American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows With little post-pandemic recovery, experts wonder if screen time and school absence are among the causes. The New York Times January 29, 2025

GailG, Rockville, MD I’m a school librarian at a suburban school.  Most of our kids are middle class but we do have students from low income families as well.  Not only do most kids eschew reading by fifth grade (the Kindergartners are still eager!) but when they do read they are mostly reading graphic novels, which are comics.  We limit them to two of these at a time but they still choose not to check out novels.  In class most of them cannot restate in their own words the content of a short paragraph.  Before vacation when I query them about what they are excited about the vast majority say, “play lots of video games “.  From the trenches, there is no question in my mind that screen time has had a huge negative impact on their reading comprehension.  Trying to convince them to read is an uphill battle when parents are not limiting screen time.  Usually educators get blamed for low reading scores but parents are the ones who need to spend time at home making sure their kids are putting into practice the skills that are being taught at school.

Jeanie Macdonald As a high school teacher, its clear that years of being stuck like glue to their phones has degraded children's ability to focus on any reading longer than a sentence. When I give them six pages to read for homework, they act like their world is falling apart! It's nonsense. They simply have to be made to read more, and read longer books. Books!

AC, UT It doesn't make sense to separate reading comprehension and mathematics. When students can't read, they can't understand the math questions. My evidence is anecdotal. From 1989 to 2000 I taught a quantitative literacy statistics class to thousands of students who hated math. Over time, my students' basic math and reading skills declined, but by 2020 their poor reading comprehension held them back more than their poor math skills.

Linds, Wisc It's not just the pandemic; it's the technology. Kids aren't reading for fun anymore. They're scrolling on TikTok, watching TV, Youtube, etc etc. When I was younger, my mom would take me and my siblings to the library every week - we'd all leave with big bags full of books to read. Now, most libraries revolve around their public computers and free wifi. Kids need to be reintroduced to the idea of reading for pleasure.

Charles NY Technology is not to blame. Its misuse is. I left education well before the pandemic when cell phones were in their infancy. At that point, we were just introducing student to Microsoft Office and how to use search engines. We began teaching graphics, CAD, graphing calculators, and other academic uses of the technology. There was great promise and little peering over the horizon. Soon beepers had given way to cell phones and the lines at the pay phones disappeared however, the devices were slow, mostly only capable of texting while unlimited data plans were scarce if not unaffordable. There were no "Apps", YouTube was in its infancy while FaceBook, Instagram, and the like were not an issue. The nemesis interfering with academic technology was the advent of instant messaging and MySpace (remember that one?) and blocked from school computers. Enter "Smart Phones" which were generally free with a plan, unlimited data, and the explosion of social media. The final nail in the coffin was the advent of the 8 second video (or, whatever it was early Tik Tok) and 55 character "Tweets". Those began to define the attention span and waste time. Finally, Google became so universal and efficient, students (and they are not the only ones) came to both believe and accept that nothing need be "learned". My last years, cell phones were a manageable problem in my work or dealing with my own children in school. Few teachers and parents I currently speak with now make that same assessment.

Annika. MA There are so many contributing factors from screen time to videos to parents to school funding to political interference from school boards and PTAs to social conditions in the community to the child's interest themselves. It is pointless to try to find one sole cause or thing to blame when you have to look at the child's educational progress holistically and within context of the experiences of the broader school community. But, I think that attention span is increasingly becoming an issue that needs to be addressed. About 15 years ago, an acquaintance was teaching college level filmography part-time. He stopped teaching  though because he was frustrated that the student would neither watch or create films that were longer than 3-5 minutes. And these were college age Millennials. More recently the NY Times reported how college professors are receiving students who do not know how to read a full book from start to finish in high school. That they had only been given excerpts from books to study passages. I don't know how to address improving attention, maybe aides in the classroom to help focus students and increase their time on task.

