Also in Europe. It's obviously related to unrestricted internet use and smart phone proliferation.
For the first time in a long time, we're having generations that are dumber than their parents.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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The US is working its way toward illiteracy. Republicans need this to install a permanent set of oligarchs in the government.
I would like to know what’s the influence of first generation immigration in these charts, because the states are kind of shit at reporting that.
My kids speak Spanish. They can read in both Spanish and English, but they learned Spanish first, so it took them a while to catch up in English. Many of their classmates come from Spanish speaking families, English is their second language, and they have a bit more of trouble. The issue here is that state level standardized testing doesn’t seem to care about Spanish at all, so you may find a bunch of very smart kids who score below average just because they speak more than one language, which is frankly insane.
NJ again lowkey goated
Damn, New Mexico is really eating shit huh? Wonder why it's so bad there specifically.
NM is one of the poorest states in the country. With no real major cities, there’s a lack of opportunity. Also, the eastern counties are as red as rural Texas.
Look at those deltas, though... Vermont, Nebraska, Maine, Delaware. The declines are massive
All this happened during the departments of education participation trophy era.
Damnit NYT, states have an abbreviation standard!
Yes but people are now too stupid to know them.
Yes but the average NYT reader doesn't know them.
Something to do with DC being the third lowest on this graph
Journalists have always used the old postal abbreviations. It's part of the Associated Press style.
The NYT has its own style guide that doesn't always match the AP.
The problem is for a lot of those I'm just guessing what they're supposed to be.
Which ones have you guessing? It feels a little insane to read compared to the standard 2 letter abbreviation, but they’re all pretty clear to me.
What's Ga. Va. and Gt.
Georgia, Virginia, and Vt. is Vermont.
New Mexico didn't even need to defend their position, but they did anyway. True goat right there
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A big part of the issue is a lot of states abandoning “phonic” based teaching for “whole language”. In phonics the focus is on teaching how letters come together to form the sound of a word, while whole language is based on just memorizing the pronunciation of words. kids being taught how to sound out words will take longer to get to a point of being able to read out short simple text, but whole language can get them reading simple stuff with all the words they’ve already been taught very quickly.
The problem is that when you move past simple stuff only using words they’ve memorized, a kid taught to sound out words will be able to figure out words they haven’t seen before, meaning that they can start to learn new words passively just by reading more complex books. The whole language taught kids need to learn every new word by instruction or by just guessing based on context, making it much harder and slower. It gets frustrating quickly and kids taught this way rarely develop a real interest in reading due to that difficulty.
A big part of the issue is a lot of states abandoning “phonic” based teaching for “whole language”.
I don't think this is accurate for explaining 2015 versus 2025. Phonics was discouraged from maybe 2000 to 2020, and education has moved back towards phonics in the last few years. Most major school systems in the US put more emphasis on phonics now than they did 10 years ago.
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.
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.
They're not even taught how to use context or subtext to understand a word they don't know. It would actually be more helpful if they did instead of just letting them go ahead and invent an entire new meaning for words they don't know.
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.
Cool that explains why I’m arguing over the literal definition of words and the context they are used in with 20 somethings constantly.
Wtf this sounds crazy, what asshole implemented this change?
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.
In other words, grifters. As is tradition in America, apparently.
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