The truth behind the endless “kids can’t read” discourse

Every month or so, for the past few years, a new dire story has warned of how American children, from elementary school to college age, can no longer read. And every time I read one of these stories, I find myself conflicted. On the one hand, I am aware that every generation complains that the kids who come next are doing everything wrong and have gotten stupider and less respectful. I fear falling into this trap myself, becoming an old man yelling at cloud. On the other hand, with every new story, I find myself asking: … Can the kids read, though? I don’t think I’m alone in this confusion. Similar responses emerge almost every time a new piece arrives with tales of elite college students who can’t get through Pride and Prejudice or another report reveals just how far reading scores have plunged among America’s schoolchildren. “Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively,” Slate reported bleakly in 2024. Within days, a teacher’s blog offered a rebuttal, arguing that there has never been an era where adults were impressed by kids’ reading habits: “Find a news article published since the 1940s that shows that students not only read proficiently but eagerly and a lot. I’ll wait.” “We’ve long seen both of those extremes,” says Elena Forzani, director of the literacy education and reading education programs at Boston University. “In a sense, you could argue both are true or neither are true.” Much of the current anxiety is being driven by the fear that new technologies are scrambling kids’ brains in a way no other generation has faced: smartphones, social media, and now the threat of generative AI, which millions of students are currently using to do their schoolwork. How could such powerful tools not change our children’s ability to process information? Yet on the other hand, there are all those think pieces about how adults had similar worries with every new piece of era-shifting technology that came before, including television. Broadly speaking, there are two different issues that get intertwined together in the “kids can’t read” narrative. The first is the sense from professors that their students are unprepared to read at the level college requires — that while they’re technically literate, they are not sophisticated readers. The second is that at the elementary level, kids’ reading test scores are going down. So is it true? How much panic over kids’ literacy is warranted? Scholars who study the subject, concerned English professors, and experts in the “kids these days” phenomenon told me that the literacy landscape is a lot more nuanced than either of my gut impulses would have led me to believe. A brief history of adults saying, “Kids these days!” When I say that every generation complains about the kids these days, I do mean all of them. We have documentation of this phenomenon going back to Horace. “It’s one of these things you keep seeing generation after generation,” says John Protzko, a psychology researcher at Central Connecticut State University and the co-author of the 2019 study “Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking.” Protzko’s study found that adults tend to judge kids by their own adult standards. If you’re an adult who likes to read, he says, you tend to assume that you read just as diligently as a child. “And then I impose that on society at large: ‘Everyone liked to read as a kid,’” Protzo explains. Rapidly, that false belief can turn into “None of the kids today read like they did in my day.” We’re particularly prone to this kind of false memory when it comes to the attributes on which we pride ourselves. If, for instance, we are proud of being polite, conscientious adults, we feel that children are growing ever more disrespectful. For highly educated people who like to read — like me, and a lot of other journalists who cover literacy, for instance — reading can be a big one. Millennials, who had the misfortune of growing up in the boom of the internet think piece economy, are particularly aware of how common the “kids these days” trope is. As the generation perhaps most loudly accused of historic levels of laziness, neuroticism, whininess, and extended adolescence, we are acutely aware of how easy it is to reflexively dismiss Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I asked Protzko if it was possible to fall into a trap of overcorrecting for the kids-these-days tendency, and to end up overlooking a real problem because you’re afraid of sounding old. “The central problem is that we rely on our intuitions, and we rely on our memories, and we think that they’re accurate,” says Protzko. “But when it comes to something like reading ability, in many cases we do actually have decades of research.” Can kids read in college? Let’s start with the college problem. A spree of recent articles written by or quoting college professors make the case that their students are getting worse at reading, and that in some cases they can no longer even read full books. “Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article,” wrote Adam Kotsko for Slate last year. Kotsko adds that the problem is not with the kids themselves, but with the education system in which they’ve been reared. “We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.” Complaints of the kind Kotsko is making go back at least 10 years. “Is it just me, or are student competencies like basic writing skills in serious peril today?” wrote Azadeh Aalai in Psychology Today in 2014. “Teachers have been reporting anecdotally that even compared to five years ago, many are seeing declines in