The standardized test scores of American students had been rising for decades. Then they began to slide, dropping to their lowest point in two decades in 2023 and 2024.

This is not a problem confined to the United States. Worldwide, the performance of 15-year-olds in math, reading and science reached a nadir in 2022.

These dismal results are at least partly a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Missed instruction during those years may still be having an impact on academic performance.

But that’s only part of the story. The decline in test scores started well before the pandemic, around 2012. One obvious culprit is smartphones, which became popular just as test scores started to decline. Since 2017, I’ve been doing research on what smartphones do to our mental health, and I recently starte

See Full Page