essay about decline of reading

Why it matters that teens are reading less

Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University

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Jean Twenge has received funding from the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and is a consultant for JANA Partners.

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Most of us spend much more time with digital media than we did a decade ago. But today’s teens have come of age with smartphones in their pockets. Compared to teens a couple of decades ago, the way they interact with traditional media like books and movies is fundamentally different.

My co-authors and I analyzed nationally representative surveys of over one million U.S. teens collected since 1976 and discovered an almost seismic shift in how teens are spending their free time .

Increasingly, books seem to be gathering dust.

It’s all about the screens

By 2016, the average 12th grader said they spent a staggering six hours a day texting, on social media, and online during their free time. And that’s just three activities; if other digital media activities were included, that estimate would surely rise.

Teens didn’t always spend that much time with digital media. Online time has doubled since 2006, and social media use moved from a periodic activity to a daily one. By 2016, nearly nine out of 10 12th-grade girls said they visited social media sites every day.

Meanwhile, time spent playing video games rose from under an hour a day to an hour and a half on average. One out of 10 8th graders in 2016 spent 40 hours a week or more gaming – the time commitment of a full-time job.

With only so much time in the day, doesn’t something have to give?

Maybe not. Many scholars have insisted that time online does not displace time spent engaging with traditional media . Some people are just more interested in media and entertainment, they point out, so more of one type of media doesn’t necessarily mean less of the other.

However, that doesn’t tell us much about what happens across a whole cohort of people when time spent on digital media grows and grows. This is what large surveys conducted over the course of many years can tell us.

Movies and books go by the wayside

While 70 percent of 8th and 10th graders once went to the movies once a month or more, now only about half do. Going to the movies was equally popular from the late 1970s to the mid-2000s, suggesting that Blockbuster video and VCRs didn’t kill going to the movies.

But after 2007 – when Netflix introduced its video streaming service – moviegoing began to lose its appeal. More and more, watching a movie became a solitary experience. This fits a larger pattern: In another analysis, we found that today’s teens go out with their friends considerably less than previous generations did.

But the trends in moviegoing pale in comparison to the largest change we found: An enormous decline in reading. In 1980, 60 percent of 12th graders said they read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school.

By 2016, only 16 percent did – a huge drop, even though the book, newspaper or magazine could be one read on a digital device (the survey question doesn’t specify format).

The number of 12th graders who said they had not read any books for pleasure in the last year nearly tripled, landing at one out of three by 2016. For iGen – the generation born since 1995 who has spent their entire adolescence with smartphones – books, newspapers and magazines have less and less of a presence in their daily lives.

Of course, teens are still reading. But they’re reading short texts and Instagram captions, not longform articles that explore deep themes and require critical thinking and reflection. Perhaps as a result, SAT reading scores in 2016 were the lowest they have ever been since record keeping began in 1972.

It doesn’t bode well for their transition to college, either. Imagine going from reading two-sentence captions to trying to read even five pages of an 800-page college textbook at one sitting. Reading and comprehending longer books and chapters takes practice, and teens aren’t getting that practice.

There was a study from the Pew Research Center a few years ago finding that young people actually read more books than older people . But that included books for school and didn’t control for age. When we look at pleasure reading across time, iGen is reading markedly less than previous generations.

The way forward

So should we wrest smartphones from iGen’s hands and replace them with paper books?

Probably not: smartphones are teens’ main form of social communication.

However, that doesn’t mean they need to be on them constantly. Data connecting excessive digital media time to mental health issues suggests a limit of two hours a day of free time spent with screens, a restriction that will also allow time for other activities – like going to the movies with friends or reading.

Of the trends we found, the pronounced decline in reading is likely to have the biggest negative impact. Reading books and longer articles is one of the best ways to learn how to think critically, understand complex issues and separate fact from fiction. It’s crucial for being an informed voter, an involved citizen, a successful college student and a productive employee.

If print starts to die, a lot will go with it.

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The Pandemic Will Worsen Our Reading Problem. Another Outcome Is Possible

Illustration of teachers helping students climb books.

Corrected : A previous version of this essay misstated the name of Emily Freitag’s organization.

The data on the foundational literacy skills of the class of 2032—the children who were in kindergarten during the shutdown and 1st graders during this bumpy and inequitable 2020-21 school year—are terrifying. According to one commonly used reading assessment , the DIBELS benchmark measures, the percentage of students falling into the “well-below benchmark” category that predicts future reading failure grew from 26 percent in December 2019 to 43 percent in December 2020. All demographic subgroups were affected, but Black and Hispanic students were particularly impacted. There is no precedent for this kind of decline in the last 20 years of using these reading measures.

The foundational learning in early years makes future learning possible and builds confidence in students’ ability to learn. Delayed and disrupted schooling in K-2 creates gaps that compound over time. The patterns of education outcomes that followed past school closures caused by outbreaks or natural disasters suggest that we will see these heart-wrenching results continue in the class of 2032’s schooling data, income, and lifetime outcomes.

If these historical patterns hold true, we can expect everything from 3rd grade state test scores to Algebra 1 completion to high school graduation will show similarly stark and inequitable declines. Postsecondary completion, lifetime earnings, incarceration rates, and lifetime expectancy will correlate. The children of the class of 2032 will feel the effects. Our country will be able to measure the impact in contracted GDP.

However, another outcome is possible. While data predict these trends, no child is condemned to this path. We know there are teachers who help children beat these odds every year. If this can be done for some children, it can be done for all children. One hundred percent of the class of 2032 could learn to read with command and fluency. We might not be able to do it by the end of their 3rd grade year, but we can do it by the end of 5th grade. It is well within our collective capability to give every student in the class of 2032 and every class that follows command of reading.

We know more about how children learn to read than we do about any other content area. We know that learning to read starts by hearing and manipulating sounds. We know students then connect symbols to those sounds, unlocking a code we use to interpret and communicate in print. The English-language code is not simple—there are 44 unique sounds—but we know the best order in which to teach children those sounds. Teaching a child to read is both complex and doable.

The real challenge is how to engineer effective literacy instruction at scale. Every school system has individual teachers who are famous for helping every single child learn to read, and some schools consistently produce more readers than others. But very few schools and no school systems can deliver a guarantee.

The components of a functional early-literacy system are clear: high-quality, systematic curriculum; trained teachers; targeted assessments; effective data meetings; and sufficient time on task. There are also clear processes to assess, group, and instruct students, as well as monitor their progress. What we don’t yet know is how to help schools combine the component parts and move through the steps with sufficient precision to produce reliable results for every child, in every classroom.

If school leaders set the intention to ensure 100 percent of the class of 2032 achieves mastery of foundational reading skills, the path would require at least three things:

Leaders must track results with discipline, accountability, and the expectation that success is possible. This involves looking at school- and systemwide data every quarter, identifying by name the students who need support, conveying a clear message to teams that 100 percent of students are expected to get to proficiency, and continuously trying new approaches and improving the offerings until every student is successful.
Leaders must ensure every school has the key components of a cohesive literacy instructional program. Teachers, leaders, and support staff need to be trained on the science of reading. Every school needs a strong, evidence-based foundational reading curriculum as the basis for instruction. The curriculum must be supported by effective screeners and diagnostic assessments to indicate which students are falling behind and pinpoint where students are in the progression of foundational skills. Educators need sufficient time in the day for instruction and collaborative planning. And each school needs someone who knows how to make sure these pieces work together effectively.
Leaders must obsess over concrete progress. Progress comes when every teacher, caretaker, and staff member who engages with a student’s reading instruction can identify the exact letters, sounds, and sound-spelling patterns that child is working on in a given two-week interval. Anything more general will not power the progress students need. Getting everyone on the same page with this level of specificity will take concentrated and consistent leadership. Every school needs a leader who is focused on little else than literacy instruction, and every school system needs to allocate real focus and attention across the system.

Supporting every student to be able to read with proficiency is hard, but we can do hard things. In the past century, we eradicated smallpox and doubled the human lifespan ; in the last year, we developed and scaled vaccines for a novel virus. Educators are a profoundly capable group. We can eradicate illiteracy.

The stakes are high, and the alarm bells are ringing. If we cannot support our young learners during this critical time, we will all lose out. If we commit to get 100 percent of the class of 2032 to read on grade level by the end of 5th grade, we will find a way. And we will see the benefits to our country and communities for generations to come.

A version of this article appeared in the July 14, 2021 edition of Education Week as What It Would Take to Eradicate Illiteracy

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Twilight of the Books

By Caleb Crain

A recent study has shown a steep decline in literary reading among schoolchildren.

In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.

You wouldn’t think so, however, if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”

This decline is not news to those who depend on print for a living. In 1970, according to Editor & Publisher International Year Book , there were 62.1 million weekday newspapers in circulation—about 0.3 papers per person. Since 1990, circulation has declined steadily, and in 2006 there were just 52.3 million weekday papers—about 0.17 per person. In January 1994, forty-nine per cent of respondents told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that they had read a newspaper the day before. In 2006, only forty-three per cent said so, including those who read online. Book sales, meanwhile, have stagnated. The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005. In “To Read or Not to Read,” the N.E.A. reports that American households’ spending on books, adjusted for inflation, is “near its twenty-year low,” even as the average price of a new book has increased.

More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen. The Department of Education found that reading skills have improved moderately among fourth and eighth graders in the past decade and a half, with the largest jump occurring just before the No Child Left Behind Act took effect, but twelfth graders seem to be taking after their elders. Their reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent. The steepest declines were in “reading for literary experience”—the kind that involves “exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works,” in the words of the department’s test-makers. In 1992, fifty-four per cent of twelfth graders told the Department of Education that they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only thirty-seven per cent said they did.

The erosion isn’t unique to America. Some of the best data come from the Netherlands, where in 1955 researchers began to ask people to keep diaries of how they spent every fifteen minutes of their leisure time. Time-budget diaries yield richer data than surveys, and people are thought to be less likely to lie about their accomplishments if they have to do it four times an hour. Between 1955 and 1975, the decades when television was being introduced into the Netherlands, reading on weekday evenings and weekends fell from five hours a week to 3.6, while television watching rose from about ten minutes a week to more than ten hours. During the next two decades, reading continued to fall and television watching to rise, though more slowly. By 1995, reading, which had occupied twenty-one per cent of people’s spare time in 1955, accounted for just nine per cent.

The most striking results were generational. In general, older Dutch people read more. It would be natural to infer from this that each generation reads more as it ages, and, indeed, the researchers found something like this to be the case for earlier generations. But, with later ones, the age-related growth in reading dwindled. The turning point seems to have come with the generation born in the nineteen-forties. By 1995, a Dutch college graduate born after 1969 was likely to spend fewer hours reading each week than a little-educated person born before 1950. As far as reading habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation—even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before—both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.

Taking the long view, it’s not the neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read at all. “The act of reading is not natural,” Maryanne Wolf writes in “Proust and the Squid” (Harper; $25.95), an account of the history and biology of reading. Humans started reading far too recently for any of our genes to code for it specifically. We can do it only because the brain’s plasticity enables the repurposing of circuitry that originally evolved for other tasks—distinguishing at a glance a garter snake from a haricot vert, say.

The squid of Wolf’s title represents the neurobiological approach to the study of reading. Bigger cells are easier for scientists to experiment on, and some species of squid have optic-nerve cells a hundred times as thick as mammal neurons, and up to four inches long, making them a favorite with biologists. (Two decades ago, I had a summer job washing glassware in Cape Cod’s Marine Biological Laboratory. Whenever researchers extracted an optic nerve, they threw the rest of the squid into a freezer, and about once a month we took a cooler-full to the beach for grilling.) To symbolize the humanistic approach to reading, Wolf has chosen Proust, who described reading as “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” Perhaps inspired by Proust’s example, Wolf, a dyslexia researcher at Tufts, reminisces about the nuns who taught her to read in a two-room brick schoolhouse in Illinois. But she’s more of a squid person than a Proust person, and seems most at home when dissecting Proust’s fruitful miracle into such brain parts as the occipital “visual association area” and “area 37’s fusiform gyrus.” Given the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed, her cold-blooded perspective is opportune.

Wolf recounts the early history of reading, speculating about developments in brain wiring as she goes. For example, from the eighth to the fifth millennia B.C.E., clay tokens were used in Mesopotamia for tallying livestock and other goods. Wolf suggests that, once the simple markings on the tokens were understood not merely as squiggles but as representations of, say, ten sheep, they would have put more of the brain to work. She draws on recent research with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that maps blood flow in the brain during a given task, to show that meaningful squiggles activate not only the occipital regions responsible for vision but also temporal and parietal regions associated with language and computation. If a particular squiggle was repeated on a number of tokens, a group of nerves might start to specialize in recognizing it, and other nerves to specialize in connecting to language centers that handled its meaning.

In the fourth millennium B.C.E., the Sumerians developed cuneiform, and the Egyptians hieroglyphs. Both scripts began with pictures of things, such as a beetle or a hand, and then some of these symbols developed more abstract meanings, representing ideas in some cases and sounds in others. Readers had to recognize hundreds of symbols, some of which could stand for either a word or a sound, an ambiguity that probably slowed down decoding. Under this heavy cognitive burden, Wolf imagines, the Sumerian reader’s brain would have behaved the way modern brains do when reading Chinese, which also mixes phonetic and ideographic elements and seems to stimulate brain activity in a pattern distinct from that of people reading the Roman alphabet. Frontal regions associated with muscle memory would probably also have gone to work, because the Sumerians learned their characters by writing them over and over, as the Chinese do today.

Complex scripts like Sumerian and Egyptian were written only by scribal élites. A major breakthrough occurred around 750 B.C.E., when the Greeks, borrowing characters from a Semitic language, perhaps Phoenician, developed a writing system that had just twenty-four letters. There had been scripts with a limited number of characters before, as there had been consonants and even occasionally vowels, but the Greek alphabet was the first whose letters recorded every significant sound element in a spoken language in a one-to-one correspondence, give or take a few diphthongs. In ancient Greek, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if you’d never heard it before. Children learned to read and write Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous. The ease democratized literacy; the ability to read and write spread to citizens who didn’t specialize in it. The classicist Eric A. Havelock believed that the alphabet changed “the character of the Greek consciousness.”

Wolf doesn’t quite second that claim. She points out that it is possible to read efficiently a script that combines ideograms and phonetic elements, something that many Chinese do daily. The alphabet, she suggests, entailed not a qualitative difference but an accumulation of small quantitative ones, by helping more readers reach efficiency sooner. “The efficient reading brain,” she writes, “quite literally has more time to think.” Whether that development sparked Greece’s flowering she leaves to classicists to debate, but she agrees with Havelock that writing was probably a contributive factor, because it freed the Greeks from the necessity of keeping their whole culture, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, memorized.