Leneen I was a high school librarian in a top ranked public school. There was NO reading culture. If you read you were considered strange. Students couldn’t understand complex texts. At all. There were no efforts made by administration to develop and support readers. Even English teachers had given up. A very sad state of affairs.

Anonymous Babies in carriages holding phones, toddlers holding iPads in restaurants, parents non-stop on phones rather than conversing with their children, empty classrooms during parent teacher conferences, parents waltzing their children into school two hours after school starts or not caring about absenteeism, kindergarten children coming to school not knowing ABC and 123.  As an elementary school teacher I don’t doubt these findings.  If we don’t get out of the technology bubble and uphold respect for education our children have nothing but an uphill climb.

Greenja FYI + no surprise . . .the college kids ain't reading either. They will spend more time AI-ing short cuts that limit their critical thinking abilities & sabotage their intellectual curiosity.

JAB I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again.  First, Fountas and Pinnell Guided Reading needs to be eliminated from K-3 classrooms and replaced with science based learn to read programs such as Wilson, alongside quality children’s literature and context based vocabulary work.  A group of parents in Massachusetts is leading the fight with a fraud class action claim against Fountas and Pinnell and their publisher — raking in billions nationwide despite decades of failure.  Second, get your screens and phones and tablets out of your kids’ hands except on the rarest of occasions.  If you are the family I see at the restaurant with your children each on a device while you and your partner scroll on your phones, know that the price you pay for what you think is “peace and quiet” is literally the dumbing down of your children.   Not only are you failing to teach them how to listen to people around them and cope with moments of boredom — they are literally losing out on a precious window of brain development.  If you think that’s just “preachy” you are lying to yourself.

Linda K A former co-worker pursued her ME to teach history at Southern CT SU. Stated plainly, her writing and reading skills were marginal at best. I surreptitiously edited and/or re-wrote every document she created for over two years. How can a barely literate person graduate with a master’s and then successfully teach children to be well spoken, well read and well written? Something is wrong with our broken education system and it’s not a new phenomenon in this post-covid period. It’s multi-generational and several decades in the making.

alpenglow As a second grade teacher, I am not surprised by these results. In the 23 years that I have taught, I have watched student misbehavior increase dramatically, and attention spans have similarly decreased. Students used to be excited to learn, but now the vast majority just.... aren't. I don't know why, and I don't know how to fix it, but I do know that my job has gotten dramatically worse and unrewarding to the point that I am likely going to leave the profession at the end of this school year.

Mr Mallard Initially kids need phonics. However, I think the widespread notion that schools "stopped teaching phonics" for decades is overblown. The main problem isn't phonics, it's volume. Kids just don't read enough. If you want kids to read, they have to actually read. Not just do phonics drills. Not just word work. They have to read, a lot, for hours every day, for years and years.

Anon I’m a university professor and I can tell you that a lot of college students cannot read well. The students who can read well go through texts with ease and fluidity. The students who can read but are at an elementary level labor through texts. How do I know? We read together as a group in-class. It’s very disappointing. Semester after semester students arrive to class and a lot of them have trouble reading. How is this possible in 2025 in America?

907guy ITSS -  It's the screens stupid. Kids are being re-programmed to only read short blurbs on their phones. texts, chats, short videos on Tik-Tok, kids have lost their attention span and ability to focus. I'm a teacher and if I assign reading kids freak out. I send out emails and they say they didn't read them because they were too long (less than one page). I was observed by a supervisor and I had my class read out loud and assigned reading for an upcoming quiz. I was later told that kids 14 yo don't read, so don't bother assigning it. I said the opposite, that kids don't read because it isn't assigned and enforced. It's an uphill battle when school administrators appear to have given in to the short attention span syndrome that kids have adopted.

Rainbow I used to teach at a university with a large number of foreign students. The class conversations were exhilarating and they never groaned when asked to read something. Now I teach at a university that's pure American. Last semester in an effort to find out their interests I asked them what they like to read. To a person, the response was, I don't read.