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I suspect a big reason for this can be blamed on the US no longer teaching kids to read with the phonics method (learning how yo sound out words by individual letters), and instead have been teaching a method to figure out what a word means with context clues, but many kids cannot sound out an unfamiliar word since they weren't taught the phonics method.
Only now are states beginning to reverse that in an attempt to reverse reduced literacy rates, which will take some time to have a noticeable effect.
Absolute nightmare
He’s literally describing what people with functional illiteracy do to work around being unable to read at a working level. He’s describing it as an acceptable goal. Batshit crazy.
That's some ponyshit reasoning.
Similar trends are observed in other countries, so the explanation isn't US-specific.
Instead, it's simpler: kids read less than they used to, and when they do, it's social media-tier.
Social media likely is a contributing factor. The pandemic is another factor for lower literacy elsewhere. I suspect that the poor reading method taught in the US only compounded those issues to an even harsher degree.
Pandemic definitely hit this too. The schools in my state have consistently scored about one grade level down for every cohort that was in school during 2020. That experiment in fully remote schooling (elementary through highschool) definitely failed - it's as if they didn't even go to school that year.
The pandemic made things worse, but something bigger is going on.
It's gonna be the pandemic hands down. The school system was never good at catching up students who were a year behind and that happened at scaleband now the system has no way to adapt
The pandemic made it worse, but the trend was already negative before the pandemic.
100%, the pandemic likely compounded the issue dramatically.
I don't think this explains 2015 versus 2025. Phonics started to get discouraged around 2000, and the pendulum has swung back hard the other way in the last 5 years, with the last holdout districts/states re-implementing phonics-based instruction.
If anything, I'd expect 2025 students to have had more experience with phonics in school than 2015 students.