If you’re a parent or a teacher—especially of English Language Arts (ELA)—you should be losing sleep over the four most harmful effects of AI. From Claude to ChatGPT, AI enables students to generate essays, papers, and even answers to tests without reading a word. Not even of AI’s hallucination-filled responses to the questions that students should be answering for themselves.

This latest development adds to the wealth of online resources that offer poor and reluctant readers summaries and analyses of virtually every book on ELA syllabi. Sources like SparkNotes and Study.com already invite reluctant readers to cobble together writing assignments or fumble their way through class discussions of reading assignments. However, AI now removes reading from the loop entirely.

For slow, struggling, reluctant readers, the damage will be both profound and long-lasting—worsening reading and writing skills and aggravating already-poor performances across science, math, history, and, of course, both reading and writing for four distinct reasons.

Students with learning difficulties enjoy three times the benefits from instruction on vocabulary in grades K-12. However, a meta-analysis of 37 studies—and thousands of students—found that direct instruction on vocabulary lacked any........

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