The "big kids" need reading help due to COVID disruptions

Children hit hardest by the pandemic are now the big kids at school. Many still need reading help.
Stuck with distance learning as they began grade school, the kids who are now finishing elementary school were the ones most disrupted by COVID, with alarming delays in their reading ability.

Some excerpts:

• "as this generation progresses, many will need extra reading support that schools are not as accustomed to providing for older students."
• Last year’s third-graders, the kids who were in kindergarten when the pandemic started, lost more ground in reading than kids in older grades and were slower to catch up. 
• an analysis of last year’s test scores by NWEA found that the average student would need the equivalent of 4.1 additional months of instruction to catch up to pre-COVID reading levels.
• Historically, phonics and help decoding words have gradually disappeared in the upper grades.
• Most English teachers at that level are no more prepared to teach a student to read than a math teacher would be,
• Lewis, of the NWEA, said the takeaway should not be that the COVID kids are beyond help. “The message has to be: We’re doing the right things. We’re just not doing enough of it,” she said. “And we need to amp up and certainly not take our foot off the gas pedal anytime soon.”