We’ve been having a debate about “book bans” in recent years, but given the steep decline in student literacy, the deeper question is how anyone would notice whether a book is available in a school library or not.
The New York Times published an eye-opening report on a study by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford documenting steep declines in student test scores, especially in reading. Over the past 10 years, reading scores have declined in 83 percent of school districts. What looked like a COVID-driven catastrophe is, instead, part of a long-running trend.
Reading scores were falling at a similar clip before the pandemic, in 2017-2019, and continued to fall into 2024. In a third of school districts, kids are reading a full grade level below where they were in 2015. This follows what had been a steady increase in test scores from 1990 to the 2010s.
The ability to read is foundational to a child’s development. It enhances verbal fluency, memory, concentration and executive function. It is associated with academic success and sundry advantages throughout life. That our schools are falling down so badly on such an elemental matter is nothing less than a civilizational failure.
Our children aren’t learning to read, in part, because we’ve forgotten how to teach them. We decided to jettison a commonsensical, tried-and-true method of reading instruction — phonics — for faddish theories that haven’t worked. It is notable that states showing improvement between 2022-2025 embraced phonics, which now goes under the rubric “the science of reading.”
It also can’t be a coincidence that these harrowing trends are playing out against the backdrop of ubiquitous screens in schools. Schools are starting to ban mobile phones, but the screen that they take away with one hand, they give with the other. According to a Times survey, 80 percent of teachers say that students at their schools have a device assigned to them; it was only a third in 2019. More than 80 percent said that kids get devices … by kindergarten.
It would have been comparable recklessness if schools had decided at the outset of the television age that every schoolchild needed a personal TV. Parents struggle to get their kids off devices at home, and then send them to school, where they read “To Kill a Mockingbird” on an iPad.
Now, books haven’t disappeared from classrooms, but they aren’t nearly as prevalent as they should be. A new study by the Rand Corporation found that most English teachers assigned at least one full book during the school year, although 9 percent didn’t assign any, and roughly two-thirds assigned between only one to four.
Engaging with a whole book in print is so important because not all reading is equal. One analysis found that “digital reading does improve comprehension skills, but the beneficial effect is between six and seven times smaller than that of print reading.” So, too, reading a book is better than reading a series of extended passages; it requires more attention and greater immersion.
As education expert Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute points out, it’s a mistake to think of reading as solely a technical skill because reading comprehension also depends on what the great educational theorist E.D. Hirsch called “cultural literacy,” the basic facts about history, civics, art and the like that form our common knowledge. To our great detriment, schools have downgraded this, too.
The worst-case scenario is that we have become a screen culture that is capable only of producing screen kids. A report last year in the journal iScience found that reading for pleasure steadily declined from 2003 to 2023. On top of evidence that reading also fell from the 1940s to 2003, this makes for an 80-year decline.
The poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky said, “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” And not being capable of reading them is even worse than that.
Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.
