Joshua McGoun, a K-12 public-school teacher in Frederick, Maryland, first noticed a change in his students about 10 years ago. They began to struggle with focus.

Increasingly, younger kids were not nailing basic reading skills before third grade — a crucial window. Those who miss it have a tough road ahead in middle and high school. Even adept readers in their tweens and teens have become afraid of complex or extended reading tasks and more comfortable with short texts or bite-size summaries.

McGoun, who has a doctorate in education, shared one stark example. With struggling readers, he hands each child a book upside down and backward. "They should be able to turn the book the right way up and open it at the first page," he said. These days, "some students aren't able to do that."

This is not unusual. Across the US, kids are struggling to read. Last year, reading performance for fourth graders hit its lowest level since 2005, and teachers expect that number to keep tumbling.

The panic to turn things around quickly is driving a wedge between teachers, politicians, and parents, all pointing the finger of blame at one another.

The Senate education committee, calling it a crisis, is pushing school districts to retrain teachers in a trendy new teaching style called "the science of reading," which has dramatically improved literacy in some areas (scroll down for more detail on that). Parents with resources to do so are moving their kids to schools that tout science-backed teaching styles.

Some teachers and policy experts worry this frenzy may have an ironic side effect, putting pressure on public schools to resolve a problem that cannot be tackled in the classroom alone.

"It makes the task of teaching harder," McGoun said, referring to new literacy programs and a focus on test results. "We're burning out at a faster rate, and it's causing a lot of apathy."

Gen Alpha kids, aged 2 to 12, need to discover the joy of reading, he and other teachers say. It's doable, but it's a more creative and slower process that many parents don't have time to wait for.

Teaching a 6-year-old to read is political

There has never been a golden age for reading scores in America. The record high was in 2017, when 37% of US fourth graders pass their NAEP reading test — just 5% higher than the most recent results.

Still, this new low raised alarm among lawmakers who were already concerned about screens and loneliness among Gen Alpha.

“The long-term implications will be dire” if literacy does not improve, Sen. Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate education committee, said in February. “We are at risk of having an entire generation of children, those who were in their prime learning years during the COVID-19 pandemic, fail to become productive adults if reading proficiency does not improve.”

His proposed solution? Get all teachers to use the same, evidence-backed teaching style.

Teaching styles have served as political footballs for over 100 years. The fierce, ongoing debate — known as the “reading wars” — dates back to at least the mid-19th century, when Horace Mann, then Massachusetts’ education secretary, slammed the alphabet as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” and said children should be taught whole words rather than their structure.

While teaching unions maintain that teachers should be able to draw from various teaching styles, it’s a tough sell with parents.

“Parents and others are getting upset about their kids’ literacy curriculum because they've heard that there's a certain way to teach kids how to read, and that might not be properly implemented in schools,” Carly Robinson, a senior education researcher at Stanford University, said.

Recently, the “science of reading” method (see chart below) has been touted as a silver bullet that transformed literacy rates in Mississippi between 2013 and 2019 — even in areas with high child-poverty rates, which typically correlate with lower literacy levels. It became known as the “Mississippi Miracle.”

In a February report, the Senate education committee said teachers who still used other methods — particularly the three-cueing system — were setting students “up for failure in the long run.”

TEACHING STYLES

In other states, parents want a Mississippi Miracle of their own.

Susie Coughlin, a mom in Falmouth, Maine, found herself going down rabbit holes about literacy techniques after her 5-year-old daughter, Carter, repeated kindergarten. Despite spending a second year at that level, the little girl had fallen behind in reading and writing.

One day, near the end of the school year, Coughlin saw a piece of Carter’s homework where she had written, “I went to the osen,” rather than, “I went to the ocean.” The teacher had not corrected the mistake because the emphasis was on visual cues — a picture of the sea — rather than spelling. Coughlin was appalled; spelling was why Carter struggled to keep up in other classes. The mom took up her concerns with the teacher, who, she said, defended the visual method.

Coughlin said that the impression the teacher gave off was that the school was "just going to let your child slide through." "So we hit the brakes."

Carter finished the year, but her parents elected to send her to a private Catholic school for first grade. In her new school, Carter was taught to “sound it out” — articulating the word as she read it rather than scanning pages for context cues.

Her progress was dramatic, Coughlin said. Now 8 years old, Carter thrives in her second-grade reading classes. “It broke my heart when her confidence was in the toilet at her old school, but her bucket of self-esteem is filling up,” Coughlin, who has since enrolled Carter’s younger brother at the same school, added.

