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🕰️Adolescent literacy isn't waiting. A new EdWeek report surfaces the challenges — and the solutions, with expert insights from 95 Percent Group on what actually works. 95pg.info/4umWPDM

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My Students Can't Read | Tyler Jagt, The Chronicle of Higher Education The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse. Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it. When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them. Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires. In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.” Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise. Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote. Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones. I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline. So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception. Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception. This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all. There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.” In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built. I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Offloading tasks to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all. I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back. But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify. I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide? Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted? Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors? The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation. chronicle.com/article/my-stu…

Data-Driven and District-Ready: What EdWeek Research Tells Us About the CTE Market edweek.org/events/webinar/da…

Tomorrow, we go live on EdWeek. One hour. Three takeaways: communication, revenue, CTE. Live Q&A at the end. Bring the hard questions. Wednesday, May 20, at 2pm ET. Free 1 hour of professional development credit for live attendees. Save your spot: edweek.org/events/webinar/tu…

🚨 Stanford no longer tries to stop students from using AI. It requires them to use it. In CS 106A, the university's introductory programming course taken by thousands of students every year, one of the final assignments is called Infinite Story. Students must code an adventure game from scratch and then use ChatGPT to keep it generating. Mehran Sahami, the instructor running the course, told Stanford Report the logic is simple. Students are going to use AI whether you forbid it or not, industries hiring them expect fluency, so the only honest move is to teach with it. Stanford's Graduate School of Business went further. Faculty are explicitly forbidden from banning AI on take-home coursework. They can decide how to allow it. They cannot decide whether to allow it. MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Caltech, Columbia, Oxford, and Imperial College London now all run on the same framework. Instructor discretion plus mandatory disclosure. The detection arms race that consumed the first two years of ChatGPT has been quietly abandoned at the top end of higher education. Turnitin still ships an AI indicator. Faculty have mostly stopped relying on it. The picture in K-12 is the opposite. Vermont's Agency of Education released 50 pages of guidance in January 2026 that prohibits AI chatbots entirely for PreK through grade 2, restricts grades 3 to 5 to curriculum-embedded AI only, and limits grades 6 to 8 to structured education-specific tools. Ohio passed a law requiring every public K-12 district to adopt an AI policy by mid-2026. Tennessee passed similar legislation in 2024. Georgia, Missouri, New Mexico, Washington, and Colorado have all issued state-level guidance. New York City Public Schools and Los Angeles Unified, the two largest districts in the country, both banned ChatGPT outright in 2023. NYCPS reversed within four months. The reason for the reversal is the same reason the bans were doomed from the start. Students with AI access at home kept using it. Students without it fell behind. The ban hurt only the kids the district was trying to protect. This is the split that almost nobody is naming clearly. AI fluency is becoming a stratifier the way SAT prep used to be. A student at Stanford taking CS 106A graduates having built real workflows with Claude and ChatGPT inside structured assignments. A student in a district that still blocks AI on the school network graduates having used it secretly on their phone with no instruction, no feedback, and no idea whether their outputs are good. The Trump executive order signed in December 2025 made the gap worse, not better. It directs federal agencies to pressure states out of writing their own AI regulations and threatens to withhold federal funding from states that pass them. The result is that the states that were trying to write thoughtful classroom AI frameworks, the Vermonts and the Ohios and the New Mexicos, are now under pressure to abandon them. What gets missed in most coverage is that the access gap was never about access to the tool. ChatGPT and Claude have free tiers. Anyone with a phone can use them. The gap is about access to instruction in how to use them. Whether your teacher will sit with you while you prompt. Whether your parents know enough to correct your outputs. Whether your school has decided you are old enough to be trusted with the most consequential technology of your lifetime. If you have a kid in school right now, the question is no longer whether they will use AI. The question is whether they will learn to use it from someone who knows what they are doing, or whether they will figure it out alone with no one watching. Source: Stanford Report, Stanford Teaching Commons, Vermont Agency of Education, Times Higher Education, EdWeek, Brookings Institution

Most scoreboards do one thing: display the score. What if yours could do more? Join us live on EdWeek, Wednesday, May 20 at 2pm ET. One hour on how K-12 school districts are turning athletic facilities into school-wide communication hubs. Free recording sent to all registrants. Plus 1 hour of professional development credit for live attendees. Save your spot: edweek.org/events/webinar/tu…

When one showed signs of an eating disorder, Grok encouraged the behavior. When i said they "heard voices," Grok told saud the CIA was "running psychological ops" on them. (EdWeek) That's genuinely dangerous.

This week's must-read: In EdWeek, @Elizheubeck covers important studies on the limits of phonics instruction and the relative importance of oral language and vocabulary development. 'Students performed better on standardized assessments when teachers routinely taught new vocabulary and encouraged more than one-word responses during comprehension lessons. “Certainly, there are teachers who are letting the other pieces of the literacy block crowd out the comprehension instruction,” Troyer said. That doesn’t bode well for students, according to the researchers. More time spent on phonics was associated with lower DIBELS scores, whereas more time spent on comprehension was linked with higher scores on the standardized tests designed to evaluate literacy skills in K-8 students.'

Without ever using the words “social and emotional learning,” Fred Rogers introduced these ideas to generations of young viewers. Read this @EdWeek article to see how his lessons continue to inspire classroom teachers today: bit.ly/4cpHWuO

🔥The Fordham report just dropped — and we support it 100%. No surprise to parents who’ve been on the ground demanding their kids’ right to READ. Here’s what they’re calling for — and we’re PUSHING in state governments nationwide: 1️⃣ Teacher prep programs MUST teach the Science of Reading 2️⃣ Licensure exams MUST test real reading science knowledge 3️⃣ Every K–3 teacher gets SOR training in their first 2–3 years 4️⃣ Districts MUST choose from state-approved, science-aligned curriculum. This isn’t a wish list. This is the roadmap. Parents started this movement. And parents will FINISH it. 💪 @Fordham @EdWeek @ExcelinEd @dyslexiaIDA

EdWeek released a special issue on middle and high school math. The REL Midwest Teaching Fractions Toolkit was featured in one of the articles. We are excited to see the toolkit being shared. ow.ly/rg6K50YVWJ8

For many female athletes who tear their anterior cruciate ligaments, the arduous hours spent recovering through physical therapy are only part of the battle. In this video, Bianca Broughton, the head athletic trainer in the Dallas Independent School District, describes how she and others in the school system try to help young women through that process. "You have to get them through all the different stages of--not necessarily grief, like you're losing a loved one--but the grief of losing their sport that they're not able to go out and participate in, for that short amount of time, in a team environment," Broughton explains. See EdWeek Digital News Reporter Jennifer Vilcarino's in-depth story on why female athletes are more susceptible to ACL tears, and what doctors, trainers, and teens say about the process for returning from the injuries.

Not exaggerating: "In 2019, an EdWeek Research Center survey found that 75 percent of K-2 and elementary special education teachers use the method to teach students how to read, and 65 percent of college of education professors teach it." edweek.org/teaching-learning…

Fun fact: This "report" being platformed by EdWeek isn't "scientific." It is mostly survey data crafted into SOR propaganda, often citing other non-scientific reports (NCTQ). It is from a conservative think tank and neither author has any background in literacy

Also, everyone in the EdWeek coverage takes pains to suggest that formal reading instruction should not begin in kindergarten. It’s curious to me that the US maintains this stance when phonics begins in England at “reception,” which is their PreK equivalent (for 4 YOs).

Two interesting points from the EdWeek coverage: Student Achievement Partners announced its own plans to review PreK curricula a month ago. 👀 A month ago, I began hearing about extensive concerns with the EdReports PreK process (not reflected in the coverage). I’m sure they did, as well. edweek.org/teaching-learning…