I don't think we can understand the causes of declining test scores without looking at the international trend, the trend of cognitive decline in adults who are out of the workforce, and the reversal of the Flynn effect. This isn't specific to school, it's something much bigger. I'd love to see an analysis comparing those different sources of data. The extent to which US schoolchildren differ from those bigger trends sounds interesting, but I haven't seen anyone dive into it.
This isn't an abdication of schools' responsibility. I think schools can and should do better. But if we run around chasing a cause of declining test scores in schools when the cause is actually outside of schools, that could distract us from all the stuff that we can control.
You are hesitant to push more blame onto screens. Why?
Especially because you write that "There’s no single or even dominant cause of the long-term learning decline," but then cite two reasons -- kids reading less for fun and more devices in schools -- that support the theory that the decline is mostly screen.
And write that "the mechanics of how kids stopped learning as much [due to screentime] have remained a little murky to me. Did they watch too many online videos and somehow become automatically unable to pass reading tests?" but, again, cite two reasons -- kids reading less for fun and more devices in schools -- that indicate pretty clearly how screentime negatively affects students' ability to read.
AND you conclude your essay, for goodness' sake, with this: "We need to lead the way as adults by modeling behaviors we want our kids (and students) to emulate. If we scroll endlessly and never sit with a book, there’s no reason they won’t follow suit."
Tim! My friend! It is mostly the screens! Around 2010, we -- all of us -- started spending WAY too much time in front of screens. When parents themselves are constantly on their phones or watching TV, what do you think happens to their children developmentally? When children are staring at screens more in school and out of school what do you think happens to them developmentally? Streaming, social media and gaming have made it both easier AND more desirable to stay home and not go to school (or go out and play.) Hence the absenteeism.
In 15 years we have allowed screens to disrupt our homes, our families, our schools and our public spaces. We are fully surrounded by and fully distracted by screens. (And that's not even considering the mindless, unredeemable content that most people look at on those screens.)
This article rules! I’ve been teaching 26 years and I can see a sensible case for all the factors.
-i would put the rise in truancy and poor attendance first. That has been getting worse for years and yes, pre covid.
-the screens do matter. Unfortunately during covid we put all our work online, it cost a lot of money, and it won’t be abandoned. Many parents are not happy and i don’t blame them. That being said the materials are accessible everywhere. It’s just that the screen captures attention differently.
-the homework stuff -I have to say I’m not a fan of assigning homework just to have homework. it’s not that it’s too much to expect of the kids, but parents work weird hours and afternoons are a mess. Single parent households make this more difficult. But the biggest reason? CHEATING. Even before AI. Screenshots sent to one another. I make kids do as much in the classroom as possible under my nose. They start copy paste, i close out the website quickly and they barely even comment anymore. I can monitor their screens.
However, they really resent reading and writing, and written work. I frequently do handwritten assignments as well. They act like i have a lot of nerve making them read and fill things out. We read together and go over things together. I don’t know what they do everywhere else but they find it annoying to have to do chapters of their social studies textbooks in class-as if there’s something else they have to do then. I’m pretty funny and engaging but it’s a constant c grade standup. I think we are lightening expectations even in school because of all the bitching. But i’m not sure sending work home is the answer due to rampant cheating.
We spend entire class periods on the material being taught. They find this tedious even with all my tricks and humor.
As for the other factors, i’m with you on all of them. You’ve done an excellent job laying this out. I know I prep kids till the cows come home for my own tests.
I have 5 sons, high school graduating years of 2010, 2013, 2016, 2018, and 2021. I home educated them for a combined 10 years, not all of them all the time, and not for the entirety of their education, but every time that I could see some gaps in their education, a de emphasis on skills such as memory work, reading, writing, and arithmetic and an emphasis on technology, synthesis, and “higher order thinking skills” (the latter of which requires the acquisition of lower order thinking skills, which get glossed over.) I saw the emphasis on “test taking strategies” instead of actually knowing the material well enough to pass the test. So I kept them home for a time so that they would learn those skills, at their own pace, without the pressure to conform to an arbitrary timeline. I had a couple of rules. No calculator for math below trigonometry, no school between noon and 2, and from Sunday night to Friday night, I permitted no video games. None. An occasional YouTube video to see how something works, PBS documentary, and the like. The 2 hour midday recess could be spent pursuing whatever leisure activity they enjoyed at the time. Being boys, they built forts in the wood, played soccer, and read, read extensively.
