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Students in the library at PS 124 in New York City on February 2, 2022. This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. “Kids can’t read anymore.” We heard this refrain earlier this month, when some connected a decline in reading among young people, as well as a shift toward getting news and information from short-form video, with the recent presidential election victory of Donald Trump. But the concerns about kids’ reading have been piling up for years, with educators and other commentators worrying that students can’t recognize letters, that kids’ novels are falling out of fashion, and that young people are getting into college without being able to read a full book. I know that the pandemic took a toll on kids’ test scores in reading and math. But I also know that older generations love to complain about ne’er-do-well young folks who can’t be bothered to crack open a book. So I reached out to educators and literacy scholars to find out how far behind kids really are, and what their reading skills (or lack thereof) mean for their future as voters, news consumers, and citizens of the world. While kids’ reading performance has slid in recent years, some experts say the language of “crisis” is overblown. In fact, reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), one of the most widely used nationwide measures of student achievement, haven’t changed that much since the tests were introduced in 1969, Catherine Snow, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me.  “They haven’t plummeted,” Snow said. “They didn’t even plummet during Covid. They went down a little bit.” What has plummeted, however, is how much kids read, especially outside of school. In 1984, the first year for which data is available, 35 percent of 13-year-olds reported reading for fun “almost every day,” according to NAEP. By 2023, that figure was down to 14 percent, and 31 percent of respondents said they never read for fun at all. Kids are also faring worse on tests that measure their information literacy, including their ability to recognize reliable sources. Those results are indicative of a broader problem. Kids may be learning basic literacy, but “they’re not reading in the ways that they need to read in order to be prepared for the tasks of learning and critical thinking,” Snow said. And a decline in those critical thinking skills has big implications not just for young people today, but for society as a whole.  “These are our voters,” Christina Cover, a special education teacher in the Bronx who leads the Project for Adolescent Literacy at the nonprofit Seek Common Ground, told me. “These are people that are really going to be taking us into what’s next for our country and for our world.” Kids’ reading scores have been (relatively) stable for decades The NAEP tests, administered every two years for five decades, offer a bird’s-eye view of how American kids’ reading proficiency has changed over time. After climbing through the 2000s, scores began to dip around 2012, a trend that intensified with the pandemic.  That drop has educators concerned, with many calling for expanded tutoring, summer school, and other supports to help kids get back on track. At the same time, even the post-Covid numbers aren’t that far off from historical norms. In 1971, the first year for which data is available, the average NAEP score for 9-year-olds was 208 out of a possible 500. In 2022, it was 215. To be clear, those scores aren’t great. It’s also disappointing to see students losing some of the ground they gained through the 2000s, and the pandemic dealt very real setbacks, especially for low-income students and other already-underserved groups. Teachers now have to “reach back, and maybe grab or review those previous standards” that students should have been taught in 2020 and 2021, Evelyn Rudolph, a reading interventionist at LEAD Academy, a public charter school in Montgomery, Alabama, told me.  But the story of students’ reading scores over the last several decades is one of “a very stable level of mediocrity,” Snow has said, not of sudden crisis.  But reading for pleasure has plummeted That’s the good-ish news. More worrisome — or at least more precipitous — is the decline in kids’ reading for pleasure. While there were hints of a decrease in the ’90s, the slide seems to have started in earnest in the 2010s — in 2012, 27 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun every day, compared with just 17 percent in 2020.  Experts aren’t exactly sure why so many kids stopped reading, but the trend coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones, said Ebony Walton, a statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP tests. Other hypotheses include funding cuts to libraries, and an excessive focus on standardized testing that has crowded out practices that instill a love of reading, like teachers reading books aloud to students. Whatever the case, the decline of reading for fun is a problem, and not just for children’s authors. “When a student reads for fun and enjoys reading outside of school, there are so many benefits that they might not even realize,” from learning new vocabulary to gaining “the background knowledge needed to approach different academic areas in school,” Cover said.  The skills that students use when reading for fun — especially reading longer texts — are also the same ones they need for everything from reading car manuals to “listening to political discourse and making sense of it,” Snow said. The importance of reading skills for civic engagement has been a hot-button topic lately, with Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor calling young people today a “generation trending toward post-literacy” that “gets its information from bits and bobs of video while scrolling.” While “post-literacy” might be a stretch, Snow and other experts are concerned that the decline in reading could make young people more susceptible to disinformation.  