A recent report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education has pointed out that chronic absenteeism and mental health problems are overwhelming American students. Another report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows math performance has dropped to what it was thirty years ago. Likewise, ACT scores are at a thirty year low. The National Center for Education Statistics also released data last year showing almost 75% of schools have seen an increase in chronic absenteeism. A Gallup Poll found that a fifth of students were mostly just concerned with mental health support at school and this is indicative of a bigger problem: making ideology and elusive concepts for uneducated people with no context seem as if they are the most important factors in an education.

What is happening?

Although there was an overall learning decrees prior to 2020, the proceeding three years made it far worse. The CDC shows that there was a 17% spike in dyslexia and speech disorders, and that this was a result of masks. Another study from the Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology, Lorraine Research Laboratory, and the University of Geneva, showed that students 5-7 were harmed by masks because they couldn’t read facial expressions or lips, which lead to literacy rate declines too. This means that decades of progress was erased due to school closure alone and remote learning, coupled with already saboteur programs such as the No Child Left Behind and Common Core strategies.

America’s education system is so poor that even countries most Americans have never heard of, or were made famous by Borat, have higher literacy rates than the U.S. In fact, only 79% of U.S. adults can read and write, leaving 21% who hopefully aren’t operating machinery or voting. Joking aside, there are plenty of illiterate people who are smart and plenty of literates who are pridefully, by choice, ignorant - literacy isn’t the only marker of education but it is a main pillar. Other countries seem to have it figured out though, including Ukraine and Japan which both have literacy rates at close to 99+%, which shows their programs are working and it’s not just their smaller populations.

A great example of this problem is what a Virginia School District is aiming to do: give kids 50% grades for not even doing an assignment. Some give 25% for writing you name, meaning you could feasibly get a C for turning in your name on a blank sheet of paper. Under the Bush administration and others too it was lowering test standards, curve grading, open book tests, and despite this, kids still failed; and as George Carlin said, the IQ slipped another few points. But it made the teachers, schools, and government look good - for a while. Other schools are letting kids use CHAT GPT. And although some countries are better off than the U.S., global illiteracy is on their rise, despite centuries of positive progress. It’s all been an experiment - Educate Back Better - and as all slave masters know, you don’t want your slaves or peasants or servants to read or write.