The uneducated don't ask questions or suspect they're being taken advantage of. This is by design.

Fun fact on why Missisipi, of all the places, improved: they introduced a law that a child cannot be promoted to next year if they do not pass reading proficiency test.

Who knew the shame of repeating a year can be motivator enough for kids and parents.

Something I've also noticed lately. Basic fucking math. I more often than not pay in cash, and recently I've had more than one person at more than one place give me incorrect change. And just not like a few cents, but dollars amount wrong. And when I try correcting them they're so adamant they're right even when I'm like... dude, you owe me 50 cents, not 3 dollars.

Soon in the red states, it will be a badge of honor to be illiterate. Tr*mp loves the poorly educated bigly.

I feel like thats not all the states?

The GOP welcomes their future voters. The dumber they are, the better for Republican votes.

Screens. Its screens. Dont give them a device. Give them a book and have the teacher teach them how to read. Slow them down and remove distractions.

I suspect a big reason for this can be blamed on the US no longer teaching kids to read with the phonics method (learning how yo sound out words by individual letters), and instead have been teaching a method to figure out what a word means with context clues, but many kids cannot sound out an unfamiliar word since they weren't taught the phonics method.

Only now are states beginning to reverse that in an attempt to reverse reduced literacy rates, which will take some time to have a noticeable effect.

Sometimes I wonder if we should have a “learn to read” community where we post an article or short stories or excerpts of longer works with some comprehension questions and discuss in the comments. Where discussing what you think about a headline or article is forbidden and only discussion about what it actually says is allowed.

I wonder if it is scored the same now as it was in 2015. That is because a lot of state exams where I studied are scored by percentile, so that the same result would get different scores in different years

"Video is the future. If it's not on youtube, people don't care."

Reaping what the internet has been sowing for the past decade.

Besides flaws in supposed more modern methods of teaching (personally I fucking hate rote memorization, it is boring), too many distractions aka entertainment options more than ever. Especially on mobile devices.

And then you have the looming gap between the haves and the have-nots, and the have-nots are being taken advantage of by not opposing the system that's oppressing them, such as deliberately making them unlearned.

Only fanatical bookworms do visit book fairs and defend public libraries from being dismantled.

COVID stole a year or two of schooling for students in poorer families.

Impressive that Arkansas and Kansas aren't even on the list. They must be down wherever Mississippi, Louisiana and Hawaii came from.

Regular readers of /r/teachers are not surprised. Teachers have been sounding the alarm for decades, as they still are.

Also, if you love your kid, you'll teach them to read. I mean books, real books, long books, no pictures, "chapter books" (which was a term I'd never heard till recently. Because, of course, books have chapters, why would one need to differentiate between... oh.) Read to them, read with them, talk about books with them, take them to the library, and take them to the book store. Give them books as presents.

When I was in junior high they decided we weren't reading enough. So for 40 minutes or so after lunch we had a reading period where everyone just read novels. Might be a good idea again.

What about the other 12 states?

You'd probably knows this was old news if you read more.

Some states are missing?

A big part of the issue is a lot of states abandoning “phonic” based teaching for “whole language”. In phonics the focus is on teaching how letters come together to form the sound of a word, while whole language is based on just memorizing the pronunciation of words. kids being taught how to sound out words will take longer to get to a point of being able to read out short simple text, but whole language can get them reading simple stuff with all the words they’ve already been taught very quickly.

The problem is that when you move past simple stuff only using words they’ve memorized, a kid taught to sound out words will be able to figure out words they haven’t seen before, meaning that they can start to learn new words passively just by reading more complex books. The whole language taught kids need to learn every new word by instruction or by just guessing based on context, making it much harder and slower. It gets frustrating quickly and kids taught this way rarely develop a real interest in reading due to that difficulty.

it has been for like 20+years, thats around the time they were giving participation grades for people to pass HS. with AI/ absent parenting it has only gotten worst. likewise with mathematics too. and people doing arithmetic courses in cc is a sign, eventhough its not as useful as algebra anyways.