Staff Reports
Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, and his co‑host Eric Eggers put a blunt headline on three fresh reports this week: U.S. students are slipping where it matters most, and cheap fixes like more gadgets won’t save them. The Drill Down podcast pulled together the OECD’s PISA 2025 reading results, a new Thomas B. Fordham Institute survey, and a GAO audit of school facilities. Taken together, they show a problem of attention, standards, and lost learning time — not lack of money.
PISA 2025: “Hasty reading” and falling scores
The OECD’s PISA 2025 results show a clear drop in reading across many countries. Students do worse on longer, harder reading tasks that ask them to evaluate and connect ideas — the very skills AI will demand. The share of so‑called “hasty readers” jumped from about 7% in 2018 to roughly 11% in 2025. Schweizer summed it up bluntly: “The report is basically saying kids are getting dumber.” That’s a provocative line, but the underlying fact is stark: reading for depth is down, and that matters for jobs, civic life, and handling AI tools.
Fordham report: phones, AI, and the age of distraction
The Fordham Institute’s new national survey fills in the classroom picture. It finds 76% of high‑school students say they engage in at least one form of illicit tech use in school every day. Many admit to relying on AI to do schoolwork: about 48% used AI to solve math problems, 36% used it to summarize books, 29% used it to draft essays, and 26% used it during quizzes. That’s not innovation — it’s outsourcing learning. When schools tolerate screens, they often lower the real work students must do. Teachers and principals need to enforce focus, not hand out more devices as band‑aids.
GAO audit and the lost days problem
On top of attention and tech problems, the GAO found that roughly one in five districts canceled school for at least a day due to facility failures. About two million students were affected and an estimated 3.5 million student‑days were lost. Add those missed days to the pandemic losses and the reading slide, and you have a lot of unfinished learning. Meanwhile, some places — Mississippi, for example — show improvement when states raise standards and push structured reading instruction. (Note: different measures can change state rankings, so the details matter when you praise a “miracle.”)
Fixes that actually work: discipline, phonics, and less autopilot teaching
Here’s the conservative remedy: stop blaming money and start demanding results. Teach reading the right way with phonics and structured literacy. Reinstate firm phone bans and paper‑and‑pencil assessments where cheating is harder. Train teachers to lead classrooms, not to press play and check email. Fordham and OECD don’t pretend there’s a single cause, but they do point to common solutions: higher standards, clearer assessments, and fewer distractions. Those are cheap, practical, and proved to help where leaders had the guts to try them.
Conclusion: Choose standards over screens
We can keep handing out devices and smiling while kids skim and outsource thinking — or we can demand focus, hard work, and real reading. If we want students who can use AI as a tool instead of letting AI do the thinking for them, we must return to discipline, structure, and high expectations. Call it old‑fashioned if you like, but it works. The alternative is letting technology win by default while kids lose the skills they’ll need most.
