Epidemic youth illiteracy in U.S. ‘a national security threat’ – IOTW Report

Epidemic youth illiteracy in U.S. ‘a national security threat’

ONN- Researchers warn that America is in the midst of a reading crisis, with the national illiteracy rate reaching epidemic proportions, according to the latest studies.

The problem has become so rife that officials in the United States military have declared American youths’ proliferating illiteracy rate as a threat to America’s national security, according to a Christianity Today (CT) report.

“America’s reading crisis has been recognized by our nation’s military leaders as a national security threat, and leaders on both the Left and the Right have declared educational inequity to be ‘the civil rights issue of our time,” informed CT’s Hermeneutics guest writer Sara Kay Mooney, who serves as a middle school teacher librarian in North Carolina and sees the problem spilling into children’s faith. “But the alarmingly high rates of illiteracy in our country also hold troubling implications for us as Christians.”

With a whopping two-thirds of 8th graders (13-to 14-year-olds) in the U.S. not scoring proficient on reading tests in 2013, Mooney is concerned that the problem stems from kids failing to read years earlier in elementary school.  MORE

13 Comments on Epidemic youth illiteracy in U.S. ‘a national security threat’

  1. Oh man I sense another entitlement program in the making. I believe the military had the idea of school lunches way back when and now look at that program. Reading does not start in school as any good parent knows.

  2. I don’t know if I agree with this assessment. 2013 was the beginning of the Common Core testing and the Reading/Writing portion was combined in many of the state’s testing. I don’t know if all the states were involved with CC testing in 2013, so this might not apply to the whole country.

    For this CC testing, students read some articles and had to write essays answering specific questions regarding what they read. Schools were scrambling to understand just how to teach for this type of test, meaning that the students really were unprepared to respond correctly.

    Three years later the administrators, teachers, students and parents are so frustrated that many states have dropped CC. Unfortunately, they spent so much money on it that they kept the tests and more troubling, they are keeping the philosophy of this type of testing.

    As I was saying, I don’t think this accurately tested the students ability to read or write. There were many responses that I had to mark as zero that, in a normal non-CC test, would have been given a very high score. This is because the students responded in the normal written essay type testing instead of the pinpoint, very specific requirements of the CC test.

    This doesn’t absolve the schools, teachers and parents, but the students just didn’t understand what the test was requiring them to do.

  3. Before long, it’ll be simple signs and symbols to convey to the stupid, those with little/no cognitive brain function, no discernment, no self-identity. Auto-moronic.

  4. Why do you think McDonalds puts picture of the food items on its cash registers? This is NOT going to get better until and unless the DOE and the teachers unions are removed, curriculums are returned to real learning, and the feel-good precious snowflake BS is thrown in the garbage where it belongs.

  5. Funny. My sixth grade daughter reads at a ninth grade level. Must be some of that white privilege going around. Or maybe its because I began reading to her at three months old. And I pay tuition in the next county so she can go to a better, smaller and yes, whiter school.

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