Tag Archives: literacy crisis

Gen Z “Less Cognitively Capable” Than Their Parents

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And It Appears That Schools May Be Contributing to their Decline

Last week’s Senate hearing on the impact of technology, social media, and artificial intelligence on the mental health of children and teenagers is well worth a watch.

This is especially true if you’re new to understanding how smart devices have influenced education in the last fifteen years.

But if you can’t fit in the entire two hour discussion, be sure to spend just a few minutes watching former teacher, cognitive scientist, and author Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s introductory remarks.

Video source: Scrolling 2 Death

Horvath studies how learning happens physiologically. According to him, humans are biologically programmed to learn from other humans, and screens circumvent the process.

Horvath along with co-panelist Emily Cherkin advocate for eliminating technology as the primary tool for learning in schools.

During the pandemic, schools were shut down, Chromebooks were issued to each student, and became, of necessity, the primary means of instruction. When schools opened up again, students returned along with this new—or at least more intensively used—way of teaching and learning.

The result is that on top of the hours spent on screens during their free time (estimates vary widely from 1 to 7 hours) , an additional 4 to 6 hours of instructional time were added during the school day.

You would think our collective hair would be on fire with data like this, wouldn’t you?

The plummeting ACT scores in the graph above underscore Horvath’s conviction that the tech tools schools use are, if not causing, then correlated to a decline in our students’ cognitive ability.

You would think our collective hair would be on fire with data like this, wouldn’t you?

So why isn’t it?

Photo source: First Fish Chronicles on Substack

Horvath’s co-panelist Emily Cherkin has some answers.

In her recent Substack post “Don’t Ask the Barber if You Need a Haircut” (which you can read without a subscription if you’re on her email list at First Fish Chronicles), she explains that the EdTech industry is “expected to be worth up to $570 Billion by 2034.”

Yes, you read that correctly. 570 BILLION.

Coincidentally, Cherkin reports, an organization entitled the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) sent a letter ahead of the hearing to Senator Ted Cruz, the Chair of the Senate committee. The letter explained that there’s a big difference between screentime use OUTSIDE of school and the objective-driven instructional use of screens INSIDE school.

In other words, criticism and regulation of social media and technology use for kids in general is fine. But decisions about school screen use? This must be left to the experts.

Here’s the problem. The experts seem to be oblivious about what the data shows about EdTech and learning.

Take a look at the list of organizations Cherkin cites in her article that signed the CoSN letter prior to the hearing:

AASA, The School Superintendents Association

AESA, Association of Education Service Agencies

American Federation of School Administrators

American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

American Library Association (ALA)

Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO)

Benton Foundation

CoSN – The Consortium for School Networking

Consortium of State School Boards Association (COSSBA)

National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP)

National Association of Federally Impacted Schools (NAFIS)

National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP)

National Catholic Educational Association

National Education Association (NEA)

SETDA (State Educational Technology Directors Association)

Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB)

…the experts seem to be oblivious about what the data shows about EdTech and learning

These groups represent the people one expects to be most committed to children’s well-being and learning, the people that parents who aren’t educators themselves look to and trust.

Have the educational decision makers all simply been bought off by this big money industry? Or are the experts actually unaware when it comes to what children really need in order to learn?

In my opinion, both reasons are probably factors. I speak from over 30 years teaching in both public and independent schools.

Many teachers and administrators don’t really understand the biology of learning and the neurological complexity of what is goes on in the learning process.

In my book about the importance of reading aloud to children from the beginning, I describe this neurological phenomenon as the invisible toolbox— a metaphor for the connections that are made in the brain in the interplay of human connection and learning.

When EdTech companies market their wares promising personalized learning, guaranteed results, and the necessity of tech experience in the formative years for a future work force, many educators and administrators believe them.

But as Cherkin has shown, there’s also a lot of money at stake to keep the industry alive and booming.

Read my review of Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber (Clement and Miles, 2019) to learn about what the authors call The Education-Industrial Complex. They describe a network of oligarchs and politicians who have neither background nor expertise in education or child development, yet have an outsized influence on curriculum in the U.S.

As schools move to ban phones during the school day, the great irony is that screen use continues widely within schools. iPads and Chromebooks are essentially just oversized phones.

And, as Dr. Horvath explains, screens simply are not what the human brain needs for deep learning.

The Literacy Crisis Has a Simple Solution

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Here’s How a Federal Initiative Can Turn It Around

According to the Children’s Reading Foundation, 4 out of 10 children begin kindergarten 1-3 years below grade level.

What exactly does this mean? It means these children lack the pre-literacy skills they need to learn to read.

Even with appropriate instruction going forward this gap is difficult to close. 75% of these children will not catch up to their peers who came to kindergarten prepared.

