I Read You Soft and Fuzzy

“….We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated."

Donald Trump last February after winning the Nevada Republican Caucuses

Even as U.S. public education slides down the global comparison charts year-by-year, you’d think adults in the country could as least read and write. But according to the October 30th BBC.com, “The US has more citizens who are illiterate - some 16 million people - than many of its developed counterparts… Many complain that the system fails those who need extra help and there is a big disparity between rich and poor areas.” Seriously? Aside from the fact that Betsy DeVos, a not-too-well-educated person herself, is our Secretary of Education, the above number is one that covers absolute illiteracy. OK, I can’t Trump-blame this on her. The problem is not new, and it gets a whole lot worse if what you are asking is whether an individual able to be functionally literate.

“Back on December 14, 2013, the Huffington Post did a little digging on what those functional illiterate numbers might look like: “According to a study conducted in late April [2013] by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.

“The current literacy rate isn’t any better than it was 10 years ago. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (completed most recently in 2003, and before that, in 1992), 14 percent of adult Americans demonstrated a ‘below basic’ literacy level in 2003, and 29 percent exhibited a ‘basic’ reading level.” And let’s face it, as state public education has been the subject of nasty austerity-driven state legislators looking for ways to cut costs (and perhaps cut taxes to reward those filthy-rich “job creators”), those numbers just continue to fall in comparison with the rest of the developed world.

The underlying facts are truly disheartening, as this sample of horribles from DoSomething.org illustrate:

2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare. Over 70% of America’s inmates cannot read above a 4th grade level.

1 in 4 children in America grow up without learning how to read.

Students who don't read proficiently by the 3rd grade are 4 times likelier to drop out of school…

As of 2011, America was the only free-market OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) country where the current generation was less educated than the previous one.

Nearly 85% of the juveniles who face trial in the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate, proving that there is a close relationship between illiteracy and crime.

More than 60% of all inmates are functionally illiterate. 53% of 4th graders admitted to reading recreationally “almost every day,” while only 20% of 8th graders could say the same.

75% of Americans who receive food stamps perform at the lowest 2 levels of literacy, and 90% of high school dropouts are on welfare.

Teenage girls between the ages of 16 to 19 who live at or below the poverty line and have below average literacy skills are 6 times more likely to have children out of wedlock than girls their age who can read proficiently.

Reports show that the rate of low literacy in the United States directly costs the healthcare industry over $70 million every year.

What you find out is that this is not a problem of too many immigrants, since too many of our functional illiterates are U.S.-born, generally from poor families (huge correlation between illiteracy and poverty), people who are often pushed through the public school system, grade-by-grade, without really having enough knowledge to move on. Ask any lecturer or professor in a community college just about anywhere about how prepared freshmen, who have from graduated high school, can read and write.

And it isn’t just in those red state schools, some of which do just fine, thank you. Try blue, blue, blue New York where 80% of its high school grads entering the community college system require remedial reading, writing and math.

Donald Trump, himself a graduate of an Ivy League school (University of Pennsylvania), has become a populist who rails against college educated “elites” (as he calls them) and experts in the sophisticated areas of governance and technology, whom he loves to tell his base he routinely ignores. He was elected with a heavy turnout of citizens without higher education struggling to find solid-paying jobs in a new economy that is replacing manual labor with robots. “The most important divide in this [past presidential] election was not between whites and non-whites. It was between those who are often referred to as ‘educated’ voters and those who are described as ‘working class’ voters.

“The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump. College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump. This is an indictment of the monolithic, insulated political culture in the vast majority our colleges and universities.” Washington Post, 11/9/16. Yeah, our colleges should do better, but Trump challenges scientific fact as if it were just one more political opinion. What’s my point? The assumption that education is a hindrance, a barrier between “average Americans” and government… another huge reason to drain the swamp and get those “elites” and “experts” out and ordinary folks in. We need to prioritize education, properly moving kids through systems that work and help them when they struggle.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we want to float all boats, we don’t succeed by rewarding those who own and maintain sinking vessels.