Some Students Have Never Read A Book. This Bill Would Fix That

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. 

Americans Don’t Read

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. So a handful of adults who love to read are skewing the results, obscuring the fact that a large majority of adult Americans do not read at all. Thirty-nine percent of all survey respondents had children in the house, and we don’t know whether these parents were the same adults who read. But it is almost certain that a majority of American kids do not see their parents read much for fun. 

Schools Aren’t Helping

While pleasure reading has been in steep decline, most of us have hoped school would bolster the reading rates, at least a little. If kids aren’t snuggled up with a book as their primary choice of entertainment, at least they’re getting some books in school, the rationale goes. 

But it seems not. Even at elite private colleges, students are arriving on campus having rarely read a whole book — sometimes, never. The Atlantic profiled several Columbia University professors in 2024 who reduced the reading load in their courses because students couldn’t handle the work. One student came during office hours to confess her struggles. At her public high school, she had read poems, articles, and excerpts, but she had never read a complete book. 

Even The New York Times weighed in on this a few months ago, running the headline, “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.” The Times surveyed more than 2,000 parents, students, and teachers, who opened up about how few books get read even in high school English classes. 

One 10th-grade teacher said she assigned one book, right after her class finished their state testing. She chose The Great Gatsby, and of her 10th-grade students, “A lot of kids had not read a novel in class before.” A mom from Maryland said her ninth-grade son listened to an audiobook of A Raisin in the Sun and watched one scene from the film version of Romeo and Juliet. A student from New Mexico said her class moved through books at such a slow pace that in one year, they read only one book. 

The Times found plenty of room for blame for the problem. In another article, it cited short attention spans in the age of TikTok and AI, excessive testing prep that crowded out real instruction, lost learning when schools went online during Covid, and online distractions when schools distribute texts electronically instead of in hard copies. These are all real issues. 

But there’s another alarming issue, one the Times acknowledges as well: the substitution of short excerpts for whole books. Many teachers in the Times’ survey reported being required to use textbooks like StudySync, anthologies that pick out short pieces of larger books. Common Core, the ACT, and the SAT all emphasize short excerpts as well. As a result, the number of books assigned per year in high school English classes keeps dropping, now to an average of 2.7 books each year. 

Kids have substantial distractions that pull them away from reading. Now they can’t even count on their parents or their schools to push them toward it. 

The BOOKS Act

Enter The BOOKS Act, written by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Mark Bauerlein, emeritus professor of English at Emory University and a trustee of New College of Florida. BOOKS stands for a commonsense notion: “Books Optimize Our Kids’ Schools.”

This model legislation would require public six- through 12th-grade English classes to assign at least two books per semester (four books per year) and to read them in their entirety. 

Kurtz and Bauerlein put some basic guardrails in place to ensure these are decent books. To count, the books should “have well-established critical reputations as central or foundational” to their subject. At least two of the four per year must have been “originally published before 1900.” Although sixth- through eighth-grade students can read young adult fiction or other books written for youth, high school students should read books written “for the general reader” — and not abridgements or adaptations either. 

Plays count, and there is no specified word count. Nor do Kurtz and Bauerlein prescribe an approved list of books. There is much room for individual schools and teachers to make their own selections. But in a stroke of genius, The BOOKS Act would require each school to publish in advance a list of next year’s assigned books, thereby giving time for parents, students, and watchdogs to double-check the school’s selections and raise alarms should the books be shoddy. 

Why Books Matter

Kurtz and Bauerlein deserve praise for this straightforward, commonsense proposal. Really, who could oppose reading books? 

Unfortunately, entrenched interests profit from students’ book poverty. Anthologies and textbooks cost far more than real books, many of the best of which are now in the public domain. Textbook publishers make significant profit peddling chopped-up versions of what students ought to read in their entirety. And they’re in step with the big testing agencies, which also ask students to read and evaluate short excerpts. 

Then there are strands of education theory devoted to the belief that books are outdated. Some of the students the Times surveyed brought up these ideas too. One student from New Jersey said, “[R]eading is not as useful as it used to be,” comparing it to the decline of Japanese swordsmanship in the wake of guns. Perhaps artificial intelligence and video messaging will replace books altogether in this line of thinking. 

Of course, a society that forgets books forgets an enormous part of its heritage. The BOOKS Act cites Ray Bradbury: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

And it is overwhelmingly books, not social media posts, that wrestle with the biggest and hardest ideas, teasing out their implications and assumptions. Do students not deserve to have a shot at reading the best that has been thought and said? Here The BOOKS Act cites René Descartes: “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”

And the best books cannot be excerpted, for there is no excess to cut out. To spend an hour in Jane Austen’s world is akin to walking the London Bridge and claiming you’ve “done England.” 

But it is Frederick Douglass’s idea that gets at the heart of the matter: “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” Excerpts can introduce students to their own civilization, and it is possible for excerpts to provide an on-ramp to the big ideas and debates of history. But it is reading and grappling with a whole book that forms the mind for freedom. 

Reading an excerpt leaves you perpetually beholden to the excerpter. Someone else read the real thing and deleted whatever he deemed unimportant. Someone else did the hard work of assessing a text and figuring out what it meant. The reader of an excerpt is utterly reliant on the skill of the one who chose the excerpt, to say nothing of the good faith required to represent the original author well. And the reader of excerpts is in a position of dependence on some cultural elite who made the big decisions for him.

Every teacher, every curriculum makes judgment calls on behalf of the student, but they ought to respect the dignity of the student to wrestle with the best himself. When you read a whole book, you draw the connections between the chapters. You observe themes. You evaluate the arguments, notice their weak points, and judge whether they might be true. You make an effort at arguing with them and, often as not, come up short. Then you learn humility and perseverance and keep reading and figuring things out. That is, you exercise the skills necessary for mature adulthood and responsible citizenship, for freedom.

Emily Dickinson famously described books as our “frigate … to take us lands away.” But they also take us to our own homeland, to our own foundational ideas and beliefs, and let us wrestle with them for ourselves. To deprive students of that right is to deprive them of an education. 

Rachelle Peterson writes from Mesa, Arizona. She runs the Substack newsletter “The Hundred Acre Bookshelf.”