The scholar Walter J. Ong once speculated that television and similar media are taking us into an era of “secondary orality,” akin to the primary orality that existed before the emergence of text. If so, it is worth trying to understand how different primary orality must have been from our own mind-set. Havelock theorized that, in ancient Greece, the effort required to preserve knowledge colored everything. In Plato’s day, the word mimesis referred to an actor’s performance of his role, an audience’s identification with a performance, a pupil’s recitation of his lesson, and an apprentice’s emulation of his master. Plato, who was literate, worried about the kind of trance or emotional enthrallment that came over people in all these situations, and Havelock inferred from this that the idea of distinguishing the knower from the known was then still a novelty. In a society that had only recently learned to take notes, learning something still meant abandoning yourself to it. “Enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity,” he wrote.

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed, doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer:

Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them.

Illiterates also resisted giving definitions of words and refused to make logical inferences about hypothetical situations. Asked by Luria’s staff about polar bears, a peasant grew testy: “What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing beyond that!” The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions. “What can I say about my own heart?” one asked.

In the nineteen-seventies, the psychologists Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole tried to replicate Luria’s findings among the Vai, a rural people in Liberia. Since some Vai were illiterate, some were schooled in English, and others were literate in the Vai’s own script, the researchers hoped to be able to distinguish cognitive changes caused by schooling from those caused specifically by literacy. They found that English schooling and English literacy improved the ability to talk about language and solve logic puzzles, as literacy had done with Luria’s peasants. But literacy in Vai script improved performance on only a few language-related tasks. Scribner and Cole’s modest conclusion—“Literacy makes some difference to some skills in some contexts”—convinced some people that the literate mind was not so different from the oral one after all. But others have objected that it was misguided to separate literacy from schooling, suggesting that cognitive changes came with the culture of literacy rather than with the mere fact of it. Also, the Vai script, a syllabary with more than two hundred characters, offered nothing like the cognitive efficiency that Havelock ascribed to Greek. Reading Vai, Scribner and Cole admitted, was “a complex problem-solving process,” usually performed slowly.

Soon after this study, Ong synthesized existing research into a vivid picture of the oral mind-set. Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

Upon reaching classical Greece, Wolf abandons history, because the Greeks’ alphabet-reading brains probably resembled ours, which can be readily put into scanners. Drawing on recent imaging studies, she explains in detail how a modern child’s brain wires itself for literacy. The ground is laid in preschool, when parents read to a child, talk with her, and encourage awareness of sound elements like rhyme and alliteration, perhaps with “Mother Goose” poems. Scans show that when a child first starts to read she has to use more of her brain than adults do. Broad regions light up in both hemispheres. As a child’s neurons specialize in recognizing letters and become more efficient, the regions activated become smaller.

At some point, as a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading, the route of signals through her brain shifts. Instead of passing along a “dorsal route” through occipital, temporal, and parietal regions in both hemispheres, reading starts to move along a faster and more efficient “ventral route,” which is confined to the left hemisphere. With the gain in time and the freed-up brainpower, Wolf suggests, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience. “The secret at the heart of reading,” Wolf writes, is “the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before.” Imaging studies suggest that in many cases of dyslexia the right hemisphere never disengages, and reading remains effortful.

In a recent book claiming that television and video games were “making our minds sharper,” the journalist Steven Johnson argued that since we value reading for “exercising the mind,” we should value electronic media for offering a superior “cognitive workout.” But, if Wolf’s evidence is right, Johnson’s metaphor of exercise is misguided. When reading goes well, Wolf suggests, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone. Ruskin once compared reading to a conversation with the wise and noble, and Proust corrected him. It’s much better than that, Proust wrote. To read is “to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately.”

Wolf has little to say about the general decline of reading, and she doesn’t much speculate about the function of the brain under the influence of television and newer media. But there is research suggesting that secondary orality and literacy don’t mix. In a study published this year, experimenters varied the way that people took in a PowerPoint presentation about the country of Mali. Those who were allowed to read silently were more likely to agree with the statement “The presentation was interesting,” and those who read along with an audiovisual commentary were more likely to agree with the statement “I did not learn anything from this presentation.” The silent readers remembered more, too, a finding in line with a series of British studies in which people who read transcripts of television newscasts, political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more information than those who had watched the shows themselves.

The antagonism between words and moving images seems to start early. In August, scientists at the University of Washington revealed that babies aged between eight and sixteen months know on average six to eight fewer words for every hour of baby DVDs and videos they watch daily. A 2005 study in Northern California found that a television in the bedroom lowered the standardized-test scores of third graders. And the conflict continues throughout a child’s development. In 2001, after analyzing data on more than a million students around the world, the researcher Micha Razel found “little room for doubt” that television worsened performance in reading, science, and math. The relationship wasn’t a straight line but “an inverted check mark”: a small amount of television seemed to benefit children; more hurt. For nine-year-olds, the optimum was two hours a day; for seventeen-year-olds, half an hour. Razel guessed that the younger children were watching educational shows, and, indeed, researchers have shown that a five-year-old boy who watches “Sesame Street” is likely to have higher grades even in high school. Razel noted, however, that fifty-five per cent of students were exceeding their optimal viewing time by three hours a day, thereby lowering their academic achievement by roughly one grade level.

The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.

No effort of will is likely to make reading popular again. Children may be browbeaten, but adults resist interference with their pleasures. It may simply be the case that many Americans prefer to learn about the world and to entertain themselves with television and other streaming media, rather than with the printed word, and that it is taking a few generations for them to shed old habits like newspapers and novels. The alternative is that we are nearing the end of a pendulum swing, and that reading will return, driven back by forces as complicated as those now driving it away.

But if the change is permanent, and especially if the slide continues, the world will feel different, even to those who still read. Because the change has been happening slowly for decades, everyone has a sense of what is at stake, though it is rarely put into words. There is something to gain, of course, or no one would ever put down a book and pick up a remote. Streaming media give actual pictures and sounds instead of mere descriptions of them. “Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium,” Marshall McLuhan proclaimed in 1967. Moving and talking images are much richer in information about a performer’s appearance, manner, and tone of voice, and they give us the impression that we know more about her health and mood, too. The viewer may not catch all the details of a candidate’s health-care plan, but he has a much more definite sense of her as a personality, and his response to her is therefore likely to be more full of emotion. There is nothing like this connection in print. A feeling for a writer never touches the fact of the writer herself, unless reader and writer happen to meet. In fact, from Shakespeare to Pynchon, the personalities of many writers have been mysterious.

Emotional responsiveness to streaming media harks back to the world of primary orality, and, as in Plato’s day, the solidarity amounts almost to a mutual possession. “Electronic technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement,” in McLuhan’s words. The viewer feels at home with his show, or else he changes the channel. The closeness makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion. It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times , for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching. Like the peasants studied by Luria, he thinks in terms of situations and story lines rather than abstractions.

And he may have even more trouble than Luria’s peasants in seeing himself as others do. After all, there is no one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone, though he, and his brain, may be too distracted to notice it. The reader is also alone, but the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, “all he can do is give us desires.” Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose. ♦

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The Loss of Things I Took for Granted

Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively..

Recent years have seen successive waves of book bans in Republican-controlled states, aimed at pulling any text with “woke” themes from classrooms and library shelves. Though the results sometimes seem farcical, as with the banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus due to its inclusion of “cuss words” and explicit rodent nudity, the book-banning agenda is no laughing matter. Motivated by bigotry, it has already done demonstrable harm and promises to do more. But at the same time, the appropriate response is, in principle, simple. Named individuals have advanced explicit policies with clear goals and outcomes, and we can replace those individuals with people who want to reverse those policies. That is already beginning to happen in many places, and I hope those successes will continue until every banned book is restored.

If and when that happens, however, we will not be able to declare victory quite yet. Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place. As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.

Since this development very directly affects my ability to do my job as I understand it, I talk about it a lot. And when I talk about it with nonacademics, certain predictable responses inevitably arise, all questioning the reality of the trend I describe. Hasn’t every generation felt that the younger cohort is going to hell in a handbasket? Haven’t professors always complained that educators at earlier levels are not adequately equipping their students? And haven’t students from time immemorial skipped the readings?

The response of my fellow academics, however, reassures me that I’m not simply indulging in intergenerational grousing. Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience. Professors are also discussing the issue in academic trade publications , from a variety of perspectives. What we almost all seem to agree on is that we are facing new obstacles in structuring and delivering our courses, requiring us to ratchet down expectations in the face of a ratcheting down of preparation. 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. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade— except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.

If we ask what has caused this change, there are some obvious culprits. The first is the same thing that has taken away almost everyone’s ability to focus—the ubiquitous smartphone. Even as a career academic who studies the Quran in Arabic for fun, I have noticed my reading endurance flagging. I once found myself boasting at a faculty meeting that I had read through my entire hourlong train ride without looking at my phone. My colleagues agreed this was a major feat, one they had not achieved recently. Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to “turn it on” when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. That’s because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age, meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.

The second go-to explanation is the massive disruption of school closures during COVID-19. There is still some debate about the necessity of those measures, but what is not up for debate any longer is the very real learning loss that students suffered at every level. The impact will inevitably continue to be felt for the next decade or more, until the last cohort affected by the mass “pivot to online” finally graduates. I doubt that the pandemic closures were the decisive factor in themselves, however. Not only did the marked decline in reading resilience start before the pandemic, but the students I am seeing would have already been in high school during the school closures. Hence they would be better equipped to get something out of the online format and, more importantly, their basic reading competence would have already been established.

Less discussed than these broader cultural trends over which educators have little control are the major changes in reading pedagogy that have occurred in recent decades—some motivated by the ever-increasing demand to “teach to the test” and some by fads coming out of schools of education. In the latter category is the widely discussed decline in phonics education in favor of the “balanced literacy” approach advocated by education expert Lucy Calkins (who has more recently come to accept the need for more phonics instruction). I started to see the results of this ill-advised change several years ago, when students abruptly stopped attempting to sound out unfamiliar words and instead paused until they recognized the whole word as a unit. (In a recent class session, a smart, capable student was caught short by the word circumstances when reading a text out loud.) The result of this vibes-based literacy is that students never attain genuine fluency in reading. Even aside from the impact of smartphones, their experience of reading is constantly interrupted by their intentionally cultivated inability to process unfamiliar words.

For all the flaws of the balanced literacy method, it was presumably implemented by people who thought it would help. It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards , teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. The emphasis on standardized tests was always a distraction at best, but we have reached the point where it is actively cannibalizing students’ educational experience—an outcome no one intended or planned, and for which there is no possible justification.

We can’t go back in time and do the pandemic differently at this point, nor is there any realistic path to putting the smartphone genie back in the bottle. (Though I will note that we as a society do at least attempt to keep other addictive products out of the hands of children.) But I have to think that we can, at the very least, stop actively preventing young people from developing the ability to follow extended narratives and arguments in the classroom. Regardless of their profession or ultimate educational level, they will need those skills. The world is a complicated place. People—their histories and identities, their institutions and work processes, their fears and desires—are simply too complex to be captured in a worksheet with a paragraph and some reading comprehension questions. Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.

This is a matter not of snobbery, but of basic justice. I recognize that not everyone centers their lives on books as much as a humanities professor does. I think they’re missing out, but they’re adults and they can choose how to spend their time. What’s happening with the current generation is not that they are simply choosing TikTok over Jane Austen. They are being deprived of the ability to choose—for no real reason or benefit. We can and must stop perpetrating this crime on our young people.

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The Decline in Reading in Modern Society

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Published: Apr 11, 2019

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New Stanford study finds reading skills among young students stalled during the pandemic

Stanford researchers find that reading fluency among second- and third-graders in the U.S. is roughly 30 percent behind what would be expected in a typical year.

A study by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) provides new evidence about the pandemic’s impact on learning among students in the earliest grades, showing distinct changes in the growth of basic reading skills during different time periods over the past year.

Ben Domingue (Image credit: Courtesy Graduate School of Education)

Results from a reading assessment given to first- through fourth-graders nationwide show that the students’ development of oral reading fluency – the ability to quickly and accurately read aloud – largely stopped in spring 2020 after the abrupt school closures brought on by COVID-19. Gains in these skills were stronger in fall 2020, but not enough to recoup the loss students experienced in the spring.

“It seems that these students, in general, didn’t develop any reading skills during the spring – growth stalled when schooling was interrupted and remained stagnant through the summer,” said Ben Domingue , an assistant professor at Stanford GSE and first author on the study , which was released by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a nonpartisan research network housed at Stanford.

“It picked up in the fall, which is a testament to the work that educators did in preparing for the new school year and their creativity in coming up with ways to teach,” Domingue said. “But that growth was not robust enough to make up for the gaps from the spring.”

Second- and third-graders were most affected, the study found. Overall, students’ reading fluency in second and third grade is now approximately 30 percent behind what would be expected in a typical year.

Reading fluency is fundamental for academic development more broadly, the researchers said, because problems with this skill can interfere with students’ ability to learn other subjects as they make their way through later grades.

“Reading is kind of a gateway to the development of academic skills across all disciplines,” said Domingue. “It’s a key that opens all of the doors. If a kid can’t read effectively by third grade or so, they’re unlikely to be able to access content in their other courses.”

Measuring periodically, not annually

The new study differs from previous research on COVID-19 learning loss in that students’ skills were measured periodically throughout the year, making it possible to assess growth at different stages of the pandemic.

“Most studies on learning loss so far have looked at fall-to-fall changes to show how students have been affected by COVID,” said Domingue. “But just measuring the cumulative effect doesn’t help us understand what was going on between those two time points. There were a lot of changes in what school looked like during different periods between those two points, and it seemed likely there would be some differences in the patterns of learning.”

The study’s focus on students in early elementary grades also distinguishes it from others on learning growth and loss, which typically look at the impact on students in grades 3 through 8 – the ages most often included in annual standardized exams and other routine assessments.

A fundamental skill

The findings were based on data generated by an oral assessment measuring reading fluency in more than 100 school districts nationwide. The reading assessment used in the study takes only a few minutes, and though normally administered in a classroom, it was also conducted remotely during the pandemic. Students were recorded while reading aloud from a device, and their score was based on a combination of human transcription and speech recognition.

