Among the people who blame phones for the “reading crisis” and the associated decline in educational outcomes, the PISA results are, in my view, somewhat misunderstood.
Where did our culture of discipline go? Who are its cultural ambassadors? And what, exactly, has created the laissez-faire ease that seems to embody so much of our educational experience?
I have some admittedly controversial thoughts about the rise of a tolerance-based culture—one increasingly oriented around “live and let live,” rather than firm boundaries, expectations, and meaningful consequences.
But alas, those ideas are rife with political entanglements, so I’ll leave it there—for now.
As the child of supposed ‘permissive parenting’ in 70s and 80s - I’d disagree - my parents were able to install values of self-discipline, study and working hard without a ‘there will be consequences’ framework.
It’s a similar thing with morality - do you teach children that theft or violence are morally wrong, or that they will result in punishment.
I would suggest that successful societies where the ‘rule of law’ dominates work more by agreed morality - expectation - than a strongly enforced legal framework.
Where I think we would agree is how that shared culture and expectations have been changed by the marketisation of everything - Hollis Robins is good on the problem of interchangeable course credits in US academia, and from what I can see of UK English Literature in schools, it’s been very much driven by a desire to replace subjective teacher judgement on essay quality with standardisation. Commoditisation removes brilliance.
Discipline, includes “self discipline” it’s something you model rather than instill. At the same time showing natural consequences for actions is also considered disciplinary. Anyhow, you get the gist and I believe we are in agreement. Cheers!
Just to note there is no “American education system.” K-12 education falls under the purview of individual states. Mine (Oregon, left coast so-called “progressive”) and another (Mississippi, rural south) have switched position in the last few years. Mississippi, with standards and PHONICS, rising from near bottom to #3 nationwide, and Oregon, continuing to refuse to implement phonics, plummeting from high ranking to 47 out of 50.
The American republic established states as the “laboratories of democracy,” so one can pick one’s lesson from this (if they can read).
Agree overall about phonics impact but Oregon did not outright refuse to implement, rather, if I understand it, HB3198 granted funding to districts in 2023 that emphasized phonics in curricula and followed up on 2025 with HB3040. So, it’s offered incentives rather than the Mississippi mandatory. Impact difference may be from recent passage of the bills?
I doubt any change in policy in 2023 would be measurable in outcomes yet - given that it would need to filter down into a change in teaching practice which then shows up in the reading level assessment years
“… call for Kotek to mandate a science of reading licensing test may fail for at least one big reason: It would almost certainly provoke resistance from the teachers union, which has 40,000-plus members.“
Oregon government is owned and operated by public-employee unions. There was a reason why FDR opposed them on principle. Not unions. Public-employee unions.
Three wee issues with this analysis. First, it contains no supporting evidence, at all, of the assertion that the English and Estonian systems are more “rigorous” than those of their neighbours, other than the PISA results themselves. The PISA scores themselves form only part of a detailed picture given by the OECD and in the UK have become unfortunately a highly politicised topic - issue two being that concerns have already been raised by UCL, as were raised before in 2021, that English scores may have been inflated by the use of a small selective sample: pupils being tested from only 5% of publicly funded English schools, selected by the DoE, whereas north of the border 25% of schools took part. Thirdly, the existence of a few outliers, even if the scores do genuinely reflect improved attainment, does not negate a general trend, which is what the OECD comment on the impact of phones identifies.
The Hendricks quotation, with which I do not disagree at all, is itself used as the launchpad for a generalised digression on some familiar HO themes. But again, where’s the evidence that the countries named teach reading in this way while other countries do not? Scottish exams ask for critical essays written on single, substantial texts, and textual analysis of single poems or passages which also shows knowledge of a larger text or selection of poems. The close reading papers are set on substantial single or, at Higher, paired article-length texts. I do suspect that this article serves to develop an agenda, using a current hot topic as its subject, but without much detailed knowledge of PISA or indeed international educational trends. (From what I’ve been reading from US academics on Substack, I cannot believe that US reading standards really are improving.)
I read the decline the way you do, with one addition. The phone explanation and the AI explanation share a flaw: both blame a device for what a system did with it. The OECD's own 2015 report found the countries that invested most heavily in classroom computers showed no gains, and Schleicher's line from that report still holds: 'Technology can amplify great teaching, but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.' Your Estonia and England point is the reading-science point as well. Mississippi went from 209 to 219 on fourth-grade NAEP reading between 2013 and 2019 on explicit phonics and coaching, with the same phones in every pocket. Where I'd push a little: the book standard you want back is also the AI defense. A child who cannot read a whole book fluently cannot supervise a machine that can summarize one. She can only obey it. So the case for enforced, whole-book reading got stronger this year.
