You send your kid to school to learn the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic. They return home with sex confusion, pronouns, and a knack for offense-taking. What’s going on? 

Literacy is the basis of everything. If we cannot read, we will struggle to learn or understand.  

And yet our test scores are at 40-year lows in Michigan. Some 95% of 8th graders in Detroit can’t read at grade level. 

Who’s supposed to run this place in 30 years? 

They say that reading Is fundamental, but that phrase never moved me as a kid. My mom said it, teachers said it, commercials said it. 

Nobody considered the obvious problem: If you can’t read, you don’t know what “fundamental” means. 

You literally don’t know what you’re missing.

And you don’t care. My first experiences with reading involved things I love: food and pro wrestling. 

Mom was amazed that I could say “McDonald’s” at less than a year old. But those french fries mattered to me, and those Golden Arches popped out to me, and I just blurted it out every time I saw one. 

A few years later when I could read, but didn’t care to, I got into pro wrestling. While my Mom would shop for groceries, I would head straight to the magazine aisle. WWF Magazine, Pro Wrestling Illustrated, anything I could get my hands on. 

Mom would buy me the magazines, but she would also buy a book about space or dinosaurs. I could read the magazine only after I’d read the book. By making wrestling the thing, she made literacy the thing behind the thing. 

I literally didn’t know what I was learning. 

My school memories are marked by a notable distance between students and teachers. I can’t tell you the first name of a single elementary school teacher. They were all Mr. or Mrs. They were the teacher, and I was there to learn. I can’t say that everybody did their job, but everybody did know their role.

Today, the lines are blurred. Your kid might come home talking about Tim, not Mr. so-and-so. 

They might be queried several times a year—“just checking in,” the teacher explains—about their pronouns, and if anything has changed in their identity journey. The kid doesn’t know what a pronoun is. Instead of teaching them about it, the teacher is asking them about it.

I talked about the literacy problem, and the black face of the literacy problem, with two unlikely sources this week. 

On the Enjoyer Podcast, Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, said her journey actually began with tackling black literacy problems in her Florida school district. The achievement gap was massive, and black students were on the bottom. Her kids were going to be fine either way, but the kids were not alright. She cared even though it was not her job to care.

The power brokers in the black community didn’t welcome Justice as an ally in the fight. They branded her a racist for daring to notice the problem. Justice had committed a heresy: She challenged a status quo that benefited everybody but the kids. No good deed goes unpunished.

At a pastors roundtable in Detroit, Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate for Michigan, appealed to a most trusted source in the community: the black pastor.

“I’m not asking you to be a Republican,” Rogers told the pastors. “I am asking you to take a chance on a set of ideas that will help this community, that will help us all grow.”

He added: “We have a literacy crisis in America, and it’s not just in black neighborhoods or Hispanic neighborhoods or white neighborhoods, it’s all of us. 80% of Michigan students cannot read at grade level.”

Rogers called education “the biggest civil rights issue of our lifetime.”

“If you can’t read in the fourth grade, by the fourth grade, you have a 70% chance of going to prison or being on welfare,” Rogers said. “There are some states that use that, those reading scores, and they use that to plan prison populations.”

Justice noted that today’s third and fourth graders suffered cracks in the foundation of their schooling. Preschool on Zoom. First grade with masks on. The building blocks of literacy were never laid properly, and it will affect a generation. 

Schools know this, and know the numbers will reflect the trauma. 

Rather than face this head-on, they’ve pivoted. From education to re-education. From the 3 Rs to Social and Emotional Learning. It’s easier to play house with kids than to teach them. For people who take no interest in teaching our kids to read, they take great interest in “the whole child.”

Your kid deserves better than being taught how to think by teachers who took their jobs to get summers off.

When the school system failed her community, Tiffany Justice stood up, spoke out, and talked back. 

She got on the school board, and then broke onto the national stage. Last month, she shared that stage with Donald Trump.

When the school system fails your kids, what will you do?

James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.