The researchers examined trends in the students’ long-run growth back to 2018, observing fairly steady growth until the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. The trajectory flattened at that point and remained flat throughout the summer, indicating that children’s reading abilities had stopped. “It was flat in an absolute sense, not just relative to years past,” said Domingue.

Growth resumed in the fall at levels similar to what the researchers saw before the pandemic. But those gains weren’t enough to make up for the ground lost earlier in the year.

The researchers also observed inequitable impact: Students in historically lower-achieving districts (based on data from the Stanford Education Data Archive ) developed reading skills at a slower rate than those in higher-achieving ones. Schools that typically score low on annual standardized tests often serve a greater share of low-income and minority students – populations disproportionately affected by the pandemic in ways that impinge on their readiness to learn, including lack of access to computers, reliable internet access or a parent at home.

“It’s quite likely that lower-achieving schools are dealing with a whole battery of problems that educators in more affluent districts aren’t facing,” said Domingue. “But there was still growth. The teachers were probably moving heaven and earth to help their kids learn to read, and it’s reflected in the gains. But it’s important to recognize the differential impact on students.”

The researchers also found that about 10 percent of students who were tested before the pandemic were not observed in fall 2020. It’s not clear why they were missing, but the researchers suggest that if these students had trouble accessing the assessment remotely, they may be less engaged with school overall and could be falling even further behind than students who were tested.

The researchers caution that, while their analysis provides important evidence on learning loss in the early grades, it doesn’t include information about whether students attended school in person, remotely or in some hybrid form.

They also note that their findings should not be applied to other academic subjects, largely because of the focus on reading in the early grades and the likelihood that it was a centerpiece of many schools’ instruction for the fall of 2020.

While the full extent of COVID-19’s impact on learning won’t be clear for months or even years, this study provides evidence that – after the initial shock of the pandemic –educators found ways to teach and assess young students’ reading skills. And even in the midst of continued uncertainty and disruption, these students were able to achieve gains in the fall similar to pre-pandemic times.

“We can build on this research by identifying practices that accelerate learning for students who’ve fallen behind, and by making sure schools have the resources they need,” said Heather Hough, executive director of PACE and coauthor of the study. “These findings are worrisome, but they do not need to be catastrophic.”

Other co-authors on the study include Jason Yeatman , an assistant professor at Stanford GSE and the School of Medicine and David Lang, a GSE doctoral student.

number 59 • Spring 2024

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The Erosion of Deep Literacy

Adam garfinkle, spring 2020.

Thoughtful Americans are realizing that the pervasive IT-revolution devices upon which we are increasingly dependent are affecting our society and culture in significant but as yet uncertain ways. We are noticing more in part because, as Maryanne Wolf has pointed out, this technology is changing what, how, and why we read, and in turn what, how, and why we write and even think. Harold Innis noted in 1948, as television was on the cusp of revolutionizing American life, that "sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances," and it's clear we are stumbling through another such episode. Such disturbances today are manifold, and, as before, their most critical aspects may reside in alterations to both the scope and nature of literacy. As with any tangle between technology and culture, empirical evidence is elusive, but two things, at least, are clear.

For one, the new digital technology is democratizing written language and variously expanding the range of people who use and learn from it. It may also be diffusing culture; music and film of all kinds are cheaply and easily available to almost everyone. In some respects, new digital technologies are decreasing social isolation, even if in other respects they may be increasing it. Taken together, these technologies may also be creating novel neural pathways, especially in developing young brains, that promise greater if different kinds of cognitive capacities, albeit capacities we cannot predict or even imagine with confidence.

But it is also clear that something else has been lost. Nicholas Carr's 2010 book, The Shallows , begins with the author's irritation at his own truncated attention span for reading. Something neurophysiological is happening to us, he argued, and we don't know what it is. That must be the case, because if there is any law of neurophysiology, it is that the brain wires itself continuously in accordance with its every experience. A decade later, Carr's discomfort is shared by growing legions of frustrated, formerly serious readers.

In her 2018 book, Reader, Come Home , Wolf uses cognitive neuroscience and developmental psycholinguistics to study the reading brain and literacy development, and in doing so, helps identify what is being lost. According to Wolf, we are losing what she calls "deep literacy" or "deep reading." This does not include decoding written symbols, writing one's name, or making lists. Deep literacy is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning, and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text. The result, with any luck, is a fusion of writer and reader, with the potential to bear original insight.

Deep literacy has wondrous effects, nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy. It is also generative of successive new insight, as the brain's circuitry for reading recursively builds itself forward. It is and does all these things in part because it touches off a "revolution in the brain," meaning that it has distinctive and describable neurophysiological consequences. Understanding deep literacy as a revolution in the brain has potential payoffs for understanding aspects of history and contemporary politics alike.

Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans, in ways both physiological and cultural. And it is what ultimately allowed Americans to become "We the People," capable of self-government. If we are losing the capacity for deep reading, we must also be prepared to lose other, perhaps even more precious parts of what deep reading has helped to build.

BRAIN REVOLUTION

Scientists continue to debate the question of addiction to technology and its effects on memory and social isolation, a question transformed anew in the dozen years since the June 2007 introduction of the iPhone. But beyond the addiction debate, few cognitive scientists doubt that so-called multitasking is merely the ability to get many things done quickly and poorly. And no one doubts that heavy screen use has destroyed attention spans.

But more than attention spans are at stake. Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits, people who cannot deep read — or who do not use and hence lose the deep-reading skills they learned — typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning. In other words, if you can't, or don't, slow down sufficiently to focus quality attention — what Wolf calls "cognitive patience" — on a complex problem, you cannot effectively think about it.

We know that prolonged and repetitive exposure to digital devices changes the way we think and behave in part because it changes us physically. The brain adapts to its environment. The devices clearly can be addictive; indeed, they are designed to be addictive. Technology companies know that swiping "trains" the brain in certain ways; designers know what produces quick bursts of dopamine and oxytocin. They also know that two-dimensional representations on a screen do not match the sensory richness of direct, unmediated experiences, and they know the implications — which is why many cyber-technologists strictly ration their use among their own children. As neurologist Richard Cytowic put it, "Digital devices discretely hijack our attention. To the extent that you cannot perceive the world around you in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape."

Thanks to roughly 200,000 years of evolution, the human brain is an extremely efficient change detector. Any sudden and atypical image, smell, or sound could signal a threat or an opportunity, so the brain had always to be on alert, even during sleep. (Some refer to this evolutionary development as the brain's "novelty bias.") And we are still on alert; our brains are not anatomically much different from what they were in Neolithic times, even if some of the circuitry is different.

Maintaining constant vigilance consumes much of the brain's power supplies, and switching attention, in particular, eats up lots of calories. Even a century ago, life was far less frenetic than it is today; more items vie for our attention in a given hour than our ancestors had to handle in a day or even a week. As Cytowic puts it,

We ask our stone-age brains to sort, categorize, parse, and prioritize torrential data streams it never evolved to juggle, while in the background we have to stay ever vigilant to change in every sensory channel....Screens of all sorts serve up rapidly changing images, jump cuts between scenes, erratic motion, and non-linear narratives that spill out in fragments....Is it any wonder people today complain of mental fatigue? Fatigue makes it even harder to sort the trivial from the salient and navigate the glut of decisions modern life throws at us.

The knock-on issue thus becomes clear: It is hard to sustain the attention necessary for deep reading when we are distracted and exhausted from being both sped up and overloaded — what tech writer Linda Stone aptly calls "continuous partial attention." And many, particularly those who have never inculcated the discipline that comes with a serious education, have become, as Senator Ben Sasse puts it, "addicted to distraction." The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains it more specifically: "Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation" (emphasis added).

A sadder and more troubling knock-on effect also reveals itself: If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists. Fully immerse yourself in digital "life," and timelines will flatten into unconnected dots, rendering a person present-oriented and unable to either remember or plan well. That permanently "zoned out" person will become easy prey for the next demagogue with an attractive promise and a mesmerizing spectacle.

Mediated electronic interactions also create forms of what could be called acquired social autism. Any experienced high-school guidance counselor can attest that most of their students do not have the social skills necessary to, for example, speak to college-admissions personnel one on one. There is also growing empirical evidence of social-media fatigue. Our gadgets create exhaustion, isolation, loneliness, and depression, which track with the rise of suicide rates in younger age cohorts. In a few extreme cases, when isolation sharply diminishes the influence of peer standards of acceptable conduct, it can lead to violent anti-social behavior.

In science fiction, the typical worry is that machines will become human-like; the more pressing problem now is that, through the thinning out of our interactions, humans are becoming machine-like. That raises the possibility that the more time we spend with machines and the more dependent on them we become, the dumber we tend to get since machines cannot determine their own purposes — at least until the lines cross between ever smarter AI-infused machines and ever less cognitively adept humans. More troubling are the moral issues that could potentially arise: mainly ceding to machines programmed by others the right to make moral choices that ought to be ours.

HABITS OF MIND

The human brain is genetically hardwired with the ability to understand and articulate oral language, but no gene exists for reading and writing. Literacy is a cultural achievement long in the making, though, on an evolutionary timeline, it is a fairly recent innovation. It is a development that, by changing the very structure of human brain circuitry, "transformed the nature of human thought," as Wolf writes. What Carr detected, even before iPhone market saturation, is that the plasticity of the human brain extends well beyond childhood: We are or become, cognitively speaking, what we do with language.

There is no question that adult reading habits have changed over the past few decades. The skimming and speed-reading in Z or F patterns that is characteristic of surfing the internet — the new norm for many — does not help enable critical content, if there is any, to sink into working memory. As reading method goes, it is the anti-deep; one barely gets wet at all. Twitter, in particular, epitomizes the transition from using written language as a means to think to using language as a platform for micro-designer spectacle — in some respects a throwback to oral culture, and certainly a far more cognitively superficial activity, as L. M. Sacasas recently argued in the New Atlantis . Skimming on the net also has a shadow effect: When one picks up a book for an afternoon or evening, the same pattern throws itself onto the printed page. That is what Carr noticed but did not perhaps understand.

Henry Kissinger noted one consequence of this development in the context of strategy:

Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships....A book is a large intellectual construction; you can't hold it all in mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalize it. Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up again on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge. People are not readers but researchers, they float on the surface....This new thinking erases context. It disaggregates everything. All this makes strategic thinking about world order nearly impossible to achieve.

Neil Postman put it succinctly, if more broadly, in 1985: Only in the printed word can complicated truths be rationally conveyed.

But Kissinger is getting at something else here: namely, the sources of original thought. The deep-reading brain excels at making connections among analogical, inferential, and empathetic modes of reasoning, and knows how to associate them all with accumulated background knowledge. That constellation of sources and connections is what enables not just strategic thinking, but original thinking more broadly. So could it be that the failures of the American political class to fashion useful solutions to public- and foreign-policy challenges turn not just on polarization and hyper-partisanship, but also on the strong possibility that many of these non-deep readers are no longer able to think below the surface tension of a tweet?

Absence of thought as a mode of cognition likewise stifles imagination and feeds cultural insularity. Along with the technology-enabled prevalence of mediated interactions as opposed to face-to-face ones, insularity in turn conduces to the narrow "tribal" emotions of identity politics. The "echo chamber" effect, characteristic of mediated electronic interactions, tends to truncate a person's ambit of empathy, as Senator Sasse has stressed, and not just as regards politics. It could be, in other words, that we skim now with respect to our emotions as well as our thinking — how else is it possible to degrade the beauty and difficulty of friendship into "friending" someone instantaneously on Facebook? Deep reading, contrarily, deepens and widens our theory of mind in both its rational and affective aspects. Fiction reading, in particular, enables us to simulate the consciousness of another person.

Indeed, our developing the ability to deep read is part of what made us human. Pre-literate cultures can be rich and imaginative without written language, but unless people capable of mobilizing their imaginations to spin wondrous stories and discover empirical truths about the world can get them written down, there is a limit to how long the power of those stories and insights can endure. The writing processes we use to objectify knowledge gained — processes that make intersubjective sharing stable and longstanding over generations — have become integral to who we are.

Literacy as a cultural achievement changed society because it enabled humans to learn from predecessors long-since deceased and to teach those who come long after, thus creating skeins of intergenerational conversation that no other animal can match. In other words, literacy enabled the sum of education and schools, libraries and archives, research and coordinated human work to generate a reality far more massive and seemingly objective than what Kenneth Burke once called our bio-sensory bit of reality, "the paper-thin line of our own particular lives." The rewards of deep reading are cumulative over time, therefore, not only in the individual, but also in society. Deep literacy marks the birth of useful abstractions bearing profound implications for moral reasoning. As Hermann Hesse pointed out, "[w]ithout words, without writing, and without books there would be no history," and so "there could be no concept of humanity."

Those reading this essay developed these habits of mind as children who learned to read and now continue to do so as adults. In an odd way, that's the problem: We almost never reflect on how unusual, and in many ways unnatural, deep reading actually is. Consider that the only time any of us can be alone with ideas brought by others is in reading. It is, as Marcel Proust put it in On Reading , "that fertile miracle of communication that takes place in the middle of solitude." Otherwise, we are each necessarily engaged in dialogue with one or more other in-the-flesh people: In other words, we experience the community as context, simultaneously with the ideas. Deep reading alone creates the possibility of a private internal dialogue with an author not physically present.

More important, when we are immersed in deep reading, we bracket our sensory surroundings and social context to become engrossed in worlds that exist only in our heads. The power of this out-of-body capacity is quite remarkable. Wolf cites research showing that when a fictional character with whom the reader has developed an affinity is running in the text, the deep reader's motoric regions activate as if he were actually running instead of sitting in a chair reading. So we can be in our heads nowhere real, but being there imaginatively creates real effects nonetheless. This tells us, among other things, that the kind of intimate, silent dialogue that occurs only during deep reading requires a considerable capacity for abstract thought just for it to occur at all . In deep reading, we separate the message of the text from the author; we decontextualize it, in other words, and therefore necessarily abstract it.

For those who make a habit of deep reading, cognitive capacities for such abstract thinking expand to fill our appetites, or what we may call our pressing artificial needs. And those needs can become pressing because the material world, while expansive and rich, has limits that the world of the abstract and the imaginative very likely does not. So once into that world, the appetite to explore more of what we, with helpful authorial others, conspire to invent can become irresistible, at least this side of the dinner bell.