Coughlin said her family was fortunate to have the resources to go private because the annual fees at the Catholic school are relatively low: $10,000 a child, compared with about $40,000 for secular private schools in Falmouth.

Forty-five states and Washington, DC, are considering bills that would retrain public school teachers in new, evidence-based reading practices. Susan Neuman, a professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University and an education official under President George W. Bush, said the bills represented “the biggest, boldest, and most inclusive effort to date to promote high-quality, scientifically supported reading instruction for all children,” adding: “We cannot fail.”

Educators are not so bullish about another initiative that requires retraining and devotion to new materials that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, preventing creativity with the syllabus.

“The problem is that some school districts think: ‘We pay for this program, and therefore you have to use this program.’ You can't use anything else,” McGoun said.

While his school allows for flexibility, he’s seen panic take over in other districts, he said: “As a teacher, you can't even make your own materials. It’s because the school district attended a conference and learned about a particular program — they promised XYZ outcomes if you only use its resources.”

Nailing the right method is not a teacher’s biggest concern, McGoun said. “The most important thing an educator can do is provide good pedagogy by focusing on the student’s interests,” he said. “When you have motivated students, they will read.”

Kids are falling out of love with the written word

Students, McGoun said, have “fallen out of love” with the written word because the march of technology has made it seem “alien” and “outmoded” to them.

Parents know tearing a school-age child away from a phone is no easy feat. No matter what literacy technique you employ, the pull of screens tends to be stronger.

There are efforts to leverage technology to help with literacy. Some artificial-intelligence programs, already appearing in classrooms, listen to students read aloud and give them instant feedback on pronunciation and comprehension, an alternative to having students play a reading game for 10 minutes on their own.

Subtitles on TV shows have proved beneficial for early readers by presenting words on a screen that a child will read, sometimes without even realizing it — so much so that the actor Jack Black joined a campaign to promote subtitles to boost kids’ literacy.

Tara West, a former kindergarten teacher and the founder of the literary-coaching organization Little Minds at Work, believes the benefits of constructive tech could outweigh the harm of kids spending too much time on screens. “Kids gravitate toward anything that’s digital,” so teachers can take advantage of that, West said, adding: “Technology is going to go far.”

Getting teachers on board may not be easy. In a recent Pew survey of elementary-school teachers, 47% of respondents said they weren’t sure how AI in classrooms would influence their students’ learning.

Jeff Jarvis, a public-school teacher in Los Angeles, is skeptical about the tech method. Sure, it might work in small groups, “but you’d almost definitely be struggling to use it effectively in a large class with 25 kids,” he said.

Educational digital media is “often attached to visuals, not texts,” Jarvis said, adding: “They’re getting quick blurbs from Snapchat and TikTok but nothing in-depth.”

Teachers like Jarvis and McGoun say that, at the most basic level, kids should be surrounded by books to simply learn how they work — turning physical pages instead of swiping on an iPad, for example. That’s where parents come in.

Pavel Buyeu, a 43-year-old dad from Seattle, said that when his daughter, Liza, now 15, began to show a reluctance to read, he feared she’d miss out on the joy and satisfaction of discovering books as a kid.

“Liza and I are from different generations with different interests,” Buyeu said. Still, he said he would like to see her enjoy some of the books he loved when he was younger. “My favorites were ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’ and ‘The Little Prince,’” he told Business Insider.

Buyeu devised a “game” to make reading fun for Liza. He’d take his daughter to the bookstore and have her pick a title in return for privileges like sleeping in on weekends. The pair read and discussed the books before writing an alternative ending to the plot. Family members voted on a winner, which motivated Liza even more.

“Reading became a joy for her,” Buyeu said, adding that Liza’s reading speed and spelling improved, said.

Buyeu’s game speaks to the power of parental involvement — a luxury not afforded to every kid.

Parents with means are paying for tutoring

Learning to read isn’t just about getting a grade; it can reverberate throughout someone’s career and personal life. Want to vote? It helps to be able to read and comprehend complex material.

If not all students become readers in school, you will start to see “the haves and the have-nots,” Neuman, the former education official, said — people with the money to pay for extra help moving ahead in school and life, and those relying on public resources falling behind.

Kumon, a private company that provides after-school math and reading tutoring, has recorded a recent surge in its number of new students, with enrollment increasing by 56% between 2020 and 2024. The company’s methodology incorporates both meaning-based instruction and phonics.

