Have you heard about the crazy situation in our public schools? It’s like, one in five Americans can’t even read their own diplomas! Despite spending a whopping $16,000 per student every year, we’re still struggling with this literacy crisis.
Take Alaysha Ortiz, for example. She graduated from Hartford Public Schools in the spring of 2024 with honours! She even got a scholarship to the University of Connecticut to study public policy. But note this: when she was in high school, she had to use speech-to-text apps to help her read and write essays.
Alaysha’s story is heartbreaking, but sadly, it’s not an isolated incident. In Illinois alone, at 24 public schools, not a single student can read at grade level. And nationwide, a whopping 54 percent of American adults read at or below a sixth-grade level. That’s like, only 46 percent of American adults could even manage to read a middle-school level of literacy, let alone high school or college.
We spend so much money on education, and yet, we’re still falling behind. Functional literacy is super important. It’s about being able to read and understand all sorts of texts, like forms, instructions, job applications, and more. It’s not just about being a skilled reader; it’s also about understanding what the text means. You need to be able to decipher the words and make sense of the information being presented.
Have you ever wondered about the fascinating world of American historical texts from the Colonial Era? They’re absolutely captivating!
One of the most popular books of that time was John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ It was a massive hit, selling millions of copies! Benjamin Franklin even said it was found in almost every colonial home.
Harriet Beecher Stowe later wrote that ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ was the second most read book by the common people, after only the Bible. It’s a true classic.
Now, here’s something interesting: we spend a whopping $16,000 per student every year on our public K-12 education. And we’re spending a whopping $857.2 billion annually on public K-12 schools across the nation.
Have you ever noticed how we often skip the sounding-out part when reading? You’re probably reading this sentence without even thinking about how each word sounds. But if we skip that step and don’t learn to sound out words we don’t know or write them phonetically, we’re basically building a shaky foundation for real literacy. Many public school classrooms have been doing this for decades, and it’s not a good idea. It puts students at risk of not being able to read and write properly.
Developed with a kind of AI and apologies to Hannah F. Hood from the Epoch Times
