From my perspective and experience, two challenges to adolescent’s literacy development that currently impact learning in US schools are student socioeconomic status and the rigidity of state standardized testing. Student socioeconomic status is a challenge when students face barriers when learning that are caused by their socio-economic status. Many times, barriers in communication and culture interfere with the process of education. Focusing on overcoming some of the barriers can help with contributing to improving adolescent literacy development. A lack of culturally responsive instruction and cultural motivation in lessons can have negative results on adolescent literacy development. The rigidity of state standardized testing is another challenge to adolescent literacy development. State standardized testing can become a challenge when assessing student’s skills as many students have anxiety over test taking. Due to the states using these testing assessments to determine student proficiency, standardized tests are considered indicative of student knowledge based on state benchmarks. Realizing the fact that prior knowledge plays a major role in literacy development is important. Students have differing levels of literacy performance skills and learn in a variety of ways. Thus, state benchmarks and standards alone only result in teachers ‘teaching-to-the-test’. This form of education does not incorporate the recent research on evidence based skills that students should know prior to taking standardized tests. The research shows that students that lack these skills tend to not perform as well as students that possess these skills. When students do not have the basic skills associated with responding to questions that appear on standardized tests, they will not perform with high levels of proficiency. When a student lacks knowledge that is required to demonstrate mastery of problem solving on a standardized test, the student skills are not properly assessed and results may not reflect student overall ability.