Rachelle Peterson writes for the Federalist about a piece of legislation that would boost student learning.
Kids hardly read anymore, for pleasure or for school, so it’s no wonder reading scores continue to drop. The NAEP (“the Nation’s Report Card”) shows that in 2024, 70 percent of eighth graders could not perform at a proficient level in reading assessments. Worse, 33 percent could not even read and understand texts at the NAEP’s “basic” level, which denotes “partial mastery” of fundamental skills.
In light of these problems, a new model bill from the Ethics and Public Policy Center aims at getting kids to read again. Even better, it sets its sights on the best type of reading material a kid could have: real books.
We’ve known for a while that pleasure reading is in decline. When kids get to choose how to spend their free time, fewer of them invest in a book. The NAEP found in 2023 that just 14 percent of students read “almost every day” for fun outside of school assignments. That number is down from 17 percent in 2020 and 27 percent in 2012. Thirty-one percent say they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, up from 22 percent in 2012.
Kids model what they see at home, and adults hardly read for pleasure either. A daily time usage study tracking more than 200,000 adults between 2003 and 2023 (excluding 2020 because of inconsistent data collection methods during Covid) showed very little time spent reading. In 2023, adults averaged reading only 16 minutes per day for pleasure, including not just books but magazines, newspapers, and audiobooks. No wonder kids rarely read for fun.
When you parse the data, it turns out that of all the adults tracked, only 16 percent of them did any pleasure reading at all. These adults read more than an hour and a half a day on average.