Once I felt that their time at home had sufficiently closed the skill gap, they were allowed to decide whether or not to go back to public school. (The youngest three graduated from a public high school, enjoy in the normal life of high school varsity sports, homecoming dances, and graduation). (And please don’t talk to me about being “privileged,” we sacrificed a lot over the years to give our kids a SAHM, including having only 1 car in the early years, me working nights and weekends as a waitress, or taking in odd jobs for spending money, low-cost vacations, doing all of our own maintenance and home improvements, and yes, during the years when all kids were in school, I did work outside the home as a teacher, but that was gravy money, a job I could quit anytime my kids needed me more.)
The key to all of this is to focus on the skills that kids need to build before they can acquire knowledge. Their formative years need to be spent learning how to read beautiful books, craft well-turned sentences, add, subtract, divide and multiply without a calculator (ideally in their head), and pursue things they are passionate about, music, art, sports…
Really thoughtful, insightful ideas per usual here Tim! One other thought I'm having that you've written a bit about--in addition to kids using screens a lot both outside of school, and inside of school...what are kids up to in the summer, during breaks, when they aren't at school, etc.? In some ways, I wonder if there have been some shifts there as well that could be a factor (among others we all probably aren't thinking of). For example, you wrote about how every kid deserves a "baller summer" at one point (completely agree) and folks at the Center for Teen Flourishing have written about the tendency for many teens to languish these days--wisely pointing out that if we want them to get off screens, we have to give them something else to do instead. The rise of travel sports (heavy duty commitment, financially and otherwise) has led to the fall of many rec sports programs and Little Leagues, and I don't have hard evidence here but I suspect fewer kids are participating in sports and extracurriculars in a fun, get outside kind of a way because so many of these programs have shifted to being expensive, serious and focused on "elite training." In my own experiences as a parent, there's been no better way to teach the role of effort and being good to the people around you than through sports (especially rec sports), and I wonder if shifts in extracurricular participation patterns are impacting the idea that effort is a good thing.
Great piece as always. I see this with my own kids (finishing up 10th grade and 7th grade) in terms of vocabulary, spelling and grammar. Both of them are great readers and luckily continue to read for fun every day. But I am often taken aback by how poor their grammar, spelling and vocabulary are. It seems we stopped teaching this in school for some reason. These skills all seem to require some level of rote memorization, which we seem to have moved away from in education.
As you know, I am running for school board here in DeKalb (runoff on 6/16!) and this piece ties into one of my campaign priorities, which is a focus on middle grade education (4-8). I think a simpler explanation is we have given up on middle schools- how they are structured, teacher working conditions (in metro-ATL, middle school schedules are different than other grades and the only configuration where teachers don’t get duty free lunch) and a lack of rigor, to start. When you look at who becomes superintendents, it is rarely people with middle school backgrounds. In our specific district, we have increasing enrollment in grades K-3 and then huge drops in 4-8, mostly 4 & 6, and then many come back for 9. I don’t have a solution, but we have had successes here with superintendent parent advisory councils that have informed audits and creating one of these councils on middle grade education is my first call to action. Personally, my son just finished 4th grade and I was disappointed, despite loving my school. It was really a continuation of 3rd. He still had 30 minutes of phonics- which was boring- and for his first book report, all the kids had a choice or whether they wrote a report or did a poster or other creative project to summarize the book. None did the written report. Also, we have heavily invested in Amira and I find it to be slop, at least in 4th.
I have noticed in my 25 years as a teacher that there has been an increase in the disdain some sections of our society reserve for "book learning"
School, teachers, and the very idea of education have been portrayed with less respect every year.
The message is:
Schools: broken
Teachers: lazy and out of touch
Education: useless to resolve the complexities of modern life
Students and parents are certainly affected by these ideas. If learning and literacy are not valued by the wider society, how can we expect children to value reading!
My youngest daughter is a member of the class of 2023, and her trajectory pretty much mirrors what you laid out.
