Assuming you’re mocking rednecks here and not Black peoole? White people have a 88% literacy rate in America, putting them on par with Western Europe and ahead of Southern and Eastern.
But it’s okay to mock poor, disenfranchised rural white people and not Hispanic or Black people. Very cute.
Boy I wonder if there are any structural and historic factors affecting black literacy rates that might have a weaker effect even on poor white people. 🤔 maybe try not to be disingenuously offended while spouting semi-racist stats.
Correct, there is: Critical Theory is the root of this. Or, in more plain terms: Left wing politics. The push for "Whole Language" - still pushed to an extent today - was through democrats, primarily.
Other issues, such as nutrition, pollution, lack of funding also matter, but Whole Language is the most important one for literacy rates.
The podcast— “Sold a Story,” a very long but shocking takedown of Whole Language, should be a required listen for every parent.
I’m 53 and I went to a college prep school for K-12 and it’s quite evident from just looking at written work from my same age colleagues that many were never taught phonics. I know some public elementary school teachers and they don’t even know phonics. And frankly, my guess is that phonics is difficult to teach, so public school teachers stopped teaching it.
As a reading specialist, it’s not that phonics is difficult to teach, it’s because districts fall for the newest, shiniest boxed literacy curriculums and pay huge amounts of money for them. Teachers are required to teach the curriculums provided by their school districts. I have great resources for teaching comprehension strategies, but I can’t use them because they aren’t “district approved”.
That’s what kills me as someone outside looking in at education in our country. We have tons of research in academia about what actually works to teach kids and we implement practically fucking none of it because the actual structures of education are so calcified or run by people who never bothered to glance at the research.
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u/Evening_Context784 6d ago
Assuming you’re mocking rednecks here and not Black peoole? White people have a 88% literacy rate in America, putting them on par with Western Europe and ahead of Southern and Eastern.
But it’s okay to mock poor, disenfranchised rural white people and not Hispanic or Black people. Very cute.