structural Problems Facing Literacy

5. Analyzing the Roots: Academic Decline and Achievement Gaps

• Test Scores and Achievement Divergence (08:59-10:00)
  • Drawing from a 2025 analysis by Chad Altman at The74, Moorhead underscores: American student achievement (across reading and other subjects) peaked in the mid-2010s, then declined sharply, exacerbated by COVID-19.
  • “…high achieving students are doing about as well as they were, but struggling students are falling further and further behind.” (09:25)

6. Understanding Literacy Instruction Failures

• The “Simple View of Reading” (10:00-11:01)

  • The widely-accepted Simple View of Reading charts two key elements: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension.

  • Altman finds breakdowns in both areas are driving the crisis.

  • Historically, American schools used phonics for “decoding,” teaching kids to recognize letters and graphemes by sound. In the mid-20th century, "whole language" methods took hold, focusing on recognizing entire words instead—diminishing phonics’ role.

  • “For centuries, decoding was taught via phonics…until roughly the mid-20th century with the rise of whole language teaching…” (10:38)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Increasingly, young Americans aren’t comprehending the things they read.” — Audrey Moorhead [03:05]
• “A systemic educational failure to teach students to engage with difficult texts.” — Audrey Moorhead [03:45]
• “Lower literacy rates mean a decline in the ability to understand the world around us, including the laws and political texts upon which this country was built.” — Audrey Moorhead [06:38]
• “Elementary schoolers in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee are improving in reading scores at astonishing rates…” — Audrey Moorhead [07:02]
• “…struggling students are falling further and further behind.” — Audrey Moorhead [09:25]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:35 – Introduction to the main topic and the Dickens comprehension study
• 03:30 – Reflections on broader academic decline from The New Yorker’s reporting
• 06:30 – The American South’s surprising literacy gains
• 08:59 – Altman analysis on post-2010s achievement and COVID impact
• 10:00 – Breakdown of the “Simple View of Reading,” phonics vs. whole language

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Tone & Style

Moorhead’s delivery is thoughtful, concerned, and research-driven—combining personal anecdotes with data and revealed trends. The episode is presented with urgency but also tempered by optimism, especially in discussing successful reforms in southern states. The style is accessible, even when discussing academic research.

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Summary

This episode preview of “Tangle” offers an incisive, evidence-based exploration of the growing literacy crisis in America. Audrey Moorhead underscores the alarming decline in reading comprehension among young Americans—supported by firsthand academic observations, nationwide studies, and expert reporting—and connects these trends to changes in foundational education practices. Yet, the episode balances concern with hope, using the success stories from southern elementary schools as inspiration for broader reform.

Listeners and readers are left with a sense of both the gravity of the crisis and the possibility for meaningful improvement through dedicated, evidence-based educational strategies.

Transcript

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This is Tangle.

[Audrey Moorhead]