You may be wondering why good teaching seldom catches these children up with their peers. Watch here to understand why this is so difficult.


If we’re going to be successful in overcoming the literacy crisis, we have to direct our efforts toward the earliest years. Here’s how it can be done.

Initiatives of the Past Show Us the Way

In the 1960s two public relations campaigns were rolled out that dramatically changed the attitudes and habits of Americans.

When the Surgeon General of the U.S. released a study warning of the carcinogenic effects of smoking, it radically shifted Americans’ behavior.

Cigarettes lost their “cool,” became socially unacceptable, and Americans gave them up.

They chose for health when they had information.

In the same decade, Lady Bird Johnson launched her “Keep America Beautiful Campaign” nationally that made littering practically an ethical crime.

Even school children were taught that throwing trash out the window of your car was wrong and disrespectful.

Every child was sent home with a plastic litter bag and told to hang it in the family car.

It worked. Throwing trash out of the car and littering public spaces became anathema.

What Do These History Lessons Have to Teach Us Now?

The federal initiatives of the past show us that public opinion and practice can change dramatically when Americans have information and support.

Here’s how a similar two-step initiative can be applied to roll back the literacy crisis nationally.

1️⃣ Educate Parents

Initiate a national public relations campaign that explains why shared reading from birth is essential for school readiness and learning to read.

The digital revolution has left a generation of parents in its wake that does not understand how important this is for a child’s brain development.

2️⃣ Guarantee Access to Books

Federally fund every child’s enrollment in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library from birth. Just $155 per child covers the cost of delivering a free book every month from birth until kindergarten.

This means every American begins life and school with a personal library of 60 books.

Photo credit: Arkansas Imagination Library

This solution is how we overcome the two obstacles preventing literacy success. It’s simple, affordable, and has a historical precedent for effectiveness.

2024 NAEP Reading Scores Drop…Again

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Why This Was Not Surprising

Despite LOTS of federal money pouring out the door to schools after the pandemic and the resurgence of phonics instruction via the Science of Reading in the eternal reading wars, the 2024 Nation’s Report Card*, unveiled this week, continued to report unhappy results.

This did not surprise me.

What would have surprised me about this year’s results would have been if we had seen growth in each group. Here’s why.

As students returned to school post-pandemic, their one to one laptops returned with them. So did the heavily tech-based work that they’d done in distance learning.

What did this mean for students? It meant less time reading actual books.

Reading is now often limited to short passages on screens or even via audio books in class.

As a teacher for over 3 decades, it was always obvious to me that students who scored as proficient readers read not only what was assigned for class, but also books of their own choice.

As with any skill, proficiency comes with practice. Reading is no different.

Changing Expectations for Independent Reading

Last November The Atlantic published an article entitled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” with the subheading: ‘To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.’

Expectations for students as readers have changed.

When a friend stepped in as a substitute teacher for a 10th and 11th grade high school English teacher who left for medical leave, he was given these instructions:

Don’t expect the kids to do any assigned reading outside of class.

You’ll read The Great Gatsby in class together via audiobook.

Then the kids will do their follow up questions independently on their Chromebooks.

This scenario occurred in a typical suburban school that included both working and middle class kids.

If students won’t do the assigned reading to prepare for class, is it likely they’re doing their own reading for pleasure at home? I think not.

Hence, there’s very little time spent actually reading.

Little practice equals low proficiency.

The cocktail of our kids’ over-saturation in technology both at home and at school combined with low expectations is a recipe for continued stagnation and decline in reading scores.

The 4th graders of 2024 were in kindergarten when schools were shut down, so their introduction to school was screen-based. The students who didn’t have parents at home who read to them were—and are—at a huge risk for reading failure.

When 69% of our nation’s 4th graders and 70% of our 8th graders are only able to read at a basic or below basic level, it has got to be a wake-up call.

It’s Past Time to Rethink the Role of Technology in the Classroom

Technology in schools is big business and was pushed into the classroom long before Covid without considering whether more time on screens is really what kids need developmentally.

Neuroscience has revealed that screen use physically changes the brain. These changes actually depress reading, language, and decision making capabilities. Check out this long-term study by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Reading and Literacy Discovery Center to see just how detrimental technology can be on developing brains.

If educators are serious about encouraging kids to become independent readers, thus improving reading scores, it’s long past time to reconsider students’ time on screens in the classroom.

*The NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) administers reading and math tests to a cross section of 4th and 8th grade students all over the United States every two years. They target all demographics socially and economically and administer the tests in both public and private schools.

