Ian Underwood has a great article on education priorities. He talks about the goals for which schools and their advocates (parents, lawmakers, taxpayers, society) should strive. That if you teach kids to read, they can then learn anything.
‘This state should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of bringing 95% of students to a 12th-grade level of proficiency in reading.’
Note that in achieving this goal as a society, we would position students to achieve their own goals as individuals: To create their own bright futures. To attend college, or train for a career, or start a business. To learn more about whatever they want, whenever they want, for the rest of their lives. To be active creators, rather than passive consumers, of public discourse on subjects like tolerance and inclusivity — or taxes, public health and safety, criminal justice, welfare, or any other matter of public policy. They would be able to participate intelligently in the political, economic, and social systems of a free government. And in doing so, help preserve a free government.
There is no truer statement you can make about education. A school system that fails to teach reading has failed at everything if education is the point of the exercise. It is the foundation of something I say often: teach them how to learn, not what to learn for which reading is fundamental.
If you can’t read or read well, that system is bankrupt, and declining proficiency scores, especially in inner-city schools, is the greatest crime against minorities.
Black Lives Matter famously grew fat, attaching its name to protests in the interest of minorities, but, in the end, only a handful of them benefited: the organization’s leadership got filthy rich while the lives it claimed mattered found themselves worse off. Black-owned businesses burned, and lives were lost as crime skyrocketed in the wake of direct action in honor of a career criminal who overdosed on Fentanyl.
The Democrat party, and anyone afraid to disagree, lionized George Floyd in the name of making Black Lives Matter, but did any black lives get better? Other than Patrice Cullors and her family, I don’t think they did. But no one was marching to make black lives better. If you wanted that, you’d invest every dime and bit of energy into solving the problem of illiteracy.
The single biggest injustice heaped on any class or race of people anywhere is funding an education system that can’t even teach a kid to read, but that is what has happened, and to hide their failure, they graduate them anyway. And it is not the product of white supremacy, whiteness, or white fragility. It is a direct result of the cabal of Democrat-run cities and teachers’ unions, many of whom, in these places, are minorities who can read.
The face these same people run the police department some claim are so oppressive should not be lost in the debate, but the answer to their failure is to hand you someone else money, but that’s not going to save you from the social cage in which you are kept. Reparations, welfare, free housing, or health care make you slaves. Learning to read can set you free.
And there is indeed no shortage of people who can read and have failed in life (or perhaps have not exactly succeeded). It is also true that we each have our own concept of success and failure. But few, if any, illiterates free themselves from poverty or dependence, not in this generation or the next. It begins with the ability to read.
Given the amount of money or resources directed at public education, there is no excuse for a student with poor or limited reading ability, and this not only continues to be the case, but illiteracy is on the rise.
If you want to protest something and demand change, you should start with the waste, fraud, and abuse of a public education system that spends obscene amounts of money but has denied students the one thing they need more than any other to succeed—the ability to read.