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take. I'm your host for Today associate editor Audrey Moorhead, and today you're going to be hearing a lot of my take on a problem that I've been reading and thinking about for some time now, a few years even, which is the modern literacy crisis and the efforts to reverse the trends. So without further ado, let's dive right in. In the summer or fall of 2025, while idly scrolling through X, I came across a rather interesting article from Natalie Wexler's substack Minding the Gap. Her article detailed the results of a small study of 85 English majors at two Kansas universities. Researchers had students read the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens Bleak House and tasked them with explaining the contents in plain English to a facilitator. Because Bleak House is a nearly 200-year-old British novel, placing it firmly in an unfamiliar cultural context for the average American reader. The students were given a dictionary, reference materials, and permission to use their cell phones to look up unfamiliar terms. Essentially, the students weren't being tested on any of their own prior knowledge, only their reading comprehension. But even in this open book environment, only four of the 85 students demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the text. 32 showed a competent understanding, but even they only understood half the text. The rest of the students were identified as problematic readers, almost totally unable to comprehend the passage. Natalie Wexler, a writer who specializes in education and literacy, pointed out that the problematic reader's difficulties came from encountering words and phrases that they were unfamiliar with. Even though they had access to research materials, Wexler wrote, their unfamiliarity with Dickens, prose style and cultural world were so profound that they simply gave up trying to understand the text. The competent readers showed a similar unfamiliarity with these words and phrases, but they were comfortable with that confusion. As a recent college graduate with a bachelor's degree in English, and particularly as one whose junior and senior research projects centered on American literature from the same time period as Bleak House, I wish I could tell you I had been shocked at these results or that I thought the study was a fluke. Instead, these findings only confirmed what I had already seen among my own peers in high school in Lynchburg, Tennessee, and in college at Harvard. Increasingly, young Americans aren't comprehending the things they read. In fact, at the end of her article, Wexler recalled a different exploration of the death of Deep Reading, whose publication I remember quite vividly the End of The English A 2023 New Yorker investigation by Nathan Heller. For his piece, Heller interviewed college English professors and students across the country, including some from Harvard. Heller's piece didn't paint a pretty picture of Harvard English. It showcased students, including English majors themselves, talking about the unimportance of the degree. And it showed professors glibly discussing students declining interests and abilities in their subject. The article's release caused quite a stir at Harvard's Barker center, which is the hub of the English department on campus. So much so that the instructor of my sophomore tutorial, a class dedicated to learning about and applying various schools of literary criticism, adjusted our syllabus to spend a whole day at the end of the semester talking about the article and its implications for the field. Wechsler highlighted one Harvard professor in Heller's piece who talked about her undergraduate's failure to understand 19th century syntax, though as she said. Misunderstanding this archaic syntax is an easier problem to address than the Kansas students complete failure to comprehend Dickens. It's still likely a symptom of the same underlying condition, a systemic educational failure to teach students to engage with difficult texts. Natalie Wexler isn't the only person who's concerned with the state of reading among young Americans. In recent years, articles about Gen Z reading less or being unable to read have abounded, as have investigations into declining literacy rates among Gen Z, backed up by a plethora of studies. The full breadth of reporting and research depicts an American generation in a full blown literacy crisis. But that's not to say the crisis is hopeless. Running parallel to these stories about college students unable to understand the text they encounter is a story of a gradual recovery at the elementary school level, spearheaded by the unlikeliest of educational heroes. I'm talking, of course, about the Southern surge in reading education. Elementary schoolers in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee are improving in reading scores at astonishing rates, outpacing states like California and Vermont, despite the latter spending more on education per student by comfortable margins. Mississippi, which led the charge starting in the 2010s, has overseen such great improvements that its former state superintendent, Cary Wright, was hired by the state of Maryland to deliver similar results there. The literacy crisis is one of the most profound problems facing Gen Z and Gen Alpha. As my generation ages up into the workforce and the citizenry, lower literacy rates mean a decline in the ability to understand the world around us, including the laws and political texts upon which this country was built. And if fewer Americans understand the texts that shape our society, our society will be susceptible to changing for the worse. Forgetting the whys and the hows that built the most successful, prosperous nation on earth. And in the belly of that forgetting lies the possibility of national decline.

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Now let's talk about the problems. According to a 2025 analysis from Chad Altman at The74, an education reform news organization, American achievement across educational disciplines, including reading, peaked in the mid 2010s. The pattern shows up across three different national tests at four different grade levels, 4th, 8th, 10th, and 12th. The decline US schools have experienced since then, which was exacerbated by the COVID 19 pandemic, sharply correlates with growing achievement gaps between the highest and lowest performing American students. Put differently, high achieving students are doing about as well as they were, but struggling students are falling further and further behind. In a different analysis on how we measure literacy, Alderman utilized the simple view of reading, a widely accepted theory that reading is broken up into two primary word recognition and language comprehension. Altman found that American literacy declines can be traced to breakdowns in instruction for both components. The first component of literacy instruction under SVR is decoding, or word recognition. This is how we teach young readers to identify letters and common combinations of letters called graphemes. String those graphemes together to form words and then connect those written words to the spoken ones they've already learned to understand. For centuries of English reading instruction, decoding was taught via phonics, teaching kids to associate graphemes like th or ch with their sounds f and ch, then stringing those sounds together when encountering new words. Alternate approaches have existed since at least the 19th century, but phonics remained dominant in American schools until roughly the mid 20th century with the rise of whole language teaching, a method of reading instruction that started in New Zealand but became entrenched in American schools. In this method of teaching, students aren't taught to identify letters with sounds individually. Instead, they learn how to identify whole words at once without words

[John Law]

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Our Executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing editor Ari Weitzman with Senior editor Will K. Back and Associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Knuth and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our [e-mail].

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