Lori Atkinson has taught English in the Copenhagen Central School District, up in the North Country, for thirty-seven years, and she assigns fewer novels now than she once did. Her reason has nothing to do with book budgets or reading lists. "I teach fewer novels because the kids simply cannot handle it," she told New York Focus, in a reporting published August 26 and that has since traveled through papers from Plattsburgh to Jamestown.

Preliminary results from the 2025-26 grades 3 through 8 state assessments put statewide English language arts proficiency at 48 percent, down from 53 percent a year earlier, while math climbed to 57 percent from 55 and science reached 47 percent from 44. That ELA figure is five points below last year and two points above the 46 percent recorded in 2023-24, a sequence unstable enough that the State Education Department has said final data will follow in early November.

Teachers across New York say the mechanism behind the decline in student reading is not a mystery, and it is not primarily phones. Across four regions of the state, veteran English teachers describe classrooms in which the full-length novel has been replaced by passages sized to resemble what appears on the state test, and they connect that substitution directly to students who can no longer sustain thirty minutes of independent reading.

Kelsey Francis has taught high school English in the Saranac Lake Central School District for twenty-six years and puts the stamina problem in physical terms. "They're fatigue after more than a few pages," she said, adding that asking her students to read independently for half an hour "is going to be really tough." Atkinson traces the cause to instructional design rather than to the students themselves. "I believe the decline in reading happened when we were forced to excerpt everything, because when you excerpt, you are not building stamina or background knowledge," she said.

In New York City, the constraint is written into the curriculum mandate. Every city elementary school and most middle schools now teach one of three approved reading programs, and the programs differ on this exact question. EL Education and Wit and Wisdom build instruction around full-length books. HMH Into Reading and Into Literature do not require them. Nicole Radosti Pipia, who teaches fifth and sixth grade in Queens, described what that means for a teacher who wants to add a novel anyway. "We're told that we cannot deviate from the program, and if you have to do the program, there's literally no time," she said.

A city middle school teacher who spoke anonymously to New York Focus described a classroom library that had become "purely decorative" and estimated that "half of them have never read a book." The same teacher offered the sharpest measure of the shift in the piece: "In 10 years, we went from kids reading multiple novels in class to them having never opened a book."

New York City Public Schools' press secretary Nicole Brownstein said the mandated program is "not the only time students have access to full texts," and pointed to a citywide digital library where checkouts rose 14 percent over the prior school year. "Literacy is foundational for every child's success and every New York City Public Schools student has access to whole books both in their classrooms and via the citywide digital library," she said. A 14 percent increase in checkouts is a real number, though it measures books borrowed rather than books finished, and it does not speak to what happens during instructional time.

The state's position is that its standards already require both. "Exposing all students to grade-level reading materials with age-appropriate complex ideas and language is critical to mastering the learning standards," said JP O'Hare, a spokesperson for the State Education Department, noting that New York's English language arts standards call for shorter texts and excerpts as well as full-length works. Teachers in four regions of the state describe a practice that has quietly become or.

How the state arrived here is a decade-long story with an identifiable turn. Common Core, adopted in the 2010s, pushed instruction toward close analysis of short, complex passages, and the assessments built on it rewarded exactly that skill. New York abandoned Common Core in 2017 and adopted its own standards, which preserved much of the emphasis while adding explicit language about full-length works. The tests, and the test-preparation culture that grew around them, did not follow the language change with the same speed. Districts kept buying programs that could be delivered in class periods, and passages fit class periods in a way that a two-hundred-page novel does not.

Jeff Smink, deputy director of EdTrust-New York, cautioned that handing students longer books without securing the underlying skills solves nothing. "Just giving a book to a kid that doesn't have those foundational reading skills is also problematic," he said, a point that lands with particular force in a year when fewer than half of the state's third through eighth graders scored proficient in reading.

There is also evidence that the ceiling is higher than current practice assumes. Emily Aierstok, an English teacher in the Capital Region with twenty-six years in the classroom, had her seventh graders read eight books over the most recent school year. That figure comes from the same reporting that produced the quotes above, and it comes from a public school teacher working under the same state standards and the same testing calendar as everyone else.

The titles still turning up in New York classrooms are recognizable to any parent who went through school here. Lois Lowry's The Giver and R.J. Palacio's Wonder remain staples in middle grades, Rodman Philbrick's Freak the Mighty holds its place, and Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures has entered high school rotations as a contemporary choice. What has changed is not the canon but the unit of consumption, because a chapter pulled from a novel and printed on a worksheet is assessed the same way a passage on the state exam is assessed, and a novel read across six weeks is not assessed at all until June.

The department has not tried to soften the score data itself. "These preliminary results show a significant decline in statewide English Language Arts performance for some grade levels compared with the prior year," O'Hare said when the numbers were released, adding a line worth holding onto through November. "We will not minimize or attempt to explain away what the data tell us. When scores increase, we report that progress. When they decline, we report that as well."

For families, the practical question is narrow enough to ask at a conference in the next few weeks. How many complete books will this class read this year, and which ones? Districts are not required to publish that number, and it varies between two schools in the same county, let alone between Copenhagen and Queens. Parents who want context for the score itself can start with our breakdown of what the 2026 state test numbers actually mean, and with our earlier reporting on the widening middle school reading gap, which tracked the same decline before this year's results confirmed it.

Final assessment data arrives in early November.