How our schools foolishness is courting civilizational failure

We’ve been having a debate about “book bans” in recent years, but given the steep decline in student literacy, the deeper question is how any child would even notice whether a book is available in a school library or not. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford recently published an eye-opening study documenting steep declines in student test scores, especially in reading. Over the past 10 years, reading scores have declined in 83% of America’s school districts. What looked like a COVID-driven catastrophe is, instead, part of a long-running trend.Reading scores were falling at a similar clip prior to the pandemic, in 2017-2019, and continued to fall into 2024.In a third of school districts, kids are reading a full grade level below where they were in 2015. This follows what had been a steady increase in test scores from 1990 to the 2010s.The ability to read is foundational to a child’s development.It enhances verbal fluency, memory, concentration, and executive function.It’s associated with academic success and sundry advantages throughout life.That our schools are falling down so badly on such an elemental matter is nothing less than a civilizational failure. Our children aren’t learning to read, in part, because we’ve forgotten how to teach them. We decided to jettison a common-sensical, tried-and-true method of reading instruction — phonics — for faddish theories that haven’t worked. It’s notable that states that showed improvement between 2022-2025 embraced phonics, which now goes under the rubric “the science of reading.”And it also can’t be a coincidence that these harrowing trends are playing out against the backdrop of ubiquitous screens in schools. Schools are starting to ban mobile phones, but the screen that they take away with one hand, they give with the other. According to a New York Times survey, 80% of teachers say that students at their schools have a device assigned to them; it was only a third in 2019...