Why America’s Literacy Crisis Started Decades Before Smartphones—A Teacher Explains
I was clearing out a moldy storage closet in the school library last month when I found a box labeled “Reading: Grade 5, 1987.” Inside were five hardcover basal readers with spotty, matte covers. No glossy images. No QR codes. Just thick, dense chapters of text with a few black-and-white line drawings scattered throughout.
A younger teacher, fresh out of grad school, peeked over my shoulder. She pulled one out and flipped to a chapter about the Panama Canal. It was four pages of single-spaced prose.
“No wonder we have a literacy crisis,” she said. “Sorry, but if I gave this to my students, they’d have a meltdown. They can’t watch a video longer than three minutes. It’s the phones.”
I smiled and nodded because it was easier than arguing. But she was wrong. Not about her students—she was definitely right that they would struggle with that textbook. She was wrong about the timing. This literacy crisis didn’t show up with the iPhone. The seeds were planted decades before anyone had a notification or a scroll to read.
The idea that social media is the root cause of America’s reading issues is seductive. It gives us a tangible culprit and a clear reaction—just ban the phones, right? But I’ve been in classrooms for over twenty years, and I remember seeing this writing on the wall long before a single student carried a device in their pocket.
Walk through the history of reading scores in the United States, and you’ll see a dip that starts in the late 1970s. The NAEP long-term trend scores—which we’ve used to measure reading for decades—show an unstable pattern that trends downwards in the 80s, hits a plateau, and then starts sliding harder in the 90s. This isn’t a TikTok problem. It’s a pedagogy problem.
Back in the 90s, when I first started teaching, the “Reading Wars” were at their peak. On one side, you had phonics. Sound it out. Drill the letter sounds. Build the neural pathway from seeing the word to saying the word. On the other side, you had whole language—or, later, balanced literacy. The idea was that children learn to read naturally, like they learn to speak, by surrounding them with great books and letting them guess the words from context.
The guessers won.
I remember sitting in a professional development seminar around 2001 when a district consultant told us, “Don’t ask a child to sound out a word if they’re looking at an illustration. The picture is the clue. They don’t need to decode it perfectly if they understand the meaning.”
It sounded so warm and human. So respectful of the child’s mind. But it was an unmitigated disaster. We weren’t teaching reading anymore. We were teaching kids to get really good at guessing from context clues.
Here’s where this gets practical. If your child is in elementary school now, look at the books they bring home. Look at the vocabulary. Is it getting simpler than the books you read at that age? I dug out an old reading list from my own sixth-grade yearbook a few weeks ago, and I was stunned. We were reading Walter Dean Myers and excerpts of Treasure Island. Meanwhile, if you ask a modern middle-schooler what they’re reading in English class, it’s often condensed versions of classics or short, high-interest articles designed to “meet them where they are.”
We traded text complexity for engagement. We decided that if a book looked boring, the student wouldn’t like reading. So we took the strategies that teachers used back in the 50s and 60s—standing in front of a class and making kids stick with a difficult passage—and replaced them with choice boards and visual storytelling.
This is why we see kids struggle today. It isn’t that their brains are fundamentally broken. It’s that they never learned how to grind through a text that didn’t surrender to them on the first line.
I see it happen with my own son. Last week, he was doing his homework—a worksheet about the American Revolution. The instructions said to read a short paragraph and circle the main idea. The paragraph was three sentences long. But when I looked at his older sister’s essay from 2007—a passage about the Stamp Act—it was a full page. He read it haltingly, sounding out words like “repealed” and “assembly.” It was painful. My gut reaction was to snatch the phone away from him. But I stopped.
I remembered that old 1987 textbook. I remembered the 90s curriculum. I realized that the problem wasn’t that he was addicted to his iPad. The problem was that nobody had ever forced him to sit with a word that long. We had taught him to look for pictures. When the pictures weren’t there, he didn’t know what to do.
Here is what works, and I say this as a teacher and a nervous parent: you don’t have to fix the whole system. You just have to change the baseline of what you expect them to handle.
Start reading above their level to them. If your third grader can read Dog Man, great. But every night, you should be reading them a chapter from a book that is two or three grade levels up—something with unfamiliar vocabulary, complex sentence structure, and no pictures. Your job is to model what fluency sounds like. Don’t pause. Just read. They will absorb the cadence of difficult language.
When you’re reading with them and they stumble on a long word, don’t tell them to look at the picture. There is no picture. Put a piece of paper over the word so they can’t see the rest of the sentence. Have them sound it out, syllable by syllable. It will be slow. They will be frustrated. That’s fine. Do it anyway.
In the classroom, I’ve started resurrecting old SRA cards—those little color-coded reading cards from the 70s. They’re dry. They have no flashy graphics. But they force students to build vocabulary and context. I’m not trying to recreate the 1950s. I’m just refusing to lower the bar to the point where a fifth grader can’t survive fifty minutes without a visual aid.
The scariest part of this literacy issue is that the trend lines started dropping when I was a kid in the mid-80s. It’s so easy to blame the screen in their hand. But the screen is just the newest place where the cracks in the foundation show up. If we fixed the foundation—if we taught decoding explicitly, and if we didn’t water down the texts we hand them—we could hand them a phone at midnight and they’d still be okay.
I don’t have a grand final plan. I still don’t know if we’re ever going to get the national literacy rate back to where it was. I just know that I’m going to keep that dusty 1987 textbook on my shelf. Not to use it in class—let’s not get crazy. But to remind myself that the decline is long and slow and human-made. It started long before Snapchat. And if we made it, there’s a chance we can unmake it.
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