Education moved up the list of issues important to voters in 2021 when Virginia Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said during a debate “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach their children.” The same year actress Bette Midler was forced to apologize after one of her hourly vinegary mean tweets, where she attacked West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin by saying the hicks who elect him are illiterate. What Midler apparently didn’t realize that in readily available literacy rate statistics by state, almost 90 percent of West Virginians read above a fifth grade level, while barely 70 percent of Californians (or New Yorkers) do, and that Appalachian states are almost on a level with Virginia or the northern Midwest, largely middle-class states with smaller minority populations that generally have literacy rates over 90 percent.
During the current presidential election cycle “progressives” have memes about how Republicans, Trump or the scary Project 2025 are endangering the nation and democracy because they want to eliminate the Department of Education. None of them seem aware that since the Department of Education was created under Jimmy Carter in the late-1970s, American students have fallen from having only 10 or 12 countries outrank them in the international rankings to having over 25 nation’s students surpass them (the Baltics, northern Europe generally, and developed Asian countries).
American kids are farther behind in math than in literacy. I’ve taught in northern Virginia schools since late-2018. One of the many surprises was when once teaching at an elementary school near the Pentagon where there is a large Mongolian immigrant community. I had four Mongolian students, in a fairly international class of 20+ third graders. Only one was fluent in English and at least one knew no English. I’d send messages to their parents from the administration printed out in Mongolian. Mongolia’s a nation with a population more or less Chinese, but ruled for decades by Soviet Russia with their language now only written in the Cyrillic Alphabet. Even the child who spoke no English would return arithmetic classwork that was flawless, even though he could barely scratch out his name on English or History assignments. All the Mongolians were ahead of their American-educated classmates.
American children are also dropping in literacy, and this started long before Covid made them miss a year or two of school. Part of the reason is that our partially-federalized education system has had an internal battle over how to teach children to read, with only two alternatives, and with each group of partisans trying to force them onto all students everywhere. Pretty much what you would expect to happen in a government controlled “monopoly” system.
The earlier (“balanced”) theory of reading is that children learn to read by experience, seeing a word, then hearing someone pronounce it, having to guess what the word means from its context in a sentence (written or spoken). At earlier stages the child might see the word along with a picture of what the word is for (“cat”), and the child would’ve learned the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes so that they could “sound out” words and syllables.
The new theory is that people who previously failed to learn to read were illiterate not because of parents’ having no choices, schools being a monopoly system like the post office or FEMA or the DMV, and children from disadvantaged families not getting anything from school, while middle- and upper-middle class children already learned to read and talk at home from their own family’s resources of books and dinner conversation. Instead they’re illiterate because they need an extensive course in phonemics and phonics, the former on how to make and distinguish sounds in speech, the latter how to identify those sounds in written language.
The newer theory is winning popularity in the bureaucracy. One alternative explanation is that bureaucracy itself is a problem. The newer theory creates jobs in every school for language and reading specialists who push into classrooms to work with children at risk for illiteracy, a mushrooming population given both the mainstreaming of children with general cognitive problems including dyslexia and also the exploding number of immigrant children who don’t speak English.
Author Michael Heggerty has a career of publishing phonics and phonemics books used in many schools. Lexia is a software program used by over 800,000 students in elementary and middle schools, and for students with low scores, high schools, that offers computer-assisted lessons and quizzes on reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary, with no teacher involved. Some children love it; others think they’re being punished by being required to do Lexia. One wonders if re-allocating resources to finding a book or short story a child would want to read and instilling a love of reading wouldn’t be a better form of education. Lexia was owned by a company that’s in turn owned by a hedge fund that recently bought Rosetta Stone for $790 million. Schools buy books, or licenses to use software programs, and they want to get their money’s worth and have them used. Used perhaps by students who don’t need them and are simply being taught to hate reading and school from being forced to spend time on them.
The phonemics is often taught in classes by a call and response system: “Say ‘mole.’ Now say it but take off the ‘m’ and put on a ‘p.’” Phonics is often taught with pseudowords: children are given handouts of nonsense words and asked to identify where the break between syllables is, or circle the silent e, or find consonant blends (e.g. “bl” or “nd”), etc. I know that children who can already read feel insulted when asked to do this call and response or handouts of nonsense words. And older children (e.g. eighth grade) who do need some help reading more fluently begin to ask if they’re special education students and are embarrassed that they’re in a class still using this type of phonics and phonemics instruction. But having paid for these products the schools want to impose them on classes beyond kindergarten and elementary school. DEI is inherent in mandatory public education, and it has little to do with protecting the gay kid from bullying or making sure the little black girl gets to take advanced math too.
Early in her career Lily Tomlin had an autobiographical set using her child character, Edith Ann. Six-year-old Edith Ann likes to read, loves school, and has a crush on her teacher Ms. Sweeney. “When asked to read aloud, I read ALOUD. ‘The boy rowed his boat out to the is-land.’” The set ends with poor Edith Ann hit by a bus, and a kid from her class shouts: “Hey, that’s that kid that said is-land!” At one time readers would learn words and their meanings from reading before we learned how they should be pronounced.
Looking at how students react in schools, and at the falling ranking of American kids internationally, I conclude that the Department of Education must be abolished and allow schools and teachers to select the methods of instruction they think best for each student, without enforcing them to all learn alike.