Today, the decline of reading in America. So I recently read a wonderful short story by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, which is called The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling. It’s featured in his collection of short stories entitled Exhalation. And this short story unfolds along two parallel tracks. In the modern narrative, which takes place sometime in the near future, a journalist is assigned to cover a new technology called Remem, which allows people to film their entire lives and playback memories on a retinal projector. In other words, it’s a technology that grants every person perfect photographic memory of every event in their life. A little bit like that great Black Mirror episode written by Jesse Armstrong.
And this journalist explores the ways that Remem changes people’s lives, how it resolves fights between couples over who said what to whom, how it makes it impossible for certain people to forget fights in their past that they might want to forget. But what makes this story so cool is that the modern sci-fi narrative is interspersed with another story that’s set in the past. Here, we have a Christian missionary introducing written language to a young man named Jijingi in a preliterate African tribe. And Jijingi initially finds the technology of writing very strange and not helpful. His tribe has relied on oral tradition to remember and to share knowledge.
But over time, Jijingi learns to read and to write, and he realizes that the process of reading is changing the texture of his thought, his own relationship to the past and to ideas. And as he changes, he begins to have fights with the elders in his tribe when they tell one story and he can consult a written document that tells another. And the story by Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, essentially pings between these two narratives. Two different technologies introduced in two different societies, Remem versus reading, looking at how they change the texture of our relationship to ideas. That’s the sci-fi story, in any case.
In reality, we don’t have anything like technologically perfect photographic memory. And in many cases, we seem to be losing reading as well. Leisure reading, by some accounts, has declined by half so far in this century alone. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers and professors that they can’t read entire books at, say, Columbia University because they were never taught to read entire books in high school or middle school. The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube.
So why does this matter? Why, with everything happening in this country and around the world, would I be interested in reading? Well, at the end of Ted Chiang’s story, he appends a little author’s note where he thanks a scholar named Walter Ong and a book called Orality and Literacy. Orality here meaning a culture of spoken language. According to Ong, literacy is not just a skill. It’s a means of restructuring our thoughts and our knowledge. In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is preserved through repetition and mnemonic and stories. Orality requires the synchronous presence of multiple people in a place at the same time. And for that reason, oral cultures tend to be highly social.
Writing, by contrast, fixes words in place, which means one person can write their thoughts and another person, decades later, can read those precise thoughts with no error in the transliteration. This word fixing allows literate culture to develop abstract thinking. They are, after all, outsourcing the work of memory to a page, right? When I write something on a note, it acts as an extension of my memory. And this allows for more complex and analytical thought. It’s amazing and incredible to me that ancient storytellers could memorize the Iliad or the Odyssey, but you simply could not, say, invent calculus or quantum mechanics without writing stuff down from time to time.
And even by some miracle, if you did, if Isaac Newton did, like, just think of calculus in his head, he would have to explain it in a story to someone who would explain it in a story to someone. And you would have to pass down this incredibly complex system of thought across generations. The Bloomberg writer and podcaster, Joe Weisenthal, has written several wonderful riffs over the last few years about what he sees as this shift today from written culture to oral culture. He’s called it the biggest story of our time. Quote, many of the things that modern institutions are built on, formal logic, reasoning, examining the evidence, are downstream of the ability to contemplate the written word. End quote.
Today, however, Joe thinks we’re completely rewiring the logic engine of the human brain. And the decline of reading in America, while surely not the whole of this phenomenon, is, I think, an important part of it. Today, we have two conversations, one with a journalist and one with an academic. First, Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitz shares her reporting on the decline of reading at elite college campuses. And second, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tells us about the alarming decline in literacy across our entire student population, and even among adults. And then, with Rose and with Nat, we discuss what it all means.
What do we lose when we lose deep reading? Rose Horowitz, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Your essay in the Atlantic magazine was entitled, The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. And it begins with Nicholas Dames, who has taught the great books course at Columbia University for decades. Several years ago, he had an experience that he described to you as jaw-dropping. Yes, so he’s taught the course for more than two decades. And one day in 2022, a student came to his office hours to tell him how challenging she was finding it. And this course, you know, it is hard to ask students to read, you know, a book, sometimes a very long book, in just a week or two. But she told Dames that, you know, at her public high school, she had never been asked to read an entire book, that she’d been assigned excerpts and news articles and poetry, but not a whole book.
