The National Center for Education Statistics, a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Education, recently released the latest survey data showing that the proportion of U.S. elementary and junior high school students who actively "read for fun" in their spare time has dropped significantly over the past decade or so, triggering concerns among the education community and parents about children's reading habits and academic performance.
The report is based on long-term tests of reading and mathematics for 9- and 13-year-old students across the country and covers long-term trends since the 1970s. The latest data comes from more than 30,000 students' answers and combines questionnaires about students' attendance and reading habits. Data show that compared with 2012, the proportion of 13-year-old students who said "reading in free time is the norm" has almost halved, while the proportion of 9-year-old students who "read for pleasure almost every day" has also dropped by 16 percentage points in the past 13 years.
Specifically, the reading interest of 9-year-old children is still higher than that of teenagers, but there has also been a significant decline. In 2025, only about 37% of 9-year-old students said they read in their spare time almost every day, compared with 42% in 2020 and as high as 53% in 1984. Educational researchers point out that there is a significant positive correlation between the frequency of active reading among children and adolescents and their reading scores on standardized tests. Students who read frequently generally achieve higher scores on the test, especially those adolescents who read every day, and the gap between them and their peers who hardly read is even more significant.
Matthew Sodenner, acting director of the National Center for Education Statistics, said this trend deserves serious attention from parents and educators because currently "we are not seeing the progress we originally hoped to achieve" in reading. He emphasized that the significant decline since 2012 shows that this problem is far more than the short-term impact of the new crown epidemic, but the cumulative result over a longer period of time, which should promote more in-depth research and policy actions.
The latest report also shows that average scores for nine- and 13-year-old students in reading and maths have fallen since 2008. The long-term trend data is divided into scoring ranges from 0 to 500. The two age groups use the same scoring standard. Therefore, the overall score of 9-year-old students is lower than that of 13-year-old students, which is within the expected range. However, regardless of which age group, the average scores are in a downward trend compared with more than ten years ago. Against this background, many states in the United States have increased investment in preschool and early reading ability development programs in recent years. Some education experts believe that such early literacy and reading promotion programs may be one of the important reasons for the partial recovery of reading scores among lower grade students after the epidemic.
Sodner pointed out that reading ability is not only related to the Chinese or English class itself, but also the basic ability of students to obtain and understand information in all other subjects, so the decline in reading level will have a knock-on impact on overall learning. At the same time, the amount of screen time teenagers spend after school continues to rise, with a 2024 study finding that more than half of teenagers aged 12 to 17 spend four or more hours a day using electronic screens.
As schools use a large number of tablets, laptops and other devices in teaching, the controversy over "whether screen time squeezes out reading time" is also heating up. Previous studies have pointed out that there is a correlation between the decline in adolescent standardized test scores and the increase in screen time, and this is mutually confirmed by the dual downward trends in reading and performance reflected in this report. Some parents who are worried about their children using computers for too long have questioned the school's distribution of equipment or the implementation of digital teaching, and have asked the school to re-examine the scope and duration of the use of electronic devices in the classroom.
Driven by pressure from parents and society, lawmakers in many states have proposed relevant bills at the state level in an attempt to limit public schools' reliance on educational technology products and shorten the time students have to face screens in class and homework. The education department and the legislative body are engaged in a battle over how to balance the advantages of digital teaching and the cultivation of reading habits: on the one hand, equipment is regarded as an important tool to improve teaching efficiency and resource equity; on the other hand, the continued decline in children's "reading for fun" and the simultaneous decline in reading scores are prompting more policymakers to re-examine the education model in the "screen age".