If you’re a parent with kids in public school, you are doubtless aware of the roiling controversies about the teaching of critical race theory and about policies governing the participation of trans athletes in sports. Those things are not trivial, but you’re probably not hearing much about a far more consequential matter: how schools are failing to teach kids to read.
That’s right — failing badly. Even before the dramatic learning loss caused by COVID, only one-third of American fourth and eighth graders were reading at grade level. How is that not a massive scandal? If only one-third of traffic lights were working properly, or one-third of army tanks could fulfill their mission, or one-third of firefighters knew how to use a firehose, we’d properly call that a government failure. And yet the failure to teach kids the basics of reading — despite widespread scientific and scholarly consensus about the best way — has dragged on year after year and decade after decade.
It was 1955 when “Why Johnny Can’t Read” became a bestseller. It argued that a retreat from phonics instruction — teaching kids to sound out words based on the sounds letters make — was handicapping American students. It was 1983 when a blue ribbon commission issued “A Nation at Risk,” the most often quoted section of which warned: