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 anyone would notice whether a book is available in a school library or not. The New York Times published an eye-opening report on a study by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford documenting steep declines in student test scores, especially in reading.
Over the past 10 years, reading scores have declined in 83 percent of school districts. What looked like a COVID-19-driven catastrophe is, instead, part of a long-running trend. Reading scores were falling at a similar clip prior to the pandemic, in 20172019, 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.
