Morning Wire XX
[0] A troubling literacy report finds that a shocking two -thirds of students in fourth and eighth grade failed to read at a proficient level, and average reading test scores are the lowest they've been in decades.
[1] The assessment comes four years after schools shuttered their doors in response to the coronavirus pandemic, and students in states across the country fell behind.
[2] In this episode, we speak to Daily Wire Investigations editor Brent Scher about just how bad the state of education has gotten, and whether there's anything that can be done to reverse course.
[3] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley.
[4] It's April 7th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
[5] If you don't employ this means of how to teach the child, that child might never learn to read, literally not be a poor reader.
[6] I mean, like, not learn to read.
[7] And if that's the case, their fate, their future is quite possibly dramatic.
[8] diminished.
[9] That was Senator Bill Cassidy sounding the alarm about a lack of reading proficiency in American children.
[10] Daily Wire Investigations editor Brent Scher spoke to him and other education experts about the troubling trend.
[11] So Brent, what did Senator Cassidy have to say?
[12] Right, yeah.
[13] So he's a Louisiana Republican and he put out a report based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or Nate, which is conducted by the country every two years.
[14] The findings were as bad as the they've been in decades.
[15] Two -thirds of fourth and eighth graders cannot read proficiently.
[16] Wow.
[17] Two -thirds.
[18] Now, proficiently, we're not talking about reading the Iliad and Greek.
[19] We're talking about reading just kind of the basic thing you need to read by which to get through life, and two -thirds cannot.
[20] The report from Cassidy's committee puts the statistics in real -world terms.
[21] If a student is proficient in reading, the classmates sitting to their left and right, are not.
[22] It also warns that we are at risk of having an entire generation of children fail to become productive adults.
[23] Cassidy says there are long -term issues caused by poor literacy and, more troubling, that we're failing to identify why these kids are struggling in time to intervene.
[24] There are studies out of the maximum security prisons in Texas, another study out of a men's prison in Louisiana, in which it found, I think it's 80 percent of the inmates were dyslexic.
[25] It might be 50 percent, but just suffices to say if it's 20 percent in the general population, it is much higher in the incarcerated population.
[26] And you would say, well, how could that possibly be?
[27] The major risk factors for incarceration are drugs, no father figure, and illiteracy.
[28] The major risk factor for illiteracy is dyslexia.
[29] And so it just stands that if you are dyslexic and you never learn to read and you have a whole lot of options in life shut off to you, that you end up going wherever you can make money or find acceptance, and that is a life of crime which leads to incarceration.
[30] So there is a real set of social ramifications if we don't address this.
[31] Cassidy says part of the problem is that schools have adopted teaching strategies that just aren't working.
[32] He referenced what is actually a pretty robust debate in the education world.
[33] One camp supports the traditional method, teaching reading through phonics, which is basically sounding out words in a systematic fashion.
[34] The other camp is called balanced reading, which focuses on whole word meaning, with a moderate focus on sounding out syllables.
[35] Whole word reading, or balanced reading, overtook phonics in the majority of American schools over the past few decades, but doesn't have a good track record when you actually look at data.
[36] Cassidy is a proponent of bringing back phonics as the mainstay for literacy education.
[37] If you think about phonics, for example, how does one learn how to read?
[38] So I'm teaching my grandson, he's nine years old, and he says, Pops, how do you pronounce this word?
[39] And he sits there and he just looks at it like it's just hieroglyphrix.
[40] And I say, okay, wait a second.
[41] What does the CH sound?
[42] Okay, what is the A -N?
[43] Eh.
[44] And what's the N -E -L?
[45] No. Okay, put them together, grandson.
[46] Ch -no.
[47] What you're really teaching the young person is the kind of way to decipher using that which he already knows.
[48] You kind of deconstruct, you don't just guess.
[49] So that's kind of at its most basic.
[50] You could say we were going back to where we started, but it's going back before what we have now and what we have now is not working.
[51] Cassidy also says we should be universally screening kids for dyslexia.
[52] There is a lot of an ursha behind just continuing to do things the way that you've been doing them.
[53] The old quote, no one likes change even from worse to better.
[54] We've got to overcome that.
[55] If you don't do anything, of course, you don't know the child's dyslexic, and the parent just thinks the child is never going to do well in school.
[56] My idea is that you begin by giving the parent and the child the diagnosis, and the diagnosis demands action.
[57] So there is a strategy to go forward, but we've got to recognize there's a lot of people that if it's broke, they still don't want to fix it.
[58] We dug a little deeper to figure out why schools haven't changed course.
[59] When 66 % of kids are failing, you'd think change a course would be obvious, but it's just not happening.
[60] I spoke with Nikki Neely, a longtime education expert who now runs an organization called Parents Defending Education.
[61] She thinks teachers are just too distracted these days.
[62] If we are spending four or six of those eight hours talking about big feelings and identity politics, then we're not actually doing math, doing science, doing reading.
[63] And so I think that's part of it is that they have this agenda where they're pushing kind of everything but.
[64] Neely points the finger at teachers' unions.
[65] She says they're not focused on putting teachers in the best position to teach, focusing on politics rather than the pragmatic support teachers need to be successful in the classroom.
[66] I mean, I think the unions are a massive impediment to this, right?
[67] Like we have seen them double down on social justice activism.
[68] I think about like the NEA's annual conference every year.
[69] They vote on these resolutions.
[70] And they'll vote on like abortion up until the point of birth.
[71] vote on funding for Ukraine and Russian, stuff like that, but not actually about remediating learning law, student achievement, proficiency, things like that.
[72] Again, they don't really care about our kids.
[73] I mean, two years ago, they voted to fund investigations into parent groups like ours that opposed critical race theory.
[74] They also voted on investigating groups that opposed the radical gender ideology.
[75] That's insane.
[76] Is that the best use of resources?
[77] Or should we actually be trying to, again, address the fact that kids can't read at grade level?
[78] What are you doing?
[79] You're doing literally everything except for what you have been put into your role to do.
[80] Neely also said that schools are doing wrong by kids by moving them along when they're just not ready.
[81] The kid that can't read in fourth grade shouldn't be moving on to the next level until the problem is fixed.
[82] Social promotion is I think it's a terrible idea because, yeah, it's giving parents kind of the misimpression that their kids are doing well, but also learning is foundational, right?
[83] If you don't learn how to read and understand phonics in first grade, then how are you going to end up reading Romeo and Juliet when you're a freshman in high school.
[84] You just can't.
[85] And, you know, we can try to mask it and we can scream equity from the rooftops.
[86] But who does this end up hurting the most?
[87] It ends up hurting disadvantaged children whose parents are not able to be engaged on a regular basis.
[88] And so I think that's the really heartbreaking thing.
[89] Is it really lays bare the hypocrisy of all these activists that have been screaming, we need more money, we need more anti -racism training.
[90] You don't actually care about these children because you are not setting these kids up to thrive later in life.
[91] It does appear the tides are turning slightly, even if just when it comes to recognizing the problem.
[92] The New York Times, which was largely in lockstep with the teachers' union messaging throughout the COVID lockdowns, recently published extensive data showing just how destructive school shutdowns were.
[93] Its authors concluded that the academic harms for children have been large and long -lasting, and that closing schools did virtually nothing to slow the pandemic.
[94] Now the impetus is on parents and teachers to take what we know about literacy and make the necessary changes in our schools, with or without the support of the unions.
[95] Well, hopefully at this point we have enough information to make those changes.
[96] Brent, thanks for reporting.
[97] Yeah, of course.
[98] That was Daily Wire Investigations editor Brent Scher.
[99] And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.