As a former teacher and high school counselor, I wholeheartedly agree with you that we need to get back to the fundamentals. I recently wrote a piece sharing an eighth grade exam from 1912. I couldn’t even handle many of those questions—especially the arithmetic ones. There’s been a lot of dumbing down going on.
Hey Tim! I think this is astute, and don't disagree with any of it. But I think you letting the tech companies off too easy-- yes, the distraction started with adults and moved to kids, yes-- but that move was masterminded-- purposefully-- by those who stood to profit!
from a recent NYT article:
Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms.
Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school.
TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.
This is so interesting. I’m a teacher and my theory about why there’s so much absence from school is that screens are at the heart of it. Can you remember how boring it used to be having a day off? Day time tv or playing alone whilst all your friends were at school. Now kids have a day off and scroll or game and parents let them.
I also blame screens for the lack of reading for pleasure. How hard would it be to be bothered to read a book and slow pleasure that gives when you can watch shorts on an iPad? And then the brain is used to high dopamine hits.
I think you’re likely right about homework too. I’m having to dramatically change lessons I deliver after 20 years of teaching a similar topic because they cannot focus on things students a decade ago found interesting and exciting.
Such a marvelous piece. The clues were coming from the kids all along. Though maddening to reflect on how so much change work and money flowed towards removing productive friction and real experience from kids’ lives, I am equally motivated to build back opportunities for the good, effortful stuff young people need to develop as readers, learners, thinkers and people.
Holy crap - thank you for putting these data points together. And yes, right in front of us.
So the best thing that could happen for the tech companies was Covid. They get to continue selling their miracle cures (which look more and more like brain damaging snake oil) and get to blame the pandemic for the learning loss that these products induce.
I’ll challenge your word “effort” and read into it with “focus.” I think kids and teachers are trying hard. Kids have had their dopamine hijacked by devices, and adults (who suffer the same addictions) have that extra hill to climb.
I don't think we can understand the causes of declining test scores without looking at the international trend, the trend of cognitive decline in adults who are out of the workforce, and the reversal of the Flynn effect. This isn't specific to school, it's something much bigger. I'd love to see an analysis comparing those different sources of data. The extent to which US schoolchildren differ from those bigger trends sounds interesting, but I haven't seen anyone dive into it.
This isn't an abdication of schools' responsibility. I think schools can and should do better. But if we run around chasing a cause of declining test scores in schools when the cause is actually outside of schools, that could distract us from all the stuff that we can control.
You are hesitant to push more blame onto screens. Why?
Especially because you write that "There’s no single or even dominant cause of the long-term learning decline," but then cite two reasons -- kids reading less for fun and more devices in schools -- that support the theory that the decline is mostly screen.
And write that "the mechanics of how kids stopped learning as much [due to screentime] have remained a little murky to me. Did they watch too many online videos and somehow become automatically unable to pass reading tests?" but, again, cite two reasons -- kids reading less for fun and more devices in schools -- that indicate pretty clearly how screentime negatively affects students' ability to read.
AND you conclude your essay, for goodness' sake, with this: "We need to lead the way as adults by modeling behaviors we want our kids (and students) to emulate. If we scroll endlessly and never sit with a book, there’s no reason they won’t follow suit."
Tim! My friend! It is mostly the screens! Around 2010, we -- all of us -- started spending WAY too much time in front of screens. When parents themselves are constantly on their phones or watching TV, what do you think happens to their children developmentally? When children are staring at screens more in school and out of school what do you think happens to them developmentally? Streaming, social media and gaming have made it both easier AND more desirable to stay home and not go to school (or go out and play.) Hence the absenteeism.
In 15 years we have allowed screens to disrupt our homes, our families, our schools and our public spaces. We are fully surrounded by and fully distracted by screens. (And that's not even considering the mindless, unredeemable content that most people look at on those screens.)
It's the screens, dude.
This article rules! I’ve been teaching 26 years and I can see a sensible case for all the factors.
-i would put the rise in truancy and poor attendance first. That has been getting worse for years and yes, pre covid.
-the screens do matter. Unfortunately during covid we put all our work online, it cost a lot of money, and it won’t be abandoned. Many parents are not happy and i don’t blame them. That being said the materials are accessible everywhere. It’s just that the screen captures attention differently.