When I read well researched pieces on the decline of reading I'm always saddened. I'm a reader as are all my children. The common theme around the world seems to be the loss of curiosity and the joy of reading for readings sake. We've stripped reading into a skill set to be aquire. From a young age children are reading snippets to assess for analytics. We want to screen, diagnose, predict and monitor reading as a skill. We've traded paragraphs for books. Testing for conversation. The loss is staggeringly seen in the data you've shared.
one step further, as critical as traditional frameworks are, comprehension within the domain-knowledge model quite often requires simply arriving at a single, pre-ordained, correct meaning. But perhaps the true goal of reading is not merely to absorb existing information but thoughtfully to question it. and digitally shared communities have become entangled by relentless feeds designed to ensure this informational flow never breaks. Yet, when we invite literature into an ambiguous and un-mapped territory and I don't know where that is but my gut tells me that right where information ends, true human creativity begins.
France is a useful test of this, because the policy changed while the phones did not. From 2017 the state halved the size of the first primary classes in priority areas and the ministry pushed schools back towards systematic phonics, and the national assessments at that level improved while the PISA figures kept sliding, which is close to the pattern your argument predicts. The other French device worth borrowing is the oral of the baccalaureat de francais, where the candidate arrives with a declared list of whole works and is questioned on one of them. Whatever else one thinks of that examination, it makes the extract unusable as the unit of study, because the examiner is entitled to ask about the whole book.
I blame the backlash on reading Harry Potter books.
(I’m being flippant, but there is much to be said for plowing through a big doorstop of a book in your pre-teens in terms of developing reading stamina. ‘War and Peace’ is less intimidating if you’ve finished Lord of the Rings)
Brilliant. Thank you for bringing these studies to our attention, highlighting what should be be held accountable, in contrast to the easy explanation of media.
Discipline!!! Discipline!!! Discipline!!!
Where did our culture of discipline go? Who are its cultural ambassadors? And what, exactly, has created the laissez-faire ease that seems to embody so much of our educational experience?
I have some admittedly controversial thoughts about the rise of a tolerance-based culture—one increasingly oriented around “live and let live,” rather than firm boundaries, expectations, and meaningful consequences.
But alas, those ideas are rife with political entanglements, so I’ll leave it there—for now.
As the child of supposed ‘permissive parenting’ in 70s and 80s - I’d disagree - my parents were able to install values of self-discipline, study and working hard without a ‘there will be consequences’ framework.
It’s a similar thing with morality - do you teach children that theft or violence are morally wrong, or that they will result in punishment.
I would suggest that successful societies where the ‘rule of law’ dominates work more by agreed morality - expectation - than a strongly enforced legal framework.
Where I think we would agree is how that shared culture and expectations have been changed by the marketisation of everything - Hollis Robins is good on the problem of interchangeable course credits in US academia, and from what I can see of UK English Literature in schools, it’s been very much driven by a desire to replace subjective teacher judgement on essay quality with standardisation. Commoditisation removes brilliance.
Self-discipline is a crucial thing to develop.
Discipline, includes “self discipline” it’s something you model rather than instill. At the same time showing natural consequences for actions is also considered disciplinary. Anyhow, you get the gist and I believe we are in agreement. Cheers!
Hoorah for Substack - polite disagreement and discussion.
Just to note there is no “American education system.” K-12 education falls under the purview of individual states. Mine (Oregon, left coast so-called “progressive”) and another (Mississippi, rural south) have switched position in the last few years. Mississippi, with standards and PHONICS, rising from near bottom to #3 nationwide, and Oregon, continuing to refuse to implement phonics, plummeting from high ranking to 47 out of 50.
The American republic established states as the “laboratories of democracy,” so one can pick one’s lesson from this (if they can read).
Agree overall about phonics impact but Oregon did not outright refuse to implement, rather, if I understand it, HB3198 granted funding to districts in 2023 that emphasized phonics in curricula and followed up on 2025 with HB3040. So, it’s offered incentives rather than the Mississippi mandatory. Impact difference may be from recent passage of the bills?
