Nobody tells you how disorienting it is to watch your smart kid struggle in school. You've seen the way they think and how they solve problems, but none of that seems to show up in the classroom.
Of all the things you'd expect chess to improve, reading probably isn't the first one that comes to mind.
A two-year study in the Bronx tracked reading scores for kids who joined a chess program against a much larger group of kids who didn't. The chess group started at the 58th percentile in 3rd grade and rose to the 63rd percentile by 5th grade. Of the 491 kids in the control group, more went down in percentile scores than up.
Chess instruction, with no additional reading support, moved reading scores in a way that nothing else did. The researchers pointed to improvements in concentration, general reasoning, and something they called "ego strength," a kid's belief in their own ability to figure things out.
That last part is a pretty interesting finding. Kids who struggle academically may have a confidence problem, and have learned to believe that school isn't for them. But chess has a way of interrupting that belief. There's more overlap between reading a page and reading a chess board than most people realize.
That makes sense since chess is a game built on pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and systems thinking. For kids who process the world that way and think in pictures, see how things connect, and get bored the second something stops being a puzzle, chess is the first activity that's speaking their language.