In American high schools, the era of books may be coming to an end. Many teens are assigned too few full-length book reading assignments — often only one or two per year — according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey conducted by The New York Times.
Reading scores in 12th grade (the equivalent of the 3rd year of high school in Brazil) are at historic lows, and university professors, even at elite schools, report increasing difficulties in getting students to engage with long or complex texts.
Perhaps this is to be expected in the age of TikTok and artificial intelligence. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be transmitted primarily through audio and video, the formats that dominate in the era of mobile media and streaming.
We wanted to know what students and teachers think about this change and what role schools can play. So The New York Times asked educators, parents and students to tell us about their experiences with high school reading.
More than 2,000 people responded.
Many of them were experienced teachers who reported assigning fewer completed books today than early in their careers. Some have complained about the effect of technology on students’ reading stamina and interest in books. But most highlighted educational products their schools had acquired from major publishers.
These programs generally revolve around reading short stories, articles and excerpts from novels, then answering short questions and writing short essays.
Students typically access content online, often using school-provided laptops. These practices begin as early as primary school, and by the time they reach secondary school, reading books can seem like a daunting obstacle.
Popular excerpt-focused curricula have been created by publishers, in part to help prepare students for state standardized tests. Many schools and teachers are under considerable pressure to improve student performance on these end-of-year exams, which feed into state and federal accountability systems. Test scores are also highlighted in school rankings and on real estate websites.
When teachers complete their curriculum and prepare their students for exams, they often have little or no time to guide classes through reading an entire book.
Andrew Polk, 26, teaches second grade English (the equivalent of the first year of high school in Brazil) in a suburb of Ohio, not far from where he grew up. When he was a high school student less than ten years ago, he was given many books to read, including “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
But as a teacher, Polk should use StudySync, which focuses on snippets. Many colleagues don’t believe students will read entire books, he said, although he noted that his own experience doesn’t bear that out.
He still assigns several longer works each year and has taught “Macbeth,” “Fahrenheit 451” and the more contemporary “Paper Towns” by John Green. Teenagers still feel “a passion for a good story,” he said. “Students absolutely can and do rise to the occasion. It’s just about setting those expectations.”
When entire books are assigned, they most often come from a relatively stagnant classics list, according to research by researchers Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman.
Perhaps what has changed the most is how many of these classics are read by students. During the 2008–2009 school year, a survey found that high school English teachers assigned an average of four books per year, with a significant minority assigning seven or more books.
A 2024 survey of English teachers by Perrillo and Newman found that they assigned an average of 2.7 entire books per year. The results will be published in 2026.
Some educators have explained this decline by pointing to the “common core” (the equivalent of Brazil’s Common National Curriculum), a set of national standards for English and mathematics that most states adopted in the early 2010s and which continue to strongly shape classroom practice.
The “Common Core” was created to better prepare students for college and introduced more nonfiction reading and thesis-based writing into schools. It also suggested a more culturally diverse range of authors and directed educators to a long list of titles characterized by “historical and literary significance.”
Many school districts responded by requiring teachers to strictly adhere to educational products that took an anthological approach – exposing students to dozens of writers and numerous genres, but through shorter readings. StudySync, for example, includes a single chapter from Amy Tan’s “The Happiness and Luck Club,” 1,179 words from Trevor Noah’s “Born of Crime,” and James Madison’s “Federalist Papers: No. 10.”
Sandra Lightman, an educational consultant who helped develop the “Common Core,” agreed that students should read entire books, but argued that it was wrong to blame the Common Core, which she said had been misunderstood.
Leading advocates had pointed out that some novels commonly aimed at adolescents, such as “The Grapes of Wrath,” did not present problems in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. They were equivalent to a second or third grade reading level despite their thematic richness.
“It was never our intention to ban it, just not to make it the only source for reading,” Lightman said. She argued that, overall, program products today include higher quality and more engaging reading materials than 20 years ago, before the “common core.”
There are other reasons why some schools prefer excerpts. It can be more expensive to purchase books than to assign a variety of shorter works that are not subject to copyright restrictions and can be easily read on a laptop or tablet.
Additionally, while more than 20 states have passed laws in the past five years that limit teaching about race, gender and sexuality, the use of excerpts allows schools to avoid passages discussing prohibited topics.
Timothy Shanahan, a literacy expert and author of the StudySync program, said there is no data to suggest that students become better readers when they are given full-length novels. The current dominant approach — reading one or two full-length books a year in class, along with lots of excerpts — “makes a lot of sense,” he said, as a way to introduce students to a wide variety of writing.
Yet some young people are frustrated by the lack of book reading in their schools.
Ella Harrigan, 22, of San Francisco, said she only read one book her freshman year, “The Hate You Sow.” “I opted out and took an online course where I read a book every two weeks,” she said.
Parents who responded to the questionnaire also complained, even though their children were enrolled in advanced classes at some of the nation’s most highly regarded public schools, including high schools in New York City and affluent suburban schools in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Both cities said they encourage a mix of full books and excerpts, but give high school principals and teachers wide latitude on how often to assign longer works.
Kasey Gray, a spokesperson for Imagine Learning, the company that develops StudySync, noted that the program offers some units based on full-length novels. But Gray acknowledged that schools using the curriculum can’t fit entire books into it.
“We understand the real constraints educators face: limited time, assessment pressures, and diverse student needs,” she said in a statement.
StudySync is distributed by McGraw Hill, and the materials come with a sort of disclaimer:
Please note that excerpts from the StudySync® library are intended to serve as reference points to generate interest in an author’s work. “StudySync®” believes that such passages are not a substitute for reading entire texts and strongly recommends that students seek out and purchase the complete literary or informational work.
Companies that publish competing products focused on excerpts, including Savvas and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said they also encourage teachers to assign entire books.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Into Literature includes a full-length play each year of high school. In response to requests from school districts, the company is developing more daily lesson plans based on full-length novels, said Jennifer Raimi, senior vice president of product development.
Many schools, educators, and publishers are defying the trend away from whole books, even if they have to bend the rules to do so.
“Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still give away entire books,” said Heather McGuire, a veteran high school English teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During her senior year, she assigned her junior and senior students “Hamlet,” “The Autobiography of Malcolm
Her students, she said, said they much preferred reading books in print rather than on screen.
This article was originally published in the New York Times
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