INDIANAPOLIS — For the fifth consecutive year, Hoosier students continue to achieve gains on the Indiana Reading Evaluation and Determination (IREAD) assessment. Following a historic jump last year, scores once again increased in 2026 — climbing 7.5 percentage points since 2021. With nearly 89% of students now reading by the end of third grade, Indiana’s literacy rates have surpassed pre-pandemic levels.
Statewide, results show that 88.7% of Indiana’s third grade students demonstrated proficient reading skills on the IREAD assessment. This is an improvement of nearly 1.5 percentage points over results for the 2024-2025 school year, the second-largest single-year increase since the assessment began.
Prior to 2021, Indiana’s literacy rates declined every year, except one. The pandemic made the literacy crisis worse, resulting in the state’s lowest literacy rates on record. Indiana continues to make historic investments aimed at helping more students learn to read, leading to five straight years of improvement.
State-level results are also now available for the 2026 Indiana Learning Evaluation and Assessment Readiness Network (ILEARN) assessment. Taken by students in grades three through eight, ILEARN is unique to Indiana to meet federal requirements and is not used by any other state. ILEARN measures student achievement and growth based on Indiana-specific Academic Standards, making it a rigorous measure of whether students are on track for the academic demands of a four-year college. In 2026, 42% of students were proficient in English/language arts and 42.7% were proficient in Math.
For more information on results, visit https://www.in.gov/doe/it/data-center-and-reports/