Kalisha Brooks of Indian Land, South Carolina, enrolled her son, Corey, at Kumon when he was in kindergarten during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was worried that the disruption of the health crisis might set him back.

“I’d read articles about children being home and getting further and further behind,” Brooks said. So she bit the bullet, budgeting an extra $200 a month for Corey to have twice-weekly reading classes. She’s glad she did. Corey, now 8, performed above average in second grade and is now in third with a renewed confidence in reading.

Jessica Mercedes Penzari, a 40-year-old mom in New York City, can relate to Brooks’ dilemma. Her son Hendrix's kindergarten report card showed that he had dramatically fallen behind in reading within months. “It was a moment of panic,” Penzari said. “Once you fall behind, getting caught up is so difficult. I thought, ‘I’m slipping as a mom because my eye isn’t on the ball.’”

Penzari secured a private tutor — a special-education teacher who lived in her building. She babysat the woman’s kids in exchange for the typically $75-an-hour lessons. It proved successful. Hendrix, who recently entered second grade, is back at proficiency level and above grade level in some subcategories.

Children who have fewer educational resources find themselves a step behind their peers at the outset. Just 10% of multilingual students can read proficiently by fourth grade compared with 33% of fourth graders overall, the NAEP found.

Last year, Nichelle Watkins, who lives in public housing in Baltimore, told Fox 45 News that her fourth-grade son, Logan, still could not read and that they couldn’t afford tutoring.

“How is he supposed to be productive if he can’t read?” she said in the news segment.

“They go there to be babysat for eight hours and come home,” the mom added, referring to Logan’s elementary school. She said legislators — to whom she later wrote pleading for improvements — ignored the problem.

“I feel like they don’t care. It’s not their children,” she said.

What now?

Linda McMahon, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead his Education Department, will have a mammoth managerial job on her hands if she is confirmed.

McMahon, a former wrestling executive who sat on the Board of Trustees for Sacred Heart University and served one year on Connecticut’s Board of Education, supports Trump’s plans to deliver funds for education directly to states, giving them the authority to choose how to spend the money. She’s sparked anger from some educators who argue her plans would hurt public schools. She has also been accused in a recent lawsuit of enabling sexual abuse of kids in the WWE. McMahon has denied the allegation, and the lawsuit is on hold while another court rules on the constitutionality of such cases.

In an emailed statement, Trump-Vance transition spokesperson Liz Huston told BI that McMahon "is ready to deliver on President Trump's agenda to restore America's education system and prepare our next generation for the future."

Robinson, the Stanford researcher, said teachers would need much more funding to implement all the new bipartisan reading policies coming through states. Still, it’s not enough to simply shower schools with cash — smart policies are key. “Just giving money without any guidelines isn't actually that helpful if you want it to be directed in a certain way,” Robinson said.

In the meantime, all of these moving parts have created a divide between parents and teachers, who point the finger of blame at each other. It’s easier to take on someone close to you than to tackle unanswerable questions, such as, “how much have screens derailed attention spans?”, and “how much education funding is enough to make a difference?”

Jarvis, the special education teacher in LA, said he understands parents’ frustration that something so fundamental to modern life now feels impossible. He agreed that federal funding for literacy programs is essential to stop reading rates from tumbling further.

In the meantime, he said that parents can make a major difference by engaging in reading with their children at home. Take your kids to libraries, the teacher said. Let your kids see you reading books at home, he added, to create motivation and a rich environment for “reading to flourish.”

“Put down your own electronic devices and read with your kids, even if it’s just for 15 minutes a day,” Jarvis said. “Let them read aloud to you and then ask questions about the text. It’s important to have parent-child time away from technology.”

• Donald Trump has surrounded himself with fellow billionaires as he nears a second term as president.
• His cabinet nominees and advisors hail from various industries —and include the world's richest man.
• Here are the billionaires Trump is working with as he readies for the White House.

President-elect Donald Trump has long been associated with wealth. Trump, as his supporters like to say, was famously a businessman before he became president — or the host of a reality TV show. Even a young Barack Obama mentioned him as the epitome of success that Americans craved.

While some have questioned how successfully he ran his real-estate empire there is no arguing that he is now very rich. The net worth of the president-elect sits at $6.1 billion, according to Forbes' estimates as of December 6.

As Trump prepares for a second term as president, it looks as if like attracts like: He counts several billionaires among his advisors and cabinet nominees.