There’s some evidence that this is already happening. US eighth-graders’ average score on the International Computer and Information Literacy Study assessment, which measures skills including recognizing reliable online sources, dropped 37 points between 2018 and 2023, to 482 out of a possible 700. American students fared worse on the assessment than students in most European countries, as well as South Korea and Taiwan. The decline in reading for pleasure can feel impossible to reverse, given the number of alternatives available to kids today. But experts say some simple strategies can help. For Snow, it’s about treating reading not simply as an academic skill to master, but “as a tool for engaging in important activities, like learning about things you’re interested in.” Reading can be a way to engage with the social justice issues that many tweens and teens are passionate about — “but those connections are not always made in schools,” Snow said. It’s also important to encourage students to read what they like, in the way they like, whether that’s in a book or on an iPad or other device, Cover said. More companies are springing up to create reading materials specifically for Gen Alpha audiences, like Storyshares, which offers books written by young people themselves. Kids “are reading in the world around them every single day,” Cover said. It’s up to educators to show them that “it’s not just something in isolation, but something that can enrich every other area of their life.” What I’m reading The accessories retailer Claire’s, a staple of many ’90s mall outings, is launching a fragrance collection in an effort to appeal to what it calls “Gen Zalpha” customers. The scents, priced at $24.99 or less, include one that smells like pistachio and vanilla. Schools in California and around the country are racing to prepare for the Trump administration and its potential effects on undocumented and LGBTQ students. Trump Health and Human Services pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is correct that chronic diseases like diabetes and asthma are worryingly common in American children, according to the New York Times. He is wrong, however, to blame vaccines and fluoridated water for the problem. My 2-year-old and I have been enjoying Little Owl’s Night, a very sweet board book that flips the bedtime story script by having its protagonist go to sleep when morning comes. It also includes the eerie line, “Mama, tell me again how night ends.” From my inbox Last week, I asked about your kids’ experiences with reading, and one reader, Kelly, had an experience that might be helpful for kids who struggle with reading for fun. “Two of my four children have dyslexia, so we were a little slower to become a ‘read to yourself’ family,” Kelly wrote. “But audiobooks meant they still grew up loving reading from an early age… just in a different form.” The kids’ grandmother “introduced my then-3-year-old daughter to Peter Pan on audiobook on her iPod, earbuds attached, and my daughter was hooked,” Kelly wrote. “In the nine years since, we’ve checked out literal thousands of audiobooks on Libby — for free thanks to the Los Angeles Public Library — and my kids listen for several hours every day.” 

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Not unlike a used car, the average iPhone has three owners throughout its lifespan. A couple years ago, just before Black Friday, I decided to replace my old, cracked Apple Watch with a non-cracked equivalent. One thing led to another, and I had spent less than I’d planned on a nicer watch than I thought I could afford. The catch: It was refurbished.  The “r” word used to be a bad one in the gadget world. A decade ago, to many people, refurbished meant used, scuffed, and maybe a little bit broken. Secondhand devices didn’t always have the best reputation. However, as the right to repair movement has pushed consumer technology companies to make their products easier to fix, a new crop of marketplaces for used and refurbished goods has captured the attention of anyone who either loves a deal or cares about the environment, or both. And these cheaper options are better than ever. You may have heard of Back Market, a Paris-based refurbished marketplace that promises to sell you “tech that’s better for the planet.” Then there are more specialized sites, like Gazelle, which primarily sells refurbished phones and laptops, and VIP Outlet, which specializes in refurbishing retail returns. Decluttr sells old CDs and DVDs alongside refurbished tablets and gaming consoles. Even big retailers, including Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Best Buy, are in the refurbished marketplace game now, too.  Prices and warranties vary, based on what you’re buying and when, but no matter where you shop, purchasing secondhand comes with a certain cachet. It’s the sensible thing to do, according to Lucas Gutterman, director of the Designed to Last Campaign at the US PIRG Education Fund.  “It’s not a bad thing for people to buy new phones,” Gutterman told me. “It’s just the idea that we should buy them every year, every other year — that seems like it’s way too much for the environment.” We certainly can’t make an infinite amount of devices with the finite number of rare earth metals on this planet. And extending the lives of phones already on the market comes with huge upside. A recent study from the French government claimed that buying a refurbished phone instead of a new one avoids the extraction of 180 pounds of raw materials and emitted 50 pounds of greenhouse gasses. Put differently, buying the refurbished device over the new one lowers the overall environmental impact by as much as 91 percent.  Taking the refurbished route wasn’t always framed as a way to fight climate change. The practice grew out of corporate IT departments’ constant need to supply machines to employees in the early days of personal computers. If an employee left the company, rather than buy a new computer, IT wiped their machines, repaired it if needed, and then assigned it to a new employee. It didn’t take long before a cottage industry emerged to sell used but restored devices to consumers. That industry is now huge and getting bigger every year. The number of used and refurbished smartphone shipments grew nearly 10 percent from 2022 to 2023, while the number of new smartphone shipments declined by over 3 percent, according to the market intelligence firm IDC. That adds up to the secondary market for phones being worth about $65 billion in 2023, and it’s expected to grow to nearly $110 billion by 2027.  