-the homework stuff -I have to say I’m not a fan of assigning homework just to have homework. it’s not that it’s too much to expect of the kids, but parents work weird hours and afternoons are a mess. Single parent households make this more difficult. But the biggest reason? CHEATING. Even before AI. Screenshots sent to one another. I make kids do as much in the classroom as possible under my nose. They start copy paste, i close out the website quickly and they barely even comment anymore. I can monitor their screens.
However, they really resent reading and writing, and written work. I frequently do handwritten assignments as well. They act like i have a lot of nerve making them read and fill things out. We read together and go over things together. I don’t know what they do everywhere else but they find it annoying to have to do chapters of their social studies textbooks in class-as if there’s something else they have to do then. I’m pretty funny and engaging but it’s a constant c grade standup. I think we are lightening expectations even in school because of all the bitching. But i’m not sure sending work home is the answer due to rampant cheating.
We spend entire class periods on the material being taught. They find this tedious even with all my tricks and humor.
As for the other factors, i’m with you on all of them. You’ve done an excellent job laying this out. I know I prep kids till the cows come home for my own tests.
I have 5 sons, high school graduating years of 2010, 2013, 2016, 2018, and 2021. I home educated them for a combined 10 years, not all of them all the time, and not for the entirety of their education, but every time that I could see some gaps in their education, a de emphasis on skills such as memory work, reading, writing, and arithmetic and an emphasis on technology, synthesis, and “higher order thinking skills” (the latter of which requires the acquisition of lower order thinking skills, which get glossed over.) I saw the emphasis on “test taking strategies” instead of actually knowing the material well enough to pass the test. So I kept them home for a time so that they would learn those skills, at their own pace, without the pressure to conform to an arbitrary timeline. I had a couple of rules. No calculator for math below trigonometry, no school between noon and 2, and from Sunday night to Friday night, I permitted no video games. None. An occasional YouTube video to see how something works, PBS documentary, and the like. The 2 hour midday recess could be spent pursuing whatever leisure activity they enjoyed at the time. Being boys, they built forts in the wood, played soccer, and read, read extensively.
Once I felt that their time at home had sufficiently closed the skill gap, they were allowed to decide whether or not to go back to public school. (The youngest three graduated from a public high school, enjoy in the normal life of high school varsity sports, homecoming dances, and graduation). (And please don’t talk to me about being “privileged,” we sacrificed a lot over the years to give our kids a SAHM, including having only 1 car in the early years, me working nights and weekends as a waitress, or taking in odd jobs for spending money, low-cost vacations, doing all of our own maintenance and home improvements, and yes, during the years when all kids were in school, I did work outside the home as a teacher, but that was gravy money, a job I could quit anytime my kids needed me more.)
The key to all of this is to focus on the skills that kids need to build before they can acquire knowledge. Their formative years need to be spent learning how to read beautiful books, craft well-turned sentences, add, subtract, divide and multiply without a calculator (ideally in their head), and pursue things they are passionate about, music, art, sports…
Really thoughtful, insightful ideas per usual here Tim! One other thought I'm having that you've written a bit about--in addition to kids using screens a lot both outside of school, and inside of school...what are kids up to in the summer, during breaks, when they aren't at school, etc.? In some ways, I wonder if there have been some shifts there as well that could be a factor (among others we all probably aren't thinking of). For example, you wrote about how every kid deserves a "baller summer" at one point (completely agree) and folks at the Center for Teen Flourishing have written about the tendency for many teens to languish these days--wisely pointing out that if we want them to get off screens, we have to give them something else to do instead. The rise of travel sports (heavy duty commitment, financially and otherwise) has led to the fall of many rec sports programs and Little Leagues, and I don't have hard evidence here but I suspect fewer kids are participating in sports and extracurriculars in a fun, get outside kind of a way because so many of these programs have shifted to being expensive, serious and focused on "elite training." In my own experiences as a parent, there's been no better way to teach the role of effort and being good to the people around you than through sports (especially rec sports), and I wonder if shifts in extracurricular participation patterns are impacting the idea that effort is a good thing.
Great piece as always. I see this with my own kids (finishing up 10th grade and 7th grade) in terms of vocabulary, spelling and grammar. Both of them are great readers and luckily continue to read for fun every day. But I am often taken aback by how poor their grammar, spelling and vocabulary are. It seems we stopped teaching this in school for some reason. These skills all seem to require some level of rote memorization, which we seem to have moved away from in education.
