The enemy of reading nowadays is not phonics alternatives, it is the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.
> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.
My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits. Most of their friends have similar arrangements. It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. When you're limited to an hour of screen time a day, there's still 23 hours to do other stuff.
A confounding variable is how reading enjoyment is built and sustained across achievement levels. Presumably your kids and their friends are already high achievers, and as you said, nothing is stopping them from enjoying reading. I think that is great, and again, presumably in these households reading is encouraged as a fulfilling pastime.
The question is to what degree lower performers both come to enjoy and choose to engage in reading. If a household doesn't often engage in reading, or it isn't encouraged, or there is little parental support for a laggard reader, it stands to reason that "those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses."
My point is that if you're looking for an ultimate cause for why this snowball never gets started, I'd look at the very beginning, when kids don't learn the fundamentals needed to make that first leap into reading. Without phonics they don't have the tools needed to sound out unfamiliar words, without this, they really are just guessing all through the rest of their education. And without competence, reading isn't fun, so why would they do it for fun?
I'd actually go further and say that the causality between screen time and lack of reading goes the other way. The reason that today's social media industry looks the way it does, with lots of short videos, is because its primary audience can't read. There were plenty of text-based social media sites that catered to Millennials in the early 00s; one is literally named "Reddit". But images and videos started dominating around 2013 because the kids entering prime social media demographics couldn't read. It's a case of the market pulling the product out: text based social media is a niche product today, with Instagram dominating over Facebook, YouTube over Google+, and Reddit and Twitter/X moving to videos, because its primary market can't deal with text.
Nice. I found almost all of the peers of my kid(s) had virtually no restrictions on phone usage. Needless to say that did not help my efforts.
Maybe it’s because their parents are spending more time on screens (… and probably working due to the stagnation of wage vs. prices) instead of reading to/teaching their kids
And this article isn't about you. It's about average people, not 1% elites like you. Average people don't have "1 hr a day of screen time", they have 4hrs or more.
It's telling that the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children. And children cannot be held accountable for poor habits that are largely a consequence of their environment.
The core issue is that it's nearly illegal to discipline students now. There's a socioeconomic divide because child behavior is unfortunately negatively correlated to socioeconomics. Thus poor schools suffer more from the lack of ability for teachers to remove disruptive students.
Yes some excellent teachers are sometimes able to deal with it, most cannot.
Interestingly, in my mom's experience, kids from immigrant backgrounds (working class or undocumented Latinos bussed in and Asian Americans from all economic strata) never get in trouble. It's only the "American" parents that try to overstep on educators toes for "disciplining" kids.
The Latiné and Asian kids aren't "bussed". Meanwhile, a large portion of African American kids are though. White Americans who aren't 1-2 gen and the African Americans tend to have parents that push back on educators (as did the small amount of 2nd gen and older Asian Americans and Latiné American households - hence why I said "American").
California is not like the rest of the US. The racial dynamics are different, and immigrant families from poorer backgrounds are fine paying extremely high premiums or even rent out a garage to live within in order to send their kids to top school districts. "American" families don't do that.
On top of that, utilizing public services is viewed negatively in the American naturalization process, as it can be contested that an applicant is at risk of becoming a "public charge".
Additionally, the moment a neighborhood becomes too "Asian" or "Latino" in the Bay, all the White and Black families who can afford to end up leaving, and those who remain complain about us "changing the character" of our neighborhoods or "being too competitive".
The Western US (Dallas westwards) has an entirely different racial and ethnic dynamic from the rest of the US.
For example, continuing with your Atlanta example, the city of Atlanta is 84% white and black, and those White and Black Americans in ATL are overwhelmingly of southern origin in the US.
Meanwhile, an Asian American from Jiangxi is extremely different from someone from the Mekong Delta who is extremely different from someone from Jeolla in South Korea. The only similarly they have is looking kind of similar.
Same for Latiné communities as well.
East Coast cities have more "White" and "Black" people, but not as many Asians or Latiné.
Also, you have to remember the history of the Western US - much of the US west of Dallas wasn't part of the US until the 1840s, and remained a frontier backwater until WW2, so a number of Asian and Latiné ethnic groups had a longer history here than a lot of ethnic groups that are now pivotal in the US.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...
There's probably a much better data source, but am on phone.
You're right, and we see this everywhere. But at least adults already learned how to read, so this is not something that will stop their development during their critical formative years.
The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less time. Children are given devices to play with because the parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully engage with young children that are full of energy.
Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply left behind as an afterthought in public budgets.
So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality education time with their parents being funneled into underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40 kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty training in grade school.
As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is something worth investing in and we need to spend the time, money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better.
Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.
Second. Screen Time causes many issues in schools. Not the least of which is the distraction they causes children in the classroom and between classes. Another issue with screens and schools is the cost of these screens and these Chromebook and all the IT and infrastructure that’s required in order to basically just read some material. Prior to chrome books you simply had books and the books lasted for decades, potentially with no further expenses required. The whole educational system is an absolute mess with tons of waste and inefficient processes. Adding technology in Chromebook on top of it all was not helpful.
Back in the 90's when they were looking for a killer app for browsers, who knew that video would be the real killer app (of the brain and attention).
We're sitting here postulating massive effects and then we don't see massive effects. The effects, if they exist, must be incredibly small in order for these kids to be testing at the high levels they are.
I say this as a parent who has kept his daughter from screens and probably will. This stuff always comes up "Oh it absolutely kills focus" "Well, then why doesn't it for these kids?" "Actually, by kill focus I meant that it has a mild negative effect on focus which is not detectible and easily overcome by good teaching even if it were detectible which it isn't and also I didn't mean that screens kill focus. I meant that social media etc. on devices with screens do that" "Okay, so teaching with screens is fine" "oh no, screens absolutely kill focus"
Christ.
However, my concern was with the use of screens IN schools as part of the curriculum and as a replacement of textbooks and other sources.
At worst they can have a negative long term effect or a mild deleterious effect. But they do not have an acute deleterious effect.
> ...the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move
Screens killing focus is clearly not backed by evidence. There may be other evidence that shows that when stratifying by percentile achievement, screen use places students at a percentile below where they would be otherwise. But it is clearly false that the use of screens kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.
Killing focus is an absolute term. You don't have to compare against someone else to determine if focus was killed. If the kids have focus at the end, then it is not killed. And at best it could be slightly reduced.
e.g. If you have the hypothesis that mangoes are acutely toxic and kill people you don't have to sample a lot of people. You are claiming a strong effect size. If even 5 people eat mangoes and don't die then the answer is that they are not acutely toxic.