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.

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.

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.

Damnit NYT, states have an abbreviation standard!

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.

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

Some states are missing?

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.

Not a single mention of food insecurity or nutrition in student outcomes, despite the fact that BEFORE the economy went sideways due to this stupid ass war 20% of homes with children were food-insecure. Only the deepest level of reporting from the NYT 🙄

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

Less education funding. Inflation. Schools closing. Low teacher pay. Large class sizes. National funding being tied to standardized testing.

Whenever school funding is on the ballot in my state, it rarely passes. Kids and teachers do not have the resources they need to be successful and it will continue to get worse until the president makes it a point to improve it. This is far from a new problem though. The government wants our nation to be full of people with below average intellect. I don't see any other reason not to invest in everyone's future.

The US is working its way toward illiteracy. Republicans need this to install a permanent set of oligarchs in the government.

"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.

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.

Did you mean across the U.S.?

I would like to know what’s the influence of first generation immigration in these charts, because the states are kind of shit at reporting that.

My kids speak Spanish. They can read in both Spanish and English, but they learned Spanish first, so it took them a while to catch up in English. Many of their classmates come from Spanish speaking families, English is their second language, and they have a bit more of trouble. The issue here is that state level standardized testing doesn’t seem to care about Spanish at all, so you may find a bunch of very smart kids who score below average just because they speak more than one language, which is frankly insane.

Just the way the politicians like it...

When I was a kid, MS and LA were #50 and #49 in all of these kinds of lists. It amazes me to see all these other states racing to tank their scores down to the bottom.

I blame Chromebooks.

What about the other 12 states?

Hey good for Mississippi!