And that experience, he really unlocked something for him, he said, because it helped explain this broader change he was seeing among a lot of his students, where they were really struggling to have sophisticated conversations about these really challenging texts and telling him that the reading load just felt impossible. And that they didn’t really know how to navigate, like, attending to small details in a text while also keeping track of the larger architecture. And this essay really struck me, because I had just been to dinner with some friends in the area with kids. And I was telling them about this reporting that you were doing on students who cannot read books at Columbia University. And the mother goes, oh, my God, it’s the same with our kid. I don’t understand it. They don’t read books anymore in middle, early high school. And I go, OK, that’s obviously not true. Your child goes to one of the best schools in the Chapel Hill Durham area. I’m going to leave the name of the school anonymous because I want to keep these folks anonymous. They certainly weren’t on the record with me.
But, you know, we call her child over and I say, you know, what do you mean you don’t read books? And they go, well, we just studied Animal Farm in our class and we read excerpts of Animal Farm and watched some YouTube videos about it. And I basically lose my mind. I’m like, Animal Farm is a children’s parable. It’s like 90 pages long. So that was my anecdotal experience confirming your reporting. You did much better than just go to someone else’s house and happen to fall into a conversation about their children. You spoke to 30 professors and teachers for this story. Tell us how widespread this phenomenon is.
So this was, I mean, I had went through the same experience where this was shockingly widespread. I mean, the majority of the 33 professors that I spoke to all relayed the same thing and they had discussed it in faculty meetings. So they knew that it was felt more broadly at their universities. Several of them had changed their courses. So they were now teaching far fewer books. And they described a really clear shift in their students. You know, a literature professor at the University of Virginia told me that his students were shutting down when they were confronted with ideas they didn’t understand. And that they were just less able to get through a challenging text than they used to be. And the chair of Georgetown’s English department told me that he notices his students having trouble staying focused even when they’re reading a sonnet, which is 14 lines. So it was very widespread and also very shocking to me.
These are good anecdotes. You talked to a lot of professors at a lot of different universities. Do we have something here that is more systemic? Either someone like Gallup or Pew surveying thousands of students to see whether we have really clear data showing that high schoolers, college students are reading significantly fewer books. So the challenge is no one has studied the exact question of, you know, are college students worse at reading full books? But we have a lot of different data points that do really point to this. We know that young teens are much less likely to say that reading is one of their favorite activities or that they enjoy going to the library. Americans of all ages are spending a lot less time reading than they used to. And the share of people who read books at all has gotten a lot smaller over the past two decades, according to the American Time Use Survey.
So we do have very strong evidence that people are reading much less, even though no one has studied the exact question of, are we worse at reading full books? If we’re looking for reasons here, then as cliched as it might seem, I do think we have to start by looking at screens and social media. Let’s keep this out of our voices first and keep it with your reporting. How did the professors and the teachers that you spoke to describe the way that screened media seem to be eclipsing books for their students? So they really spoke about it with two forms. So phones having kind of two main effects. One is that they just take up a lot of students’ time, and it’s really hard to get students to read books, you know, when they can spend their time on TikTok or YouTube.
And the best kind of evidence for that is that, you know, 50 years ago, about 40% of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the past year, compared to about 12% who hadn’t read any. And now those percentages have flipped. And so that is sort of one way that phones are just really fun to spend time on, so people read less. And then the other is that phones have gotten us sort of very accustomed to being entertained. You know, one psychologist told me that it’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention, and that being bored has just become unnatural. And so, you know, he was sort of talking about how, you know, persisting through something challenging and when it’s not immediately interesting, like, that’s a skill and, like, a muscle that needs to be worked out. And it’s just something that we’re not exercising.
A theme of your reporting is that college students can’t read entire books because of a pipeline problem. High schools aren’t teaching full books. Middle schools are moving away from full books. What role do you think education policy at the middle and high school level is playing here? So my reporting showed that that is likely one of the most significant factors. You know, for more than two decades, there’s been these educational initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Common Core. And a really common theme of them is that they emphasize informational texts and standardized tests. And so that leads teachers to teach to the test. They use short informational passages and then ask you questions like, what’s the author’s main idea? Cite this specific example. And that’s the format of standardized reading comprehension tests.
And a Stanford education professor told me that these new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and learn how to analyze texts. And so they’re really bound up in ideas of global competitiveness. But he said, and this is his direct quote, in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general. And I spoke with school administrators and education experts who travel the country to train teachers. And they all told me that just excerpts are replacing books across grade levels. When I think back on my time in middle and high school, everything in my English and history classes revolved around a list of books. Like you got this reading list at the beginning of the year. And it was all full books, history books, American history, global history, Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Bluest Eye. And our education revolved around the text.
