America’s literacy crisis isn’t what you think

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

“Kids can’t read anymore.”

We heard this refrain earlier this month, when some connected a decline in reading among young people, as well as a shift toward getting news and information from short-form video, with the recent presidential election victory of Donald Trump. But the concerns about kids’ reading have been piling up for years, with educators and other commentators worrying that students can’t recognize letters, that kids’ novels are falling out of fashion, and that young people are getting into college without being able to read a full book.

I know that the pandemic took a toll on kids’ test scores in reading and math. But I also know that older generations love to complain about ne’er-do-well young folks who can’t be bothered to crack open a book. So I reached out to educators and literacy scholars to find out how far behind kids really are, and what their reading skills (or lack thereof) mean for their future as voters, news consumers, and citizens of the world.

While kids’ reading performance has slid in recent years, some experts say the language of “crisis” is overblown. In fact, reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), one of the most widely used nationwide measures of student achievement, haven’t changed that much since the tests were introduced in 1969, Catherine Snow, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me. 

“They haven’t plummeted,” Snow said. “They didn’t even plummet during Covid. They went down a little bit.”

What has plummeted, however, is how much kids read, especially outside of school. In 1984, the first year for which data is available, 35 percent of 13-year-olds reported reading for fun “almost every day,” according to NAEP. By 2023, that figure was down to 14 percent, and 31 percent of respondents said they never read for fun at all. Kids are also faring worse on tests that measure their information literacy, including their ability to recognize reliable sources.

Those results are indicative of a broader problem. Kids may be learning basic literacy, but “they’re not reading in the ways that they need to read in order to be prepared for the tasks of learning and critical thinking,” Snow said. And a decline in those critical thinking skills has big implications not just for young people today, but for society as a whole. 

“These are our voters,” Christina Cover, a special education teacher in the Bronx who leads the Project for Adolescent Literacy at the nonprofit Seek Common Ground, told me. “These are people that are really going to be taking us into what’s next for our country and for our world.”

Kids’ reading scores have been (relatively) stable for decades

The NAEP tests, administered every two years for five decades, offer a bird’s-eye view of how American kids’ reading proficiency has changed over time. After climbing through the 2000s, scores began to dip around 2012, a trend that intensified with the pandemic. 

That drop has educators concerned, with many calling for expanded tutoring, summer school, and other supports to help kids get back on track. At the same time, even the post-Covid numbers aren’t that far off from historical norms. In 1971, the first year for which data is available, the average NAEP score for 9-year-olds was 208 out of a possible 500. In 2022, it was 215.

To be clear, those scores aren’t great. It’s also disappointing to see students losing some of the ground they gained through the 2000s, and the pandemic dealt very real setbacks, especially for low-income students and other already-underserved groups. Teachers now have to “reach back, and maybe grab or review those previous standards” that students should have been taught in 2020 and 2021, Evelyn Rudolph, a reading interventionist at LEAD Academy, a public charter school in Montgomery, Alabama, told me. 

But the story of students’ reading scores over the last several decades is one of “a very stable level of mediocrity,” Snow has said, not of sudden crisis. 

But reading for pleasure has plummeted

That’s the good-ish news. More worrisome — or at least more precipitous — is the decline in kids’ reading for pleasure. While there were hints of a decrease in the ’90s, the slide seems to have started in earnest in the 2010s — in 2012, 27 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun every day, compared with just 17 percent in 2020. 

Experts aren’t exactly sure why so many kids stopped reading, but the trend coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones, said Ebony Walton, a statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP tests. Other hypotheses include funding cuts to libraries, and an excessive focus on standardized testing that has crowded out practices that instill a love of reading, like teachers reading books aloud to students.

Whatever the case, the decline of reading for fun is a problem, and not just for children’s authors. “When a student reads for fun and enjoys reading outside of school, there are so many benefits that they might not even realize,” from learning new vocabulary to gaining “the background knowledge needed to approach different academic areas in school,” Cover said. 

The skills that students use when reading for fun — especially reading longer texts — are also the same ones they need for everything from reading car manuals to “listening to political discourse and making sense of it,” Snow said.

The importance of reading skills for civic engagement has been a hot-button topic lately, with Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor calling young people today a “generation trending toward post-literacy” that “gets its information from bits and bobs of video while scrolling.” While “post-literacy” might be a stretch, Snow and other experts are concerned that the decline in reading could make young people more susceptible to disinformation. 

There’s some evidence that this is already happening. US eighth-graders’ average score on the International Computer and Information Literacy Study assessment, which measures skills including recognizing reliable online sources, dropped 37 points between 2018 and 2023, to 482 out of a possible 700. American students fared worse on the assessment than students in most European countries, as well as South Korea and Taiwan.

The decline in reading for pleasure can feel impossible to reverse, given the number of alternatives available to kids today. But experts say some simple strategies can help. For Snow, it’s about treating reading not simply as an academic skill to master, but “as a tool for engaging in important activities, like learning about things you’re interested in.” Reading can be a way to engage with the social justice issues that many tweens and teens are passionate about — “but those connections are not always made in schools,” Snow said.

It’s also important to encourage students to read what they like, in the way they like, whether that’s in a book or on an iPad or other device, Cover said. More companies are springing up to create reading materials specifically for Gen Alpha audiences, like Storyshares, which offers books written by young people themselves.

Kids “are reading in the world around them every single day,” Cover said. It’s up to educators to show them that “it’s not just something in isolation, but something that can enrich every other area of their life.”

What I’m reading

The accessories retailer Claire’s, a staple of many ’90s mall outings, is launching a fragrance collection in an effort to appeal to what it calls “Gen Zalpha” customers. The scents, priced at $24.99 or less, include one that smells like pistachio and vanilla.

Schools in California and around the country are racing to prepare for the Trump administration and its potential effects on undocumented and LGBTQ students.

Trump Health and Human Services pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is correct that chronic diseases like diabetes and asthma are worryingly common in American children, according to the New York Times. He is wrong, however, to blame vaccines and fluoridated water for the problem.

My 2-year-old and I have been enjoying Little Owl’s Night, a very sweet board book that flips the bedtime story script by having its protagonist go to sleep when morning comes. It also includes the eerie line, “Mama, tell me again how night ends.”

From my inbox

Last week, I asked about your kids’ experiences with reading, and one reader, Kelly, had an experience that might be helpful for kids who struggle with reading for fun. “Two of my four children have dyslexia, so we were a little slower to become a ‘read to yourself’ family,” Kelly wrote. “But audiobooks meant they still grew up loving reading from an early age… just in a different form.” The kids’ grandmother “introduced my then-3-year-old daughter to Peter Pan on audiobook on her iPod, earbuds attached, and my daughter was hooked,” Kelly wrote. “In the nine years since, we’ve checked out literal thousands of audiobooks on Libby — for free thanks to the Los Angeles Public Library — and my kids listen for several hours every day.”