WASHINGTON — When Usha Vance considered what issues she wanted to tackle as second lady of the United States, her own children were just learning how to read. As she was teaching them to read and love books, she noticed plummeting literacy rates across the country.
“I was really concerned by what I was seeing about the decline in literacy scores, the decline in reading for pleasure,” she shared in an interview with The Daily Wire from her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. She was also noticing “the loss of attention and the attraction that screen-based inputs have to everyone, children and adults.”
“I thought that that was a really good place to put some effort, because there’s so much you can do to counteract that,” the second lady shared. “And I’m in a position where I don’t have a massive budget to deploy. I don’t have an agency that I run. What I have is the ability to bring together different people who are interested in the topic and get them to actually take action … So it was worth taking on.”
The second year of Usha Vance’s Summer Reading Challenge brought in over 30,000 students, averaging around the age of eight, between second and third grade. That’s double the number that her pilot program in the summer of 2025 received.
“Last summer it was a pilot program,” she explained. “We came up with the idea just a few weeks before rolling it out.”
The program was focused on a specific problem: the backsliding that children experience in the summer when they are not in school. Studies show that during the summer months, children can lose up to three months of learning, a problem particularly exacerbated during the coronavirus pandemic.
“They end the school year at a certain literacy level, you know, with a certain engagement with text, and then they forget it over the summer, and then they have to restart in the following [year],” she shared. “And we wanted to think of a really simple way that people could tackle that at home with minimal resources and minimal sort of stress.”
With a successful pilot program behind her, Usha Vance focused on enhancing the number of participants and making the challenge a rewarding process so that the children would be excited to do it — and maybe jumpstart a love of reading in the years to come.
This year, each student read 12 books over the course of the challenge, resulting in more than 360,000 books read, 150,000 distinct book titles, and 35,000 distinct authors, including Mary Pope Osborne, author of the beloved “Magic Tree House” series; Dr. Seuss; J.K. Rowling; and Gertrude Chandler Warner, who penned “The Boxcar Children” series, which chronicles the adventures of four orphans who make a home in the boxcar of a train.
The challenge received submissions from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa, a White House official shared, noting that Texas, California, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, and New York were the top states to submit.
“It really magnifies the impact,” Vance reflected, thinking of the many children and the books they read. “And also, I think really importantly, we have all the pieces in place for it to become even bigger next year. We put in so much front-end effort that I’m really excited to see what we can do next year with all of that work done. We’ll try to get more schools, more libraries, and so on.”
The effort comes amid concerns from educational institutions that American children are struggling to read at their appropriate level, a decline that began during the coronavirus pandemic. The 2024 National Assessment of Education Progress found that 40% of fourth graders were reading below the basic level for their grade, while only 31% were reading at the proficient level. Meanwhile, the NAEP found that 33% of eighth graders were reading below the basic level of their grade and only 30% were above the proficient level.
“When you have children, and I think anyone with small children in this position, you’re thinking about how you want to raise them to be the people that you want them to be, and the landscape that they’re growing up in is so different from the one that I grew up in that I think it required almost more thought than I anticipated,” Vance told The Daily Wire.
“So we, both JD and I, were always reading about this. We’re trying to understand: How do we want them to engage with the devices that we all have in our pocket? How do we want them to engage with knowledge? What is it that we want them to know or believe is important when they grow up? And so that was kind of the process where I came to feel that childhood literacy was a project that was important beyond the scope of our family and had been so important within our family.”
This year’s challenge brought in partners from all over — partners who, only a few years ago, might have shied away from collaborating with a Republican administration. But Vance worked with the Cub Scouts and partnered with the NFL, Scholastic, and the Toy Association for prizes (she joked that her daughter Mirabel was most excited about the edible bubbles prize). There was even a raffle for a Kindle for the winners from each state, and a raffle for a trip to the White House.
“And then we have partners who have helped with both events to spread the word and also with prizes, which is kind of one of the big innovations of this year,” the second lady noted. Those partners included the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Education, the NEH, the NEA, and more. “Any kid who participates got a certificate like last year and a bookmark like last year, but also got a special code to go on our prize website and receive the prize of their choice.”
“The whole point was not really to bribe children to reading,” she explained, “but to make them feel like someone was seeing that they had put in all this effort and excited about it on their behalf.”
Vance’s interest in the initiative stemmed not only from her experience teaching her own children to read, but also from her own love of literature and background as an avid reader. She’s currently reading “I, Claudius” by Robert Graves and keeps an up-to-date Goodreads profile, she told The Daily Wire, while Vice President JD Vance has been reading their children “The Hobbit” before bed.
“I loved reading as a child,” she shared. “I grew up in a household that was full of books. Actually, my graduate work when I was at the University of Cambridge was in the history of the book … in law school, I was really interested in copyright. I continued doing that as a lawyer.”
“There are so many ways in which the book, as an object, as a cultural phenomenon, as a thing, a source of knowledge, has been so important to me,” she shared. “But when I arrived here and needed to think about ways to fill my time, what was really on my mind was my children — the fact that they were becoming literate themselves.”
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