Reading scores for students in the United States have declined significantly in the last 15 years, a slide which continues in the most recent Nation’s Report Card.

Some point to the school closures during the Covid pandemic as cause for this decline. Doubtless the lockdowns had an impact, yet data shows that test scores were already declining. Covid seems more a stumbling block than a cause for these lower scores.

Exacerbated by the pandemic, absenteeism has increased among school age children. Certainly too many missed school days would affect students’ test results.

Social media, games, and other screen activities have also left their mark. Numerous researchers and commentators have demonstrated the negative effects of this explosion of technology vis-à-vis the reading of books – not just on students but on adults as well. The good news? Many state education systems and private academies have banned or restricted the use of phones on campus, with the results yet to be processed.

Many of these students also lack examples of adult readers. A 2022 Gallup Poll shows Americans reading fewer books for pleasure per year than ever. If adults don’t value reading except on their screens, then why expect anything but the same from children?

Incompetent teachers, faulty techniques, and poorly disciplined classrooms must also bear some responsibility for the jump in the number of poor readers. Parents are at fault as well, for fewer of them are reading aloud to their young children, and of those who do, less than half consider these read-alouds “fun.”

Yet there are some positives in this bleak picture.

Some states, like Mississippi and Alabama, have revamped their reading programs, deploying a strategy that goes under the catchall phrase “the science of reading.” This approach begins with the teaching of phonics, with students sounding out words rather than guessing the meaning based on pictures or context in a sentence. It also aims at expanding vocabulary and fluency in reading over time. Whether it’s the technique or simply a major shift in emphasis toward reading, this program has brought success. Both Mississippi and Alabama, ranked low on the educational totem pole not so long ago, have in a relatively short time seen vast improvements in student performance, thereby bucking the national trend of decline.

There are anomalies as well. Americans may be reading fewer books, yet the sale of books remains strong. Moreover, in the last few years hundreds of small independent bookshops have sprung up around the country. Why? Were these shops founded by quixotic bibliophiles with stars in their eyes or is there a growing market print and paper, particularly for used books?

Combine all these circumstances, and we find no single answer as to why reading scores have fallen. Likely, all these and other factors have brought on this deterioration in schools and the growing disinterest of the American public in reading books.

What is of greater importance, however, are the consequences.

Right now about 45 million Americans, 21% of the population, are functionally illiterate, meaning they read below a fifth-grade level. Besides being a personal handicap, this illiteracy costs the country more than a trillion dollars a year.

Can we survive as a republic with so many people unable to make sense of a pharmaceutical prescription or understand some basic article on technology?

Moreover, untold millions of readers, both young and old, find themselves lacking the stamina to read a book and complain of an inability to focus, a condition most attribute to online media and social media. We open up our screens and then jump from post to post, from article to article, skimming, lifting snatches of information from our devices, and then muddling them up or forgetting them altogether.

Again, the question: Can a republic survive when the minds of voters are a hodge-podge of confusing information and disjointed thoughts?

The solution to all these problems isn’t to wait for government to take a hand or for schools to change. We must act on our own, teaching our children the joy, wisdom, and knowledge books can deliver. This endeavor offers a spectrum of choices, from reading fairy tales to preschoolers to family reading circles, from introducing kids to the wonderful biographies about our country’s historic figures to starting book clubs in the home for our teens and their friends.

The question “What has changed?” has only one real answer: “We have. Our culture has.” But we don’t have to be swept away in that change. We can resist by keeping books and reading alive, a protest, incidentally, which should be filled with pleasure.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

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