National Endowment for the Arts Study Finds Plummeting US Reading Scores

Improvement = More Books, Less Textbooks, Big Read

The prestigious National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) recently released a study entitled To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. The study's findings were ominous:

'Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.¹

On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.' (NEA)

Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.³

2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.⁴

Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.^{5' NEA}

Are we less intelligent now? Are we poorer readers? The answer to both questions may not be 'yes' yet, but given these statistics, it certainly will be soon. The leading cause cited by the study for poor reading habits, surprisingly is not television, Internet use or video gaming. To be sure those are contributing factors. The leading cause of reading score drops is the increased amount of text book reading and the drop in actual book reading.