Teachers Say Tech Is Killing Reading. The Story Is Bigger.

This week I read a story out of Connecticut that I haven’t been able to shake. Teachers there told the Hartford Courant that technology is destroying students’ academic ability, and reading is where they feel it most. Kids who won’t finish a chapter book. Kids who reach for a summary instead of the text. If you want to understand the conversation about reading decline and technology right now, that headline is it.

Then, three days later, Harvard published a piece that looked at the same problem and came back with a much longer list of causes. Same crisis. Very different story.

Here’s the thing… both of these can be true at the same time. And if we only listen to the first one, we’re going to fix the wrong thing.

What’s happening with reading decline and technology

The Connecticut story, written by Livi Stanford for the Hartford Courant and republished on October 26, draws on a Connecticut Education Association survey of 113 teachers. More than half agreed it is harder to get students to finish a chapter book than it was five years ago; only 10 disagreed. Teachers described students who lack the stamina for longer texts and the vocabulary for complex ones. One called some students “functionally illiterate.” Another said AI is “sealing the deal” on reading problems that started with phones.

CEA president Kate Dias put it plainly: “We cannot produce students that can read and understand if they don’t actually read.” English teacher Meghan Hatch Geary said that “putting kids on screens, from phones to devices, has really had a detrimental impact.”

I want to be fair here. These are experienced teachers describing what they see every day, and I believe them. The article also notes some encouraging signs: nearly nine in ten of these teachers still assign three or four books a year, and Connecticut’s average English Language Arts score edged up, from 64.7 to 65.0, still short of the state target of 75. But it is worth being clear about what the piece is: teacher perceptions and open-ended comments. It is not a study that tested what is causing the problem.

On October 29, the Harvard Gazette’s “U.S. literacy crisis keeps getting worse” by Liz Mineo talked with researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The numbers are sobering. NAEP reading scores have trended down since 2013 for eighth graders and since 2015 for fourth graders. Only 31% of fourth graders were proficient or advanced readers on the 2024 NAEP. And the share of eighth graders reading for fun almost every day fell from 27% in 2012 to 14% in 2025.

When the Gazette lists the causes, it says the decline “has myriad causes,” including “pandemic disruption, chronic student absenteeism, fewer resources to support struggling readers,” “and the rise of smartphone technology and artificial intelligence.” Professor Phil Capin says “smartphones are taking opportunities away from children to read” and that “AI, when used inappropriately, replaces opportunities to read and write.” Professor Paola Uccelli points out that the students who read for fun almost every day and the students who miss no days of school score highest on national reading assessments.

Notice that phones and AI are on the Harvard list. I’m not going to pretend they aren’t. But they are on a list.

Here’s what the headline leaves out

When the story becomes “technology is destroying reading,” we end up with one villain and one fix: take the devices away. I understand the appeal. It’s visible, it’s simple, and you can announce it at a board meeting.

But look at what else is on that Harvard list.

Pandemic disruption. The students in middle and high school right now were learning to read, or learning to read to learn, when school went sideways.

Chronic absenteeism. A student who isn’t in the room isn’t reading in the room. I wrote about this a few weeks ago in Before We Blame Screens, Let’s Count the Empty Desks, and Uccelli’s point about attendance lands right on it.

Fewer resources for struggling readers. If a 7th grader can’t decode a grade-level text, no phone policy fixes that. Reading specialists, interventions and time do.

And one more thing worth sitting with: NAEP scores started sliding in 2013 and 2015. Smartphones were spreading among teens around then too, so I get why the timing feels convincing. Timing is a reason to ask the question. It isn’t the answer.

Here’s the distinction I keep coming back to. Back in 2010 I wrote about Active vs Inactive Screen Time. Scrolling short videos for three hours and reading a long article on a tablet are both “screen time.” They are not the same thing. When we lump them together, we lose the ability to teach the difference.

Yes… students are choosing short over long. Adults are too, most of us included. The reading habits kids see modeled at home and in the world matter, and that’s not a school problem schools can solve alone.

Reading is a skill we have to teach, not a habit we can protect

What strikes me most about the Connecticut teachers is what they are already doing about it. They’re breaking books into smaller sections, reading aloud, partner reading, and using shorter texts to build up. That is teaching. That’s the work.

Taking a device away doesn’t build stamina. It removes one distraction. Stamina gets built the way it always has, by reading, a lot, with support, in school, where we can see it happen.

And if students are going to spend their lives reading on screens (they are), then reading well on a screen is a skill we have to teach too. I argued back in 2014 in Replacing Skills that schools need to be intentional about the skills we’re adding as the world changes. Digital reading, knowing when to slow down, knowing when to close the tabs and go deep: those are skills. Banning teaches nothing. Teaching does.

The same goes for AI. Capin’s words matter: “when used inappropriately.” If a student uses AI to skip the book, that’s a problem with the task as much as the tool. In Human Still Required, I make the case that AI didn’t break school — it exposed it. Assignments that could be completed by reading a summary were always a little fragile. AI just made that obvious faster.

It comes back to the line I keep returning to on this blog: Preparing students for their future, not our past. Their future has more text in it, not less. Much of it on screens. Much of it written or summarized by machines. The kids who can read deeply, and who know when they need to, will have an enormous advantage.

What schools can do this week

• Protect real reading time in the school day. If most reading is assigned for home, find out how much is actually getting done, and move some of it back into class where you can support it.
• Look at your attendance data next to your reading data. Which students are missing the most days, and how are they reading? Start there.
• Ask what your struggling readers need. Is it decoding, fluency, vocabulary or motivation? Each one has a different fix, and none of them is a phone policy.
• Teach digital reading on purpose. Have students compare reading the same piece on paper and on a screen, and talk about what changes and how to focus.
• Redesign one assignment that a summary or an AI tool could complete without reading. Ask students to do something with the text that only a reader could do.

Frequently asked questions

Is technology causing the reading decline?

Technology is one factor researchers name, but not the only one. The Harvard Gazette lists pandemic disruption, chronic absenteeism, fewer resources for struggling readers, and smartphones and AI together. The evidence supports a multi-cause explanation, not a single villain.

Should schools ban phones to improve reading?

A phone policy can reduce distraction during the day, but it does not teach reading. Stamina, fluency and comprehension are built by reading a lot with support. If a school adopts a phone policy, it still needs a plan for reading time and help for struggling readers.

What can parents do at home?

Make reading visible and normal: read in front of your kids, talk about what you’re reading, and give them time and space to read things they choose. Pay attention to the difference between passive scrolling and active reading, on paper or on a screen.

I’m grateful to the Connecticut teachers for saying out loud what so many teachers feel. The frustration is real. My worry is that we answer a complicated problem with a simple fix, then wonder in five years why the scores didn’t move.

If your school or district is working through reading, AI and device decisions right now, this is the kind of work I do with leaders every week. You can find me at JeffUtecht.com.

So I’ll ask you: when your school talks about reading, how much of the conversation is about what to take away, and how much is about what to teach?

Sources

• “‘It is disheartening’: Teachers say technology is destroying students’ academic ability”, Livi Stanford, Hartford Courant (via Jefferson City News-Tribune), October 26, 2026
• “U.S. literacy crisis keeps getting worse”, Liz Mineo, Harvard Gazette, October 29, 2026