Free Republic

Illinois Republican state Rep. Dan Ugaste is speaking out against a “nationwide literacy crisis” that counts Illinois among the more than 40 states where just one out of every three fourth grade students are now meeting reading proficiency standards. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress report card shows that in Illinois, just 30% of fourth graders are hitting such standards. In a 2024 national exam, the state's students finished 29th in the country for the percentage of fourth graders at or above proficiency. “This is a huge problem across the country, but it's a real problem here in...

A Connecticut student who graduated with honors in June is now suing her former high school, claiming she can't read or write and is failing college as a result of her alma mater's poor curriculum. Aleysha Ortiz was born in Puerto Rico and moved with her family to Hartford, Connecticut, when she was 5 years old. She graduated through the school program despite reading at a kindergarten or first grade level as a sixth grader, according to reporting by CNN. During her last month at Hartford Public High School, after she disclosed she was attending the University of Connecticut in...

A New Jersey law that removes a requirement for teachers to pass a reading, writing and mathematics test for certification will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. The law, Act 1669, was passed by Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June in an effort to address a shortage of teachers in the state... Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass a “basic skills” test ... Just months earlier, Murphy signed a similar bill into law that created an alternative pathway for teachers to sidestep the testing requirement....

Kids aren’t reading anymore. That’s the conclusion of a recent article by The Associated Press noting that children are not only reading less for fun — only 14% say they do so daily compared to 27% in 2012 — but they are also not getting assigned actual books much in class either. Per the AP, “In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare...

When I speak of Christians being illiterate, I have far more in mind than just the inability of some to properly read and write – in that they are simply the product of the modern Western education. But I am speaking here of a wider sort of illiteracy, one that is as regrettable as it is widespread. I refer to historical illiteracy, theological illiteracy, biblical illiteracy, church history illiteracy, etc. Far too many Christians in the West today are woefully ignorant of that which they should not be ignorant. They know little about their own faith, their own Christian culture...

The Democrat Party is pushing to increase “literacy” on climate change-related material in America’s schools while students are performing poorly with respect to actual literacy. The party’s education platform mentions the importance of “climate literacy” for American K-12 students several times, emphasizing the purported need for students to be able to understand and interpret information relating to climate change. Meanwhile, the average reading score for both fourth and eighth grade students in 2022 had fallen by three points relative to 2019, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). “We will equip students with the knowledge and skills to...

In Minnesota, 50% of students cannot read at grade level. If we were to apply the traditional academic grading scale to that outcome, the public education system in the state would get a solid F.. That abysmal performance was the topic of much debate during this term of the Minnesota legislature, prompting the Democrat trifecta to pass “the READ Act,” an effort to replace the failed “whole language” method of literacy training with traditional phonics education. “Whole language” is an absolute joke, recognized even by many on the Left as a toxic methodology that fails students. In essence, “whole language”...

Reading is white supremacy now. Good luck getting ahead. Over the past several decades, many of us who were associated with the humanities noticed, within the ranks of its academic practitioners, an incipient displeasure with Western civilization taking hold and gradually developing into outright hostility. This attitude was at first manifested by a growing reluctance to engage with the vast literary output of Western man, whose creative strivings were summed up dismissively as the work of “dead white males” and consequently deemed irrelevant to the late twentieth century and beyond. If “educators” had their way, those geniuses would be silenced,...

Students in a Seattle English class were told that their love of reading and writing is a characteristic of “white supremacy,” in the latest Seattle Public Schools high school controversy. The lesson plan has one local father speaking out, calling it “educational malpractice.”Lincoln High School in Seattle teachings on white supremacy leads to controversy. (School photo courtesy of the school district website; quiz images provided by a parent in the school district)As part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week, World Literature and Composition students at Lincoln High School were given a handout with definitions of the “9 characteristics...

A wooden tablet discovered on Easter Island may pre-date European colonization of the region, researchers revealed in early February. Less than 30 wooden tablets containing an undeciphered script called “Rongorongo” were found on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), four of which were removed in 1869 by Catholic Missionaries, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Those wooden tablets were analyzed using radiocarbon dating, and one of them was found to pre-date European settlement on the island, the study said. Easter Island was “discovered” by Europeans in the 1720s, and absolutely decimated in the years following, the...

Illiteracy is a serious and growing problem in the United States: 21% of adults were illiterate in 2022, and 54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level. Illiteracy traps people (and nations) in poverty. This, despite the fact that the United States spends more money on primary and secondary education than any other industrial nation. One of the main reasons our literacy skills are so abysmal is the rejection of traditional phonics-based pedagogy in favor of trendier, "ground-breaking" or "leading edge" methodologies pushed by prominent schools of education at prestigious universities. Educational fads pushed by highly credentialed advocates and...

What qualifies as being literate in the United States? It all depends on your measurement. According to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), literacy is defined as, “understanding, evaluating, using and engaging with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” This seems quite broad, yet is used to show the Literacy Gap Map on the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy site. It is here that the map details where 36 million of U.S. population doesn’t meet the threshold for even basic literacy. However, there is...

During my time in law school, on rare occasions, a student would be called on and either hadn’t read the case material or was utterly clueless about what they’d read. On those occasions, the professor would either move on to another student and ask a second student to explain why the first student was mistaken. Or the professor would ridicule the student with something like: “That’s not remotely what the facts are. Did you read the case?”On Tuesday, Megyn Kelly had Dr. William B. Allen on as her lead guest. In 15 minutes, Dr. Allen took apart the nonsense disseminated...

For years, most of the media, the federal Justice Department, and other Democrats have waged a vendetta against Donald Trump, perpetuating endless investigations in search of crimes. So far, their efforts have failed, but that's not stopping another left-wing loon from boarding the Trump Derangement Syndrome train. Since New York attorney general Leticia James could not find a crime, she has promised voters that she would destroy Trump, and now, since election is coming soon, she's suing Trump and his family for alleged fraud for supposedly claiming that their property was worth more than it is. If the Trumps committed...

In Cook County, 89.2 percent of black third grade students failed the 2021 state English exam. This means 89.2 percent of black third graders are not proficient in English, which is considered a core skill for later success in life. These students struggle with understanding what they’ve read, recounting stories, and learning from illustrations like pictures of maps, according to the standards set by the state. Numerous counties saw all black third grade students fail to reach an acceptable proficiency level in English. Counties include: Alexander, Marion, McDonough, Pulaski, Jefferson, Henry, and Randolph County. Illinois report card data showed there...

(BACKGROUND: When a local group wanted to start a new school some years back, they asked me to write a proposal. Here is that proposal, which anyone may use for ideas and inspiration.) A new private school is coming to your neighborhood. You can be involved with the school in several ways— parent of a student, investor, donor, volunteer, and community support. To create something we can all be proud of, that's the goal. AlphaAcademy serves boys and girls in Grades K-9. The overarching concern is preparing students for success throughout life. The school favors a traditional curriculum and classical...

There’s been a move over the past few years to help young Americans learn how to manage their money better. And it’s long overdue. It can be easy to wonder what sort of problems financial literacy courses could have prevented for the generations before those who are in school now. In recent months, Florida, Nebraska, Ohio, and Rhode Island have signed laws creating a requirement that high school students take financial courses in order to graduate. In all, a dozen states have similar laws on the books. Georgia joined the ranks of those states this week. Gov. Brian Kemp signed...

Decades of underinvestment in schools, culture battles over bilingual education, and dizzying levels of income inequality have pushed California to the bottom of the pile, making it the least literate state in the nation.

PJ Media's Matt Margolis recently wrote an excellent piece about the kids' book publisher Scholastic Press pushing the extremism of The Radical Left onto our kids. The post went up shortly after I found myself scratching my head at the flyer from Scholastic that Little Bob had brought home from school. Of course, if we see something that will capture his imagination and stoke a desire to read I don't mind eating a few bucks. After he & Sister Babe looked through it together, Little Bob wasn't all that interested in anything. So I decided to flip through and now...

Bill Bryson, in his iconic travelogue about the United Kingdom, “Notes from a Small Island,” observes that nearly all tourist leaflets are “depressingly illiterate, particularly with regard to punctuation.” He sarcastically promises that “if I see one more tourist leaflet that says ‘Englands Best’ or ‘Britains Largest’ I will go and torch the place.” Bryson’s book was published in 1995. Since then, anecdotal evidence as well as statistical surveys reveal that literacy problems have persisted, not just in the United Kingdom but also in Australia. The existence of these problems may even be gleaned from the email culture that has...