Is reading at risk? Or is there a "new literacy" emerging that cannot be measured by traditional testing tools and standards?

That debate is sure to flare anew today among literacy experts, teachers, multimedia whiz kids and good old-fashioned book lovers as the National Endowment for the Arts lays out a study that sounds the alarm about the dire state of reading in our culture. It's the second time in three years it has raised such concerns.

To the first question, NEA researchers and chairman Dana Gioia are ready with statistics from more than 40 broad-based studies on the reading habits of children, teenagers and adults.

"Americans are reading less, therefore they read less well," Gioia said last week during a conference call with reporters and writers. "And because they read less well, they do less well in school, less well in the economy and are less involved in civic life -- in every way that we're able to measure this."

The NEA's new study ("To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence," at www.nea.gov) echoes the findings of a 2004 study ("Reading at Risk") but brings in more recent data from many more sources, including federal agencies, universities, nonprofit foundations and business research organizations. Among the findings:

• Nearly half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.

• People ages 15 to 24 spend only seven to 10 minutes per day on voluntary reading (about 60 percent less than the average American).

• Reading scores for 17-year-olds are down, while those for 9-year-olds are at an all-time high (ground that is lost in adolescence).

• Even while reading, 58 percent of middle- and high-school students are watching TV, listening to music or using other media.

• Literary readers among college graduates dropped from 82 percent in 1982 to 67 percent in 2002.

"These negative trends have more than literary importance," the NEA study argues. They correlate, among other things, to fewer job opportunities, lost wages, higher incarceration rates and less participation in civic and community life, including voting and volunteering.

Begging to disagree

"For heaven's sake," said Prof. Rosemarie Park, a literacy expert at the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development. "There's a correlation between the size of people's big toes and their IQs. That doesn't mean to say they're causal. In northern Europe, the storks all fly north in spring and the birth rate goes up. Does that mean storks bring babies? That's where correlational data get you."

There's a reason why people in prison have reading problems, she said. "The underlying variable is that they're poor. Poor people have less access to education, tend to knock over the local convenience store ... and can't afford good lawyers."

But, counters Gioia: "The poorest people of the United States who read behave fundamentally differently from the richest people in the United States who don't read. This does seem to be a transformational behavior that changes your life's course."

Their opposing views highlight fundamental, philosophical differences of opinion about reading and learning in the digital age.

From Park's perspective, the new information and communication technologies -- blogs, word processors, Web pages, search engines, CD-ROM, e-mail, text-messaging, listservs, interactive gaming, virtual worlds and avatars -- all contribute to more active, exciting and engaged learning.

"I see every day, when I'm teaching my students, how much better job I can do now with all of these modalities available to me," she said. "I can show them things I could never show them before. I can give them access to readings from all over the globe. I can get them into databases. I can take them on [virtual] field trips. All of those things make life incredibly richer. Whereas before, the only access we had was sitting down around the fire with the Victorian father reading a book and sort of raising the educational level of the family to a higher plane of sensibility. Now we have all of these different sources, so why is it so bad that we use them?"