Tipsheet

America Has a Serious Literacy Problem on Its Hands

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  May 15, 2026 9:30 AM

Anyone who has paid attention to the state of American public education knows we have serious problems. In places like Chicago and New York City, teachers — and teachers' unions — see public schools not as houses of education and learning, but as indoctrination factories over which they wield tremendous power. And wield it they do. In those cities, students have been exposed to radical, far-Left ideologies that include pulling them out of school to "protest" on May Day and sneaking "fugitive pedagogy" into curricula. New York schools are facing a civil rights probe over anti-Israel, antisemitic indoctrination of students as young as five years old.

All that Leftist indoctrination takes time away from actual teaching, and — coupled with the massive learning loss from COVID-era lockdowns and remote learning — American students have seen a massive decline in their reading scores in the past decade.

In fact, scores have fallen in all but three states.

This includes this writer's home state of Wisconsin, where students are lagging in the post-pandemic era.

It is shameful.

No. The Democrats will do what they always do: blame Republicans. They will claim that President Trump shutting down the Department of Education is at fault, that Republicans don't "adequately fund" public schools (despite massive spending to the contrary), and that we need to end school choice and homeschooling to improve the failing public system.

The mentality of some of the teachers and the teachers' unions proves this, by the way.

"There is no such thing as learning loss," says Cecily Myart-Cruz. "Our kids didn't lose anything. It's okay that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup."

Incredible. Simply incredible.

Yes, it is. The Left wants us to fail. They want an illiterate, dependent class of voters they can use to maintain a stranglehold on power.

Mass immigration without assimilation is also part of it.

As is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

They can't talk about it because this is the fruit of decades of Democrat control of public schools.

We've had Leftists argue, with straight faces, that being literate and reading to your children is a form of "white supremacy" that disadvantages others. They want these low scores.

They'll never admit that they were wrong about phonics because they're getting the outcome they do want: a compliant, obedient voter class that can't read or do math, and therefore can't question or understand their policies.

That's why Leftists genuinely believe Zohran Mamdani balanced NYC's budget in five months.

The purpose of a system is what it does. And we see what the American education system does.