I’ve been a history buff since I was eight years old. I remember one of the first relatively mature books I read was the historical realistic fiction book, “The Boy in The Striped Pajamas,” when I was in third grade. My teacher had warned me that the topics in the book may be too advanced, but I was intrigued by the significance of striped pajamas in the title, and my mom gave me the book so my teacher let it rock. As I read, I was transported into Nazi-occupied Poland amidst the Holocaust, seeing this world of horrors through the eyes of a German boy named Bruno the same age as me. The boy, who was a son of a high ranking Nazi officer at a concentration camp, narrated in a way that showed his innocence and privilege which made him naive to the sinister acts of genocide occuring around him. All he saw across that fence was just another eight year old boy-a friend.
As I worked through the book with my young brain-confused at times but locked in on the story line-I was introduced to themes around racial prejudice, family structures and politics. Once I reached the end, not only was I heartbroken but also blunted by the reality of the mass lengths of evil basic humans can achieve. It was a lot, but after reading that book it felt like my eyes were finally wide open, and I think my love for literature started there.
“Our children cannot read….Our children cannot read.”
These are the words of Tik Tok user, @huney_combs, who put the nation in check with a video she posted to her platform in May. The video has since gone viral. She highlights how as a former assistant principal, middle school teacher and high school teacher, she has noticed something critically concerning about the teaching of this generation’s youth that isn’t getting enough national attention: America is in a literacy crisis.
She goes on to explain how children that are clearly illiterate, experiencing comprehension troubles or can’t even sound words out are still passing on to the next grade level with this huge issue being widely overlooked, and this has been the new educational norm.
“They’re not holding the children back, they’re moving them on. They’re graduating them knowing that your child is illiterate,” she says. “Our next changemakers, our next lawmakers, our next voters cannot read.”
“I beg of you take the tablets and the cellphones away. Practice letter recognitions and sounds and reading with your child please,” the former educator continues.
She then goes on to break down the issue even further, explaining how the Department of Education “been knew the babies couldn’t read and didn’t care.” In fact, it wasn’t until after the pandemic that the illiteracy rate statistic was too vast to not be reckoned with.
According to a 2023 study done by the National Council on Teacher Quality, the COVID-19 pandemic worsened already poor rates of literacy across the country, noting that more than one-third of fourth graders in America couldn’t read. It’s also unfortunate yet necessary to note that illiteracy statistics are even higher amongst children that face certain intersectionalities dealing with race, class and disabilities.
An article titled, “The Literacy Crisis in the U.S. is Deeply Concerning—and Totally Preventable,” outlines statistics found in a 2023 report done by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The NAEP releases national “report cards” from nationwide standardized tests in mathematics and literature. Their 2023 report showed that only 43% of fourth graders achieved proficient reading levels-that’s less than half of the test takers. On top of this, only “17% of Black students, 21% of Latino students, 11% of students with disabilities, and 10% of multilingual learners can read proficiently by fourth grade.” Once again, this is according to the study.
There are a multitude of factors that need to be taken into consideration when breaking down America’s literacy crisis, as children learn differently from one another and their life experiences aren’t the same. Also, quarantine during the pandemic was a huge contributor to the current problem as the nation was in a state of crisis. Children were taken out of the physical classroom and sent to screens. However, there are also two focus issues for Generation Z and those following in regards to reading comprehension that should be noted: failing teaching methods of reading and teacher training programs. Tik Toker @huney_combs highlighted that New York City schools were using a method called “balanced reading” which is a controversial teaching approach that was fully backed by Columbia University-an institution that never fails to disappoint me.
Balanced reading-or balanced literacy-was introduced over 20 years ago by educator Lucy Calkins with her Units of Study curriculum. Calkins was the director of Columbia’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, which she founded in 1981. Calkins gathered and trained thousands of teachers on Units of Study, and with the praise of Columbia, this teaching method went on to take over NYC schools.
Balanced reading strays from the basic teaching of phonics that was commonly used in the past. Instead of focusing on sounding out words, kids are taught to look at the letters and pictures, and sort of guess the word from there.
Parent, Jessica Winter, describes her experience reading with her kindergarten daughter during the pandemic in her New Yorker article, “The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy.” She explains how as they read the child’s beginner book for school together, her daughter didn’t grasp the process of sounding out words and instead seemed to predict it based on the letters and pictures.
“It seemed possible that my kid’s scattered, self-directed reading style wasn’t entirely a product of her age or her temperament,” Winter says. “To some extent, it had been taught to her.”
Lucy Calkins’ program was heavily under scrutiny over the years as studies showed around half of NYC students couldn’t read with this method, but it wasn’t until September 2023 that Columbia quietly parted ways with Lucy Calkins as none of her teaching methods were on the NYC Department of Education’s approved reading program. Yet, schools around the country are still using these teachings in their curriculum.
Calkins is far from the only person to blame for this literacy crisis however. It’s important to hold state and federal officials accountable as well because it wasn’t until 2020 that federal courts even recognized literacy as a fundamental right. This was due to a milestone lawsuit brought about by students in Detroit who stated that Michigan failed them. These students came from five different Detroit schools in low-income districts. These schools couldn’t afford adequate school supplies, school staff or amenities-making it borderline impossible for these kids to learn anything.
“You’re sitting down in the classroom, and you see rodents in a corner. Or you can hear things crawling in the books,” says former student Jamarria Hall, a plaintiff in the class-action suit reported by NPR. “But the saddest thing of all was really the resources that they had, like, being in a class where there’s 34 students, but there’s only six textbooks.”
In 2020, Judge Eric Clay ruled literacy to be a constitutional right in this lawsuit. Preceding this however there have been plenty of other complaints from low-income schools across the nation that were overlooked by state and supreme courts. The message was basically if you’re poor, you don’t deserve to read.
Lastly, as @huney_combs mentioned in her Tik Tok, not all kids have the privilege of having constant present parents that have ample time to teach them how to read in the home and attend all PTO meetings. Due to the ladder, schools can make critical decisions in a child’s education without the parent’s knowledge.
There’s so much more to dissect in America’s modern literacy crisis, and more attention needs to be brought to the ordeal because literacy is imperative and our kids deserve the right to read. Still it’s our role as adults to focus on policy that can amend these issues, and raise an intelligent future of critical thinkers that make better decisions than us.
