The Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky this month announced a surprising unintended consequence of a new statewide cellphone ban. In many of the district’s schools, the number of books checked out in the first few weeks of class had skyrocketed compared with last year, before the ban was instituted.
In just the first 17 days of the school year at Pleasure Ridge Park High School in Louisville, where only 17 percent of students are proficient in reading according to state assessments, the district said that “students have checked out more than 1,200 books, nearly half the total number borrowed during the entire 2024-25 school year.” At other schools in the district, Kentucky’s largest, the results are even more impressive: 40 percent of students at one high school have books checked out of the library, “double the number who borrowed books all last year.”
I discovered this heartening news the same day as I read this headline: “Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hit a New Low.” Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP (considered the gold standard of educational assessments) “showed that about a third of the 12th-graders who were tested last year did not have basic reading skills,” according to my newsroom colleague Dana Goldstein.
Some of these students have comprehension levels so low they may not be able to decipher the meaning of a political speech, Goldstein notes. “The picture for low-performing 12th graders is sad,” Tim Daly, the chief executive of EdNavigator and the author of a newsletter on education, told me in an email. “We have way more kids now who are functionally illiterate. They’re going to struggle as adults with things like identifying a location on a map, knowing how/where to report for jury duty, and following instructions to fast before a medical test. Basic, everyday stuff.”
While many factors play into the decline in test scores over the past decade, this is more evidence that the ubiquity of smartphones in our schools are part of it. Sometimes the obvious answer is also the right answer.
I called Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for and analyzes the NAEP, to ask about the most recent results. She told me that looking at the results over time, the “pivotal year really looks to be 2013.” There was some stagnation in test scores before that, but “once you get to that 2013 you start to see steady decline in math and reading.” That long predates Covid school closures, which is what so many public officials point to as the moment when school performance fell off the cliff.
The time frame of over a decade ago jibes with other statistics about teenagers’ internet use. “The share of teens who report being online ‘almost constantly’ has roughly doubled since 2014-15 (24 percent then versus 46 percent today),” according to a Pew Research fact sheet published in July. Correlation is not causation, but there have been studies showing that devices in classrooms aren’t distracting just for their users — their peers in proximity are also distracted and may do worse on tests.
The omnipresence of devices, including school-provided laptops, affects even the best students’ attention spans, and basically every college-level instructor I have interviewed in the past decade has told me that his or her students no longer have the patience for analyzing longer texts (by this point, we’ve all heard about the elite college students who can’t read books). But when you drill down into the 12th grade NAEP reading scores, the top 25 percent is doing about as well as they have since the 1990s. The story here is that the bottom 25 percent has fallen more precipitously.
Muldoon pointed out to me that while the children of college-educated parents tend to do better on the NAEP over all, a good chunk of the lowest performers also have college-educated parents. Nearly 40 percent of lower performers had parents who graduated from college, and over 40 percent were from the middle socioeconomic stratum, showing that the declines in reading abilities cut across demographic lines. This should alarm policymakers; it seems that few demographic groups aren’t touched by this.
This school year does feel like a turning point in terms of a bipartisan, widespread acknowledgment that screens in schools, not just cellphones, were a natural experiment that went completely off the rails. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia have signed or already enacted policies restricting cellphone use in K-12 schools.
Beyond cellphone bans, there are other ways school districts are addressing their students’ woeful literacy. Tim Daly pointed out Richmond, Va., as a bright spot. Some of its schools added 20 days of instruction to help close Covid literacy gaps, and they’ve seen considerable increases in their early elementary literacy scores. Virginia also has a cellphone ban in place, but it went into effect only this year, so it’s too soon to tell if it will also help improve literacy.
To reach older children who have slipped through the cracks, middle and high school teachers may need better training, or schools may have to employ more remedial literacy experts. Parents also need to be better informed about how their students are doing.
Some of this is better communication between parents and students. But it is also about the kind of standards teachers hold for students. There is rampant grade inflation, and state test scores don’t tend to come out until the school year is over, so parents may discover too late that their children’s skills are below grade level. I interviewed a Georgia middle school teacher in 2023 who went viral for talking about how his seventh grade students were still reading at a fourth grade level, and he told me that no matter how many zeros he puts in the grade book, his students will be passed along to eighth grade.
In an opinion essay this month in The Wall Street Journal, Roland Fryer, a professor of economics at Harvard, succinctly described what schools need to do to improve learning: institute “more instruction time, high expectations, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction and high-dosage tutoring.” While this prescription is straightforward, it’s not easy and it’s not cheap. Schools need the money, the will and the time to do it.
In the meantime: cellphone bans. It turns out that when kids aren’t allowed to doom scroll, take rude pictures of each other or rot their brains on TikTok during lunch hour or in study hall, they get bored enough to go to the library and check out books.
If there are eight full hours, five days a week, during which students can’t look at their phones, they may also discover that they enjoy reading for pleasure, a pastime that too many teenagers have abandoned. Despite some parents grumbling about new bans, I see very little downside — and a lot of positive, unintended benefits.
End Notes
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Winning? I watched both episodes of “aka Charlie Sheen,” a documentary about that troubled Hollywood scion and tabloid staple. Sheen drips with off-kilter charisma, and the film has an extensive catalog of his drug use, carousing and violence. It’s both a story about how fame can warp a human being, and also how wealth and celebrity can insulate a person from meaningful consequences for decades. Special shout-out to Sheen’s ex-wife, the actress Denise Richards, who took care of two of Sheen’s children from another marriage when he and their mother were in the throes of addiction. Richards’s stalwart honesty is a standout and her words illustrate how Sheen’s behavior took an endless toll on his family.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
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