In order for deep reading to exist there also must be deep writing. The author also must abstract the message being crafted because, usually, no specific reader can be readily anticipated or held in mind. Classes or kinds of people can be identified as a writer's target audience, but that is different and that too requires a kind of decontextualized abstract thought. Thus, we have a writer privately squeezing into an artificial, decontextualized "space" in order to convey something, fictive or not, to unknown readers in unknown but theoretically very distant times who are similarly situated, so to speak, in an artificial, decontextualized space. If this is not in some non-trivial sense an unnatural act for human beings to engage in, then what is?

And yet we typically overlook how significant this act is for us as individuals and to us collectively as a society. We only feel uncomfortable when we sense, as did Carr, our earned capacities somehow slipping away — or when we worry that cognitively sped-up and multitasking young brains may not acquire sufficient capacities for critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy, and hence will become easy prey for charlatans and demagogues.

Deep literacy has often been overlooked as a factor in history because historians are so deeply enmeshed in a world of deep reading that they, like the proverbial fish in water, take its existence for granted. A poignant example is that of Karl Jaspers, famous for his theory of the Axial Age. Jaspers observed that several civilizational zones with little to no contact between them nevertheless developed several philosophical themes seemingly in common at around the same period, between the eighth and third centuries B.C. Why this was so constituted a mystery for Jaspers and the many interpreters his 1949 study attracted. It seems not to have occurred to them that the advent of literacy for a critical mass of people during the period in question might account for the commonalities Jaspers observed.

What Jaspers saw was less the similar content of the formulations of different ancient cultures and more the similarity of the level of abstraction at which those formulations took shape by dint of the cultures having recently become literate. In other words, phenomena that many saw as causes of the Axial Age were actually consequences of something else that went unremarked: the spread of deep literacy in a still-small but critical share of the population.

Understanding deep literacy can also take us from Jaspers's Axial Age to the modern age. The rise of individual agency — one of the hallmarks of modernity — depends on the development of a refined sense of interiority in a person: that sense of the inner conscious being that defines one's individual, essential self. In short, very likely, the advent of deep literacy, by enabling a new sense of interiority, is the proximate source of modernity via the rise of individual agency that it allowed.

Unless provoked to think about it, we usually assume that this sense of interiority has been an invariant aspect of being human. But that is not obvious. The growth of our inner voice to articulate maturity probably depends on our developing language capacities, from that of the child before he develops a theory of mind to that of the adult capable of seeing the self as an object — capable in other words of asking the first question of philosophy: Who, or what, am I? After all, what need has anyone for a particularly articulate inner voice if that voice never has anyone else to "talk" with , which is an activity done silently only in reading? Thus, our adult sense of interiority seems closely linked, perhaps inextricably so, to our gaining literacy competence.

The mature "narrator" likely arises from the aforementioned complementary pairing of unnatural acts, as the necessarily dialectic reading/writing process that defines deep literacy continues over time. The mature narrator in our heads is thus a cognitive artifact of culture, of the revolution in the brain, not of neurobiology alone. As Walter Ong put it, "[o]ral communication unites people in groups" whereas writing and reading "throw the psyche back on itself" and thus cultivate individuality.

So the silent narrator in the minds of non-readers must be, at least in some ways, a narrator different from our own — and societies made up of the latter must, at least in some ways, differ from societies made up of the former. The slow movement from oral/communal to written/private uses of narration has indeed ultimately been epochal. It is hard to disagree with Ong's conclusion that, "without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials."

In this light, consider a typical child in a society with widespread deep literacy and the development of the relationship of narratives to thinking in his mind. The process starts when books are read to a child before he can decode them, creating a link between the written word composed of morphemes, the phonemes the words make when the morphemes are sounded out, and the symbolic meaning carried by them. (As far as we know, this link can be created only by shared attention between at least two human beings; it cannot be fashioned between a child and a television set, an e-reader, or any other machine. That is one main reason why the best predictor of eventual reading proficiency is how many hours adults spend reading to young children.)

Then a child learns to decode writing and pronounce it, but usually only aloud. As decoding matures into true reading, a child will still usually not be able to read silently; there is often an intermediate stage on the way to deep literacy when a child is whispering or moving his lips while reading. (Some adults who have yet to achieve full deep literacy do this, too, as can sometimes be observed on buses, trains, park benches, and so on.) Only later can the more mature child advance into truly silent reading, and gain the ability to meet an author halfway in the complex dynamics of deep literacy common to adults. Only then does the child's narrator develop into a mature form.

This development is true on the historical scale as well. Ponder the language of prayer and ritual over the millennia. Ancient prayer was and most ritual prayer is still communal, so liturgy is meant to be spoken aloud, chanted, or sung. But even individual prayer, whether it takes place in a group setting or alone, is not usually supposed to be completely silent even today; lips need to move. This tradition, at one point itself a novelty as illustrated by the exchange between Hannah and Eli at Shiloh in I Samuel, is a remnant of an earlier time when truly silent prayer, and silent reading, was all but unknown — a time when nearly all writing that went beyond mere lists was integrally related to and arose from within religion.

The rise of Protestantism has everything to do with Martin Luther's key insight that the essence of a person is the soul within. Hence his view that the priestly rituals of the Church were in vain because they could not penetrate into the interiority of the soul — could not directly engage the inner person, could not converse with the narrator. In his view, the ritual was functionally mute and thus useless. But (probably) unbeknownst to Luther, his own deep literacy likely formed the portal of his sense of interiority, and therefore presaged his theological discovery. Protestantism's focus on scripture in the new theological dispensation was not coincidental, to put it mildly.

The rise of deep literacy in enough people in early modernity — mightily aided, of course, by Gutenberg's invention of movable type — was a precondition of Protestantism's firm establishment and rapid growth, and its establishment was in turn a major accelerator of deep literacy in the societies in which it became the principal faith community, in large part because Protestants ordained compulsory schooling for all children. The Reformation found a very powerful engine in the establishment of these schools: Wherever Protestant beliefs spread, state-mandated education soon followed, each reinforcing the other.

This rendered the Reformation a twin theological-political movement, based on the idea of "conscience" as the fulcrum. Conscience was central to arriving at theological truth through reading Scripture, and theological truth led to a social consensus on the importance of conscience in the political arena as well. The simple understanding here was that the capacity for moral reasoning is essential for an individual to come to religious truth, and moral reasoning collected into a social ethos is the only foundation for a morally just political order — the individual and socio-political facets of conscience reinforcing each other in a virtuous cycle.

The eventual consequences of this development, for the West and in due course for the world, have been huge. The Protestant way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and society is quintessentially modern because it starts with individual, not corporate, agency. As far as political thought goes, this is the origin of our "We the People": God's will is implemented upward through popular sovereignty, not downward from the divine right of kings. This is where the moral basis for modern liberal democracy comes from, and without the spread of deep literacy, it likely doesn't come at all. It is simply not possible to build a bourgeois economy and society without enough people who are literate and numerate to operate them.

LITERACY AND POPULISM

The capacity for abstract reasoning, too, is integral to liberal-democratic politics: The concepts of representation; the virtues of doubt, dissent, and humility; and the concept of a depersonalized constitutional order are all very abstract ideas. Is it possible that an emotionally more volatile post -deep-literate society may at a certain tipping point regress to accommodate, and even to prefer, less-refined and -earned forms of governance?

We know what such a regression would basically look like: a less abstract, re-personalized form of social and political authority concentrated in a "great" authoritarian leader. On the left, that looks at the extreme like a brave new world order that enforces diversity and radical, undifferentiated egalitarianism from above by dint of brainwashing and coercion. On the right it looks like an extreme form of conservative nationalism, the nation defined as white Americans and tolerated non-whites, in which the state provides social and economic security to the Volksgemeinschaft while strictly policing both its literal and figurative borders. In any event, neither dispensation can stand too much liberalism, and possibly not much more democracy either.

We know that a significant decline in a society's deep literacy can matter because it has happened before. Thanks in part to the revolutionary impact of the codex, male literacy rates in the Roman Republic and then Empire were probably in the 30% to 40% range, at least in urban areas. We even have records of slaves knowing how to read and write. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476, literacy rates quickly dropped below 5%, and did not regain their previous levels until the 16th century at the earliest. Until they did, the advent of liberalism as we understand the term could not happen.

One could argue that American history is replete with majorities of non-deep-literate people in virtually every decade since 1776, and democracy endured and populist surges were rare. And surely, whatever the recent decline in deep literacy, more Americans are deep-literate today than in 1919 or 1819. But this overlooks the fact that, at its 1776 birth, independent America probably constituted the most mass-literate society in world history, notwithstanding the number of slaves and indentured servants. Such a high rate of literacy was the consequence of the highly scripturalist nature of Protestantism and the deeply religious character of most colonial-era American settlements.

Furthermore, populist surges were not rare; they merely expressed themselves most often in religious culture as Great Awakenings rather than directly in politics — but the bleed-over from the former to the latter was hardly trivial. Besides, throughout most of American history, politics has been an elite affair despite its ever-growing egalitarian pretensions. That was true before the Jacksonian era, but it was basically true long thereafter, as well. Most people showed a natural deference to educated folk, and the further back one goes, the higher the percentage of educated men (it was mostly men) who went to divinity school. Protestant scripturalists showed particular reverence for well-educated clergy, especially in "high church" circles.

Literacy rates in 19th-century America, notably female literacy rates, register a near continuous rise, and the correlation with democratic participation is arguably positive. All three major American antebellum social movements arose from this development: abolition, temperance, and female suffrage. But rising literacy rates did not bring unvarnished blessings because too much democracy driven by scantily educated people rarely does: It constitutes a distributed mob, potential or extant, more or less of the kind the ancient Greeks warned against. For example, higher rates of literacy and democratic participation in the 1850s correlate with the brittle, abstract forms of para-theological, Second Great Awakening reasoning that infested political discourse and helped bring about the Civil War.

A kind of sine wave seems to run through American history, with each step-change upward in literacy associated with a Great Awakening, and each one rotating around an emotionally evocative and encompassing central idea. There was George Whitefield's Awakening of the 1740s, with its core idea of God, part rediscovered and part redefined from the days of the Puritan pioneers. Then came the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s through the 1840s — the camp-meeting Awakening associated with Charles Grandison Finney, Methodist circuit riders, and the rise of the Baptists. The core idea was the nation, under the aegis of the further-redefined, far-more-democratic Protestant God. Then came the Third Great Awakening, which spanned the 1880s through 1910s: the Awakening of the Chautauqua movement, William Jennings Bryan's Populists, and the Social Gospel. The core idea was the Whig understanding of progress as annealed in the spreading Industrial Revolution.

Now, arguably, we behold a fourth Great Awakening, which began in the late 1950s — just as the television entered every home and commenced the draining of Americans' capacity for deep reading — and continues today. Its core idea is radical (and sometimes global) egalitarianism. It is roiling American politics with what we conventionally call the culture wars, but it obviously also affects a host of policy zones, including immigration and education.

Each successive Awakening wave has moved further from viewing church clerical leadership as its explicit font of authority. Each has been more democratizing in various ways and less deferential to established hierarchy. Each has increasingly infiltrated and reified political discourse to one degree or another — the moral fervor of the Second Great Awakening that helped produce the Civil War was preceded by the moral fervor of the First Great Awakening that arguably led to an earlier civil war, which Americans call the Revolutionary War. And now, unsurprisingly given the history, we live amid a (mostly) cold civil war.

Put in the idiom of literacy, it could be that, all else being equal, literate people are less deferential to authority, and that would make some contemporary Americans inclined to demand freedom from the state and others to demand equality enforced by the state. This sounds self-contradictory because it is. Maximum freedom, or liberty, and maximum equality are in tension. Thanks to "the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue," as Jefferson put it to Adams, unconstrained freedom will produce economic, social, and usually political inequality. Attempts to enforce equality will put a crimp on freedom. In a sense, the populist, Awakened energies in American politics today are twinned, with populist demands for equality of outcomes, not just opportunity, coming from the left, and populist demands for freedom coming from the right. The challenge is to figure out ways to reconcile these two fundamental demands. But we will have a difficult time doing that if the process is driven more by emotion than by thought — especially at a time when deep reading, and all that flows from it, has gone out of fashion.

CONCRETE THINKING

As it is, we now have greater levels of at least superficial participation in political discourse, if not in politics itself, thanks in part to social-media technologies. Vast numbers of people contribute scantily supported opinions about things they don't really understand, validating the old saw that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

A greater percentage of Americans may be deep literate in 2019 than in 1819 or 1919, but probably not than in 1949, before television, the internet, and the iPhone. We have reached a stage at which many professors dare not assign entire books or large parts of moderately challenging ones to undergraduates because they know they won't read them. And while more Americans are graduating from four-year colleges than ever before, the educational standards of many of those institutions, and the distribution of study away from the humanities and social sciences, suggest that a concomitant rise in deep literacy has gone unrealized as the degree factories churn.

The decline of deep literacy, combined with the relative rise in status of the superficially educated, may well be the main food stock for the illiberal nationalist forms of the contemporary populist bacillus not just in America, but in much of the world at large. If so, it endows Ortega y Gasset's 1930 radio-era observations in The Revolt of the Masses with new import. The common, not particularly well-educated person, Ortega y Gasset argued, has ideas in his head but did not produce those ideas:

He wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion....To have an idea means believing one is in possession of the reasons for having it, and consequently means believing that there is such a thing as reason, a world of intelligible truths. To have ideas, to form opinions, is identical with appealing to such an authority...and therefore believing that the highest form of inter-communion is the dialogue in which the reasons for our ideas are discussed. But the mass-man would feel himself lost if he accepted discussion, and instinctively repudiates the obligation of accepting that supreme authority lying outside himself.

And this, he continued, gave rise to both the right-wing and left-wing extremists of his day: "The Fascist and Syndicalist species...characterized by...a type of man who did not care to give reasons or even to be right, but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: ‘the reason of unreason.'"

The very notion of a right not to be reasonable is predicated on a discourse, if one can even call it that, of untethered emotion that rules out that mode of activity that enables reasoning: deep literacy, and what follows from it. Indeed, amid all the recent confusion about what populism actually is, the deep-literacy prism in the light of history can help achieve some definitional precision: Populism of the illiberal nationalist kind is what happens in a mass-electoral democracy when a decisive percentage of mobilized voters drops below a deep-literacy standard.

