We Must Invest in Early Education to Improve Children’s Literacy
By GEEARS
Third grade is a bellwether when it comes to literacy. Research shows that children who are reading with proficiency by third grade are four times more likely to graduate from high school. They’re also less likely to need government assistance as adults and less likely to engage in criminal activity.
That’s why the results of our state’s latest standardized assessments, known as Georgia Milestones, caught our attention. In 2025, only 35% of third graders demonstrated proficiency on the English Language Arts assessment. This is a three-percentage-point decrease from 2024 and a tremendous drop relative to 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, when 42% of third graders tested as proficient.
One might be tempted to blame 2025’s results on the pandemic’s continued effects on education. But a closer look at the trajectory from 2019 to 2025 (absent 2020, when the Georgia Milestones weren’t administered) tells a different story.
In 2021 and 2022, third grade proficiency dropped to 36% and 37%, respectively, a trend seen in states across the country. From there, we began to see recovery. Thirty-nine percent of third grade readers were proficient in 2023 and a close 38% were proficient in 2024. But in 2025, that dip descended further, to 35%.
What explains the Milestones’ shifting trajectory? While there are likely many factors at play, we know that children’s experiences during the years leading up to third grade—the ages of birth through eight—are critical in shaping their literacy skills.
The first years of life—when young children experience their most consequential brain development at the rate of one million new neural connections every second—lay the foundation for all the years that follow.
A child who experiences high-quality early education during these first years has a stronger foundation for future learning. Children who don’t have this access—a group that disproportionately includes children living in poverty—are more likely to miss that critical third grade milestone.
To rectify this disparity, Georgia urgently needs to strengthen its early childhood education ecosystem. Our leaders have made several significant steps forward, including passage of the Georgia Early Literacy Act, assembly of the Senate Study Committee on Access to Affordable Childcare, and a commitment of almost $100 million to make critical improvements to our state’s Lottery-funded Pre-K program. Private entities, non-profits, and community leaders have collaborated to create the Georgia Literacy Commission. But the 2025 Milestones results indicate that, collectively, we must do more.
“Our state has shown that we understand the critical connection between high-quality early education and third-grade reading proficiency,” says Mindy Binderman, GEEARS’ Executive Director. “Our existing initiatives have indeed increased quality. But they haven’t fully addressed a core problem many Georgians face—a lack of access. As families navigate historic inflation rates and the skyrocketing cost of living, many simply can’t afford the early education they desperately need.”
We therefore recommend. . .
- Continuing the state’s critical investment in Georgia’s nationally recognized Pre-K program.
- Making a sustained and significant in Childcare and Parent Services (CAPS), a child care scholarship that helps eligible working families afford high-quality care.
- Continuing to align our early education and K-3 systems, enabling elementary educators to build upon children’s earliest experiences and increase quality across grade levels, learning settings, and curriculum and policy development.
Only by making serious and strategic investments in the years leading up to third grade can we improve reading results in third grade. The trajectory of our Milestones scores shows that we urgently need to make those investments now.