According to the Nation’s Report Card (NAEP), in September 2025, average reading scores for seniors in high school were at their lowest level since 1992.
“Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop,” The Atlantic stated. “But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.”
Reading and writing skills are implemented in education as early as preschool and kindergarten.
“It’s fundamental,” reading specialist Lauren Freeman said. “In order to be able to acquire knowledge on your own, you have to learn how to read.”
The abilities to read and write carry young minds beyond academics and into empathy. “They take us out of our own self and force us into someone else’s perspective,” English teacher Joseph Upton said. “One’s ability to engage with text written by someone else gives us that expansion and that greater knowledge of the world around us.”
With the ever-growing technological advancements of today, it’s more and more unlikely that students feel inclined to enrich their literacy skills.
“When I was a kid, if I didn’t want to pay attention in class, I’d read a book, and the joke was kind of on me because the whole time, I developed incredible vocabulary and literacy skills,” English teacher Jake Vallicelli said. “But now, when kids are checked out, they don’t reach for a book to read.”
Teachers are witnessing the decline in motivation in real time. “A few years ago, I gave my AP students an exit survey, and I asked, ‘Of the four core novels that we read at the time, what percentage of the pages do you think you actually read?’ The average was about 60 [percent],” Vallicelli shared. “If you have our best readers reading only two-thirds of the books that they’ve signed up to read, you could sort of waterfall from there and see less motivated students or less able students are going to struggle with that even more.”
The lack of independent reading is forcing educators to change the way they teach. “Sustained, focused thinking is becoming harder for students to develop and, in a lot of ways, education pushes us to say, ‘Well, let’s meet the kids where they are,’ and then we create more assignments that encourage students to keep those habits in place,” Upton said. “We have to find a way to balance meeting students where they are but then also pushing them to actually sustain their thinking, to build that self-reflective self.”
The balance is being worked towards in reading intervention classes as well. “What we ultimately wanna do is make sure all kids have access to grade-level text because what research has found is if you’re in third grade, and you’re reading at a first-grade level and we’re only giving you access to first-grade text, when are you ever going to start reading third-grade text? The responsibility falls on the teacher to make a piece of text that might be challenging or frustrating to a student more instructional,” Freeman said.
The decrease in interest for reading could be blamed in part by the novels pushed in curricula today. “We keep giving kids – and I think this begins early — books that are meaningful but not necessarily enjoyable and this starts that cycle downward where they’re reading books about pain, about suffering, about some of the worst social problems imaginable,” Vallicelli said. “The lack of choice and the lack of high-interest reading knocks them out of it early.”
English teachers are finding new ways to encourage and nurture independent reading. Upton and Vallicelli have implemented free-choice reading as well as in-class reading time.
Freeman explained that the most efficient readers read using the left side of their brain. Reading comprehension is built from word recognition and language comprehension. To be a strong reader, areas in both categories must flow together.
“One thing that’s really profound is that we no longer base how we teach kids how to read on theory and best practice. There’s now actually neuroscience that we use to provide reading instruction,” Freeman said. Due to lack of accessibility, educators have only begun to use this research fairly recently.
Freeman believes that vocabulary and background knowledge are where the vast majority of students need support.
Helping kids to build background knowledge and firm vocabularies by avoiding assumptions on what they may or may not know ensures solid understanding in older readers.
Students and families need to understand the importance of literacy for any real change to arrive. “You can tell me you did all the reading, you can pass all the quizzes, you can produce the essays, but the end result is you will not be any smarter, any more able, any more literate. If you really want to value literacy, if you really want to cultivate skills that are going to endure, then you’re going to have to commit. They’re going to have to decide for themselves that it was worth it to put in the work,” Vallicelli said.
