this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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I feel like thats not all the states?
I count 38 states. Looks like South Carolina and North Dakota is missing at least.
yeah kinda wierd it has a spot for dc. so its like are these the worst or the best or what.
Soon in the red states, it will be a badge of honor to be illiterate. Tr*mp loves the poorly educated bigly.
I wish I could remember the quote instead of my shitty paraphrase "These people act like education is a trap they avoided, instead of something they failed"
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
The GOP welcomes their future voters. The dumber they are, the better for Republican votes.
Some heavily blue states plummeting too here.
Did you mean across the U.S.?
"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.
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.
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.
it’s more than that: they’ve been hiring literacy coaches to sit in on and improve literacy classes across the state and rating schools while double-counting the performance of the bottom 25%. plus lots of testing
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/podcasts/the-daily/mississippi-schools-test-scores.html
Decades of studies have shown that retention, repeating grades, is not beneficial for any stakeholder.
Well schools have been forcing teachers to pass failing students for at least a decade now, and look at how that's going.
My state repealed a law a few years ago that required holding kids back who failed the 3rd grade test.
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.
when i was in school, we called it the USSR period. Uninterrupted silent substantial reading. we'd literally just read whatever we felt like for an hour.
All of the schools around where I live had SSR (Sustained Silent Reading). It's pretty beneficial for students. You always get the morons who do everything they can to not read, but it helps most other people.
It's long enough that you'll start reading just out of boredom.
The uneducated don't ask questions or suspect they're being taken advantage of. This is by design.
I'm dumb and poorly educated, but i still don't like dumpy mcshitpants.
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.
Some sort of online community for people to practice reading, especially critically so they practice skills like recognizing subtext, irony, themes, etc, could probably be cool
Unfortunately, the people on a text based platform like Lemmy probably have better than average reading skills. The people who need more help probably stick to video.
Also there's a surprising amount of anti-intellectualism, sometimes, where people say things like "it's just a story it doesn't have any deeper meaning!". Fundamental misunderstanding of how meaning works. (You don't find the correct answer. You make up an answer and justify it with the text.)
Just speaking for myself, but even though I don't "need" help I still feel my literacy becoming more siloed and my patience for reading reducing over time, so a community for collaborative/social reading would be motivating for me. Plus I have friends and family who could use the same encouragement or examples of what to read, so I'd participate for the inspo.
Have you considered a book club? Locally or on Lemmy. That might be nice, though I'm not sure how to level it up from "we're reading this" to include "and we did some critical analysis". Also online is more vulnerable to slop, even though I don't understand why someone would use AI to think for them in an exercise that's entirely about thinking.
A friend of mine had a book club and was reading a book a month, but then the ring leader had a kid and it's on hiatus.
Good suggestion, thanks. Honestly I haven't looked very hard, I would probably enjoy a book club. In Lemmy form I like the idea of a rotating crew of participants with a few regulars, and that it's not strictly books though I'm sure some book clubs probably feature short stories or articles too.
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My state is on this list, near the bottom, but my kid isn't.
Some states are missing?
Per the article:
The data includes third- through eighth-grade test scores for districts in 40 states and the District of Columbia, as of the end of last school year. It accounts for about 68 percent of U.S. school districts nationwide. (Ten states were excluded, among them New York and Illinois, because of high opt-out rates or noncomparable data.)
Oddly, only 38 states + DC in the graphic shared here
If they could read, they'd probably be really mad about that.
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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.
In a 2019 interview, Goodman responded to criticisms of three cueing, saying that "word recognition is a preoccupation" and emphasizing that he places greater value on making sense of language as a whole than understanding specific words. In response to the example of children failing to distinguish between "pony" and "horse", Goodman argued that it was irrelevant whether children understood the specific word, as "pony" and "horse" are similar concepts, and a reader failing to distinguish between them would still understand the meaning of the story as a whole.
Absolute nightmare
He’s literally describing what people with functional illiteracy do to work around being unable to read at a working level. He’s describing it as an acceptable goal. Batshit crazy.
That's some ponyshit reasoning.
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