Something I’m hearing you say is that books have been slowly de-centered, so to speak, in modern education. Like they’re no longer the sun around which the education revolves. They’re just another planet. Do you have any evidence that books are being marginalized in this way? Yes. So I was struck in my reporting by finding this document, this position statement, from the largest professional organization of English teachers, where they argued that the time had come to de-center book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education, and that it was instead time to be teaching students media literacy and preparing students for what they’re encountering in the real world.
And that’s obviously a very extreme example. But in a recent survey of middle school teachers, nearly a quarter said that books are just no longer the center of their curricula. And then half said that, you know, books were part of it, but they’d also really emphasized excerpts. And only 17% said that books were the main part, and they were teaching mainly or wholly books. And, you know, one other example of this is when I spoke with a high school teacher at a public school in Illinois. She told me that she used to structure her classes around books, but now she focuses them on skills and uses books as one piece of that. So, for example, she’ll teach parts of Homer’s Odyssey in a unit about leadership and then supplement that with music and articles and TED Talks.
And so she’s using books sort of in service of teaching about skills. That last example is so great because a part of me wants to be very fair to that teacher. Maybe her approach is just better than reading Homer’s Odyssey alone. It’s more multimedia. It meets students where they’re at. It teaches them about a life skill using the media they’re already engaged with, YouTube, music videos, music. It approaches the Odyssey as a practical text about life. And in many ways, the Odyssey was probably first communicated between storytellers as a kind of civics education, right? A practical guide to the values of ancient Greece. And there’s definitely an argument to be made there. There, I think, are advantages to reading smaller portions of text, but analyzing them much more deeply and using these other forms of media to help supplement that.
You know, a lot of professors talked about that. The advantages of just kind of focusing in on something instead of having students skim it. And we also know that, you know, it is likely to make students more engaged and that there is an advantage to kind of teaching them, you know, about specific skills. The problem, though, arises when that replaces reading full books. And, you know, this teacher was very clear that she also teaches two full books, you know, at school. But when this, you know, focus on skills or focus on other media ends up replacing reading, I think they’re that we lose something unique and beautiful.
This clicks into the final thing that I want to talk to you about, which is that I feel like you and I are circling this idea that education has become more instrumental and fixated on accountability and pre-professional in the last few decades. And this is a shift that has happened both at the level of education policy and at the level of parent and student psychology. Maybe young people are reading less, not because they’re less intelligent, but because they are funneling their intelligence toward explicit resume building. And all things equal, if you’re a 16, 17-year-old who is two hours free on a Wednesday, you can read for fun or you can practice violin. And that violin practice is going to directly increase your odds of getting into a good college much more than reading 100 pages of your favorite novel, right? In a way, reading is a very inefficient means of burnishing a resume. It’s also comparatively an inefficient means of getting that next unit of enjoyment compared to, say, watching television or, you know, watching some movie on Netflix.
So how much do you think this shift away from reading full books has to do with the intense pressures of achievement culture, which are squeezing book reading out of a lot of kids’ lives? I think that that’s a big factor. And it’s something that surfaced continually throughout my reporting, that we aren’t really seeing a change in skills so much as just a shift in what we, as a society, value.
And, you know, I think that’s a compelling argument because, you know, we know that these students know how to read. So if they aren’t, then, you know, we could think maybe they’re just choosing not to. And, you know, one professor of Literature Humanities, that course at Columbia, said that students come up to him year after year and say that they loved the course and the opportunity to read great books, but they were going to major in something more useful for getting a job that would make their parents happy.
You know, and students are under a lot of pressure to major in computer science or economics. And, you know, even when they do take classes that are focused on reading or assign a lot of reading, you know, there’s a lot of pressure to pursue things more and more outside of the classroom. You know, a recent survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend about as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics.
And, you know, seeing as basically all of them are going to get an A, like I think about 80% of students at Harvard or grades at Harvard are in the A range. Like there’s a lot of pressure to differentiate yourself outside of the classroom because you’re not really going to do it in it. And so they do that with internships and extracurriculars, which, you know, feel like they are going to be what secures you a job.
I quoted one literacy scholar who wrote that every generation at some point discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect. And she wrote that in 1979. So we’re not being original here. And going back even further, you know, the most famous example of this is in Plato’s Dialogue Phaedrus, where Socrates worries that writing things down will make people forgetful because they won’t practice using their memory.
So I think it’s always good to approach these claims with some healthy skepticism, just knowing that throughout history people have been making them. But at the same time, you know, I think that this example of Socrates kind of shows something different because the way we interface with information does change. Like who could memorize the Iliad today? Like we don’t train our memories to do that.
And so I think that if we look at the amount that people read, it’s been declining for decades. So it’s possible that, you know, as people have been making these arguments, maybe it’s been a slower, less dramatic shift, but that they’ve kind of been right and that it’s just been happening this whole time in the background.
