Eighth-grade reading proficiency levels are the lowest they’ve been in over 30 years, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Spelling ability often follows reading ability, but with advances in AI, many wonder if it is still necessary to know how to spell.
“It’s absolutely necessary that people know how to spell,” English teacher Susie Choe said. “We’re not always going to have technology at hand, and even if we always have technology at hand, it becomes so much slower if you have to stop and do spell check.”
“Smash your phones,” Creative Writing teacher Maria Angelone said. “I think I see a decline in spelling if students’ first drafts are handwritten, but if an assignment is online, AI or Grammarly takes care of all the typos.”
According to a study on how social media is linked to spelling ability, about 80% of students interviewed said that social media negatively affects their spelling ability.
“It started when texting became really popular,” English IV teacher Laura Mercer said. “A lot of students use text language as their academic language, and with the rise of more popular music like rap, they have different ways of spelling different words, and it doesn’t seem to be academic anymore.”
Some teachers point to an insufficient amount of reading as the leading cause of the problem. “I don’t think enough students read outside of class, so vocabulary is shrinking,” English II teacher Anton Gerth said. “They just don’t visually see those words being spelled accurately enough.”
English Language Development teacher Abigail Korman believes that there is a solution to the recent decline in spelling. “Nationwide, we should be training teachers from kindergarten all the way up through high school, in the basics of phonics.”
The goal of phonics instruction is to help children learn the alphabetic principle—the idea that letters represent the sounds of spoken language—and that there is an organized, logical, and predictable relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.
“I think that [learning phonics] would help us with spelling, it would help us with reading, it would help us even with decoding really long words,” Korman said. “Especially as high school teachers, we were not taught [how to teach] phonics, because it’s for elementary school, but I would argue it’s really not for elementary school. Everyone should know basic phonics.”
As a result of worsening spelling and reading capabilities, the Department of Education launched a nationwide phonics learning program in 2024. This program is ongoing and particularly focuses on kindergarten through second grade, aiming to build a literacy foundation.
