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--:-- Georgia Howe: Welcome to Morning Wire. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's April 7th.
--:-- John Bickley: Good morning, Georgia.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Today, we're talking about a troubling literacy report that finds two-thirds of American children fail to read at a proficient level. We'll speak to Daily Wire Investigations editor Brent Schur about the state of education and what can be done to reverse course.
--:-- Georgia Howe: 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, I mean like not learn to read. And if that's the case, their fate, their future is quite possibly dramatically diminished.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Senator Bill Cassidy sounding the alarm about a lack of reading proficiency in American children.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Daily Wire Investigations editor Brent Schur spoke to him and other education experts about the troubling trend.
--:-- Brent Schur: So Brent, what did Senator Cassidy have to say?
--:-- Brent Schur: Right, yeah. So he's a Louisiana Republican, and he put out a report based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAIT, which is conducted by the country every two years. The findings were as bad as they've been in decades. Two-thirds of fourth and eighth graders cannot read proficiently. Two-thirds. Now, proficiently, we're not talking about reading the Iliad in Greek. We're talking about reading just kind of the basic thing you need to read by which to get through life.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The report from Cassidy committee puts the statistics in real terms. If a student is proficient in reading, the classmates sitting to their left and right likely are not. It also warns that we are at risk of having an entire generation of children fail to become productive adults.
--:-- Brent Schur: 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.
--:-- Brent Schur: 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% of the inmates were dyslexic. It might be 50%, but just suffice it to say, if it's 20% of the general population, it is much higher in the incarcerated population.
--:-- Brent Schur: And you would say, well, how could that possibly be? The major risk factors for incarceration are drugs, no father figure, and illiteracy. The major risk factor for illiteracy is dyslexia. 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.
--:-- Brent Schur: So there is a real set of social ramifications if we don't address this.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Cassidy says part of the problem is that schools have adopted teaching strategies that just aren't working. He referenced what is actually a pretty robust debate in the education world. One camp supports the traditional method, teaching reading through phonics, which is basically sounding out words in a systematic fashion. The other camp is called balanced reading, which focuses on whole word meaning, with a moderate focus on sounding out syllables.
--:-- Brent Schur: 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.
--:-- Brent Schur: Cassidy is a proponent of bringing back phonics as the mainstay for literacy education.
--:-- Brent Schur: If you think about phonics, for example, how does one learn how to read? So I'm teaching my grandson, he's nine years old, and he says, "Pops, how do you pronounce this word?" And he sits there and he just looks at it like it just hieroglyphics. And I say, "Okay, wait a second. What does the C-H sound?" Chuh. Okay, what is the A-N? En. And what's the N-E-L? Null. Okay, put them together, grandson. Chuh-null.
--:-- Brent Schur: What you're really teaching the young person is the kind of way to decipher using that which he already knows. You kind of deconstruct. You don't just guess. So that's kind of at its most basic. You could say we're going back to where we started, but it's going back before what we have now. And what we have now is not working.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Cassidy also says we should be universally screening kids for dyslexia.
--:-- Brent Schur: There is a lot of inertia behind just continuing to do things the way that you've been doing them. The old quote, "no one likes change, even from worse to better." We've got to overcome that.
--:-- Brent Schur: 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. My idea is that you begin by giving the parent and the child the diagnosis. And the diagnosis demands action. 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.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We dug a little deeper to figure out why schools haven't changed course. When 66% of kids are failing, you'd think changing course would be obvious, but it's just not happening.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I spoke with Nikki Neely, a longtime education expert who now runs an organization called Parents Defending Education.
--:-- Nikki Neely: 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.
--:-- Nikki Neely: And so I think that's part of it is that they have this agenda where they're pushing kind of everything but.
--:-- Nikki Neely: I mean, I think the unions are a massive impediment to this right. Like we have seen them double down on social justice activism. I think about like the NEA annual conference every year. They vote on these resolutions and they vote on like abortion up until the point of birth. They'll vote on funding for Ukraine and Russia and stuff like that, but not actually about remediating learning loss, student achievement, proficiency, things like that.
--:-- Nikki Neely: Again, they don't really care about our kids. I mean, two years ago, they voted to fund investigations into parent groups like ours that opposed critical race theory. They also voted on investigating groups that opposed the radical gender ideology. That's insane.
--:-- Nikki Neely: Is that the best use of resources? Or should we actually be trying to, again, address the fact that kids can't read at grade level?
--:-- Nikki Neely: What are you doing? You're doing literally everything except for what you have been put into your role to do.
--:-- Nikki Neely: Neely also said that schools are doing wrong by kids by moving them along when they're just not ready.
--:-- Nikki Neely: A kid that can't read in fourth grade shouldn't be moving on to the next level until the problem is fixed.
--:-- Nikki Neely: 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? 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? You just can't.
--:-- Nikki Neely: And, you know, we can try to mask it and we can scream equity from the rooftops. But who does this end up hurting the most? It ends up hurting disadvantaged children whose parents are not able to be engaged on a regular basis.
--:-- Nikki Neely: And so I think that's the really heartbreaking thing 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. You don't actually care about these children because you are not setting these kids up to thrive later in life.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It does appear that the tides are turning slightly, even if just when it comes to recognizing the problem.
--:-- Georgia Howe: 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.
--:-- Nikki Neely: 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.
--:-- Georgia Howe: 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.
--:-- Brent Schur: Well, hopefully at this point we have enough information to make those changes.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Daily Wire Investigations editor Brent Schur. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