So million-dollar question, what is this all about? What’s really so valuable about reading whole books? Well, I think that there’s a couple things that are so valuable about reading books. And one is just the content that’s in books. You know, it’s where we have access to kind of a lot of things that are just passed down through generations.
And certainly you could read a summary or it could be translated into a different form. But that would take you kind of ever further away from the original form and therefore the original meaning of a text. So I think that that is sort of one bucket, what’s contained in the text.
And then I think the second is what reading books does for us. And, you know, I spoke with the neuroscientist Marianne Wolfe, who told me that deep reading, that really immersing yourself in a text, stimulates critical thinking and self-reflection. You know, another professor said that engaging with someone else’s ideas or experiences can really expand our empathy and reading can really train us to engage with nuanced arguments.
I think a lot of this is bound up with changes in our attention because, you know, we don’t know the causation of whether we read less and then, you know, that weakens our attention muscles or did our attention atrophy and therefore we read less. But, you know, we know that a lot of the discovery of new ideas and the understanding of existing ones really requires sticking with them and thinking about them for an extended period of time, you know, even when it’s not immediately gratifying.
And reading can really train us to do that. And I think if we aren’t reading, we’re missing out on something that we kind of can’t get in any other thing that I can think of. I agree with much of that. I think at a personal level, I feel smarter when I’m in a phase of my life where I’m reading books consistently and where the practice of reading is knit into the fabric of my day-to-day habits.
And the truth is, when I think about the people I know who I consider very successful, there are very few of them who are like, “Yeah, I don’t read. I don’t have enough concentration to focus on a book or long essay. I’m just incredibly successful, and yet I have no faculty of reading concentration.” Those things don’t hang together, in my experience.
And maybe this is an older millennial thing, and Gen Z and Gen Alpha will develop an entirely different and more multimedia suite of skills, the same way that literacy replaced the skills of orality that you described. But I really do have a hard time thinking of people in my life who are successful who don’t read as a habit.
And one level deeper here, I think that the most important ideas require a concentration and a focus that benefits from hanging with an idea, staying inside of it for more than a minute or two. And that level of concentration is very different than the kind of attention required to, say, watch a video for an hour, watch TV for an hour.
There’s a lean-back aspect to watching video. But nothing against TV and film. There’s something about reading that feels to me like the necessary co-creation of an idea. It’s like the author had an idea, and they put their idea, their little brain movie, into letters. And now my eyes are scanning the letters, and I have to build in my own inner brain movie an idea drawn from those letters.
It’s up to me to bring that film of the inner mind to life. And in that way, reading really is a different kind of co-creation, I think. And I feel like if we lose that level of concentration and that ability to co-create complex ideas, I mean, I know I’m high, high, high on a soapbox right now, but I really do think there’s something quite profound that’s lost.
If our teachers in our schools determine that this kind of patient thoughtfulness isn’t valued anymore. Yes, and I will say, you know, since the article came out, a lot of teachers and parents have reached out to me, and a lot of them did have those same concerns or have the exact same observations about, you know, what was happening.
I spoke or I heard from a, you know, prep school teacher who said that English teachers sometimes can’t assign more than 10 to 15 pages of reading a night. But at the same time, I also heard from a lot of people who were fighting back against this and who were offering optional courses for students who just wanted to read or were, you know, giving students the opportunity to read books for pleasure in the place of other assignments and trying to inspire a lifelong love of reading.
So certainly a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the decline of reading, but there was also something heartening about hearing people trying to retrain their attention. This episode is brought to you by Audi. The all-new fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron is a huge leap forward featuring effortless power, serious acceleration, and the most advanced tech of any Audi ever.
Experience technology that puts you center stage with a panoramic digital stage, plus an optional screen for front seat passengers. The Q6 e-tron is not just a new EV. It’s a new way to experience driving. Learn more at AudiUSA.com. Always pay careful attention to the road and do not drive while distracted.
This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Hiring someone new for your business can be a big move, and I understand you probably want to take your time to make sure you’ve found the right person. But playing the waiting game could do more harm than good. Because that’s extra work and extra stress you’re putting on you and your team, it’s not a healthy work environment.
When it comes to hiring the right people fast, Indeed is all you need. Their sponsored jobs move your job post to the top of the page, letting you stand out first to relevant candidates. It makes a massive difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.
Another great thing about sponsored jobs is that you’re only paying for results. You don’t have to worry about monthly subscriptions or long-term contracts. There’s no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed.
Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com/plain. That’s Indeed.com/plain right now. And support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/plain. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed, is all you need.
