National Reading Month

For decades, federal surveys have tracked a simple question: how often do you read for fun on your own time? The answers have been drifting downward for a generation, and the drop is sharpest among teenagers, who now read for pleasure far less often than the same age group did in the 1980s. Each cohort reads on its own time a little less than the one before.

The reading skills followed the habit. The 2024 Nation's Report Card recorded the weakest fourth-grade reading results in more than two decades. A month dedicated to reading is, in plain terms, a response to that.

For its first two decades, the program wore one face: the Cat in the Hat, perched on a black-and-white silhouette of the United States. The NEA had contracted with Dr. Seuss Enterprises in 1997 to use the imagery royalty-free, and the character became the look of reading every March.

Then scholars took a closer look at the books. A 2017 analysis found that only about 2 percent of the human characters across Seuss's work were people of color, alongside illustrations critics called racial caricatures. The NEA began to move.

By 2018 its theme had become "Celebrating a Nation of Diverse Readers," and the Seuss Enterprises contract was allowed to run out that August. For the 2019-20 school year the program was rebranded in full, with a new logo not tied to Seuss and a year-round push for books in which every child could see themselves. In 2021, Dr. Seuss Enterprises itself stopped publishing six titles for the same reason.

The date stayed. The cat did not. National Reading Month kept March 2 and the spirit of the thing, and quietly outgrew the author who once defined it.