"You don't get fit by watching sport."

That was Andreas Schleicher's analogy for one of the more troubling findings in the latest PISA results. Reading scores among 15-year-olds across developed countries have fallen by 25 points since 2018, the equivalent of more than a year of learning. Students are reading faster than they did seven years ago, but less accurately. The share classified as "hasty readers," who move quickly through a text and answer incorrectly, has nearly doubled.

The OECD's answer is "digital distraction," and Schleicher pointed to short-form video on Instagram and TikTok. But the report concedes it cannot prove cause and effect, and the distinction inside its findings may be more useful than the indictment. Students who used AI almost every day performed worse on some measures, while the effects were less harmful when students said they used it specifically to help them learn. Technology can assist the workout. It cannot do the repetitions for you.

In New York, teachers describe what happens when those repetitions disappear. Students are reading fewer full-length books as curricula emphasize excerpts, test preparation and online interventions. One veteran teacher who once assigned five novels and a Shakespeare play now considers herself lucky to finish three books. Another said students assigned an online reading program often click through it while visiting Spotify and YouTube. Her classroom library has become "purely decorative."

Colleges are conducting their own experiment in putting the repetitions back. Sales of blue books have risen nearly 40 percent since fall 2023 as professors return to handwritten, in-class exams. Some see the blue book as a way to make students perform their knowledge and reveal their thinking. Others see it as a retreat from the world students are entering.

Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock argues that students need more opportunities to practice with AI, not institutions trying to make it disappear. At Dartmouth, that includes a critical AI librarian, team-based projects and assignments that require students to build, test and interrogate AI-generated work. One professor may require a blue book while another requires an AI audit. What matters is whether each knows what students are supposed to learn.

A new report from the American Psychological Association offers a useful test: Can students remember, explain and apply what they learned after the app closes? As the APA's Nicole Barnes put it, a product can hold a student's attention, generate impressive usage numbers and still fail to produce knowledge that lasts. Technology can also do the opposite, prompting students to retrieve information, explain their reasoning and apply ideas in new contexts.

The same principle applies to the adults making these decisions. Education Week's Kevin Bushweller argues that psychological safety is not about being nice or avoiding conflict. It requires curiosity, candor and a willingness to remain in productive disagreement. School leaders deciding how to respond to AI will need all three. A blanket prohibition may end the argument, but it does not answer the harder questions about when technology strengthens learning, when it weakens it and what evidence should distinguish the two.

The useful question is which struggles are productive. Reading a full novel is one. Sitting with evidence that runs counter to your instincts is another. Technology can support both kinds of work. What it shouldn't do is the repetitions, or turn the classroom library into decoration.

— Thomas

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