What does it mean to be rich? Maybe it’s about measuring life in laugh lines and time, not by how much you have, but by how often it stands still. At Edward Jones, we believe the key to being rich is knowing what counts. Our dedicated financial advisors provide one-on-one support, meeting you where you are through all of life’s changes.
Because what matters most is living a life you love. Let’s find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC. Many thanks to Rose Horowitz of The Atlantic. Next up, we broaden our analysis. Because, of course, it is lurid and fascinating to realize that students at some of America’s most prestigious colleges and universities cannot read entire books.
Or, I suppose in some extreme cases, cannot hold their attention through the end of a single sonnet. But elite college students are, by definition, an elite, small sliver of the total population of students. So what’s happening to literacy and reading for that total population of students?
Here we turn to Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute, who studies education policy in the U.S. And he’s recently published a report on reading and literacy scores of students nationwide in fourth and eighth grades. During the pandemic, there was a lot of attention paid to so-called COVID learning loss.
But as Nat explains, and has explained in this show before, COVID masked or accentuated a deeper decline in student achievement that goes back at least 10 years. And this decline is particularly sharp in reading. To explain why this phenomenon isn’t just about elite college students, but rather about our middle schoolers as well, we welcome Nat.
Nat Malkus, welcome back to the show. Glad to be here. So, student test scores in reading, and also in subjects like math, seem to have peaked around 2013. But they’ve been declining now for more than a decade. And this is a trend that goes beyond the pandemic, beyond issues about COVID learning loss.
Just start us off with the big picture. What’s going on here with student reading scores? Yeah, I mean, scores just came out last month and showed additional declines in reading, maybe that we weren’t expecting. And look, everybody looks at these things in the now, and they’re thinking, well, it’s the pandemic, right?
But you’re absolutely right that on a bunch of tests, there’s a peak somewhere between 2012 and 2015. 2013 is a good place to put it. And that’s sort of the height of scores in reading and in math. And here we’re talking about nationally representative data. But if you look at those averages, and they’re substantial declines, they’re not small.
But the average declines in reading are worth being alarmed about, but that’s not quite the full story. And who’s leading this decline in reading achievement? Are we talking about a decline among elite college students, high-achieving students? Are we talking about the decline being concentrated somewhere else?
Yeah, the elite college students are definitely at the top of the scoring distribution, by and large, which you would expect. What we’ve seen is from 2013 to the most recent test scores, and again, there’s variation across tests, but generally the highest-performing students have been pretty much flat. They took a little bit of a hit during the pandemic and are largely sort of doing okay.
They’re treading water. The kids on the low end, the kids at the 25th percentile and the 10th percentile, they’ve taken a huge nosedive. And in this latest round, the bigger hits were in reading, not in math. So when we talk about student reading scores declining, the biggest story is that the worst readers are getting worse.
Who are we talking about here, like demographically speaking? Yeah, I mean, we’ve known for some time, right, we have a black-white achievement gap. And we think about the achievement gap as black and white because white students, on average, score higher than African-American students. There’s a Hispanic-white gap. There’s a poor-non-poor gap.
And so, yeah, there’s some disadvantages. Disadvantaged students typically don’t score as high as more advantaged students on a number of things. But that’s not what’s driving what we’ve seen lately. In preliminary work where we’ve been looking at these NAEP scores, it looks like the gap between the 90th and the 10th percentile in this period has been growing faster than achievement gaps divided by black and white students or poor and non-poor students.
So, achievement gaps aren’t what they used to be. How significant is America’s achievement gap compared to other countries for which we have good data? Yeah, the data on this is a little thinner. But if you look, for instance, at TIMSS, which I did in a recent paper, that’s math and science scores. And you have a bunch of countries that have the scores during this same period, you know, the 2013-15 zone till now.
America’s achievement gap during that time, again, between the top scores and the bottom scores, grew more than any other country. So, this thing that we’re seeing in U.S. student test scores is not only something that’s confined by this time period. If you compare it to other countries, we’re sort of number one in the world in a category where you don’t necessarily want to be number one.
Before we go on, I don’t want the answer to this question to put people entirely to sleep, but you’ve mentioned NAEP and TIMSS. Can you just tell us really briefly, like, how do we know what we know in the world of student literacy here? What’s NAEP and what’s TIMSS?
Yeah, NAEP is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s usually called NAEP. It’s a test where usually fourth and eighth graders in math and reading every couple of years take this test. It’s nationally representative. Over the two tests and the two subjects, you have almost half a million kids take it. So, it’s a huge sample. It gives very reliable data.