vocabulary, grammar, writing, and analysis.” Yet there is little hard data that shows such a decline. One recent splashy study led by English professor Susan Carlson evaluated 85 undergraduate English and English education majors on their ability to understand the first seven paragraphs of the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House. “Fifty-eight percent of them could not get through a few paragraphs without being completely lost,” Carlson told me. “Yet 100 percent of them said they could read it with no problem. What that tells me is there’s a disconnect between what people think reading is or what they think they’re doing and what they’re actually doing.” Carlson, a professor of Victorian literature at Pittsburg State University, didn’t set out to make a grand sweeping claim about the literacy of all college students, but to look closely at the inner workings of the minds of a specific cohort to figure out how they thought about reading. She compared them with students from a similar regional Kansas university, but she kept the rest of the study small by design. What she found is that these specific students — despite years of training in literary analysis — lacked the vocabulary, background knowledge, and reading strategies it takes to understand Dickens at a college level. It’s hard to use this data set to extrapolate past that. As Carlson told me over the phone, “85 people is not enough to know anything. I can’t make any kind of assumptions based on that.” Carlson’s study also doesn’t provide a comparative data set from previous years that might show us whether or not there’s been a change in the number of students who can evaluate a complicated text like Bleak House well. Notably, the data was all gathered in 2015, meaning that it was looking at the tail-end millennials who were in college in 2015, not the much-maligned Gen Z. (Why the delay between when the data was gathered and the study was published? “I teach a four-four courseload,” Carlson says.) Carlson told me she has a feeling that her students have gotten noticeably worse at reading over the past five years. “It’s just a feeling, right? Who cares about a feeling?” she says. “But when I talked to other professors, they felt the same way.” Currently, we don’t have enough data to show that college students are graduating with lower reading comprehension abilities than they used to have. The fears around their capabilities are only accelerating as reports emerge of their reliance on ChatGPT to do coursework. Still, what’s actually going on here is an open question. When it comes to childhood literacy rates, though, we’ve got a lot of data. The controversy comes when we try to interpret it. Can kids read in elementary school? When it comes to a childhood literacy crisis, the numbers that all the horror stories cite come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as NAEP or the Nation’s Report Card. NAEP tests a sampling of representative students across the country every year to see how well American students are doing at various different subjects. For the last decade, NAEP reading scores have been in decline. “I track closely the share of students who are not meeting what we define as a basic level of proficiency. These are students who are really struggling with the fundamentals of literacy,” says Martin West, an education professor at Harvard and vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board. “That number is now 40 percent of students in grade four and 33 percent in grade eight.” NAEP’s reading proficiency ratings nosedived during the pandemic years when schools went virtual. But they had already been trending downward before that, says West: “As far back as, depending on the grade level, 2013 or 2015. That’s when reading scores in the US peaked. They’ve been falling since then.” In 2013, only 33 percent of fourth-graders were reading below basic level, and 23 percent of eighth-graders. That’s a 7 percentage point and 10 point difference, respectively, from where we are now. Notably, the scores have held pretty flat among high-achieving students. But among the bottom third of scorers, they’ve plunged. The plight of those kids began receiving increased attention after the massive success of the podcast Sold a Story. Published by APM Reports in 2022, the podcast drew on five years of education reporting by its creator Emily Hanford to make the case that schools have ignored the “science of reading” by skipping over important phonics work to focus on context clues, like telling kids to look at a picture and guess a word. The podcast was so impactful that in its aftermath, at least 25 states passed new legislation on how reading should be taught. The idea that schools overlooked the importance of the science of reading has become a popular explanation behind the long-term drop in reading test scores. But that’s not the case, says Hanford. The methods she critiques in Sold a Story have been popular for much longer than a decade. They’ve been used in different parts of the country on and off since at least the 1960s. “One of the things I object to is a narrative that I often hear which is that we need to go back to the basics and back to the good old days and back to the way things were,” she says. “We don’t have any good evidence that I’m aware of that there are good old days when we were doing such a good job with this before.” The best reading scores the country ever got showed that a third of fourth-graders still hadn’t achieved basic literacy. Another popular explanation for the drop in reading test scores is the Covid lockdowns that shut down schools. Nearly everyone I