As you know, I am running for school board here in DeKalb (runoff on 6/16!) and this piece ties into one of my campaign priorities, which is a focus on middle grade education (4-8). I think a simpler explanation is we have given up on middle schools- how they are structured, teacher working conditions (in metro-ATL, middle school schedules are different than other grades and the only configuration where teachers don’t get duty free lunch) and a lack of rigor, to start. When you look at who becomes superintendents, it is rarely people with middle school backgrounds. In our specific district, we have increasing enrollment in grades K-3 and then huge drops in 4-8, mostly 4 & 6, and then many come back for 9. I don’t have a solution, but we have had successes here with superintendent parent advisory councils that have informed audits and creating one of these councils on middle grade education is my first call to action. Personally, my son just finished 4th grade and I was disappointed, despite loving my school. It was really a continuation of 3rd. He still had 30 minutes of phonics- which was boring- and for his first book report, all the kids had a choice or whether they wrote a report or did a poster or other creative project to summarize the book. None did the written report. Also, we have heavily invested in Amira and I find it to be slop, at least in 4th.
I have noticed in my 25 years as a teacher that there has been an increase in the disdain some sections of our society reserve for "book learning"
School, teachers, and the very idea of education have been portrayed with less respect every year.
The message is:
Schools: broken
Teachers: lazy and out of touch
Education: useless to resolve the complexities of modern life
Students and parents are certainly affected by these ideas. If learning and literacy are not valued by the wider society, how can we expect children to value reading!
This is a great essay. I love how you strung the graphs together to tell the story. Thank you for writing this!
My youngest daughter is a member of the class of 2023, and her trajectory pretty much mirrors what you laid out.
As a former teacher and high school counselor, I wholeheartedly agree with you that we need to get back to the fundamentals. I recently wrote a piece sharing an eighth grade exam from 1912. I couldn’t even handle many of those questions—especially the arithmetic ones. There’s been a lot of dumbing down going on.
See how well you can do on this test: https://foxyheterodoxy.substack.com/p/can-you-pass-a-1912-eighth-grade?r=1qba3o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Hey Tim! I think this is astute, and don't disagree with any of it. But I think you letting the tech companies off too easy-- yes, the distraction started with adults and moved to kids, yes-- but that move was masterminded-- purposefully-- by those who stood to profit!
from a recent NYT article:
Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms.
Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school.
TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/us/social-media-schools.html
This is so interesting. I’m a teacher and my theory about why there’s so much absence from school is that screens are at the heart of it. Can you remember how boring it used to be having a day off? Day time tv or playing alone whilst all your friends were at school. Now kids have a day off and scroll or game and parents let them.
I also blame screens for the lack of reading for pleasure. How hard would it be to be bothered to read a book and slow pleasure that gives when you can watch shorts on an iPad? And then the brain is used to high dopamine hits.
I think you’re likely right about homework too. I’m having to dramatically change lessons I deliver after 20 years of teaching a similar topic because they cannot focus on things students a decade ago found interesting and exciting.
Such a marvelous piece. The clues were coming from the kids all along. Though maddening to reflect on how so much change work and money flowed towards removing productive friction and real experience from kids’ lives, I am equally motivated to build back opportunities for the good, effortful stuff young people need to develop as readers, learners, thinkers and people.
Compelling. And depressing. Thank you for analyzing and writing. I’m sharing this with a lot of people. Including my 13 and 15 year old.
Thoughtful synthesis, Tim Daly! And careful reading of Magnifica Humanitas!
Holy crap - thank you for putting these data points together. And yes, right in front of us.
So the best thing that could happen for the tech companies was Covid. They get to continue selling their miracle cures (which look more and more like brain damaging snake oil) and get to blame the pandemic for the learning loss that these products induce.
I’ll challenge your word “effort” and read into it with “focus.” I think kids and teachers are trying hard. Kids have had their dopamine hijacked by devices, and adults (who suffer the same addictions) have that extra hill to climb.
Yikes!
And right on cue, I came across this one: https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read (paywall, so I literally can’t read it myself)