It's backsliding It's the constant war for defunding education that Republicans fight as soon as they get in

Definitely backsliding.

We used to teach phonics, now a lot of schools use some bullshit called three-cueing which literally teaches kids to guess words they don't recognize.

“By the 1990s and early 2000s, research began to conclude that phonics was the necessary method of teaching reading to children, with an American congressional panel in 2000 concluding that the essential components of reading instruction were "vocabulary, comprehension and phonics". Programs began to re-incorporate phonics around this time, although three cueing remained a part of curriculums in the approaches of balanced literacy and whole language.[1][4] As of 2020, an estimated 75% of American teachers used three cueing”

There's a reason why Republicans are constantly cutting school funding, and pushing idiotic policies that basically force school resources to get diverted and underperformers to be passed regardless of readiness.

it's never been better if you are rich.

if you are not rich, it's backsliding.

same with the economy too. if you are rich, you'll never done better, but if you aren't, you can't get ahead no matter how hard you try.

40 years ago the difference between being rich and poor, didn't matter as much in terms of education and opportunity. there wasn't a huge gulf between rich schools and poor schools. now there is a huge gulf between rich schools and middle class schools.

This seems to be hard to tell from the data. While the others are right that there have been recent downward movement, the country is old and we don't have data going back very far.

basic literacy has almost certainly increased (meaning one can write a sentence about onesself, and read it). The large majority of Americans meet this bar (and the rest are children or quite old/sick), while only ~80% met this bar 100 years ago.

But it seems we haven't kept data on reading level for very long. The wikipedia page is pretty good afaict. I suspect what actually matters for democracy and such is the literacy rate of voters, though I haven't seen great data on it. We know a large share of folks don't vote, I would guess this correlates very strongly with literacy.

Also, there's a relevant confounder here (which the wikipedia page highlights): one can be american and not speak english, but still be literate in their childhood language.

Valid, I'm using voice to text and was in a rush. At least no one can ever accuse me of being an LLM.