talked to agreed that Covid exacerbated the problem. Yet as West points out, reading scores started dropping well before lockdowns, from 2013 to 2015. West outlines a few other potential ideas that could play a part in the drop in reading scores. There is, of course, the astronomical rise of screen time among children and teens. Perhaps related to the rise of screens, there is the decline in the number of children who say they read books for fun. There’s also the end of the No Child Left Behind Act, President George W. Bush’s standards-based educational reform, set into place in 2001 and ended by a bipartisan Congress in 2015. While the controversial NCLB was criticized for pushing schools to teach dogmatically around standardized tests, West notes that NAEP scores went up while it was running and started falling after it ended. “We have lots of ideas” about what’s gone wrong, West says. “What we don’t have is definitive evidence.” Not everyone, however, is convinced that the NAEP data is even giving the whole picture. Some of the literacy experts I spoke to felt that NAEP’s standardized tests don’t capture the full possibilities of what literacy might look like for today’s kids. “In order for NAEP to succeed and to have these results year in and year out, it means that we need to hold a particular kind of definition of literacy,” says Antero Garcia, a Stanford professor of education and the vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English. “That’s just not how language functions historically and culturally in societies, right?” He argues that today’s kids can be quite sophisticated with language and hybrid language, like Spanglish, and in complex virtual spaces like the live-streaming platform Twitch, that NAEP just isn’t reflecting. Garcia suggested that the “gap in understanding” between the literacy that lets a kid navigate the screen-in-screen chat scroll of Twitch and the literacy that guides a kid through Bleak House offers schools an opening for education. “Those places of, ‘How do I take this highly literate conversation that might be happening on Twitch and then translate it into an academic essay’ — those feel like opportunities for scaffolding,” says Garcia. “Which oftentimes is not happening in schools, because the ways we evaluate if kids can read and write doesn’t start with the investment in where kids are currently at, and where culture currently thrives.” Forzani is concerned that the recent wave of reforms that have hit schools since Sold a Story have narrowed into a focus on phonics drills (although the podcast emphasizes multiple times that reading involves a lot more than that). “A lot of people are thinking about reading in terms of pretty narrow definitions of comprehension,” says Forzani. “But of course we want kids to be able to make inferences and interpretations beyond just literal interpretations, right? We want them to be able to make higher level inferences and to be able to evaluate and critique text.” Forzani points to research from the UK, where reading curriculums were widely reimagined a few years before the US did the same thing. “They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important,” she says. “But then they’ve also seen, ‘Wait, we did too much of that focus and now we lost sight of really comprehending at a high level.’” West says that the current concern over kids’ ability to read might actually be understated. “I’ve been struck by the lack of a sense of urgency on the part of what seems to be the larger share of the public,” says West. “Literacy is the foundation for everything that we want schooling to be able to do for our children.” Lots of kids can read just fine. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still be concerned. By the end of my reporting, my head was spinning from all the data and studies I had read through. Parsing the whole thing out, though, here’s the conclusion I came to. US schools have never done a very good job at teaching kids to read, but it seems as though there’s meaningful evidence that we’re doing a worse job right now. While high-achieving kids are still reading the way they’ve read for decades, the ones to whom reading doesn’t come easily are failing more now than they used to. We don’t have clear data on what happens when kids get to college. Still, it’s certainly plausible that the problems being documented in the primary education years persist into secondary education as well. It’s not being old or out of touch to say so. Moreover, no one seems to know what the solution is: to endlessly drill kids in phonics, or to try to build a reading curriculum that accounts more effectively for how they communicate today, or both or neither or something else. What seems pretty clear to me is that this is not a problem we should be looking away from. In the meantime, schools are bracing for impact as generative AI continues to make its way onto students’ devices, fundamentally changing the ways they interact with text. “To study the strategies that [students are] going to use to survive is really important,” says Carlson, the English professor who wanted to know what her students were thinking when they read Bleak House, “because they’re not going to hit the wall until later.” Later: when they leave school and come to join us in a world that, for now, remains text-based. Correction, July 9, 11:20 am ET: A previous version of this story misidentified where “kids these days” may have originated from. There’s documentation of this phenomenon going back to Horace.

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The truth behind the endless “kids can’t read” discourse