Free Republic

The state of Oregon will no longer require its students to demonstrate proficiency in math, reading and writing in order to earn a high school diploma in a bid to bolster minority students. Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill late last month suspending the state's 'essential skills' requirement for graduation for the next three years while its Department of Education seeks alternative graduation requirements. The bill extended a suspension of the requirements that was put in place during the coronavirus pandemic. Proponents of the measure have said the state's proficiency specifications hurt disadvantaged students, while opponents say suspending them lowers...

Results from a recent global assessment indicate that reading scores for American high school students have dropped over the past three years, while math and science performance still falls behind their peers in several other developed countries.The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-olds in math, science, and reading proficiency as metrics for college and career readiness, conducted its last tests in 2025.The initial findings, released on Sept. 8, indicate that children from Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom continue to outperform American public-school children in those three subjects.PISA has not yet shared comprehensive...

Homeschooled students scored substantially above national norms in reading, language, mathematics, social studies, and science, according to the first peer-reviewed nationwide homeschool achievement study of its kind in approximately 15 years.

The kids can’t read. Such has been the implication, even the declaration, made by a wave of articles in recent years. But the statement needs some qualification: the kids in question are American; what they can’t read is entire books, especially literary fiction; and it isn’t just the kids in the first place. It would be the rare reader, especially of a site like Open Culture, who could resist feeling any despair when confronted with, say, a study finding that only five percent of college English majors tested could understand the opening of Bleak House. But the real problem is...

Nearly one-quarter of U.S. adults—21%—are illiterate, and 130 million people can’t read a simple story to their children or sound out more than a few basic words. The problem isn’t confined to high school dropouts, those with disabilities, and non-¬English speakers. It affects university students, working professionals, and those who grew up speaking English at home. It goes beyond the inability to enjoy books, skim websites, and write emails. Medication instructions, ingredient labels, and posted warnings can conceal deadly risks from nonreaders.The problem starts in elementary school, where a battle over how to teach reading continues to rage and fewer...

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What Students Read In 1776 | The Books That Shaped The Revolution Have you ever wondered which books shaped the American founding or ignited the American Revolution? What were the students at Harvard and Yale studying in 1776? In this historical analysis, I cover the books the founders would have studied at Harvard or Yale and provide a breakdown of those that would have shaped their thinking. From John Adams, Nathan Hale, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, to the famous Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Warren, and Sam Adams, we learn what the founders were reading on the eve of the American Revolution....

For over a century, post-modern critics have insisted that literature must be liberated from the stifling realm of moralism in order to become truly authentic in its artistic approach. The various platitudes in this vein have been prolific: “Morality ruins creativity,” “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” or the proposition of “art for art’s sake,” which all seem less as genuine insights into the faculty of human creativity and more as rhetorical shields against difficult questions relating to the nature of truth. In our own contemporary age, the argument has at least partially mutated, but it has never...

We’ve been having a debate about “book bans” in recent years, but given the steep decline in student literacy, the deeper question is how any child would even notice whether a book is available in a school library. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford recently published an eye-opening study documenting steep declines in student test scores, especially in reading. Over the past 10 years, reading scores have declined in 83% of America’s school districts. What looked like a COVID-driven catastrophe is instead part of a long-running trend. Reading scores were falling at a similar clip prior to the pandemic, from...

California legislators have grilled the state’s top librarian about huge sums of money tied to a statewide literacy program linked to country music legend Dolly Parton that are missing. And it’s the kids who may suffer. Greg Lucas, the state’s top librarian, has been accused of failing to account for almost $650,000 related to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library during, a literacy initiative meant to deliver free books to young children across the state. “You don’t have receipts requested six times. You don’t have bank statements requested six times from this committee,” Republican State Sen. Shannon Grove said during a budget...

When United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas first appeared, the Obama era was only beginning, Obama’s ‘New Middle East’ was still far on the horizon, and the ‘Iran Deal’ had yet to be dealt. What made Jamie Glazov's magnum opus so remarkable was how thoroughly it not only recapitulated the ugly history of communism, but anticipated what was only an emerging alliance between two terrible ideologies united by their hateful mutual ambition to destroy civilization as we know it and love it. Even as it connected the dots between the two totalitarian ideologies, United in...

