Research Wednesday | March 19, 2025

This week’s evidence focuses on the fact that real reading requires real books, and it’s not too late to stop the madness of technology substitutes. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results are miserable – and we can’t just blame it all on COVID and TikTok. Students spend 8 hours a day on screens, and some schools are succumbing to the siren song of letting tech substitute for reading literacy.

33% of 8th graders are below basic reading skills – the worst result in 32 years. 14% of those students read for pleasure.

English teachers allow more ideas to be represented by images and multimedia, conceding the field to reading real books. 

37% of 12th graders are reading proficiently. 

Some lessons:

Dressing up as characters is not understanding characters.

PowerPoint is not a substitute for writing a coherent essay.

A summary of a novel does not convey the emotion inherent in the text.

I know that the rejoinder to this will be, “We don’t have the time for full novels and essays!” I respect the time demands on teachers. The antidote is not withdrawing from the field of the literacy battles but rather choosing one’s battles more carefully. Four essays a year, with multiple editing and rewriting, is superior to a weekly essay with little respect for teacher feedback. Two novels per year, with close reading and deep discussions, are better than six novels that will be quickly consigned to Cliff Notes or AI content summaries. 

One final note. A friend of mine who is a very distinguished author despaired that her son was going to be an English major, fearing that he would live in poverty in her basement. When he was hired by McKinsey for a six-figure salary, they explained “We can teach you finance, but we can’t teach a finance major to be a good writer.” 

Here’s the link to the article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/opinion/read-books-learning.html