These big numbers reflect an industry that’s gone from mom-and-pop shops selling fixed-up laptops to multiple mainstream marketplaces where millions of people buy everything from phones and computers to watches and video game consoles. The competition between those marketplaces also means that quality and customer experience is vastly improved. Now, refurbished gadgets often come with the same long warranties, trade-in options, and payment plans as new devices.  One surprising thing The logistics of online shopping comes with a significant carbon footprint. However, the original manufacturing process for devices like phones are much more significant. Shipping a phone in a 1-pound package 500 miles produces about 1.3 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions. Manufacturing an iPhone 16 Plus, according to Apple, produces 110 to 167 pounds of emissions. Plus, the latest devices tend to have fewer new features that would make upgrading worthwhile. “People are less excited about getting another camera lens on their phone or getting a new button on the side of the iPhone,” Gutterman said. Spending less on a refurbished phone and feeling better about your environmental impact is just a better choice for a growing number of people, he explained. The refurbished market is also more transparent than it’s ever been. It all starts with a gadget that ended up in the inventory of a refurbisher or original equipment manufacturer. Often, it’s simply a device that someone else traded in or sent back for a warranty or insurance claim. Both refurbishers and manufacturers refurbish these kinds of devices by wiping them, fixing any hardware issues, repairing any cosmetic damage, cleaning them, and boxing them back up. (This can happen several times over the lifespan of a product.) Then the device goes on the market. Most marketplaces also give you options to buy items in different conditions, from poor to premium, at different prices. Some devices sold on the secondhand market are actually new, too. Cleland explained to me that some of the inventory that ends up in the refurbishers’ hands includes products that were sold and returned but never used.  That’s thanks, in part, to the boom in online returns, especially since the pandemic, which has led to a liquidation market worth hundreds of billions of dollars that’s finding new homes for all kinds of secondhand goods, from furniture to construction equipment. For phones and tablets, there’s even a standardized method for grading the condition of used devices to streamline the process of reselling and refurbishing them. It all adds up to better, cheaper secondhand goods. “It’s estimated now that anytime a new iPhone comes out, it’s going to have at least three different users over its lifespan, because it’s going to get either traded or dropped and then resold,” Sean Cleland, vice president of mobile at the marketplace B-Stock Solutions, told me. “Like, back in the day, people would just put their old phone in the drawer.” If you zoom out, what’s happening with refurbished phones and other electronics is a shining example of what a circular economy can do.  A circular economy aims to keep products in use as long as possible through refurbishing, repairing, and recycling to conserve resources and open up new economic opportunities. While the term has been around since the late 1980s, the circular economy concept has gained popularity in recent years. The European Union even adopted a circular economy action plan in 2020 that set forth a number of policies and strategies to promote sustainable development. These government incentives have perhaps helped marketplaces such as the Back Market to thrive in France and across Europe. “Going circular and finding ways to reuse the old inventory to create new things, I think, is necessary,” Cleland said. “As resources dip but consumer demand increases, you’ve got to figure out a new way.” American companies are embracing the circular economy model as well. Amazon now has Amazon Renewed, which launched in 2017 and features the same fast shipping you get with other Amazon products as well as a 90-day free return policy, which goes up to one year for some premium products. Meanwhile, eBay offers a two-year warranty on certified refurbished products, which are delivered like new, as well as one year on lower-grade used goods. Walmart Restored similarly has a one-year minimum warranty on premium refurbished goods, and 90 days on everything else. Target sells items refurbished by the original manufacturer with a six-month minimum warranty. Back Market’s warranty is good for one year across the board. Warranty is only one factor to consider when choosing where to buy refurbished goods, says PIRG’s Gutterman. You should avoid buying refurbished items that aren’t designed to last, like Apple AirPods, as well as bulky items like TVs, which can be easily damaged. You should also make sure manufacturers still support software updates on older devices. Here’s a list of iPhone models that support the latest iOS 18 software, for instance. (You can find more tips in this recently updated guide to buying — and gifting — refurbished products that Gutterman co-authored.) If you’re like me, you might just want to find the best deal. My Apple Watch battery is starting to fail, so I’m actually thinking about getting it repaired or getting a new one. Since the market for refurbished gadgets has blown up so much in the past few years, I have more options to upgrade than I did a few years ago.  And as much as I’d like to try the new features, it might feel better to trade mine in, let it find its way to a new owner, and live a little longer. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

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