Re the READ Act, a pathetically contrived acronym for 'The Reading Excellence and Achievement for Development Act' [S. 4689 / H.R. 10031], do-nothing parents, the inept education industry, and disconnected politicians are still completely oblivious to the fact that it's not a teacher's job to teach a kid how to read.
Just like it's not a teacher's job to teach a kid how to use a spoon, how pull his pants on, what gravity is, how to stay clear of fire, how to cross the street and how not to drown, it's not their job to teach a kid the critical life-skill of literacy. The parent is the first teacher. The home is the first classroom.
The best fix for illiteracy is the love of parents who fulfill their sacred duty to educate their children. Our culture and our government refuse to address the gravamen of this manifest failure: it's the parents' fault. It's always the parents' fault.
Why do American teachers allow themselves to be fall guys for the crime of parental neglect and undertake the almost insurmountable task of rehabbing the mental health crisis of illiteracy? If ever there was case for in-your-face recalcitrance, this is it.
Just like the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Cancer, the War on AIDS, the War on Terror, the War Against an Invisible Enemy [COVID], the War on Waste, as well as actual American wars that are extravagant squanderlust, this newest War on Illiteracy - updated from the old War on Illiteracy preceding Title 1, the National Literacy Act, and every government intervention going back to the Massachusetts Bay School Law of 1642* whose first fine for illiteracy was 'twentie shillings' and subsequent fine was removal from the family into a forced apprenticeship - will fail.
Just like past high-minded failures [Head Start, Guided Reading, Reading Recovery, Balanced Literacy, Levelled Literacy Intervention, Whole Language, etc.], this new debacle will waste fresh billions. Throwing outside manpower at illiteracy hasn't worked on a problem whose solution has always been inside the home. Per the latest NAEP stats, two thirds of America's public school kids cannot read, and one third is chronically truant. Imagine that Venn diagram's bloated oval.
Illiteracy is a growth industry.
Reading is a cognitive process of recognition. That's all it is. And it never stops, from kids sounding out 'horse' to well-read adults sounding out 'sesquipedalian'.
In the gap between the indifference of uncaring parents, the detachment of false-negative teachers, and the bluster of performative politicians, few if any of whom recognized the real issue [kids' need for parental attention] and its simple cure [parental attention], public funds were thrown into public schools for a problem that shouldn't exist. Government largesse appeased the anguished and sacrificed the innocents. Charlatans took the money and left kids illiterate.
In their panhandling entreaty for something, anything, to assuage their self-imposed guilt, the education business has relabelled phonics as 'The Science of Reading' [the draft law leans on this quixotic euphemism], and they're foraging for fat federal financing as if that will fix the fiasco.
It's happening again...
Things won't change until prosecutions for child endangerment change them. District attorneys will compel parents who are guilty of neglect into doing what their supposed to do, and adjudicated parents will yield the field and be grateful for society's enforcement of the compulsory and mutually rewarding routine of setting a spell with their kids in the hypnotic mind-meld of reading together. Only then will the future will become literate.
Meanwhile, because it's not a teacher's job to teach a kid how to read and because enough parents aren't doing it [yet], it's up to kids to learn the life-saving skill themselves, which they're perfectly capable of doing inside the Overhead in Bed Experience where heightened consciousness and Deep Reading ensue in a cognitive process that's intimate and generative.
Massachusetts Bay School Law of 1642
[emphasis OURS]
Forasmuch AS THE GOOD EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IS OF SINGULAR BEHOOF AND BENEFIT TO ANY COMMON-WEALTH; AND WHERAS MANY PARENTS and masters ARE TOO INDULGENT AND NEGLIGENT OF THEIR DUTY IN THAT KINDE. IT IS THEREFORE ORDERED that the Select men of everie town, in the severall precincts and quarters where they dwell, shall have a vigilant eye over their brethren & neighbours, to see, first THAT NONE OF THEM SHALL SUFFER SO MUCH BARBARISM IN ANY OF THEIR FAMILIES AS NOT TO INDEAVOUR TO TEACH by themselves or others, THEIR CHILDREN and apprentices SO MUCH LEARNING AS MAY INABLE THEM PEFECTLY TO READ THE ENGLISH TONGUE & knowledge of the Capital Lawes: UPON PENALTIE OF TWENTIE SHILLINGS FOR EACH NEGLECT THERIN. Also that all masters of families doe once a week (at the least) catechize their children and servants in the grounds & principles of Religion, & if any be unable to doe so much: that then at the least they procure such children or apprentices to learn some short orthodox catechism without book, that they may be able to answer unto the questions that shall be propounded to them out of such catechism by their parents or masters or any of the Select men when they shall call them to a tryall of what they have learned of this kinde. And further that all parents and masters do breed & bring up their children & apprentices in some honest lawful calling, labour or imployment, either in husbandry, or some other trade profitable for themselves, and the Common-wealth if they will not or cannot train them up in learning to fit them for higher imployments. AND IF ANY OF THE SELECT MEN AFTER ADMONITION BY THEM GIVEN TO SUCH MASTERS OF FAMILIES SHAL FINDE THEM STILL NEGLIGENT OF THEIR DUTIE in the particulars aforementioned, wherby children and servants become rude, stubborn & unruly; THE SAID SELECT MEN WITH THE HELP OF TWO MAGISTRATES, OR THE NEXT COUNTY COURT FOR THAT SHIRE, SHALL TAKE SUCH CHILDREN or apprentices FROM THEM & PLACE THEM WITH SOME MASTERS for years (boyes till they come to twenty one, and girls eighteen years of age compleat) WHICH WILL MORE STRICTLY LOOK UNTO, AND FORCE THEM TO SUBMIT UNTO GOVERNMENT according to the rules of this order, if by fair means and former instructions they will not be drawn into it.