For the first time in a generation, American students find themselves reading at levels not seen since the turn of the millennium — a quiet crisis made louder by the fact that no other nation among the ninety assessed carries so wide a gulf between its strongest and most struggling readers. The data arrives at a moment of profound institutional disruption, as the Trump administration moves to dismantle the very federal body charged with tracking such outcomes, wagering that dispersing authority and expanding school choice will accomplish what decades of centralized oversight could not. History