Marie Clay and Lucy Calkins

And then when Bush Jr implemented "No Child Left Behind," schools had to use certain research-backed curricula if they wanted to keep their funding. So they trusted that the "research" about whole-language reading curricula was true. It took decades to see that it wasn't the teachers' implementation that was flawed, it was bad research. The approved curriculum reinforced bad reading practices.

That is actually incorrect. You're describing the entire point of Whole Language learning.

They are to learn a number of words, and then use their collection of words to deduce other words.

The problem is they don't necessarily deduce correctly. Who is to say you deduced them correctly?

Also people are lazy. They would rather just leave the blanks than fill it in.

An impact on early education stunting people’s reading capabilities wouldn’t show up for about 10~20 years… so… between 2015 and now is where the impact would be most obvious.

There are of course other factors, such as the cost cutting and underpaying of teachers leading to shortages and larger class sizes, but the introduction of whole language absolutely lines up with the dramatic spike seen recently in functionally illiterate young adults/teens, if you account for the fact that the effects wouldn’t be fully manifested until people taught it in kindergarten reached a point where they’re expected to be functionally literate teens and young adults.

Yes, but the changes will take a few years to truly show. Because young kids won’t really start to struggle until they start getting into the more advanced stuff years later. A change back to phonics a few years ago likely wouldn’t have made a noticeable difference yet, because the kids who learned phonics won’t be old enough to be reading the more advanced stuff yet.

They don’t take the test until grade 4, so repeating grade 3 does not impact funding being student population.

Well schools have been forcing teachers to pass failing students for at least a decade now, and look at how that's going.

Except the one right here in front of your eyes

Does stakeholder here mean shareholder? As in, it’s not good for the capitalists to ensure that students are forced to actually learn things?

Flippant anti-capitalism aside, I’m skeptical of your claim, but I would love to see a source if you have one to share.

Thank you for this. I've been saying basically the same thing for years. Didn't know there was a term for it.

The problem is for a lot of those I'm just guessing what they're supposed to be.

If I could read, I would have taken this personally.

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.

Paywalls are easy; avoiding surveillance would be extremely difficult.

The inconvenient truth for us old shits is that the parents are at fault mostly. Mostly we were powerless to stop it as a megatrend of course, but also many of us used our own money and our own free will (if there's such a thing) to buy our kids those devices and then let them use them freely.

No idea where dude is shopping but I haven't seen a register that didn't show the change in the last 20 years. When I worked retail cashiers were told to never do math just put the numbers in the machine and give the customer what ever the machine says.

Well.. simpler for you. Unless the store is low on ones, I never understood why this feels like a favor. It's nicer for you to walk away with just a five rather than two ones back when you already have an extra 2 ones in your wallet you don't want. A cashier doesn't care what denominations they have.

Either way, embarrassing when people can't do basic addition (though I remember the first time this happened to me as a teenager, and it wasn't the addition that tripped me up, it was the concept. The customer was so impatient because it was so "obvious" they wanted fewer bills back, but I was just afraid I was missing something they were trying to buy. I'm guessing as cash becomes rarer, more people just are unfamiliar with this tactic.)

It’s gonna fuck them at the end of their shift when their register cash is wrong.

In a country where higher education is a debt trap, that kinda makes sense.

Social media likely is a contributing factor. The pandemic is another factor for lower literacy elsewhere. I suspect that the poor reading method taught in the US only compounded those issues to an even harsher degree.

That's some ponyshit reasoning.

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.

The pandemic made things worse, but something bigger is going on.

The new data provides the first national comparison of school districts through 2025, and... underscores that many districts have experienced a long-term slump in student achievement, not just a blip during the pandemic.

From 2017 to 2019, students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024.

Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990 — then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops.

It's gonna be the pandemic hands down. The school system was never good at catching up students who were a year behind and that happened at scaleband now the system has no way to adapt

The pandemic made it worse, but the trend was already negative before the pandemic.

100%, the pandemic likely compounded the issue dramatically.

Finding information on if it was universally adopted is proving difficult. Best I could find is when states started enacting legislation against 3-Cueing. Mississippi was the first to require phonics be taught to children back in 2013, and they are the only state in the OP's graph to show a strong improvement since 2015 (even though it's still not reading at grade-level). Unfortunately Covid threw a wrench in our ability to suss out if eliminating 3-cueing is helping, as even if it did, the lack of schooling during that period seems to have really set back all of the kids who went through it, as they can't really benefit from teaching phonics if they're receiving it poorly through tele-schooling.

From the article:

The new report found that science of reading reforms were necessary, but not sufficient, to improve scores. Only states that had embraced science of reading reforms showed improvement from 2022 to 2025 — yet not all of those that did saw gains.