By Rich Lowry
Friday, May 15, 2026
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 ten years, reading scores have declined in
83 percent of school districts.
What looked like a Covid-19-driven catastrophe is,
instead, part of a long-running trend. Reading scores were falling at a similar
clip prior to the pandemic, in the years 2017 to 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 that showed improvement between
2022 and 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 New
York 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 and 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, since 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 only capable 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.
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