Read it and weep.
https://www.oregonjournalismproject.org/unprepared-broken-pipeline-oregon-teacher-school-online-jim-green-kotek-fail-reading
I doubt any change in policy in 2023 would be measurable in outcomes yet - given that it would need to filter down into a change in teaching practice which then shows up in the reading level assessment years
Exactly
Goes back DECADES. And this is why.
“… call for Kotek to mandate a science of reading licensing test may fail for at least one big reason: It would almost certainly provoke resistance from the teachers union, which has 40,000-plus members.“
Oregon government is owned and operated by public-employee unions. There was a reason why FDR opposed them on principle. Not unions. Public-employee unions.
Three wee issues with this analysis. First, it contains no supporting evidence, at all, of the assertion that the English and Estonian systems are more “rigorous” than those of their neighbours, other than the PISA results themselves. The PISA scores themselves form only part of a detailed picture given by the OECD and in the UK have become unfortunately a highly politicised topic - issue two being that concerns have already been raised by UCL, as were raised before in 2021, that English scores may have been inflated by the use of a small selective sample: pupils being tested from only 5% of publicly funded English schools, selected by the DoE, whereas north of the border 25% of schools took part. Thirdly, the existence of a few outliers, even if the scores do genuinely reflect improved attainment, does not negate a general trend, which is what the OECD comment on the impact of phones identifies.
The Hendricks quotation, with which I do not disagree at all, is itself used as the launchpad for a generalised digression on some familiar HO themes. But again, where’s the evidence that the countries named teach reading in this way while other countries do not? Scottish exams ask for critical essays written on single, substantial texts, and textual analysis of single poems or passages which also shows knowledge of a larger text or selection of poems. The close reading papers are set on substantial single or, at Higher, paired article-length texts. I do suspect that this article serves to develop an agenda, using a current hot topic as its subject, but without much detailed knowledge of PISA or indeed international educational trends. (From what I’ve been reading from US academics on Substack, I cannot believe that US reading standards really are improving.)
I read the decline the way you do, with one addition. The phone explanation and the AI explanation share a flaw: both blame a device for what a system did with it. The OECD's own 2015 report found the countries that invested most heavily in classroom computers showed no gains, and Schleicher's line from that report still holds: 'Technology can amplify great teaching, but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.' Your Estonia and England point is the reading-science point as well. Mississippi went from 209 to 219 on fourth-grade NAEP reading between 2013 and 2019 on explicit phonics and coaching, with the same phones in every pocket. Where I'd push a little: the book standard you want back is also the AI defense. A child who cannot read a whole book fluently cannot supervise a machine that can summarize one. She can only obey it. So the case for enforced, whole-book reading got stronger this year.
When I read well researched pieces on the decline of reading I'm always saddened. I'm a reader as are all my children. The common theme around the world seems to be the loss of curiosity and the joy of reading for readings sake. We've stripped reading into a skill set to be aquire. From a young age children are reading snippets to assess for analytics. We want to screen, diagnose, predict and monitor reading as a skill. We've traded paragraphs for books. Testing for conversation. The loss is staggeringly seen in the data you've shared.
one step further, as critical as traditional frameworks are, comprehension within the domain-knowledge model quite often requires simply arriving at a single, pre-ordained, correct meaning. But perhaps the true goal of reading is not merely to absorb existing information but thoughtfully to question it. and digitally shared communities have become entangled by relentless feeds designed to ensure this informational flow never breaks. Yet, when we invite literature into an ambiguous and un-mapped territory and I don't know where that is but my gut tells me that right where information ends, true human creativity begins.
France is a useful test of this, because the policy changed while the phones did not. From 2017 the state halved the size of the first primary classes in priority areas and the ministry pushed schools back towards systematic phonics, and the national assessments at that level improved while the PISA figures kept sliding, which is close to the pattern your argument predicts. The other French device worth borrowing is the oral of the baccalaureat de francais, where the candidate arrives with a declared list of whole works and is questioned on one of them. Whatever else one thinks of that examination, it makes the extract unusable as the unit of study, because the examiner is entitled to ask about the whole book.
I blame the backlash on reading Harry Potter books.
(I’m being flippant, but there is much to be said for plowing through a big doorstop of a book in your pre-teens in terms of developing reading stamina. ‘War and Peace’ is less intimidating if you’ve finished Lord of the Rings)
I hope you are not graphing your ELO…
Brilliant. Thank you for bringing these studies to our attention, highlighting what should be be held accountable, in contrast to the easy explanation of media.