And since we run it every couple of years, we can go back, you know, decades and look at the trajectory. So, we can really compare these things. And we know what each state is scoring. We know some metro areas. That’s NAEP. On the international tests, these are tests that are similar, but they might be for an age or a year in school that are comparable. And not all countries participate in it, but it’s usually run through the OECD. And there’s a lot of countries for comparison, as long as they’re taking the tests in the same year.
So, we’ve established the phenomenon here. This is not just a crisis of elite college students not being able to read books. This is a broader crisis of American students in fourth, eighth grade, maybe even through high school, who have meaningfully worse literacy scores than they did just 10 years ago. And this is a decline that’s being accelerated by the worst performing students. That’s the phenomenon we’re starting with.
I’m most interested in the questions of why. What is going on here? What could explain this? I think we should start with policy. Was there a policy shift in K-12 education that lines up with this change? You said something seems to have happened between 2012 and 2015. Is there a policy shift here that could begin to explain what’s going on?
Yeah. The test scores are good at identifying where we are, but not why we got there. So, there are a couple of the big education policy shifts that are in America that kind of fit that. So, one is sort of, this is kind of at the tail end of No Child Left Behind, which was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Just slow down. Why don’t you just explain what each of those policies were?
Yeah. So, No Child Left Behind sort of was in force through the 2000s, and this was from the Bush administration in 2002. And it insisted that every state test students from third to eighth grade every year in reading and math, and that we hold students accountable for, or schools rather, accountable for students’ test scores. This was a huge leap forward in terms of bringing accountability to schools. Not everybody loved it.
ESSA was sort of, to put it bluntly, sort of a de-fanging of No Child Left Behind. The test scores are still there. The bite was gone. And so, how does this sort of rhyme with these test scores? Well, it seems, or you could at least line it up and say, well, the teeth and the accountability went away around the time that these student test scores, particularly the lower-performing students, started to fall off. And so, maybe the timing works. And it is certainly an American phenomenon.
So, that might explain why it happened here at that time, differently than it happened in other countries. I’d love to go just a little bit deeper into this policy shift. Because one thing that’s interesting to me about the way you describe No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Act, so No Child Left Behind and ESSA, is that we tend to think about Republicans being interested in states’ rights and devolving power to the states. And we tend to think about Democrats as always wanting to concentrate power at the federal level.
But am I wrong in saying that ESSA seemed to actually return more power to the states? It defanged No Child Left Behind by giving the states more flexibility in terms of using the results of these, you know, federal tests or of these student achievement scores. And it was a reaction to schools who thought that No Child Left Behind was too rigid in its focus, too much of a one-size-fits-all straitjacket.
Am I wrong in seeing this education policy shift you’re describing as somewhat complicating certain stereotypes about Republican versus Democratic policymaking?
No, it is complicated. It’s a little more complicated than that, though. I’d say that in No Child Left Behind, that was sort of born out of an era where we had this sort of purple education reform compromise. That was kind of real for a long time. And this is the same time period when you might see a lot more folks in the Democrat Party supporting charter schools and so forth. These sort of left-right agreements were much, much stronger.
And over No Child Left Behind, that sort of devolved somewhat, maybe not only because of education policy. I think there might have been some other reasons for polarization over that decade. But by the time ESSA came around, that left-right sort of truce had fallen apart to some degree. And then the other thing about it was there were a lot of states with a lot of complaints about the overreach in No Child Left Behind. It wasn’t a perfect bill, so there was plenty of grist for that mill.
I just want to make sure that I have a really granular understanding here of how you think the shift to ESSA might have played a direct role in the decline of literacy scores. What would be the most parsimonious way to draw that connection?
Yeah, No Child Left Behind put in place both the measurement of reading scores and some accountability measures, some consequences. And those were particularly aimed at shoring up the floor. It wasn’t as much about, hey, let’s get the highest achievers moving on. And ESSA sort of defanged that. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a super potent explanation for this because I don’t know how much No Child Left Behind improved student test scores. There’s evidence it did improve them, but not whether it improved them that much, and certainly not in sort of similar sizes to the declines we’ve seen since.
All right. And just as long as we’re setting the table with possible explanations, we’ve talked about a shift in national policy. I want to talk about a shift in teaching philosophy. A couple years ago, there was this burst of media attention around the decline of phonics education in America and a shift toward methods, including whole language approaches. So that is a shift away from spelling out or pronouncing words by connecting letters or sounds toward sort of gulping words whole.
To what extent do you think young American reading issues can be traced all the way back to this pedagogical change that we’ve seen, this shift away from phonics-based education?