Sight-words — a theory about how to teach reading — is absurd. Give me three minutes, and I’ll explain why. The premise is that children can memorize English words without much effort. This is blatantly not true. Our words are hard to remember, and the more words you learn, the more they get in one another’s way. That’s why we have so many non-readers in middle school and high school. (Dirty little secret: Everyone running the school system surely knows this.) Think back to when you had a meal with some friends at a restaurant. Can you bring up the...

Every three years, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluates how well 15-year-olds can apply reading skills to real-world situations.This visualization, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, ranks the top-performing countries based on their average reading scores.The data for this visualization comes from the OECD’s PISA 2022 results.PISA measures reading proficiency in a student’s native or primary language of instruction, focusing on comprehension, interpretation, and evaluation of written texts. Top-performing systems typically score in the 550–560 range, while the OECD average is 476.Singapore Leads by a Wide MarginSingapore ranks first globally with an average reading score of 543, placing...

In 1857 Charles Dickens first performed a live reading of a self-abridged "A Christmas Carol." He read it every year at Christmastime until his death in 1870. This is Hank Hayes, The Pirate Radio Guy reading from Dickens' abridged book.

Looking at getting a tablet with a "paper like" screen for reading ebooks and bible study. I currently use a few apps with saved notes, highlights, etc. on my phone so it will have to be an Android device to carry that over. A color screen is another need but understand the cost going up there. I see many in the 6 to 7 inch size but not sure much better that is than my phone. Appreciate any recommendations gang and many thanks in advance.

Louisiana spends less per student than most of the country, yet its fourth graders are outperforming peers in nearly every other state. New data from the Urban Institute ranks Louisiana second in the nation for reading when adjusted for race and income, despite per-pupil spending of just $13,800 – thousands of dollars less than what some states spend. Spending data is sourced from the World Population Review. By comparison, Vermont spends $33,000 per student but ranks 46th, and Connecticut spends $25,000 yet lands at 13th. Other small, high-spending states like Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Alaska all exceed $20,000 per...

This is why “the Mississippi Miracle,” the sobriquet for the extraordinary gains that students in the Magnolia State have made in reading in recent years, is a misnomer. There’s nothing miraculous about a state that adopts phonics and that sets high standards for its kids getting better results in reading instruction. This, to the contrary, is a predictable outcome, and a replicable one, as other Southern states that have taken up similar polices have shown. Mississippi went from 49th in fourth-grade reading results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress about a decade ago to ninth in 2024. Its low-income...

When I was a kid in the 1980s, my parents sent me to a Waldorf school in England. At the time, the school discouraged parents from allowing their kids to watch too much TV, instead telling them to emphasize reading, hands-on learning and outdoor play. I chafed at the stricture then. But perhaps they were on to something: Today I don’t watch much TV and I still read a lot. Since my school days, however, a far more insidious and enticing form of tech has taken hold: the internet, especially via smartphones. These days I know I have to put...

The College Board reduced the Reading and Writing portion of the SAT exam by up to 500 words, arguing the length was nonessential in assessing students' aptitude.. One expert projects the ACT will soon cut its standards as well. In 2024, the College Board introduced sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), made largely without the awareness of lawmakers. According to a June 18 op-ed by Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), one major change was the format switch from paper to computerized testing. This allows the exam to be adaptable, which means that...

Not to disappoint Philip Roth, but the fact that you title your book, The Great American Novel, does not make it a great American novel. My definition of Great American Novel is pretty straightforward: a first rate fiction, by an American, that tells us something large and expansive about the American experience. One other condition—it has to be readable. A caveat upfront for the sensitive: seven of the ten novels listed below use the word “nigger,” not the infantile “n-word,” but the actual word itself. For the last many years, we have collectively refrained from using “nigger,” even in an...