Perhaps any literacy overshadows deep literacy in democratic political life. Adults who haven't read a book since high school tend to become mobilized to vote for reasons that differ from those of more literate voters. This is not a new observation; political scientist Philip Converse wrote of this phenomenon in 1964, a time when social science was just beginning to penetrate the mythology of a "pure" American democracy:

[M]oving from top to bottom of this information dimension, the character of the objects that are central in a belief system undergoes systematic change. These objects shift from the remote, generic, and abstract to the increasingly simple, concrete, or "close to home." Where potential political objects are concerned, this progression tends to be from abstract, "ideological" principles to the more obviously recognizable social groupings or charismatic leaders and finally to such objects of immediate experience as a family, job, and immediate associates. Most of these changes have been hinted at in one form or another in a variety of sources. For example, "limited horizons," "foreshortened time perspectives," and "concrete thinking" have been singled out as notable characteristics of the ideational world of the poorly educated.

Could it be that the masses, referred to by Hamilton as a "dreadful monster," are composed in the main of "concrete thinkers," who think concretely because they lack a facility for, or a habit of, deep reading? After all, deep readers at least may know what they don't know, and hence are better able to deploy shields of skepticism against all forms of advertising, including the political kind that enchants populist mobs into being. Those who lack a reading habit may be locked in perpetual intellectual adolescence, but they can still gather in the street, shout, and even shoot. The 16th-century English bishop John Bridges wrote that a fool and his money are soon parted. He might have said the same about a non-reader and his political agency.

The phenomenon of deep literacy can be a powerful explanatory factor for a range of theoretical and practical questions. No single factor explains anything entirely when it comes to the spiraling universe of social and political life, and it would be a stretch to claim that any of the above arguments amounts to a proof. But to omit deep literacy from the range of considered variables seems unwise. We should continue to generate new and more interesting questions to pose about deep literacy, and the meaning of its possible erosion, or transformation by novel means, in our own country and beyond.

Adam Garfinkle is founding editor of the American Interest.

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The Decline of Reading: A Short Research

Introduction : The Decline of Reading

Table of Contents

When I conducted my brainstorming exercise regarding the decline of reading in schools and colleges, I delved into various viewpoints from diverse sources and explored perspectives from different angles. It became apparent that the advent of screens had disrupted the book market. However, I overlooked the flip side, which is the widespread use of screens for reading purposes—a practice I engage in frequently myself. Additionally, feedback from my professor prompted me to revisit my initial thoughts, leading me to arrive at a completely different conclusion and enabling me to approach various questions with fresh insight.

Three Significant Questions:

Has the proliferation of screens affected the reading habits of the adult population?
How has the emergence of smartphones altered public reading habits?
What are the implications of the transition from printed material to screen-based reading on overall reading habits?

As I began exploring different reading materials and sources, I followed the common practice of conducting more in-depth research. This led me to discover an intriguing article discussing how the digital revolution has reshaped reading habits. The article provides a comprehensive review of various relevant works, including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” among others. It examines the reading process, current trends in online reading in the United States, the rise of digital texts, and the ebook revolution. Furthermore, it sparked my interest in neuroscience, prompting me to delve deeper into emerging trends, particularly regarding the transformative impact of smartphones.

David Denby on The Decline of Reading

This prompted me to conduct another Google search, leading me to stumble upon another compelling article by David Denby, published in The New Yorker, a highly regarded magazine. Denby’s article delves into the impact of smartphones on teenage users and their diminishing interest in reading. Drawing upon research from the Pew Research Center and other supporting evidence, Denby illustrates how teenagers are increasingly abandoning books and failing to engage in the reading habits typically associated with their age group.

While Denby expresses concern over this decline in reading among teens, he also highlights another troubling trend: the dwindling emphasis on humanities-based reading due to the pervasive use of smartphones. Teenagers, it seems, are becoming less inclined to engage in the rigorous reading required by humanities subjects. In light of these observations, I felt compelled to explore the industry perspective on this issue. It’s evident that many publishers are adapting to the digital age by offering a wide array of digital and ebook options online. This shift in publishing practices reflects the evolving landscape of reading habits and the increasing prominence of digital platforms in the literary world.

Sain Cain on The Decline of Reading

Does this mean that reading has not declined? In this context, I accessed databases and discovered another research article by Nadine Vassallo, titled as a chapter of a book. Vassallo asserts that with the advent of ebooks and the shift to reading via screens, it has become imperative for publishers to establish an online presence. However, this does not necessarily signify a decline in reading; rather, it suggests that reading itself remains unchanged, with only the mode of reading evolving. The traditional printed page is gradually being replaced by digital screens, prompting publishers to adapt by offering digital editions of books. While Vassallo acknowledges a decline in the sales ratio of printed books, she notes a corresponding increase in ebook sales. She opines that reading may have declined to some extent, but assessing the true extent of this decline will require more time, as not everyone has equal access to screens. Many individuals still prefer reading books in their traditional printed format.

This exploration led me to further investigate the comparison between printed books and ebooks, prompting me to read a compelling report in The Guardian, a reputable newspaper published in the United Kingdom. The opening sentence of this report by Sian Cain provides a starkly different perspective on actual readers. Cain describes students experiencing a “sigh of relief” upon encountering a physical book. The writer presents several compelling statistics to illustrate that the number of readers of physical books is indeed increasing. This contrasts sharply with what I previously read in The New Yorker. Cain utilizes an infographic to demonstrate that book sales have surged, and ebooks are also experiencing an upward trend. Additionally, the report references numerous global publishing houses affirming that books are making a vigorous comeback and are here to stay. This has prompted me to ponder whether books are competing with ebooks, and if so, where printed books currently stand in terms of readers’ preferences. Are people still opting for printed books, or are they increasingly favoring ebooks?

Carlyle on The Decline of Reading

In this context , I came across a compelling article by Alex Wright that delves into the evolving nature of books. Wright contends that books are assuming a fluid reality, transitioning to digital formats such as websites, screens, ebooks, and PDFs, offering readers multiple avenues for consumption. He provides a thorough exploration of the history of printing, encapsulated in the aptly titled piece, “The Battle of Books.” Wright traces this history from Swift to Carlyle, touching upon pivotal figures like Gutenberg and the advent of printed books, ultimately highlighting the emergence of digital books as a new evolution in the literary landscape.

Commenting on this new trend, Wright anticipates a growing anxiety surrounding the shift to digital formats, which he believes will ultimately foster a deeper connection between readers and writers regarding the act of reading. His article does not indicate any trend of decline in reading but rather underscores the transformative nature of digitalization in the literary sphere.

However, this exploration prompts a new question: the impact of digital reading on the brain. As I contemplate this query, I am intrigued by the potential effects of prolonged screen exposure on reading speed and comprehension. Will the transition to digital formats alter our reading habits, or will it lead to unintended consequences due to the effects of screen light on the brain? This question opens up a fascinating avenue for further exploration into the intersection of technology and cognition.

Conclusion : The Decline of Reading

The writer, Jabr Ferris, draws a parallel between the evolution of music consumption from physical devices to digital formats and the current shift from printed books to screen gadgets like Kindle. Ferris eloquently discusses his own reading preferences, highlighting the benefits of online reading and the enjoyment of graphics and webcomics. However, he ultimately emphasizes the superiority of text presented in print form, suggesting a nostalgic attachment to traditional books.

Despite Ferris’ sentimentality, the reality among many contemporary readers, including myself and my classmates, is a preference for ebooks over hardback textbooks. This preference reflects the convenience and accessibility offered by digital reading platforms. Moreover, proceedings from a conference on the future of books and libraries suggest that libraries are adapting to the challenge posed by digital reading by embracing ebooks and online resources.

My own experience echoes this sentiment, as I primarily access reading material through ebooks and online papers via the library. Consequently, it appears evident that ebooks are shaping the future of reading. Despite assertions that printed books are in decline, the rise of ebooks and online reading suggests that the future of reading is digital.

Therefore, my thesis posits that the decline in printed book reading has transformed into an increase in ebooks and online reading, positioning the future of reading to triumph over the proliferation of digital devices.

Works Cited: The Decline of Reading

Cain, Sian. “Ebook sales continue to fall as younger generations drive appetite for print.” The Guardian, 14 Mar. 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/14/ebook-sales-continue-to-fall-nielsen-survey-uk-book-sales . Accessed 04 Nov. 2023.
“Conference Call: Should Libraries Jump on the E-Book Bandwagon?” American Libraries, vol. 31, no. 7, 2000, pp. 61–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25637720 .
Cull, Barry. “Reading revolutions: Online digital text and implications for reading in academe.” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 6, 2011, n. pag. Web. Accessed 4 Nov. 2023.
Denby, David. “Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore?” The New Yorker, 23 Feb. 202. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/books-smell-like-old-people-the-decline-of-teen-reading. Accessed 04 Nov. 2023.
Jabr, Ferris. “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.” Scientific American, 11 Apr. 2023. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/ . Accessed 04 Nov. 2023.
Vassallo, Nadine. “An Industry Perspective: Publishing in the Digital Age.” Academic E-Books: Publishers, Librarians, and Users, edited by Suzanne M. Ward et al., Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana, 2016, pp. 19–34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wf4ds0.5 .
Wright, Alex. “The Battle of the Books.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), vol. 33, no. 4, 2009, pp. 59–64. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20700629 .

Relevant Questions about The Decline of Reading

What are the primary factors contributing to “The Decline of Reading” in printed books, and how do they compare to the rise of digital reading platforms?
How do societal attitudes towards reading, particularly among younger generations, impact “The Decline of Reading” in printed books?
In what ways are libraries and educational institutions adapting to “The Decline of Reading” in printed books towards digital reading, and what challenges do they face in maintaining accessibility to reading materials?

Government’s Usage of Euphemism: Hiding Truth
“You Fit Into Me”: by Margaret Atwood
Resistance and Anger in Mahmoud Darwish
“The Eagle” and “Hawk Roosting”: Comparison

America’s reading problem: Scores were dropping even before the pandemic

Reading Remedies

Seven newsrooms joined together to report on the problem and find solutions for America’s reading problem.

‘The Reading Year’: First grade is critical for reading skills, but kids coming from disrupted kindergarten experiences are way behind

Retraining an entire state’s elementary teachers in the science of reading, states’ urgent push to overhaul reading instruction, masks, virtual instruction and covid-19 challenges made it hard for kids to learn reading, battling pandemic reading woes through teacher support, training, “guided reading” launched a district into one of california’s top performers.

Mackenzie Woll, a second-grade teacher at Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, said diagnostic tests at the start of the year revealed that most of her students were reading at a kindergarten or a first grade level. In previous years, some students would come in reading above grade level; this year, no one in her class did.

Woll now reviews kindergarten-level phonics with her second graders. On a recent day, a student held up flashcards at the front of the class and led her peers in a call and response chant through the alphabet. “A, apple, ah!” she said. Her classmates echoed the sounds back to her.

In a normal year, the exercise would have been scaled back by this point, Woll said. “But because of the pandemic, I’m still doing those letter sounds every day.”

Teaching aide Hannah Chancey faces the same problem in second grade classrooms at Rehobeth Elementary School in a small low-income community in southeastern Alabama, a state with reading scores near the bottom nationally.

“They couldn’t read; they couldn’t identify letters,” said Chancey, clutching a clipboard with the names of children who need extra instruction. “We couldn’t have enough help.”

Nationwide, test scores for younger students, who are just learning to read, dropped far more than for older students. The average third grader’s reading score fell 6 percentile points on the MAP test, twice the drop of the average eighth grader . In a separate pandemic study of second and third graders in 100 school districts, Stanford University researchers found that although teachers had figured out how to teach reading remotely during the 2020-21 school year, students didn’t catch up.

“They’re still behind,” said Ben Domingue, an assistant professor at Stanford who was one of the authors. Domingue said reading gaps in younger children could “mutate” into future academic problems. Students need to read in order to learn other subjects, from science to history.

Parents of young children are worried.

Before the pandemic, Albalicia Espino often took her 6-year-old daughter Sara to the West Dallas Library. On special occasions, they’d make the trip to downtown Dallas, where the towering library building has a dedicated children’s floor.

The pandemic halted those treasured visits.

“I didn’t want her to get started on the wrong foot and lose a lot of those basic things,” Espino said. She worries Sara didn’t get enough practice learning letter sounds and other foundational reading skills.

Related: What parents need to know about the research on how kids learn to read

Sara is back at school in person for first grade, trying to learn the elements of language from behind a mask. Her Dallas elementary school extended its school year in an effort to help students make up for lost time. Sara is also getting extra help in reading through a nonprofit organization in her neighborhood.

During the pandemic, students in low-income districts, already lagging, fell even further behind students from wealthier districts. In high-poverty schools, where more than three-quarters of students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch, the drop in reading scores on the MAP test was often more than three times as large as it was in low-poverty schools, where a quarter or fewer students qualify for the lunch program.

“We’re teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum.” Elena Forzani, a reading specialist at Boston University

Racial and ethnic gaps worsened too. Reading scores on the MAP test fell almost twice as much for Black and Hispanic students as they did for white and Asian students.

Researchers worry that the drop in reading achievement during the pandemic may be even worse than their figures indicate. All the estimates rely on some sort of test, but many low-income students didn’t take any tests in 2021. For the same reasons that many low-income students struggled to learn remotely during the pandemic, it was also hard, if not impossible, for students to take an online assessment of their progress.

Even before the pandemic, reading achievement was in a slump. In 2016, U.S. fourth graders slid seven points on an international reading test, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) . Then, fourth and eighth graders — particularly eighth graders — posted lower scores on the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a benchmark test that is taken every two years by both age groups.

Related: Why reading comprehension is deteriorating

Analysts noted that reading scores of the lowest achieving students had been declining for a decade , and that the 2019 losses — especially steep among low performers — had erased 30 years of progress. In previous tests, the gains of the highest achieving students had offset the losses at the bottom, leaving the national average steady. But in 2019, the reading performance of all students deteriorated.

“We’ve never seen a significant decline like this before,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which has been monitoring and releasing data on student achievement for decades. “All the tests are showing these patterns. We’re seeing it everywhere.”

“Because of the pandemic I’m still doing those letter sounds every day.” Mackenzie Woll, a second grade teacher

The reason for the pandemic’s toll on reading achievement is obvious: It’s hard to learn when schools are closed. But the reason that reading scores fell before the pandemic is less straightforward. Educators and researchers are weighing three theories on what is responsible for the decline: money, instruction or reading itself.

After the 2008 recession, schools across the country cut spending by $600 per student, on average, and laid off thousands of teachers. It took state and local governments seven years to restore their tax bases, muster the political will to approve spending increases and send the money to schools.

“What’s causing these trends is no mystery,” Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank, posted on Twitter. “It’s almost surely the spending cuts that happened in the wake of the Great Recession. The 13-year-olds who did so poorly in 2019 would have been in grades K-2 during the worst of the cuts, from 2011-14. Those early years matter!”

Long before the pandemic, many reading experts argued that young children didn’t receive enough phonics instruction in kindergarten and first grade to become smooth, fluent readers. More than half of Black fourth-graders and 46 percent of Hispanic fourth grade students scored below the lowest level on the NAEP test. For these students, “it is likely that if fluency were improved, comprehension would also improve,” a September 2021 analysis by three prominent reading scholars concluded.

Some educators have tried to respond by emphasizing phonics. The Wenatchee School District in Washington state switched all students to phonics-based reading instruction a few months before the pandemic. The district has long struggled with low reading scores, especially among its English learners, who make up nearly a quarter of the enrollment.

Superintendent Paul Gordon recalled a moment during a visit to a fourth grade classroom that underscored why the district needed to move quickly.

“I asked the kids what they found challenging and fun,” he said. “We had a lot of stories about lunch and recess. But I will never forget at the very end, a little girl raises her hand and says, ‘I can’t read. When I go out to recess, I feel like everyone is laughing at me because I don’t know how to read.’”

Allison Hurt, a first grade teacher who has taught at Lincoln Elementary School in Wenatchee for 20 years, said the switch required a complete overhaul of the way she taught — and thought — about reading.

“I didn’t realize that there is actually a sequential order in phonology that students should be learning their sounds — biggest to smallest,” Hurt said. “They have to be able to break a sentence apart into words, and chunk them apart into syllables.”

By the end of the first full year of teaching this way, Hurt said 80 percent of her class had aced a phonology test — a rate she hadn’t seen before.

Not every student has improved as dramatically, but Hurt said this structured method has made it easier to catch students who are stuck.

Many scholars are concerned that phonics alone won’t help children read proficiently as they get older. Elena Forzani, a reading specialist at Boston University, thinks the recent slide in eighth grade test scores could reflect ineffective teaching practices.

“We tend to take those kids and throw lower-level instruction at them,” Forzani said. “They get these rote phonics programs. It’s all focused on learning to read. They’re not having complex discussions about a text. At the same time, we’re also taking away science and history instruction where kids can develop knowledge and where they can put comprehension strategies into practice. We’re teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum.”

Researchers are also zeroing in on changes in home reading habits. In student surveys that accompanied the NAEP reading assessments, the percentage of eighth graders who said they read 30 minutes or more a day, excluding homework, declined by 4 percentage points from 2017 to 2019. They were less likely to say they talked about books, went to the library or considered reading one of their favorite activities.

Related: U.S. education achievement slides backwards

It’s too soon to blame the distraction of texting, TikTok and Minecraft. More time reading doesn’t necessarily produce strong readers. Researchers sometimes find instances, such as in Mississippi, where students read less but their scores actually increased slightly . In other states, such as Rhode Island, reading habits were more stable but scores slid.

The root of America’s reading problem could take years to unravel. In the meantime, teachers have to help the students sitting in front of them right now.

Back in South Carolina, Yon is trying to get her seventh and eighth graders to re-engage with literature by giving them physical books. She finds they read better if they are looking at an actual page instead of a screen.

On Saturdays, her students can get one-on-one tutoring. Yon was surprised by the high turnout at recent sessions. It’s a sign, she said, that things will eventually improve.

This story about reading proficiency was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with the Christian Science Monitor and the Ed Labs at AL.com, the Dallas Morning News, the Post and Courier, and the Seattle Times. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter .

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It seems to me that the educational leadership goes out of its way to ensure that the remedial kids remain remedial kids. It think that the comment below sort of sums it all up. If you’re serious, recognize that equality comes first – equal opportunity to engage in a challenging content rich grade level curriculum that is effectively taught. Upon the foundation of equality there will be a greater showing of equitable outcomes. The other way, the easy way, which today’s educators seem bent on doing is, lower the standards until everyone is equally unable – that goes for academics and for student conduct. The following quote was taken from the article above:

You have a so called reading specialist from Boston University who actually cites a curriculum that ” only focuses on learning to read” as a cause of poor reading skills. Anyone remember the 80s and 90s when something called HOOKED ON PHONICS became enormously popular? That happened because the public schools had stopped the proven and correct way of teaching reading, which was Phonics, and all of the sudden American children were not learning to read. The sudden demand for Phonics instruction was created by the absolute failure of public education to teach reading and phonics instruction could only be obtained through a private company which parents had to use toh home school their kids. The problem is clear and so is the solution. All these incompetent, self proclaimed ‘experts’ have removed academics and replaced it with hack psychology. Public schools do not teach academic proficiency, rather they teach behavioral outcomes and that right there is the problem. Period. It is absolutely sickening that people who are so monumentally stupid are even involved in education much less running it. The only thing worse are the parents all over this country who are obvious too stupid to figure it out and put a stop to it.

What about home-schooled students? Presumably they had little or no interruption of classes during the pandemic. How do their reading scores compare with their peers in public school before, during and after the pandemic?

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Reading achievement declines during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from 5 million U.S. students in grades 3–8

Published: 17 August 2022
Volume 36 , pages 245–261, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

Megan Kuhfeld ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2231-5228 1 ,
Karyn Lewis 1 &
Tiffany Peltier 1

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The COVID-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented disruption in students’ academic development. Using reading test scores from 5 million U.S. students in grades 3–8, we tracked changes in achievement across the first two years of the pandemic. Average fall 2021 reading test scores in grades 3–8 were .09 to .17 standard deviations lower relative to same-grade peers in fall 2019, with the largest impacts in grades 3–5. Students of color attending high-poverty elementary schools saw the largest test score declines in reading. Our results suggest that many upper elementary students are at-risk for reading difficulties and will need targeted supports to build and strengthen foundational reading skills.

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been widespread concerns about the accumulation of unfinished learning due to ongoing disruptions to schooling. All public schools in the U.S. closed during spring of the 2019–2020 school year, and many of schools operated in remote or hybrid models across much of the 2020–2021 school year. Given the magnitude of the disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not surprising that numerous studies have now documented impacts of COVID-19 on student test scores (Betthäuser et al., 2022 ; Hammerstein et al., 2021 ; Thorn & Vincent-Horn, 2021 ; West & Lake, 2021 ; Zierer, 2021 ). Although researchers have consistently found large declines in math test scores since the start of the pandemic (e.g., Halloran et al., 2021 ; Lewis et al., 2021 ), research on reading test scores has been more mixed. In fall 2020, reading test scores in grades 3–8 were mostly consistent with historic averages (Curriculum Associates, 2020 ; ; Renaissance, 2020 ), though more substantial relative declines were reported by spring 2021 (Halloran et al., 2021 ; Lewis et al., 2021 ).

Although it is now clear that the pandemic has taken a toll on reading achievement, we still know relatively little about which students were hit hardest and what kinds of supports are needed for recovery. To address these gaps in our understanding, this research explores the impacts of the pandemic on reading achievement in a large national sample. We use reading test scores from fall 2021 (as well as fall data from the two prior years) from 5.2 million U.S. public school students to examine how reading achievement at the beginning of the school year has changed across the course of the COVID-19 pandemic thus far. Specifically, we address three research questions:

To what extent have reading test scores in the U.S. changed during the first two years of the pandemic (and how do these trends compare to what has been observed in math)?

Do the impacts of learning disruptions on reading achievement differ by grade level?

Which groups of students had the most and least change in test scores?

Grade differences

An additional important contribution of this research is examining how the impact of the pandemic may vary across grade. This is particularly relevant for research looking at reading outcomes given how reading skills typically develop. Reading comprehension is comprised of two major components, decoding and language comprehension (Gough & Tunmer, 1986 ). Decoding is a constrained skill (meaning it is comprised of a limited number of items and can be mastered in a relatively short amount of time). Students typically master decoding phoneme-grapheme correspondences and develop fluency while reading by the end of second grade (Hasbrouck & Tindall, 2017 ). Language comprehension, however, is an unconstrained skill (meaning it is comprised of an unlimited amount of information) in which students continue to develop throughout their lives (Paris, 2005 ). During the early grades students develop these components at different rates, with phonics and spelling instruction largely contributing to students’ decoding ability (Tunmer & Hoover, 2019 ). In turn, decoding abilities provide the foundation for students to develop as fluent readers.

Given the sequential nature for how students develop decoding and language comprehension skills, it is likely that age and reading ability at the onset of the pandemic may be an important factor and younger students still in the process of acquiring early building blocks of reading may have been more impacted by pandemic disruptions. Consistent with this, initial evidence from students in K-2 tested during the pandemic indicates that a significantly higher proportion of students are at risk for reading problems compared to pre-COVID-19 students (Amplify, 2022 ; McGinty et al., 2021 ). Because most decoding-focused instruction takes place in the early grades, we hypothesize that those most negatively impacted would be students enrolled in kindergarten through second grade during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (who would be expected to be in grades 2–4 by the 2021–2022 school year).

Differences by race/ethnicity and poverty

The evidence is clear that communities of color disproportionately bore the economic, social, and health consequences of the pandemic (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022 ). Studies have consistently found that Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous households were at increased risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19 and were also more likely to struggle with food insufficiency during the pandemic (CDC, 2021 ; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2021 ). Furthermore, students in majority Black and Hispanic schools reported facing more obstacles to learning during the pandemic, including feeling depressed, stressed, or anxious and having concerns around their own health and the health of their family members (YouthTruth, 2021 ). Additionally, students in high-poverty households were also less likely to have adequate technical infrastructure, high-speed internet, and quiet learning spaces at home, which were important during remote learning periods (Coleman et al., 2021 ). Not surprisingly, the cumulative toll of these burdens is evident in education outcomes and achievement gaps across race/ethnicity and income groups that existed prior to the pandemic have widened. For instance, Black and Hispanic students and schools serving poorer communities made learning gains at lower rates during the pandemic compared with their White and higher-income peers (Curriculum Associates, 2021 ; Dorn et al., 2020 ).

In this research we also examine how reading achievement declines differ across groups and build on other studies by considering the intersection between race/ethnicity and poverty with regards to students’ academic experiences in the pandemic. Race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status are not experienced in isolation but rather intertwined in ways that result in accumulated disadvantage (Nurius et al., 2015 ). Limited English proficiency status may also be related to factors such as ethnicity and poverty. Thus, a complete understanding of which students have been most impacted requires considering these factors in tandem, which has been largely missing thus far in studies of the impact of the pandemic.

Methodology

The data for this study are from the anonymized longitudinal student achievement database collected by Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a research-based, not-for-profit organization based in the United States. School districts voluntarily choose to administer NWEA MAP® Growth™ assessments to their students, while students are typically given the option to opt out of testing if they would like. Assessments typically administered in the fall (usually between August and November), winter (usually December to March), and spring (late March through June). The test scores are typically used to monitor elementary and secondary students’ reading and math growth, but are also sometimes used for evaluating educational interventions, as a component of teacher evaluation systems, and as a part of admission decisions for special programs. For more information on how students and teachers use MAP Growth scores, see the MAP Growth technical documentation (NWEA, 2019 ).

The NWEA data also include demographic information, including student race/ethnicity, gender, and age at assessment. An indicator of student-level socioeconomic status is not available. We measure school poverty level using free or reduced priced lunch (FRPL) eligibility data from the 2019–2020 Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey data file from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). We classified low-poverty schools as those with percentage FRPL eligibility less than 25% in 2019–2020, while high-poverty schools were schools with FRPL eligibility greater than or equal to 75% in 2019–2020.

In total, our sample consists of approximately 5.2 million students in grades 3–8 in approximately 12,000 U.S. public schools. We limited our sample of schools to a consistent set of schools that tested at least ten students in a given grade in fall 2019, fall 2020, and fall 2021. This sample restriction guards against the competing explanation that any differences we observe in achievement over time are potentially driven by systematic differences between schools that did and did not consistently test students in all three years. Descriptive information for the students in our sample by grade is provided in Table 1 . Overall, the samples of students who tested in 2019 and of same-grade students who tested in fall 2021 were very similar in terms of gender and race/ethnicity, though the number of students tested in each grade was consistently larger in fall 2019. The average NWEA school was remote for approximately 20% of the 2020–2021 school year, though there was wide variability across states and school poverty levels, with high poverty schools spending about 5.5 more weeks in remote instruction than low- and mid-poverty schools (Goldhaber et al., 2022 ).

Descriptive information for the schools in our sample along with comparison information on the population of U.S. schools is provided in Table 2 . Information about U.S. public schools was obtained from the 2019–2020 NCES Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey data file. The schools in our sample represent roughly 12–15% of U.S. public schools in any given grade. Our sample closely matches the U.S. distribution of schools across various locales (urban, suburban, rural, and town). However, our sample reflects schools serving higher average percentages of White students (55% in our sample vs. 49% in the nation), lower average percentages of Hispanic students (20% vs. 26%), and slightly lower percentages of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch (FRPL) relative to national averages (53% vs. 56%).

Student test scores from the NWEA Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Growth reading assessments, called RIT scores, were used in this study. MAP Growth is a computer adaptive test that precisely measures achievement even for students above or below grade level. Most tests are administered at school (in a classroom or computer lab), but many tests were administered remotely during the early part of the 2020–2021 school year. Each test begins with a question appropriate for the student’s grade level, and then adapts throughout the test in response to student performance. Students respond to assessment items in order (without the ability to return to previous items), and a test event is finished when a student completes all the test items (typically 40–53 items). Each test takes approximately 40–60 min depending on the grade and subject area. MAP Growth scores are scaled using the Rasch item response theory (IRT) model and allow for both within-grade and across-grade level comparisons. The items on each assessment are aligned to state content standards (NWEA, 2019 ).

NWEA MAP Growth 2–12 is a measure of reading that measures comprehension of various elements of reading, including word meaning (e.g., word origins, semantics) and literacy and informational concepts (e.g., main ideas, inferences, purpose, text structure). This would correspond to a score for overall reading comprehension, as students need to decode the passages or words in order to answer the comprehension questions that follow. The assessments are highly reliable (α > 0.90) and have strong correlations ( ρ > 0.70) with other US state-specific assessments, such as the ACT Aspire, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) assessments (NWEA, 2019 ).

Students receive test scores in each subject/term that are reported on the RIT (Rasch unIT) scale, which is a linear transformation of the logit scale units from the Rasch item response theory model. We also reported scores in standard deviation units, which are described in further detail in the following section. We primarily focus on reading results in this study, though we provide a comparison to math results using a consistent sample of schools.