Well, certainly, how we teach students to read matters. And a couple of years ago, this podcast sold a story, came out, and really shone a light on, well, maybe the way we’re teaching students to read in schools is not as based on the science of reading as it should be. And I think that one thing to note is that that wasn’t a recent departure from phonics. We probably haven’t been teaching students to read in appropriate ways for quite some time.
The change that that push towards the science of reading has brought, which has been seen in state legislatures who’ve been passing science of reading laws across the board, really came about in the past couple of years. I don’t know that we’re going to see those changes in the test scores that we’ve seen so far. Certainly, I think that the decline in reading that we’ve seen, particularly among the lower performers, is probably not related to the recent focus on the science of reading instruction, just because the timelines don’t match up.
It’s not like we were teaching phonics up to this 2013 mark and then stopped. We probably haven’t been giving the highest quality reading instruction for a lot longer than that.
So we’ve talked about national policy. We’ve talked about pedagogy. I think people are waiting for us to talk about screens, smartphones, and maybe even to a certain extent, televisions. Let me set us up this way. Screens, I think, would not be the best explanation if it turned out that this decline in literacy was only happening among one very particular cohort of students. Because what that would imply is a cohort effect, which is to say a policy change, and that cohort was affected by that policy change.
But if screens are relevant, then what we would really expect to see are declining literacy scores across the board, not just for one micro generation of students, but for older students, for younger students, even for adults. Is there any evidence, Nat, that literacy scores, reading scores are declining for adults as well?
Yeah, there absolutely is. I think we don’t have anywhere near as good a data on how well adults read. However, we do have this international test, PIAC, and it’s had some problems, and I’m hesitant to use it, except it’s the only nationally representative data we have. So, given that proviso, it shows a remarkably similar pattern to what we’re seeing in students’ scores. That is, the highest performers on PIAC, their numeracy scores have stayed relatively flat. And our lowest performers, I mean, it dropped like a rock.
Now, some of that drop may be overextended. I don’t think you should think about this as, well, it’s exactly this much of a drop. However, a drop, even at half the size that the scores reflect, is absolutely alarming, and it rhymes very well with the student test scores.
To what extent does that rule in screens as an explanation here for the decline of literacy and reading scores in America? If we thought this was something that happened to second graders in a given year, we would expect, like you said, a cascading effect. So, fourth graders two years later, eighth graders, they might peak four years later, because this event for this group in this grade then shows up down the line. That’s not what we’re seeing just among the sort of fourth, eighth, even 15-year-old test scores.
The peaks were very similar and have come down since. The one thing that I’ll say about it that you do have to map on is, well, does that make sense for the lower performers, but not for the higher performers? Because that’s the distinction that still is maintained today, both for adults, for students on the vast majority of these tests. The top performers are treading water. The lowest performers are getting hammered.
So, what would be your stylized explanation here? Like, if you were going to write an essay for The Atlantic or the New York Times op-ed section, and the editor approached you and said, Nat, what I want you to do is to write an essay about why reading scores are declining, why literacy scores are declining, not only for students, fourth grade, eighth grade, but also, it seems, for adults across the country. Something’s happened in the last 12 years, and it’s crying out for an explanation, especially among the lowest-performing readers. What do you think is going on?
So, look, I’ll tell you that I don’t have a perfectly satisfactory answer. This is tough. I’ve laid out that this is, you know, sort of started in around 2013. You have this division between the top and bottom performers. It’s also a U.S. phenomenon. We also see it for adults, right? So, what satisfies those things?
I think that the biggest change for that population is the screens. We hold these in our pocket. They shift what we do every day. But the trick there is to, how do we understand, well, this would obviously affect the lowest performers and have relatively small effects on the upper performers? Now, look, I think that could possibly happen. I would think that, you know, we’ve talked about the decline of reading.
I think a lot of the rise of phones has been a displacement of what might have been reading and other kinds of activities. And that displacement may have a greater effect on lower performers who might not already be engaged in cognitively stimulating alternatives. And it may be that higher performers still maintain some of that. And so, sort of the effect of screens, they just have some insulation or a buffer against that. But that’s still conjecture. But I don’t see anything else out there that has the explanatory power to explain this big of a fall over this period.
Well, let me engage with that conjecture because I find it quite plausible. Judging from other data that you linked to in your recent report, you know, the American Time Use Survey, going back to the last 20 years, asks people, how much time do you spend reading for personal interest? How much time do you spend reading for personal interest? And leisure reading, by this definition, has declined about 30% in the last 20 years for all Americans.
And then I went to break it down by age. I think the National Academies actually has a page where they break down the Bureau of Labor Statistics data by age. And according to their breakdown, the largest declines in reading for pleasure isn’t actually among young people at all in the last 20 years. Quite the opposite. It’s seniors. And the vast majority of that decline actually seems to have happened before 2013.
