Students are reading less complex texts in school

Reading has become more 'accessible', but less intellectually challenging:

"Last year, almost all of the top 40 books read in grades nine through 12 were well below grade level. The most popular books, the three books in The Hunger Games series, were assessed to be at the fifth-grade level. … 'The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read,' Stickney says, 'has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level.'"

What Kids Are Reading, In School And Out (NPR)