To understand how overall reading achievement in fall 2020 and fall 2021 compared to prior to the pandemic (e.g., fall 2019), we standardized the fall 2020 and fall 2021 test scores relative to the mean and standard deviations (SDs) of the fall 2019 MAP Growth test scores (separately by grade level). The resulting estimate ${\overline{\mathrm{Z}} }_{21g}$ represents the standardized difference (in fall 2019 SDs) between the fall 2019 and fall 2021 means:

Standardized mean estimates were calculated in fall 2020 and fall 2021 for each grade/subject. The mean and SDs for each term used to calculate the standardized estimates are reported in Table 3 . In all of the analyses presented, we compared test scores in a single grade relative to same-grade peers from a previous school year and used the term “declines” to refer to changes across cohorts of students (rather than changes in an individual student’s trajectory across school years).

We also further disaggregated the results to examine trends across student subgroups. Specifically, we first compared trends in average test scores from fall 2019 to fall 2021 in low- and high-poverty schools. Second, we compared students by racial/ethnic group separately in low- and high-poverty schools. We translated all the subgroup RIT score means into standard deviation units based on the overall fall 2019 mean and SD. In 2019, the estimate ${\overline{\mathrm{Z}} }_{19sg}$ in grade g and subgroup s represents the difference in SDs between the fall 2019 subgroup mean and the overall mean in fall 2019:

In fall 2021, the estimate ${\overline{\text{Z}}}_{21sg}$ in grade g and subgroup s represents the difference in SDs between the fall 2021 subgroup mean and the overall mean in fall 2019:

Research question 1: trends in reading test scores

The top panel in Fig. 1 presents trends in average reading test scores (in RIT points) between fall 2019, fall 2020, and fall 2021. Additionally, test score changes are reported in the figure in SD units relative to the fall 2019 test score distribution. Students showed mostly similar reading performance in fall 2020 as before the pandemic (changes ranging from − 0.02 to 0.05 SDs by grade). As a point of reference prior to the pandemic, average reading scores held constant (changes ranging from − 0.02 to 0.01 SDs within each grade) between fall 2017, fall 2018, and fall 2019 (see Table 3 ). However, sizable drops in reading achievement occurred between fall 2020 and fall 2021, resulting in a total test score change of − 0.09 to − 0.17 SDs since the start of the pandemic. The bottom panel in Fig. 1 provides a comparison of the trends observed during the same period in math. In contrast, math test scores declined in a fairly linear fashion across the first and second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with substantial math test score declines (− 0.20 to − 0.27 SDs) across the two-year period (fall 2019 to fall 2021).

Changes in MAP Growth test scores in fall 2020 and fall 2021 (relative to fall 2019). Note. Reported estimates are calculated based on subtracting the observed mean in each year by the fall 2019 mean and then dividing by the fall 2019 standard deviations (SDs) for each grade

Research question 2: differences by grade level

While all grade levels showed declines between fall 2020 and fall 2021, we were also interested in understanding which grade levels showed the largest effects in reading. Our analyses show the largest declines are evident for students who were in grades 3–5 during fall 2021 (e.g., were in grades 1–3 when the pandemic began). The reading declines in the elementary school grades were approximately 1.5 times as large as the test score declines for students in middle school in fall 2021, while the math test declines were fairly similar across grade levels.

Research question 3: differences by school poverty and race/ethnicity

Figure 2 shows differences in average reading achievement between fall 2021 and fall 2019 disaggregated by student grade and school poverty level. This allows us, for example, to situate reading achievement for 3rd graders in high-poverty schools in fall 2021 (0.65 SD below the pre-pandemic overall mean) relative to the reading achievement of 3rd graders in high-poverty schools in fall 2019 (0.40 SD below the pre-pandemic overall mean) and calculate the difference between the two groups (0.25 SD drop). Across all grades and poverty levels, reading achievement dropped between fall 2019 and fall 2021, but the drops were considerably larger for students in high-poverty schools. This was especially notable in grades 3–5, where the achievement drops were 2.5 times larger for students in high-poverty schools compared with low-poverty schools.

Changes in standardized MAP Growth reading test scores between fall 2019 and fall 2021 by school poverty level. Note . The circles represent the average standardized test score for the pre-pandemic (fall 2019) cohort; the arrow tip represents the average standardized test score for the fall 2021 cohort; and the value outside the arrow indicates the change in averages between fall 2019 and fall 2021. For example, 3rd graders in high-poverty schools in fall 2019 were .40 SD lower than the pre-pandemic sample mean, which increased to .65 SD lower than the pre-pandemic sample mean by fall 2021 (a difference of .25 SD)

Figure 3 displays differences in average reading achievement disaggregated by grade level, race/ethnicity, and school poverty level. The fall 2019 test scores reveal that there were sizable differences across racial/ethnic groups in average pre-pandemic performance within each school poverty level. Additionally, the pattern of test score drops between fall 2019 and fall 2021 is uneven across student groups. In both low- and high-poverty schools, Asian American and White students on average showed declines of a smaller magnitude relative to Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN), and Black students.

Changes in standardized MAP Growth reading test scores between fall 2019 and fall 2021 by the interaction of race/ethnicity and school poverty level. Note. AIAN = American Indian or Alaska Native. The circles represent the average standardized test score for the pre-pandemic (fall 2019) cohort; the arrow tip represents the average standardized test score for the fall 2021 cohort; and the value outside the arrow indicates the change in averages between fall 2019 and fall 2021

Our results add to the abundant evidence amassing showing the profound impacts of the pandemic on education outcomes. Consistent with other reports looking at interim assessments (Curriculum Associates, 2021 ; Renaissance, 2021 ) and end-of-year state tests (Halloran et al., 2021 ), we find that achievement declines relative to pre-pandemic averages are larger amongst students enrolled in high-poverty schools and students of color. Also consistent with other research showing larger educational impacts of COVID-19 for the youngest students (West & Lake, 2021 ), our study shows differences in the magnitude of achievement declines by grade. However, our study also adds important nuance to this trend in that we find grade-level differences in the magnitude of achievement declines is dependent on school-poverty level. Specifically, we see differential patterns of achievement declines across grades when we compare high- vs low-poverty schools. Within high-poverty schools, elementary grade students showed larger achievement declines than older students, but in low-poverty schools achievement declines were of a roughly similar magnitude for all the grades in our study. As a result, gaps between students in low- and high-poverty schools disproportionately widened in the elementary school grades relative to middle school grades. The reading test score decline in high-poverty elementary schools was 2.5 times larger than in low-poverty elementary schools, compared to less than two times as large in high-poverty middle schools.

Our data cannot shine light on the mechanisms behind these differential trends. However, other evidence offers some insights that allow us to speculate about the underlying causes of these trends. First, there is mounting evidence that remote learning led to worse outcomes than in-person learning (Goldhaber et al., 2022 ; Halloran et al., 2021 ). Second, high-poverty schools were more likely to stay remote for longer (Camp & Zamarro, 2021 ; Parolin & Lee, 2021 ). Low-wage workers have significantly lower access to opportunities for telecommuting (Garrote Sanchez et al, 2021 ). Thus, caregivers in high-poverty households were probably more likely to continue to work outside the home and thus their children may have been less likely to be able to rely on the assistance of an adult when they encountered difficulties with virtual learning. This was potentially more detrimental for younger students who were less able to independently navigate online learning platforms. Simply put, students in high-poverty schools endured more virtual learning while simultaneously being less likely to have access to a caregiver to provide supplemental support and the end result may have been a learning environment that was particularly detrimental for the youngest students.

Implications for practice

Our findings suggest that after the COVID-19 pandemic began, elementary students began the year further behind in their reading development than previous cohorts. Because upper elementary classrooms are typically not resourced to teach early literacy skills, such as constrained decoding skills, school leaders must now consider providing new training, aligned resources, and personnel support to equip upper elementary teachers to provide differentiated, explicit instruction for classes of students who continue to exhibit difficulties in these areas. Additionally, high-quality, intensive intervention services will likely be needed for students entering significantly below their peers. Intervention in reading is crucial to ensure students can continue to access grade-level content in written materials during the instruction of other subject areas (e.g., math, science, history).

We recommend shifting schedules and instructional time to match students’ needs as identified, on a broad level, by screening assessments such as NWEA MAP Growth to determine students who are falling behind grade level expectations. Next, schools can administer further, more specific, diagnostic assessments to students who exhibit difficulties on the initial screener. This will help to determine if individual student difficulties are specifically in decoding skills and/or language comprehension and provide appropriate, targeted intervention, which is critical to begin to improve student reading outcomes and complete unfinished learning that may be due to the pandemic. Teachers may also need additional training and resources to bolster research-based practices, such as implementing and analyzing screening measures, identifying students’ needs, grouping students for instruction, strategies for intensifying intervention, implementing high-quality instruction and intervention curricula, and ongoing coaching and support for data-based decision making. School leaders should also consider the addition of class-wide phonics, spelling, handwriting, and fluency intervention for cohorts of students now in the upper grades who may have missed out on valuable in-person learning centered on these constrained skills during their early elementary years.

Limitations

There are several important limitations to our study worth noting. Most importantly, we only included U.S. public schools that tested in fall 2019, fall 2020, and fall 2021. Schools with the resources to consistently test across this three-year span are likely different from schools that did not. Additionally, many U.S. schools stayed remote or hybrid for longer than schools in other countries, so the results presented here may not generalize to international contexts. Second, while we would like to examine the pandemic test score trajectories for students in kindergarten to 2 nd grade, test comparability issues with the K-2 assessments prevent us from analyzing MAP Growth K-2 test scores collected during the pandemic (Kuhfeld et al., 2020b ). Third, the number of students testing in a given grade changed over the course of the testing periods, which could impact the magnitude of the score drops we observe. If students were more likely to be missing in high-poverty schools and for students who were already low-achieving (e.g., the data are not missing at random), we may be underestimating the differences in the test score patterns in fall 2021. Fourth, we examined differences between schools classified as “low-poverty” and “high-poverty”, but it would be informative to further explore whether there is actually a non-linear relationship between poverty and achievement declines. Additionally, it would be worthwhile to explore how the pandemic differentially affected students who were initially struggling (bottom of the distribution) or high achieving (at the top of the distribution) prior to the pandemic. Finally, we do not have access to information about whether students had access to in-person, hybrid, or remote instruction through the course of the 2020–2021 school year. Without detailed information on the amount and types of instruction received, we are not able to adequately explain the disparities we observed by race/ethnicity and school poverty.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented interruption to students’ lives and schooling experiences, so it is perhaps not surprising that large reading declines (0.09 to 0.17 SDs) were observed during this period. However, it is notable that these declines were the largest for elementary students and occurred primarily during the 2020–2021 period rather than directly following the spring 2020 school closures. More research is needed to unpack which students and schools were hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and need additional supports and resources to rebuild and strengthen these key reading skills. Given the critical nature of early elementary school for the development of foundational reading skills, it is essential to continue to monitor reading achievement for young students and match recovery efforts with need. Our data suggest that further resources should be targeted to young students in high-poverty elementary schools to ensure students continue developing these foundational reading skills.

Amplify. (2022). Amid academic recovery in classrooms nationwide, risks remain for youngest students with least instructional time during critical early years. https://amplify.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/mCLASS_MOY-Results_February-2022-Report.pdf

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Kuhfeld, M., Lewis, K. & Peltier, T. Reading achievement declines during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from 5 million U.S. students in grades 3–8. Read Writ 36 , 245–261 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10345-8

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8 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Our fiction recommendations this week include a “gleeful romp” of a series mystery, along with three novels by some heavy-hitting young writers: Téa Obreht, Helen Oyeyemi and Tommy Orange. (How heavy-hitting, and how young? Consider that Obreht was included in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” issue in 2010 — and she’s still under 40 today. So is Oyeyemi, who was one of Granta’s “Best Young British Novelists” in 2013, while Orange, at 42, has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the John Leonard Prize and the American Book Award. The future is in good hands.)

In nonfiction, we recommend a painter’s memoir, a group biography of three jazz giants, a posthumous essay collection by the great critic Joan Acocella and a journalist’s look at American citizens trying to come to terms with a divided country. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

THE MORNINGSIDE Téa Obreht

After being displaced from their homeland, Silvia and her mother move into the Morningside, a weather-beaten luxury apartment building in “Island City,” a sinking version of New York in the middle of all-out climate collapse. Silvia learns about her heritage through the folk tales her aunt Ena tells her, and becomes fascinated with the mysterious woman who lives in the penthouse apartment.

“I marveled at the subtle beauty and precision of Obreht’s prose. … Even in the face of catastrophe, there’s solace to be found in art.”

From Jessamine Chan’s review

Random House | $29

A GRAVE ROBBERY Deanna Raybourn

In their ninth crime-solving tale, the Victorian-era adventuress and butterfly hunter Veronica Speedwell and her partner discover that a wax mannequin is actually a dead young woman, expertly preserved.

“Throw in an assortment of delightful side characters and an engaging tamarin monkey, and what you have is the very definition of a gleeful romp.”

From Sarah Weinman’s crime column

Berkley | $28

THE BLOODIED NIGHTGOWN: And Other Essays Joan Acocella

Acocella, who died in January, may have been best known as one of our finest dance critics. But as this posthumous collection shows, she brought the same rigor, passion and insight to all the art she consumed. Whether her subject is genre fiction, “Beowulf” or Marilynne Robinson, Acocella’s knowledge and enthusiasm are hard to match. We will not see her like again.

"Some critics are haters, but Acocella began writing criticism because she loved — first dance, and then much of the best of Western culture. She let life bring her closer to art."

From Joanna Biggs’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $35

WANDERING STARS Tommy Orange

This follow-up to Orange’s debut, “There There,” is part prequel and part sequel; it trails the young survivor of a 19th-century massacre of Native Americans, chronicling not just his harsh fate but those of his descendants. In its second half, the novel enters 21st-century Oakland, following the family in the aftermath of a shooting.

“Orange’s ability to highlight the contradictory forces that coexist within friendships, familial relationships and the characters themselves ... makes ‘Wandering Stars’ a towering achievement.”

From Jonathan Escoffery’s review

Knopf | $29

PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE Helen Oyeyemi

In Oyeyemi’s latest magical realist adventure, our hero is a woman named Hero, and she is hurtling through the city of Prague, with a shape-shifting book about Prague, during a bachelorette weekend. But Hero doesn’t seem to be directing the novel’s action; the story itself seems to be calling the shots.

“Her stock-in-trade has always been tales at their least domesticated. … In this novel, they have all the autonomy, charisma and messiness of living beings — and demand the same respect.”

