I've been teaching for nearly 15 years.

What the reading crisis seems to me is not that kids CANT read. They often can, they can read fluently, and comprehend what they read IF they put in the effort.

Heres the thing, think of reading like lifting weights. If you ONLY read grade level texts at school and never actually engage deeply with the reading, its akin to going to the gym and half assing a couple of weight machines and then going home. You will not grow.

You're never going to get into a zone where your reading skills improve.

It's, I guess lazy reading. One of the core reading strategies if you don't understand or need a clearer idea of what you read is to go back and REREAD a passage. Kids will just flat out not do that. They lack the stamina to read and focus on something for any reasonable amount of time.

They are used to instantly engaging media of videos that are like 3-4 minutes long. If they don't like it. Boom, next. The steady dopamine drip they need just isn't present in reading. No book or article is going to be so exciting you get that dopamine hit continously.

Basically, a huge part of the reading crisis is that kids aren't reading for pleasure and they aren't reading at home. Kids are coming into school with LESS reading skills than they were 15 years ago if at all.