Studies on “Reading Aloud to Children, Social Inequalities, and Vocabulary Development”

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The Evidence is Mounting…

Recent studies on the effects of speaking and reading to children in the preschool years confirm an important truth about where future literacy success begins.

A highly significant take-away is that poverty, lack of parental education, and even under-resourced schools, while they may be correlated statistically, are not necessarily the cause of poor literacy outcomes nor are they necessarily determinative.

This is very good news.

The more we learn about brain development in the first five years, the more obvious it is that those who care about children and literacy must focus our efforts on this period of life.

Last spring I titled my talk at the World Literacy Summit in Oxford “How the First Five Years Frame Future Literacy.”

Two studies published recently corroborated this claim.

Having spent decades teaching, I had reached this conclusion long ago. Most teachers understand that a child’s exposure to language and books before they ever set foot in kindergarten makes all the difference when they are eventually taught to read.

But research and studies are important too and difficult to ignore. So here they are.

How Do Infants and Toddlers Learn Language?

One study reported in Neuroscience News sampled over 1000 infants and toddlers from 12 countries speaking 43 languages to understand how language is learned.

They discovered that the amount of speech children hear is the “primary driver of language development.”

Not socioeconomics, or gender, or multilingualism.

In a nutshell, children who hear more speech, understand and produce more speech.

The take-away for parents? Talk to your babies.

Who Benefits from Information About Shared Reading and Access to Books?

Another study came from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Based in Bonn, Germany, IZA’s research mission is to “focus on understanding economic inequality, particularly the central role of labor markets and the psychological underpinnings of human behavior.”

We know that literacy outcomes have everything to do with a future skilled and employable labor force. This study aimed to discover how we can foster that.

The research team wanted to understand the impact of setting up a ‘randomized controlled trial’ of a shared book reading intervention targeting 4 year old children in socially mixed neighborhoods in Paris.

We selected a large, random sample of families and provided parents with free books, information on the benefits of SBR (shared book reading) and tips for effective reading practices.

The vocabulary of children in both treated and control groups were assessed both before and after the intervention.

Here is what they discovered:

Children from all families in the intervention group greatly increased their shared book reading frequency and improved their vocabulary.

The ‘low-educated and immigrant’ families improved their vocabulary as much as those from ‘high-educated, native families’.

Also significantly, continuous positive vocabulary growth occurred in disadvantaged families, despite the fact that these children often attended poorly resourced schools.

What Do These Studies Reveal About Where Literacy Begins?

Speaking and reading to young children before they begin school—regardless of their socioeconomic status, immigrant status, gender, level of parental education, or multilingualism—results in language and vocabulary development.

Since a child’s vocabulary is the number one predictor of school success, this is critically important to understand.

What these studies show is that if we want to have a real and lasting impact on literacy outcomes, we need to focus our attention and resources on parents and caregivers of children from infancy through the preschool years.

This is what will set all children up for success.

Reading Comprehension: When Kids Struggle

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The Missing Tools That Make Reading Comprehension So Hard to Teach Directly

Why is reading comprehension so difficult to teach?

Because it’s predicated on three tools that are effortlessly gained when a child is read to, yet harder to achieve when they have to be consciously taught.

~A large and rich vocabulary

~A well-developed attention span

~Access to a wider world (what teachers call background of experience)

These tools are prerequisites for understanding what is read.

When a child arrives at school without them, learning to read and understanding what they read can be a Herculean challenge.

Teachers know this. And they work hard to build them.

But the sad reality is that 75% of children who begin school without these tools will never catch up.

A child can be spared this struggle so easily.

Just one picture book a day results in…

~Exposure to over a million words by kindergarten.

~A well-developed attention span.

~Background knowledge that helps them understand what they read.

Then reading comprehension follows. Easily.

For a quick audio review of The Invisible Toolbox by the youth services librarian of the Westmont Public Library, find it here.

“The Invisible Toolbox” is Off to Oxford

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World Literacy Summit, 2023

This spring I’ll be crossing the pond to be one of the presenters at The World Literacy Summit 2023. People from 85 countries who care about improving literacy around the world will gather in Oxford to share experiences and ideas.

If you can’t get to England, but are interested in attending, there’s good news. There’s also a virtual option for registration. You can check out all the details here.

In the meantime, if you’re curious about my talk, have a look at the overview that I submitted to the selection committee below:

“The Invisible Toolbox: How the First Five Years Frames Future Literacy”

“Neuroscience confirms that children who have been read to regularly from birth arrive at school on day one with “invisible toolboxes” full of all the pre-literacy tools that they need in order to be successful in school and beyond.  

While it’s generally understood that reading aloud to a child is a good idea, many new and expectant parents don’t fully understand why doing so in the early years is critical for a child’s academic and social-emotional development. 