Trump's first-term cabinet was the wealthiest in modern times and included several multimillionaires among its ranks, including centimillionaires Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin. Betsy DeVos, his former Secretary of Education, and her family were worth $2 billion when she held office, Forbes reported. More billionaires, including Diane Hendricks and Isaac Perlmutter, were among his early advisors.

There will be more clarity about the net worths of Trump's current cabinet picks and his remaining nominees when they file public financial disclosures due soon after their nominations become official.

These disclosures will also bring to light any conflicts of interest, which often result in large divestments. For example, in 2017, Steven Mnuchin, then the Treasury secretary nominee, agreed to divest from 43 companies and investments to comply with those standards.

Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in some cases, nominees from the private equity or venture capital worlds may find it difficult to divest their assets in time.

Vincent Viola, a Florida billionaire and Trump's pick to be Army secretary in 2017, withdrew his name from consideration after it became clear how difficult it would be to disentangle his financial holdings.

"You have to be prepared to divest of any asset," Canter told Business Insider. "The president needs to be able to call on any member of their cabinet and all of their senior officials, right? And not have to worry about whether by calling them and asking for their advice on a particular matter" they would create a criminal conflict of interest.

Here are the billionaires advising President-elect Trump and how rich they are. The net worths are based on Forbes estimates as of December 6 unless otherwise stated.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is by far the richest person to sign up to work for Trump, with a net worth of $355 billion.

Musk, the cohead of Trump's government efficiency commission, will work with conservative entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy outside the federal government on the "Department of Government Efficiency." The duo has said they want to cut more than $2 trillion from the federal budget.

For now, Musk, the world's richest man, is not subject to divestment requirements as he's outside the Trump administration. Ethics experts say it remains to be seen if DOGE will meet the definition of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. This 1970s-era law sought to bring order to the external and sometimes secretive panels that advised the federal government. If DOGE does, Musk and Ramaswamy may be required to file financial disclosure forms. Most critically, DOGE may also have to hold open meetings and make its records available to the public.

Musk's approach to the federal government may mirror the one he takes at his companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, which has made him very rich. His stakes in EV company Tesla — he owns about 13% of the trillion-dollar company — and rocket manufacturer SpaceX make up the bulk of his fortune.

Musk is known for his "hardcore" management style and has shown no problem conducting extensive layoffs, requiring his teams to work "long hours at a high intensity," and relentlessly cutting corporate perks.

He spent about $119 million boosting Trump's campaign — and his bet on the president-elect paid off. Since the election, Musk's fortune has grown by about $90 billion. The success of his companies, particularly SpaceX, has been tied to the government before. The New York Times reported that Tesla and SpaceX signed nearly $3 billion of government contracts last year.

Warren Stephens

Investor banker Warren Stephens is Trump's nominee to be the next US ambassador to Britain.

Stephens, who is worth $3.4 billion, operates the Little Rock, Arkansas-based investment bank, Stephens Inc., which has been tied to his family since the 1930s. The firm was a major player in Walmart's 1970 IPO and later helped finance the construction of the Superdome, home to the NFL's New Orleans Saints.

The ambassador to the Court of St. James, as the post is formally known, is considered one of the poshest assignments in the foreign service. Presidents often name major donors to the role. Trump's first ambassador to the UK was Woody Johnson, co-owner of the NFL's New York Jets.

Stephens donated $3.5 million to pro-Trump causes, including $2 million to Make America Great Again Inc., the main super PAC for the former president.

Stephens hasn't always been supportive of Trump. In 2016, he donated $2 million to a group trying to block him, The New York Times reported. Before Trump locked up the nomination, Stephens supported Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.

"Over the last 38 years, while serving as the President, Chairman, and CEO of his company, Stephens Inc., Warren has built a wonderful financial services firm, while selflessly giving back to his community as a philanthropist," Trump wrote in his statement announcing Stephens' nomination.

Jared Isaacman

Trump has chosen Jared Isaacman, who is worth $1.8 billion, to head up NASA.

A high school dropout, Isaacman made his money through two companies: payment processing firm Shift4, which is publicly traded, and aviation venture Draken International, which he sold to Blackstone.

Isaacman would bring real space experience to his role as NASA administrator.

He's been to space twice on SpaceX's civilian flights that he funded and he conducted the first-ever commercial spacewalk in September.

Isaacman said that leading NASA would be "the honor of a lifetime."

