America’s illiteracy problem.
The Atlantic released an article last week that was really eye popping, and the first paragraph really tells us a lot:
The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.
Test scores about reading levels:
Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000.
The distribution numbers also shows how the divide between the rich and the poor is only growing, and will continue to grow:
These learning losses are not distributed equally. Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always have, whereas those at the bottom are doing worse. From 2000 to 2007, the bottom tenth of fourth graders in reading ability showed substantial improvement, before stagnating. But by 2024, those gains had been erased. In 49 out of the 50 states (all except Mississippi), the gap between the top tenth and the bottom tenth grew. Nat Malkus, of the American Enterprise Institute, has pointed out that this surging inequality has grown faster in America than in other developed countries. The upshot is grim: The bottom tenth of 13-year-olds, according to NAEP’s long-term-trend data, are hitting lows in reading and math scores not seen since these tests began in 1971 and 1978, respectively.
The obvious problems such as smartphones, social media, and ill-spending are all going to be there, but the one critical component is always going to be how children learn to read:
A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them. In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. It didn’t just issue a mandate, though; it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools. Louisiana’s improvements came about after a similar policy cocktail was administered, starting in 2021. And this outperformance might continue in the future: The state recently reported that the number of kindergartners reading at grade level more than doubled in the past academic year—rising from 28 percent to 61 percent.
The “Mississippi miracle” should force a reckoning in less successful states and, ideally, a good deal of imitation. But for Democrats, who pride themselves on belonging to the party of education, these results may be awkward to process. Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least unionized in the country. And these red states are leaning into phonics-based, “science of reading” approaches to teaching literacy, while Democratic-run states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have been painfully slow to adopt them, in some cases hanging on to other pedagogical approaches with little evidentiary basis. “The same people who are absolutely outraged about what” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is doing on vaccines are untroubled by just ignoring science when it comes to literacy,” Andrew Rotherham, a co-founder of the education-focused nonprofit Bellwether, told me.
Phonics is the key to reading, and it works no matter the economic status of the family. It is a simple curriculum that any parent can teach their children from a young age. If a child’s reading isn’t established, every other aspect of their life will be deficient, and they will be at a huge disadvantage throughout their life.
This isn’t a joke.
The way we learn how to read Qur’an, such as Noorani Qaeda, is the exact way we need to use to learn English. For more detail information from a professional Muslim teacher, check out this video from Br. Michael Abraham.