Education & Accountability

It’s Not “The Man” Holding Your Kids Back

It’s a profession that stopped doing its one job — teaching children to read, do math, and think — and filled the empty space with ideology.

MTR  |  Contributing Editor, WFPX News

For two generations, American parents have been handed a ready-made villain. If your child is falling behind, the story goes, blame “the system” — structural oppression, unfair tests, underfunding, a society rigged by “the Man.” It is a comforting story. It asks nothing of the people actually standing at the front of the classroom. And the numbers say it is wrong.

The 2024 Nation’s Report Card — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the one test no state can grade on a curve — found that roughly 40 percent of American fourth graders now read below the NAEP Basic level, the worst showing since 2002. A third of eighth graders fell below Basic in reading, the largest share in the history of the assessment. In eighth-grade math, nearly four in ten students are below Basic. Fewer than a third of children nationally read at a proficient level in either grade.

“Below Basic” is not a technicality. It describes an eighth grader who cannot make a simple inference about why a character in a short story did what he did. It describes a child who may not know that “industrious” means hard-working. These are not kids being held back by a shadowy oppressor. These are kids who were never taught.

The Decline Started Before the Pandemic

The easy excuse is COVID. School closures did real damage, and nobody serious denies it. But fourth-grade reading scores began sliding around 2015, and math scores peaked around 2013. The rot predates the lockdowns. The pandemic didn’t break a working machine; it exposed one that had been running on fumes for a decade.

In my restructuring career, the first rule of any workout was simple: stop blaming the weather. When an airline is bleeding cash, you don’t start with the economy, the unions, or the price of jet fuel. You start with the operation — what the company is actually doing every day, and whether it works. Apply that discipline to American education and the operational failure is not hard to find.

What Happened Inside the Classroom

For decades, many schools of education taught future teachers that reading comes naturally, like speaking. Children didn’t need systematic phonics, the theory went; they needed to be immersed in books and coached to “guess” unfamiliar words from pictures and context. The method had names — balanced literacy, three-cueing — and it was sold in curriculum packages to thousands of districts. Cognitive scientists had warned for years that it contradicted how the brain actually learns to read. The profession largely ignored them.

Math followed a similar path. Memorizing times tables was dismissed as “drill and kill.” Showing the “right answer” was treated as less important than discussing feelings about strategies. Accelerated tracks were cut in the name of equity — San Francisco eliminated eighth-grade algebra, and it took a citywide vote in 2024 to bring it back.

Then came grading reform. In a growing number of districts, zeros were banned, deadlines became suggestions, and retakes were unlimited. The language was compassion. The effect was to remove the feedback loop that tells a child, and his parents, that something is wrong while there is still time to fix it.

Meanwhile, classroom hours were steadily rerouted toward identity workshops, activism projects, and lessons on oppression — teaching children what to think about society before they could read a paragraph about it. That is the core failure. A child who cannot read cannot weigh an argument. A child who cannot do math cannot check a claim. A child who has not been taught to think will simply absorb whatever the loudest voice in the room tells him.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. PROVERBS 22:6 (KJV)

The Proof That It’s Fixable

Here is what should make every parent angry: we know how to do this. Mississippi — long dismissed as the bottom of every education ranking — passed a literacy law in 2013 that required phonics-based instruction, retrained its teachers in the science of reading, and screened young children early. Its fourth graders climbed from near the bottom of the nation toward the middle and beyond. Louisiana was one of only two states in 2024 to surpass its pre-pandemic score in a tested grade and subject, in fourth-grade reading. Neither state got there by spending its way out. They got there by changing what happened between the teacher and the child.

If poverty and “the system” were destiny, Mississippi’s children would still be at the bottom. They aren’t. Method matters. Instruction matters. The teacher matters.

This Is Not an Attack on Teachers

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. Many teachers are heroes. Plenty of them saw through the fads, closed their doors, and taught phonics and long division anyway. Many were trained badly by colleges of education and handed curricula they didn’t choose. My quarrel is with a professional establishment — the ed schools, the curriculum vendors, the consultants, and the union leadership — that kept defending failed methods long after the evidence was in, and that found it easier to talk about oppression than to teach a child to decode a word.

In every other profession, results are the standard. A surgeon whose patients keep dying does not get to blame “structural factors.” An engineer whose bridges keep falling does not get to call accountability an attack. Teaching is a profession, and professions answer for outcomes.

What Parents Can Do Monday Morning

I have long argued that a child walks through three formative doors — home, school, and church — and that each generation answers for what it sends through them. When the school door fails, the home door has to stand watch. Ask your child’s school, in writing, what reading curriculum it uses and whether it teaches systematic phonics. Ask whether students memorize math facts. Ask how grades are calculated and whether a missing assignment counts as a zero. Read with your children every night. Sit with them through the times tables. And show up at school board meetings, because the people setting curriculum are counting on you not to.

“The Man” is not standing between your child and a good life. Illiteracy is. Innumeracy is. And an education establishment that has spent a generation explaining its failures instead of fixing them. The good news is that failure, unlike oppression, has a known cure: teach the child. Teach him to read. Teach him to count. Teach him to think. Then let him decide for himself who the villains are.