Abby McCloskey, Dallas Morning News, May 22, 2023

My husband recently taught a class in a local high school on spy thriller writing. If you haven’t felt old lately, you’re about to. No one in the class had watched Homeland, which was basically as current as I Love Lucy. No one had heard of the spycraft master John Le Carré (RIP) or read modern thriller writers like Brad Thor. But here’s the kicker: When my husband asked if anyone had read a book — any book — in the last year, only one or two hands went up. And this was at a well-to-do local high school; other schools likely fare worse.

What does it mean for kids’ attention spans, ability to learn, ability to engage in the world around them in all its beauty, pain and complexity, if they are not reading books? And lest adults feel off the hook, nearly a quarter of American adults report not reading a book in any format in the past 12 months either, according to Pew Research.

Now, the point of this piece is less to bemoan books or spy fiction, although the McCloskey family has a bit of a vested interest here. But something is amiss in our education system where books and high schoolers are fish and air, and it points to something bigger: For all of our education policy conversations from before kindergarten (child care, universal preschool) to after high school graduation (student loan debt, college access); for all of our conversations about critical race theory, “woke” history lessons, screen time and offensive library books; for all of the debate about teacher pay and school funding, the heart of the issue is that in our education system our kids in K-12 are struggling to learn the basics — how to read, write and do math.”