So when I put all of that together and think what, again, I think you set this up really beautifully. What is an explanation that meets all of these criteria? It seems to me that in the last 20 years, both with the rise of cable television and then streaming and also smartphones, our leisure time, the texture of our leisure time is shifting from written communication to video and oral communication. We just spend less of our leisure time engaging with the written word and more leisure time engaging with video and audio products.
And I wonder if that has to do with the decline in reading proficiency that we’re seeing across ages, is that essentially the written word is being outcompeted. And so new generations of people, young and old, are less facile with reading and therefore are scoring lower on their reading because of this victory of video communications over written. How do you feel about that?
So I think there’s a lot to like about that explanation. And look, I think there’s multiple causes here. And I just think that this is clearly a big one. I think part of this can be displacement. But I think another part of this is not only the screens as taking up our time, but also how they’re taking up our time.
So I think that if you just look at the way we interact with screens over this past decade compared to the decade before that, the algorithm is just a big functionality to reduce our concentration time on anything. You know, we’re just looking at smaller chunks of coherent information. And this sort of fits with the trend away from, well, you don’t need to read the whole book. We’ll read excerpts of it. Or we can do this in smaller, faster chunks because we need to be on something else.
And that sort of harnessing of the attention economy is something that I think does take place. And that’s another factor that I think could divide against the higher performers and maybe not have as much of a deleterious effect on their scores and cognition as the lower performers who could be continuing to fall victim of that. But the worst thing about that is it could continue to get worse. I don’t see that as being a sort of self-moderating or self-constrained phenomenon.
So I’m going to check myself and ask you and also to a certain extent myself this question. So what? You know, young people, older people, they’re reading fewer books. They don’t necessarily have the level of concentration or the drive to sit with long magazine stories or beach reads or old Russian novels or new nonfiction. They just don’t really want to do that anymore. They prefer to watch television, watch videos, maybe read, but only in the chunks offered by X, Twitter.
What’s so wrong about that? Why should we be concerned about this outcome?
Yeah, I mean, for me, look, I’m kind of a data guy. That’s my zone that I work in. But here I’m just going to drop that and go completely subjective here. You know, the ability to concentrate and embody a topic and to be conversant with it and to create within that space is productive. And most of the other short concentration pieces are consumption oriented.
And I want to, you know, I’m a conservative. I’m going to stand a thwart history and yell stop on this one. I would rather have people who are more engaged and have an ability to engage at a deeper level. And I think that’s the direction we want to head in. And, you know, we got to resist the candy.
What’s the cause for optimism here? You mentioned that some states are sowing phonics back into their young child literacy education policies and anything else. What gives you cause for optimism in this space?
Yeah, I think there’s reason to be optimistic on the literacy front. I think that there’s a lot of change that could be made. I mean, to put a pessimistic tone on it, it may be because we haven’t been doing a whole lot of excellent education for a while. So there’s a lot of room to grow, but I do think that there are changes that we can make.
I don’t have a lot of positive yarn to spin on this, though, I’ll tell you. And the reason is, you know, look back at our conversation. We’ve talked about some policies and we’re a little bit iffy. And then we talk about sort of the cultural things. And culture eats policy for breakfast every day. And if we sort of attend to this, like, well, what should we do with our schools to fix this up? I think we’re really missing the problem that we need to address.
And the fact that adults and and this isn’t just some adults, right? When I talk about these adults, it’s, you know, 16 to 65. It’s the whole nation being affected by this. I really think that we have to understand this as a much broader force and treat it as such. Otherwise, we’re just going to be victims of it.
Nat Malkus, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
Many thanks to Nat. Many thanks to Rose. I think one thing for me to take away from this episode is not just the fact that elite college students are reading fewer books or that leisure reading is declining across the country or that reading scores are declining for many Americans at the fourth and eighth grade level.
But rather to remind us or remind myself of the context here, that this is all happening during a period where literate culture seems to be giving way to a more oral culture, as Walter Ong called it. And this involves not just a shift in the way that we communicate information, it involves a shift in the texture of thought, in the culture of thought, in the kind of ideas that go aerodynamic.
And I want to keep thinking about this. Maybe I’ll have Joe Weisenthal on the show to talk about his big ideas on this, because I really do think this is a profound shift, a shift away from the book, the text, reading as the centerpiece of education toward a kind of educational philosophy that sees books as, as I said earlier, just one other planet in the solar system.
I think something important is happening here, and I’d love to explore it further. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you next week. Bye.