Howard Lutnick

Trump's pick for Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, is worth more than $1.5 billion thanks to his decades on Wall Street. He's been CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm, since 1991 and of its spinoff brokerage firm, BGC Partners, since its formation. Cantor Fitzgerald's deals include Johnson & Johnson's $1.9 billion acquisition of Ambrx.

In addition to his work at Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick is chairman of the Newmark Group, a roughly $2.6 billion commercial real estate giant.

Trump said that Lutnick would be his point person on trade, even though the US Trade representative, a Cabinet-level post, typically fills that role. If confirmed, Lutnick would oversee 13 agencies, including the Census Bureau and the Patent and Trademark Office. During Trump's first term, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, another former banker, was central to the White House's trade war with China.

Vivek Ramaswamy

Musk will co-lead the DOGE with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy, who made his fortune in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, is worth $1.1 billion.

He founded Roivant Sciences, a drug company that went public in 2021. The company has a market cap of nearly $9 billion, and Ramaswamy, who was the company's CEO before stepping down in 2021 to focus on politics, owns about 10% of its outstanding shares.

In 2022, Ramaswamy cofounded Strive Asset Management, an investment company that takes a non-ESG approach to money management. The company counts Vice President-elect JD Vance, who attended law school with Ramaswamy, as an investor.

Like Vance and Trump, Ramaswamy built his political reputation on the foundation of his business experience. Ramaswamy was harshly critical of corporate ESG and DEI initiatives, which he railed against in his 2021 best-selling book "Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam."

During the 2024 Republican presidential primaries, Ramaswamy stood out from the rest of the field by just how much he embraced Trump — a sign of loyalty that he quickly noticed. Despite his lack of political experience, Ramaswamy repeatedly qualified for debates while other more conventional picks struggled to meet the polling and donor thresholds. He dropped out of the field after finishing fourth in the Iowa Republican caucuses and quickly endorsed Trump.

During the summer, Ramaswamy bought a stake in BuzzFeed to remodel the online publication in his conservative image.

Steven Witkoff

Steven Witkoff will serve as Trump's special Middle East envoy, as well as the cochair of his inaugural committee.

A real estate developer, Witkoff is worth at least $1 billion thanks to his stake in the development company the Witkoff Group, which is responsible for luxury condos, hotels, and office space across the country, and his personal portfolio of homes in New York City, the Hamptons, and Florida. He's also partnered with Trump on the cryptocurrency project World Liberty Financial.

Witkoff, like many on this list and in the broader Trump cabinet, has no formal experience in his role. During Trump's first term, the president-elect relied on Jared Kushner, his wealthy son-in-law, to play a similar role, which later resulted in the Abraham Accords, a series of deals to normalize relations between Israel and four Arab states.

Scott Bessent

Hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, Trump's nominee for Treasury secretary, is likely a billionaire — though Forbes has not yet crowned him one.

A Wall Street veteran, Bessent has worked for George Soros twice and was behind two of the financier's most lucrative bets, the shorting of the British pound and Japanese yen. In 2017, he launched his own firm, Key Square Capital, which has struggled to produce consistent returns.

While he has supported Democrats in the past, Bessent is now fully aligned with Trump. This election cycle, he donated $3 million to Trump-aligned PACs and Republican committees.

Bessent prevailed amid intense private jockeying to lead the Treasury Department, securing the role without Musk's blessing, who had backed Lutnick instead. Markets reacted positively to Bessent's appointment, but Trump soon clarified that this more conventional pick would not limit his tariff commitment.

Linda McMahon

Linda McMahon, Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education_, is the cochair of his transition team and led the Small Business Administration during the president-elect's first term.

According to multiple reports, McMahon hoped to be named Commerce Secretary, but that post fell to Lutnick after failing to get the Treasury Department role.

She doesn't have much experience in education policy, but she has spent the past few years leading the America First Policy Institute, a think tank that many in Trump's orbit flocked to after he lost the 2020 election.

When he announced her role, Trump pledged that McMahon would champion school choice, a long-sought-after conservative goal to allow public funds to cover the costs of sending children to private and charter schools. Some in the Republican Party have even argued for the dissolution of the Education Department entirely and ceding the policymaking power to state and local governments.

While not a billionaire in her own right, McMahon donated $15 million to Trump's campaign and is married to Vincent McMahon, the former executive chairman of WWE-owner TKO Group Holdings, worth $3 billion.

The McMahons cofounded and ran WWE, and Linda served as CEO for over a decade. Vincent resigned from TKO's board of directors earlier this year after a former employee filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual misconduct.