A new round of education data is raising concerns that American students are losing ground in reading, even as classrooms fill up with laptops, apps and now artificial intelligence tools meant to help them learn.
Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer laid out the case on a recent episode of The Drill Down podcast, pointing to a pattern he calls troubling: students reading faster but understanding less. Researchers refer to this as “hasty reading,” and according to the data discussed on the show, the share of students who read quickly but inaccurately has roughly doubled in seven years, now sitting near ten percent.
“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read,” Schweizer said. “The report is basically saying kids are getting dumber.”
Co-host Eric Eggers said the trend shows up clearly in the numbers and reflects a shift in how students are engaging with text.
One state bucking the trend
Not every state is seeing the same slide. Mississippi, once ranked at the bottom of the country for student performance, now ranks ninth in the nation for fourth-grade literacy. Educators and researchers have dubbed the turnaround the “Mississippi Miracle,” built over roughly a decade through statewide changes to standards, curriculum and teacher training.
The approach leaned on phonics instruction, vocabulary building and direct measurement of reading comprehension, rather than on new devices or software. Schweizer pointed to Mississippi as a model worth studying. “If you’re raising kids and they’re going to public schools, you might want to move to Mississippi for high-quality public education,” he said. “There is lots of chaos going on in the American education system today, and we’re going to explain why Mississippi is kicking butt.”
A global slide in reading
The decline is not limited to the United States. The Program for International Student Assessment, which tests fifteen-year-olds worldwide, found that reading performance dropped in roughly three-quarters of participating countries between 2018 and 2025. Schweizer said the average decline amounted to about three-quarters of a year of learning.
American students trailed several other countries in the assessment, including China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Eggers noted that countries that have kept discipline and academic standards high, such as China, Taiwan and South Korea, have largely avoided the same drop-off.
Schweizer argued the difference isn’t about school spending. American classrooms have been supplied with Chromebooks and digital learning platforms at a scale not matched in much of the rest of the world. “I don’t think that is the case nearly as much in China and in Europe, partly because it costs a lot of money to do that,” he said.
What’s happening with AI in classrooms
A separate survey from the Thomas Fordham Institute, titled “High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction,” found widespread use of technology in schools for purposes that have nothing to do with coursework. According to Eggers, 76 percent of respondents said they personally engage in at least one form of unauthorized technology use daily in high school, including scrolling social media, messaging friends, online shopping or gambling.
The same survey found nearly half of students have used AI tools to solve math problems. Thirty-six percent used AI to summarize books they were assigned to read, twenty-nine percent used it to draft written assignments, and twenty-six percent used it for help during quizzes or tests.
Schweizer said tools marketed as aids for students often end up benefiting teachers more, by reducing classroom interaction. “It is really designed to help the teacher. The teacher can basically plug in and check out,” he said. “They can say, ‘All of you watch the video, which will teach you how to do your math assignment,’ while they can sit at their desk, probably on their phone looking at their social media feed. That’s worse than having the teacher doing it on the board where it’s interactive and students can ask questions, and the teacher can determine whether the students are getting it or not.”
Eggers added that he has heard of substitute teachers video-calling friends during class while students are left unsupervised.
Schweizer, who has three middle-school-age children, said the stakes go beyond test scores. “Are they just plugging into AI and going on autopilot or are they actually learning how to think critically? If they’re not, the ramifications for our country are absolutely enormous, in terms of people being able to fill jobs,” he said. “We keep debating AI and worry if it is going to destroy the world, but it may dumb us down so much that it can win without a fight.”
Crumbling buildings add to the problem
A separate report from the Government Accountability Office found that physical conditions in schools are also disrupting instruction. Nearly one in five school districts canceled classes in at least one school last year due to facility problems such as plumbing failures or extreme indoor temperatures. Eggers described one case in which flooding created what he called a “little waterfall” in a classroom, forcing a teacher to call off the lesson because of the distraction.
According to the GAO findings cited on the podcast, roughly two million students lost an estimated 3.5 million days of learning last year because of facility issues. “America’s schools are not in the greatest shape,” Eggers said.
