A poet-friend of mine runs a blog that carries, as its tagline, “Would it kill you to read a #$%&% book?” To my ears, the slogan has come to sound less like a writer’s rant, or the crude appeal of a beleaguered parent, than a knee-jerk reaction to federal stats about reading in the U.S. Most recently, survey results from three different sources—the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Department of Education, and, yes, the Arts Endowment—have shown a gradual and worrisome trend of fewer Americans reading for pleasure.

Last fall, the NEA reported how, according to its 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, 48.5 percent of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year, compared with 52.7 percent five years earlier, and 54.6 percent ten years earlier. Meanwhile, in 2022, just 37.6 percent reported reading a novel or short story, compared with 41.8 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012. As we said at the time, the fiction-reading rate was the lowest in the history of the SPPA, a survey that goes back more than three decades.

Now we have indicators from other places. First, in the same year that the NEA survey findings came out, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported long-term declines in the share of 13-year-olds who reported reading for fun “almost every day.” In 2023, the figure was 14 percent, down from 17 percent in 2020 and 27 percent in 2012. The share of 13-year-olds who fell into this reading category in 2023 was lower than in any previous test year, according to NCES’ National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), billed as “The Nation’s Report Card.” 

Only in recent years, moreover, has the slump registered among nine-year-olds, another student population tracked by NAEP’s long-term assessments. For decades, more than half of all nine-year-olds reported reading for fun “almost every day.” In 2012, that figure was 53 percent. In 2020, it dropped to 42 percent, and in 2022 (the most recent year for which data are available), 39 percent. Also in 2022, the share of nine-year-olds who “never or hardly ever” read for fun was at its highest: 16 percent.

Reading Often and Reading Well

The ability to read well and the inclination to read for pleasure are intimately connected. Advocates for the literary arts, therefore, should be concerned with both dimensions of the student experience. From 2012 to 2023, the same period that saw the share of 13-year-old “almost-every-day” readers fall by 13 percentage points, average reading scores slipped from 263 in 2012 to 260 in 2020 and 256 in 2023.

The long-term trend decline in scoring was experienced by students at all percentiles of reading skill. Meanwhile, according to data released earlier this year, nine-year-olds had an average reading score of 215 in 2022 (the most recent test year), compared with 220 in 2020 and 221 in 2012.

Those setbacks in reading achievement were mirrored by NAEP’s separate reading assessments of 4th- and 8th-graders. In 2022, 37 percent of fourth-graders placed in the “Below Basic” reading level, up from 34 percent in 2019; 24 percent in 2022 read at the proficient level, compared with 26 percent in 2019. Among eighth-graders, 30 percent placed at “Below Basic,” versus 27 percent in 2019, while the share of “Proficient” readers slipped from 29 percent in 2019 to 27 percent in 2022.

It is impossible to view the declines in leisure reading—whether among adults or children—and the lagging performance of children and youth on reading tests, without recognizing that some of the sharpest dips occurred in the years immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Did COVID-19 Accelerate a Trend?

Post-pandemic, the arts sector is reckoning with changing audience preferences. But even if all the shutdowns, and people’s inability or reluctance to participate in large-group gatherings—opting instead, very likely, to consume digital entertainment—even if these factors had lasting effects on arts attendance, it remains unclear why they would have affected personal reading preferences. More certain are the COVID-era impacts of school shutdowns on children, and the disruption for learning across all subjects (including reading), as NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr has made clear on many occasions. 

With leisure reading, however, one can’t readily account for why the activity had declined even before the pandemic. As previously noted, the share of adult readers of novels or short stories—or of books of any type—eroded between 2012 and 2017. 

Further, the NEA’s Arts Basic Survey (a short-form version of the SPPA) found that between 2013 and 2015, and between 2015 and 2020, the share of adults reading novels, short stories, poems, or plays, slid by a total of five percentage points—to 39.9 percent. (The 2020 survey occurred before the COVID-19 pandemic had been declared.)

Another federal data source, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, also suggests a longer-term pattern. On any given day from 2017 to 2023, the amount of time that Americans aged 15 and older spent reading anything “for personal interest” was roughly 15-16 minutes. Yet, for each year from 2013 to 2015, that amount had exceeded 19 minutes, before slipping to about 17 minutes in 2016. Over the entire measurement span (from 2013 to 2023), by contrast, Americans spent between 2:40 and 2:51 hours watching TV on any given day.

When it comes to screen time, social media addiction remains a threat for early and evolving learners. The phenomenon must be understood not just in terms of healthy brain development (a relationship tracked by the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, on which the NEA is a partner) or youth mental health more generally (a relationship that has been flagged by the Surgeon General). Rather, another question arises: how and under what circumstances can social media, and, for that matter, other uses of screen time, impair literacy and literary imagination? Alternatively, how and under what circumstances can they be a benign or even catalytic influence on literacy and literary imagination?

Screen Time and Digital Reading

Inevitably, the answers will vary by age group. In December 2023, in a top-tier journal of education research, a team from Universitat de València (Spain) published findings of a large meta-analysis, concluding that even “leisure digital reading does not seem to pay off in terms of reading comprehension, at least, as much as traditional print reading does.” Indeed, the relationship between leisure digital reading and text comprehension proved downright negative for primary and middle school learners.

These concerns have darker implications for low-performing students. Children already trailing their peers as readers could fall further behind. In the end, questions about reading habits and methods are essential not only to the future of the literary arts, or to literacy alone. Such questions are about providing greater opportunities for cultural and civic participation, and social and economic mobility, for people from all backgrounds. 

To affirm the joyful and transformative power of reading, programs such as the NEA Big Read rally entire communities around a single book, fostering local creativity and attachment to place through literary and cultural engagement. (See here for the latest awards in this category.) Without concerted actions of this sort, to stem the declines in reading, there is little point in running historical surveys on the topic.

To mark the one-year anniversary of two NEA research reports about how Americans engaged with art during the COVID-19 pandemic, we present a series of thoughtful essays about the reports’ findings and implications—from the perspective of arts practitioners.

Sunil Iyengar directs the Office of Research & Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts.