The latest Education Recovery Scorecard from researchers at Harvard and Stanford should have been a societal gut check. Researchers found that America’s children remain significantly behind where they were before the pandemic, particularly in reading, and despite billions of dollars spent trying to reverse the losses, the recovery has largely stalled. 

The cultural expectation that children will regularly read complete books (with words, not graphic novels) has evaporated. Today’s children read in fragments: excerpts assigned at school, passages selected for testing, text messages, social media posts, and video captions.