I know a lot of teachers and have heard some pretty dire reports about trends in reading skills in students. Even the "advanced" kids are tripped up by sentence

I know a lot of teachers and have heard some pretty dire reports about trends in reading skills in students. Even the "advanced" kids are tripped up by sentences as complex as the sort that were common in juvenile literature of the postwar 20th century. This wasn't the case 15 years ago, but books that would have been unremarkable assignments back then are now very difficult for kids in the same grades. This isn't a problem with outdated vocabulary or anything like that—the trouble seems to be that they just can't follow sentences that have more than a couple simple clauses. I dunno if that's fallout from some of the terser Moderns and their effects on popular preferences for prose structure, finally hitting in full force. Maybe? Seems like a long delay, though. I do suspect (relevantly to TFA, kind of!) some of it comes from publishers realizing how much of an advantage it is to make books hyper-palatable to their target markets, cutting anything that might be difficult. Sustained over decades, I'd expect that to gradually reduce reading skill levels. Maybe some of it's because people read way, way more amateur and otherwise very poor writing than they did before the Web and before smartphones—that actually lines up fairly well with the observations, since having home Internet access didn't break the 50% mark in the US until after 2000.