From Chelsea Leu’s review

Riverhead | $28

3 SHADES OF BLUE: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool James Kaplan

On one memorable occasion in 1959, three outstanding musicians came together for what may be the greatest jazz record ever, Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” Kaplan, the author of a Frank Sinatra biography, traces the lives of his protagonists in compelling fashion; he may not be a jazz expert but he knows how to tell a good story.

“Kaplan has framed '3 Shades of Blue' as both a chronicle of a golden age and a lament for its decline and fall. One doesn’t have to accept the decline-and-fall part to acknowledge that he has done a lovely job of evoking the golden age.”

From Peter Keepnews’s review

Penguin Press | $35

WITH DARKNESS CAME STARS: A Memoir Audrey Flack

From her early days as an Abstract Expressionist who hung out with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning at the Cedar Bar to her later success as a pioneering photorealist, Flack worked and lived at the center of New York’s art world over her long career; here she chronicles the triumphs, the slights, the sexism and the gossip, all with equal relish.

“Flack is a natural, unfiltered storyteller. … The person who emerges from her pages is someone who never doubts she has somewhere to go.”

From Prudence Peiffer’s review

Penn State University Press | $37.50

AN AMERICAN DREAMER: Life in a Divided Country David Finkel

Agile and bracing, Finkel’s book trails a small network of people struggling in the tumultuous period between the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. At the center is Brent Cummings, a white Iraq war veteran who is trying to cope with a country he no longer recognizes.

“Adroitly assembles these stories into a poignant account of the social and political mood in the United States. … A timely and compelling argument for tolerance and moral character in times of extreme antagonism.”

From John Knight’s review

Random House | $32

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

James McBride’s novel sold a million copies, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that, as he considers the critical and commercial success of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”

How did gender become a scary word? Judith Butler, the theorist who got us talking about the subject , has answers.

You never know what’s going to go wrong in these graphic novels, where Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it .

When the author Tommy Orange received an impassioned email from a teacher in the Bronx, he dropped everything to visit the students who inspired it.

Do you want to be a better reader? Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

10 books to add to your reading list in April

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Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your April reading list.

April’s book releases cover some difficult topics, including Salman Rushdie discussing his 2022 maiming, Leigh Bardugo’s fiction about the dark arts and Ada Limón’s poetry anthology about our fragile world. However, like April, there is also sunshine: Leif Enger’s wild Great Lakes love story, Helen Tworkov’s beautiful memoir of Buddhism and a collection of the inimitable Maggie Nelson’s essays. Happy reading, happy spring!

I Cheerfully Refuse: A Novel By Leif Enger Grove Press: 336 pages, $28 (April 2)

An unusual and meaningful surprise awaits readers of Enger’s latest, which takes place largely on Lake Superior, as a man named Rainy tries to reunite with his beloved wife, Lark. While the world around this couple, a dystopian near-future American where billionaires control everything, could not be bleaker, the author’s retelling of the myth of Orpheus (who went to the underworld to rescue his wife) contains the authentic hope of a born optimist.

The Familiar: A Novel By Leigh Bardugo Flatiron Books: 400 pages, $30 (April 9)

Bardugo departs from novels of dark academia in a standalone to make the hairs on your neck stand up, set in 16th century Spain. A hidden Sephardic Jew and scullery maid named Luzia Cotado matches wits with fellow servant Guillén Santángel. Luzia discovers a secret of Guillén’s, but she’s already fallen in love with him. And because he knows hers, too, they might both avoid the Spanish Inquisition. It’s a gorgeous tale of enchantments both supernatural and earthly.

The Sleepwalkers: A Novel By Scarlett Thomas Simon & Schuster: 304 pages, $28 (April 9)

A couple honeymoons at a Greek resort. What could go wrong? In Thomas’ hands, plenty – especially as the author has never written a comfortable story; her books, from “PopCo ” to “Oligarchy,” crackle with unreliable characters, as well as big philosophical ideas. In this case, the new marriage’s breakdown is chronicled through letters between the spouses, and sometimes bits of ephemera, that ultimately untangle a dark mystery relating to the title.

The Garden: A Novel By Clare Beams Doubleday: 304 pages, $28 (April 10)

Few novels of literary fiction are written as well as “The Garden,” let alone given its sadly relevant retro setting, a 1940s country-estate obstetrical program. Irene Willard walks through its gates having endured five miscarriages; pregnant again, she and her war-veteran husband George desperately hope for a live birth. But as Irene discovers more about the woman who controls all here, Dr. Bishop, she fears carrying to term as much as she once feared pregnancy loss.

Reboot: A Novel By Justin Taylor Pantheon: 304 pages, $28 (April 23)

David Crader, former teen TV heartthrob, just wants to reboot his career when his old show “Rev Beach” has a moment. His life has devolved through substance abuse, divorce and underemployment. But when he and colleagues launch a remake, devolution continues: The protagonist’s struggles are mirrored by climate-change issues, from flooding to wildfires. Despite that darkness, Taylor’s gift for satire might make this a must-read for 2024 beach bags.

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World By Ada Limón (Editor) Milkweed Editions: 176 pages, $25 (April 2)

A wondrous artist herself, Limón is currently poet laureate of the United States, and this anthology is part of her signature project, “You Are Here,” which will also feature poetry as public art in seven national parks. Released in conjunction with the Library of Congress, the collection features 50 previously unpublished poems by luminaries including Jericho Brown, Joy Harjo, Carl Phillips and Diane Seuss, each focusing on a piece of regional landscape.

Like Love: Essays and Conversations By Maggie Nelson Graywolf Press: 336 pages, $32 (April 2)

While all of the pieces in Nelson’s new book have previously been published elsewhere, they’re made fresh here both through being collected and through their chronological placement. Readers can practically watch Nelson’s incisive mind growing and changing as she speaks with colleagues such as Hilton Als and Judith Butler, or as she writes about queerness, motherhood, violence, the lyrics of Prince and the devastating loss of a friend.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder By Salman Rushdie Random House: 204 pages, $28 (April 16)

On Aug. 12, 2022, the author Salman Rushdie was speaking at upstate New York’s Chautauqua festival when a man rushed the stage and attempted to murder him. Rushdie, a target of Iranian religious leaders since 1989, was permanently injured. In this book, he shares his experience for the first time, having said that this was essential for him to write. In this way, he answers violence with art, once again reminding us all that freedom of expression must be protected.

Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America By Helen Tworkov St. Martin’s Essentials: 336 pages, $29 (April 16)

Dworkov, founder of the magazine Tricycle, chronicles her move from a 1960s young-adult interest in Buddhism to travels through Asia and deep study in the United States of the different strands that follow the Buddha’s teachings. Tworkov mentions luminaries such as the artist Richard Serra, the composer Charles Mingus and the Dalai Lama, but she’s not name dropping. Instead, she’s strewing fragrant petals from her singular path to mindfulness that may help us find ours.

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War By Erik Larson Crown: 592 pages, $35 (April 30)

Even diehard Civil War aficionados will learn from Larson’s look at the six months between Lincoln’s 1860 election and the surrender of Union troops under Maj. Robert Anderson at Charleston’s Ft. Sumter. Larson details Anderson’s secret Christmas redeployment and explores this individual’s contradictions as a former slave owner who loyally follows Lincoln’s orders. The author also shares first-person perspective from the famous diaries of the upper-class Southerner Mary Chesnut. All together, the book provides a riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult.

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Demonstrators rally outside Holyrood against the SNP's hate crime bill

JK Rowling will not be arrested under new Scottish hate law, say police

‘No further action’ over posts by author and gender-critical activist despite complaints

Comments by JK Rowling challenging police to arrest her for online misgendering do not amount to a crime, Police Scotland said.

As the Scottish government’s contentious hate crime law came into force on Monday, the author and gender-critical activist posted a thread on X saying the legislation was “wide open to abuse” after listing sex offenders who had described themselves as transgender alongside well-known trans women activists, describing them as “men, every last one of them”.

She stated that “freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal”.

On Tuesday afternoon, Police Scotland confirmed they had received complaints about the social media post but added: “The comments are not assessed to be criminal and no further action will be taken.”

The act brings together existing laws. Under the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, it is a crime to make derogatory comments based on age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.

JK Rowling at the premiere of a Fantastic Beasts film

As concerns continue about officers being overwhelmed, reports suggest Police Scotland has received at least 3,000 complaints under the new act in the two days since it came into force.

Responding to the decision, Rowling said: “I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women – irrespective of profile or financial means – will be treated equally under the law.”

Earlier on Tuesday, the force also confirmed that racist graffiti found on Monday near Humza Yousaf’s family home in Broughty Ferry had been recorded under the new act.

The first minister said the graffiti, which contained a racial slur against him, was a reminder of why Scotland must take a “zero-tolerance” approach to hatred. On X, he said: “I do my best to shield my children from the racism and Islamophobia I face on a regular basis. That becomes increasingly difficult when racist graffiti targeting me appears near our family home.”

The Scottish National party leader robustly defended the legislation, which has prompted a barrage of criticism about how it will be policed and how it could affect freedom of speech, as well as fears that it could be used maliciously against certain groups for expressing their opinions, in particular gender-critical feminists.

Yousaf said it “absolutely protects people in their freedom of expression” while guarding “people from a rising tide of hatred that we’ve seen far too often in our society”.

The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, asked about Rowling’s comment on Tuesday morning, said that while he would not comment on a police matter, “nobody should be criminalised for saying commonsense things about biological sex”.

Robbie de Santos, the director of campaigns and human rights at Stonewall, said: “The prime minister and high-profile commentators are simply incorrect when they suggest that misgendering or ‘stating facts on biology’ would be criminalised.

“This is no more true than stating that the existing law has criminalised the criticism of religion. This kind of misrepresentation about the act and its purpose only serves to trivialise the very real violence committed against us in the name of hate.”

He called on political leaders to address the trend of “rising hate and escalating violence” facing LGBTQ+ people. “We already have longstanding laws preventing the incitement of hatred on the basis of race and religion, and the new Hate Crime Act creates parity in the law in Scotland by expanding these protections to cover sexual orientation, transgender identity, age and disability,” he said.

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Scotland is in decline because of SNP’s independence obsession, says Gove

Trans activists will not be charged over picture of JK Rowling’s home

Scottish health secretary resignation prompts mini cabinet reshuffle

Authors quit JK Rowling agency over transgender rights

Scottish Labour leader appeals to pro-independence voters to ‘boot Tories out’

Shohei Ohtani's reps decline to say which authorities contacted to report theft

Check out the full statement from Shohei Ohtani as he denies betting on sports and discusses his former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. (11:36)

Data analyst and reporter for ESPN's Enterprise and Investigative Unit.
Winner, 2014 Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Award; finalist, 2012 IRE broadcast award; winner, 2011 Gannett Foundation Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism; Emmy nominated, 2009.

Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani 's representatives declined again Tuesday to answer ESPN's questions about which authorities they have contacted to report their allegation of theft against Ohtani's former interpreter.

ESPN has been asking repeatedly for the information since Ohtani's lawyers first issued a statement last week alleging that "Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft, and we are turning the matter over to the authorities."

When asked Tuesday to provide proof that Ohtani or his representatives have reported the theft to an investigating agency, a spokesperson for Ohtani declined to comment.

ESPN received no confirmation from any of the likely local, state or federal agencies that could investigate allegations of theft that they received a report from Ohtani's camp.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed to ESPN on Tuesday that it is working with the IRS to investigate Ohtani's ex-interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, but would not specify whether it was looking into Ohtani's theft allegation or if it had been contacted by Ohtani's representatives.

"Homeland Security Investigations Los Angeles and IRS Criminal Investigation Los Angeles Field Office are conducting a joint federal investigation into the matter," a spokesperson told ESPN in a statement, noting he was referring to the "overall investigation including Mizuhara's role." He wrote that the agency could not comment further on the ongoing investigation.

ESPN previously confirmed with IRS spokesperson Scott Villiard that the agency is investigating Mizuhara and bookmaker Mathew Bowyer, but Villiard declined to say whether the IRS had been contacted by Ohtani's representatives.

The Department of Homeland Security, the IRS and the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Central District of California have been investigating Bowyer since at least October, according to multiple sources and documents reviewed by ESPN. The same agencies are also involved in a sprawling federal money laundering and illegal gambling case that drew in former minor league baseball player and bookmaker Wayne Nix and former MLB All-Star Yasiel Puig.

It is unclear whether the agencies' investigation into Mizuhara is part of the wider probe, or how Ohtani's theft allegation fits in, if at all.

Tulsi Gabbard claims she rejected offer to be RFK Jr.’s VP: ‘Didn’t work out’

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Ex-Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard claimed she spurned an offer to serve as independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate.

Gabbard, 42, who left the Democrat Party in 2022 not long after her unsuccessful presidential bid, did not elaborate on why she opted against taking the opportunity.

“I met with Kennedy several times, and we have become good friends,” Gabbard told ABC News .

“He asked if I would be his running mate. After careful consideration, I respectfully declined.”

Her name had been tossed around his veepstakes rumor mill for months as a potential contender, alongside former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers and others.

Ultimately, the Kennedy scion went with a largely unknown individual — Silicon Valley lawyer Nicole Shanahan , 38, who had been a major backer of his presidential bid.

Shanahan is the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the 10th-richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index . She bankrolled a controversial Super Bowl ad for Kennedy earlier this year.

Like Gabbard, Kennedy, 70, toyed with a long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination to be president. President Biden claimed that mantle in 2020 and is poised to do so again in 2024.

Last October, Kennedy switched his party affiliation to independent, voicing his disillusionment with the Democratic Party, and aired grievances similar to Gabbard’s.

A source close to the Kennedy campaign confirmed to the outlet, “There were definitely meetings, but it didn’t work out.”

“We talked to a bunch of people,” that source continued. “Tulsi’s a rock star no matter what.”

The Post contacted both Gabbard and the Kennedy campaign for comment.

She has also been floated as a potential VP for former President Donald Trump and expressed an openness to joining that ticket.

Gabbard has an upcoming book, “ For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind ,” which is set to hit bookshelves later this month.

The former congresswoman from Hawaii blamed the “warmongers” in the Democratic Party for her departure.

Kennedy’s performance in the polls has rattled allies of Trump and Biden alike.

In a three-way matchup, Trump scores 40.7% support, compared to Biden’s 35.3% and Kennedy’s 12.3%, according to the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls .

Kennedy will need to top 15% in select polling to secure a place on the debate stage later this fall. Should he achieve that, it would be a feat not accomplished since the 1990s.

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