What are these tools? Why do they make such a difference? How can we educate parents, in this age of distraction, to understand that reading aloud to their child is one of the greatest gifts they can give and support them in doing so? 

We will explore these questions through the lens of the research of Dr. John Hutton (Pediatrician and Director of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Reading and Literacy Discovery Center), the data of various literacy and government organizations, and my own experience as a teacher of reading and writing for decades in the elementary school classroom. 

We’ll also discuss organizations in the U.S. and beyond that are reaching into communities with limited access to books that may also have language and cultural obstacles that prevent them from filling their children’s “invisible toolboxes.” 

As I’ve begun piloting my own program to gift The Invisible Toolbox and related resources, I’ve been heartened and amazed to see what tremendous work is going on in the nonprofit sector. But there is still much to do. 

Reaching people in the earliest stages of their parenting and helping them develop their own tools so that they can pass them along is one of the greatest gifts that those of us who care deeply about literacy and children can give.”

See you in Oxford!

Thanks, Read Aloud Nebraska!

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A widespread internet outage last Friday at Read Aloud Nebraska‘s annual conference threatened to derail my virtual keynote presentation. Yikes! This is the type of unforeseen event that every conference planner and speaker dreads. But Megan, the expert IT specialist on site, cooly and calmly found a work-around. She used her iPhone as a mobile hotspot to share my talk and enable me to call in for a discussion with our in-person audience. Great save, Megan!

I love sharing about The Invisible Toolbox and why reading to our children is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give. Here’s an excerpt that explains how the building of every child’s invisible toolbox begins with love and connection…

The Gift of Reading and Wellness

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May was a busy blur of book talks and presentations. While they’re still happening virtually, life does seem to be opening up. Hopefully, soon more of these will happen in person!

One of my favorite audiences to speak to are the parents of young children. Earlier this month I had a great time visiting and sharing with my friend and former colleague Ji Wang’s Saturday morning PTA Wellness group at the elementary school where she is principal. The sign above hangs on the fence right next to their parent drop off/pick-up circle. How clever is that?

Here’s a quick excerpt from my presentation:

If you’re interested in setting up a presentation, book talk, or class for your school or parenting group, I’d love to hear from you! Soon-to-be and new parents, it’s never too early to learn about one of the greatest gifts you’ll ever give your child.

“It may be small, but it’s mighty…”

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When I met my newborn book for the first time, it wasn’t love at first sight. I held the tiny tome* in my hand, eyeing it critically, wondering what people would think. Couldn’t she write a book with more pages? Would they think it lacked substance?

A smallish gift book was what I’d planned all along, a volume so not intimidating and so visually appealing that even the most reluctant parent reader would consider picking it up. But when my agent and I met with my editor and the company’s CEO last month via Zoom and learned that Mango had reversed their earlier decision and now planned to print The Invisible Toolbox in soft cover instead of hard, my heart dropped. I was not only disappointed; I was worried. Would a softcover gift book have the same appeal as hardcover?

Mango’s marketing department was concerned that titles comparable to mine were priced at a rate with which a hardcover book wouldn’t be able to compete. Like a wounded parent, I protested: But my book is unique! There isn’t anything out there quite like it. They weren’t moved. And so the decision was made. It was out of my hands.

“I wasn’t sure I could sell it. But then I couldn’t resist.”


When Federal Express left a carton of complimentary author copies on my doorstep this week, I called my agent. “It’s so little.”

She laughed. “Remember, I almost didn’t sign you because the book is so small. I wasn’t sure I could sell it. But then I couldn’t resist.” Julia believes in the message and understands what’s at stake. For her, it’s all about saving democracy. Maybe you’ve seen the meme: A child who reads will be an adult who thinks.

Thank you, Julia, for blowing away any lingering wisps of self-doubt. The Invisible Toolbox may be small. And it may even have a softcover. But its message is mighty.

* An oxymoron, I know, but I like the alliteration.

The Critical First Five Years

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As much as we’d like to believe that children arrive at school on the first day of kindergarten with comparable reservoirs of potential, the sad reality is this simply isn’t true. From the very beginning of their school lives, the playing field is not even. Children arrive in wide-ranging states of readiness to learn, predetermined by their early language experiences.

Watch this powerful graphic illustration of the impact of the first five years on a child’s future learning trajectory from The Children’s Reading Foundation:

The fact is, children who have been read to regularly come equipped with the critical tools they need for the world of school. Children who lack this experience enter school already behind and, as the video reveals, they rarely catch up.

By reading to our children from birth on, we can build a foundation of literacy skills that will not only enable them to enter kindergarten on day one with joy and confidence, but carry them successfully far into the future.