A Texas Experiment

Our educational establishment, it seems, has catastrophically failed the nation's public schools over the last few decades. Despite the bipartisan No Child Left Behind bill from the George W. Bush Administration and the national testing frenzy that it mandated, basic skills of reading and math appear to have been declining, not advancing, a trend accelerated by the pandemic. One big reason was the abandonment of phonics as the main means of teaching kids how to read, in favor of encouraging students to guess word's meanings based upon their context. That, I have to believe, can only reflect the obsession with new generations with proving that they think they can do things better than their parents did. One remarkable bright spot is the state of Mississippi, which abandoned the new methods in 2013, and has now seen its ranking in 4th grade reading rise from 49 in that year to 9 most recently. Now, in a very different way, the state of Texas--where public schools are under a sustained…