A fireside chat with Usha Vance

Washington, DC

Usha Vance is on a mission. This year’s low reading scores have shocked the White House into action – so they have placed the Yale-educated Second Lady at the helm of the reading recovery ship. But as well as addressing faltering childhood literacy, Vance has a host of other tasks to complete for the Trump administration.

Vance described her role in Trump 2.0 at the annual US-India Strategic Partnership Forum hosted at the Waldorf Astoria in DC Tuesday. It includes reading challenges, the Special Olympics and US-India relations – fueled by her children’s interactions with the country’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The conference followed the launch of the “Second Lady Summer Reading Challenge.” From the stage, Vance described the initiative as a “small” way of helping American kids get better at reading. “Pick up a book, read 12 of them, write it down and send it in to us,” she said. “If you do it, that’s great, and we’ll send you a little prize, and we’ll enter the kids into a drawing to come visit the White House and have a little fun in DC.”

In January, education researcher at the Calder Center Dan Goldhaber told the Washington Post that the most recent standardized reading scores (NAEP scores) are not a “canary in the coal mine,” but are “a flock of dead birds in the coal mine.”

While some children will be motivated to read 12 books and submit their titles to the White House, the summer incentive may miss the portion of American children who are struggling the most with reading: children from low-income households, whose academic ability has been on the decline since the Covid-19 pandemic and related school closures. A weighty factor in the decline of reading scores is the worsened performance of children who already had the lowest scores.

Vance also fears that America’s youth have lost their ability for “sustained thought and reflection,” saying that she believes concentration is under attack with the advances of social media. Without sustained attention, “you really lose something,” Vance said.

This reading challenge will likely not be the last time Vance dips her toes into child literacy. “Our goal is to keep rolling out little things, bit by bit, and see which ones work and which ones don’t and expand the ones that work,” she said.

The Second Lady also took some time to describe her family’s recent trip to India at the end of April. She described it as “a real opportunity for us to cement that personal relationship” with Prime Minister Modi. Hinting she believed the two countries’ relationship would deepen during the Trump administration, Vance said while “the US and India’s relationship has ebbed and flowed,” she believes the next four years will be a “time of great opportunity, and I think if my husband were here, he’d say the same thing.”

Prime Minister Modi welcomed Vance’s family to the country and invited them to his home during their visit. “When we were at the Prime Minister’s residence, our son was just so taken by everything, and then taken by the entire cart of mangos that was available for him to eat, that he announced to the Prime Minister that he could maybe live there and started making his plans,” Vance said with a laugh. She added that her children have “been all over the place, and they’ve had wonderful opportunities to see the world, but this was really special to them.”

Though she neglected to include any specific details, Vance said she would continue to be involved with the Special Olympics. In March, the Second Lady led the presidential delegation at the Turin 2025 Winter Games. Vance added that if these two projects don’t take up all her time, “we’ll add some more.”