Anyone who follows education news, or just has children in public schools, knows that we have an education crisis in this country right now.
Grade school students in multiple states cannot read or do math at grade level. The problem already existed years ago, but shutting down schools during Covid-19 made things even worse.
Now, some states in the south have discovered a cure for the problem – Going back to basics and teaching things like phonics.
It’s amazing. If you focus on teaching kids to read rather than telling them about social justice and gender theory, they actually learn to read. Who knew?
Kelsey Piper writes at ‘The Argument’ on Substack:
Illiteracy is a policy choice
This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized tests better known as the Nation’s Report Card. The results have left me blazing with rage.
In my home state of California, for instance, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently. Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level — which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all. Eighth graders, as you might expect, look almost as bad…
But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.
The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it’s not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation’s best performers when you look at students who are not “economically disadvantaged.”…
First, it’s not just Mississippi — Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted the same strategies, stemmed the bleeding affecting states elsewhere, and seen significant improvements…
This is the part of the story that has gotten the most attention — teach phonics! And you should, indeed, teach phonics. But making schools adopt the approach took more than a mere nudge. The Southern Surge states have tried earmarked funding, guidance to districts, and outright mandates to accomplish universal adoption.
When schools embrace nonsense like gender and social justice, they do so at the expense of basic and necessary skills like reading and basic math, robbing students of learning the things they will need to succeed in life.
Every school in America needs to return to the basics. It is an absolute crime for a young person to go through years of schooling only to emerge unable to read.
Southern states are showing the way and it works.