OPINION:
Across America’s inner cities, in Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis, a quiet crisis is unfolding in our classrooms. It’s not just about underfunded schools or overworked teachers. It’s about a generation of Black and brown children, especially boys, being robbed of the most basic and essential tool for success: the ability to read.
Let’s be clear: This is not a coincidence. It is the direct result of decades of failed liberal policies prioritizing grievance over growth, dependency over discipline, and victimhood over victory. When you strip students of rigor, accountability and expectations in the name of “equity,” what you get is exactly what we have today: an entire generation left behind.
In Chicago, 83% of Black students in grades three through eight can’t read at grade level. In Detroit, more than 85% of students fail to meet basic literacy benchmarks. In St. Louis, just 14% of Black third-graders are proficient in reading. The District of Columbia, the liberal utopia, is no better, with only 17% of Black fourth-graders reading at grade level.
This isn’t just a tragedy. It’s a moral failure. The people most responsible are the very ones who claim to champion the communities they are decimating. Liberal education bureaucrats have spent the past decade gutting standards, pushing race-based grading policies and demonizing phonics and other proven reading strategies as “racist relics of the past.”
They have replaced reading time with gender identity lessons, replaced merit with mediocrity and replaced excellence with excuses.
Meanwhile, they have taught children that the system is stacked against them, so why try? They have turned the classroom into a therapy session instead of a launchpad. They have told children that reading Shakespeare is “colonial” while propping up drag queens as role models. Is it any surprise these children can’t read?
This is the America liberals have built, and it’s an America where kids are being set up to fail and then told it’s someone else’s fault. The left doesn’t want literacy; it wants loyalty. A well-read population asks questions, thinks critically and breaks generational cycles. An illiterate population? That’s easier to manipulate. Easier to keep angry. Easier to keep voting blue. Enough is enough. We know how to reverse this. We just need the courage to do it.
First, we must re-center reading instruction around the science of reading, a proven, phonics-based method that works. We should ban any curriculum that fails to teach kids how to decode words and ditch the feel-good nonsense that’s leaving children functionally illiterate. Second, we need school choice so parents in failing districts can pull their children out and find schools that teach.
Education dollars should follow the child, not the bureaucracy. Third, we must empower local leaders, community churches, mentors and, most important, parents to fill in the gaps after school hours. Saturday tutoring, barbershop reading circles, literacy boot camps — we don’t need the federal government’s permission to teach our kids how to read. We just need commitment. Finally, we must reject the culture of low expectations.
No more telling children the world is against them. No more people allowing children to not show up, as we have seen in cities like the District, where one-third of K-12 students were reported truant. Start telling them that they are capable. They’re powerful. And with a book in their hand and a fire in their heart, they can change everything.
If we truly believe Black lives matter, then Black literacy must matter too. This is our fight. Not just for policy but also for our future. Let the left keep selling victimhood. We’ll be busy building victors.
• CJ Pearson is an American conservative activist, political adviser, former political candidate and commentator. He is the co-chair of the Republican National Committee Youth Advisory Council.
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