Legislation requiring middle school and high school students to read four full books per year might be considered in some states next year, the author said.
Kimberly Lewis is growing up in a digital world where information and entertainment are instantly accessible at the tap of her finger.
Still, she prefers to turn pages.
The high school senior from Paterson, New Jersey, has read more than 100 books. She enjoyed the Harry Potter series as a youngster but fell out of love with words on paper during her screen-based middle school years. Lewis’s passion was reignited after a teacher assigned “Lord of the Flies” freshman year.
“That’s when I wanted to lock in,” she told The Epoch Times. “I really think everyone can love books. You just need to find the right stuff.”
For Lewis, the right stuff right now is World War II historical fiction. She consumes stories about the corners of the globe that her social studies classes barely touch on—China, Southeast Asia, and Africa—or how the events affected people away from the battlefield.
Lewis plans to study history and political science in college. She loves the idea of mandating whole books in school, saying that the required reading in English class three years ago changed her life.
She is not alone. Last month, Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Mark Bauerlein, a trustee at New College of Florida, introduced model legislation requiring students in grades six through 12 to read two books per semester, or four per academic year. Kurtz said he expects to discuss the Books Optimize Our Kids’ Schools Act with state lawmakers in the months ahead.
“It’s too early to go into detail, but I do think we’ll see legislation inspired by this model introduced in at least a few states in 2027, maybe more if we’re lucky,” he told The Epoch Times via email.
The Retreat From Whole Books
The Common Core State Standards, established during President Barack Obama’s administration, are academic benchmarks for students that were adopted by 41 states and the District of Columbia.
The intent was to establish comparable standards for math and English language arts instruction among states. In the era of digital learning that followed, teachers would extract key concepts from excerpts and seemingly cover more works by more authors without requiring students to read entire books.
The word “text” appears in the Common Core standards for K–12 English language arts instruction more than 180 times.
By contrast, “books” appears in the document nine times, and “novel” five times. Both are used mostly to contrast genres—stories, poetry, fiction, and graphic or historical novels.
Even the SAT used for college admissions has been modified to include shorter passages, or texts, in the verbal section.
Education policy experts say these changes cost students cognitive persistence and the ability to follow ideas and narratives over time. Now, with concerns about record-low test scores and short attention spans, they are calling for the return of entire books to public schools.
“It takes time and work to enter a book, and that’s actually important for students to achieve that persistence,” Doug Lemov, founder of nonprofit education consulting organization Teach Like a Champion, said during a March 19 American Enterprise Institute panel discussion.
“They live in a world of instant gratification. But the book teaches you that if you persist and you struggle, you’re rewarded with a depth of thought and insight you don’t get from any other medium.”
The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report, which is based on state test scores, indicates that only 35 percent of high school seniors were at or above proficiency levels in reading in 2024, down from 40 percent in 1992 and 37 percent in 2019. It also states that 69 percent of fourth graders and 70 percent of eighth graders are not proficient in reading.
This “disfluency epidemic” is growing as students increasingly read less outside of school, Lemov said. Worse, he added, with the intrusion of cellphones, young people are reading or learning to read in a constant state of distraction, so their attention is being fractured. A part of the human brain is dedicated to speaking, but that organ does not have a natural space for reading. Through quality repetition, parts of the brain that are naturally built for some other process can be rewired for reading.
“How you fire is how you wire,” he said.
