When you’re a struggling reader, there’s no amount of motivation that can power you through the sludge of an opening paragraph. Because no matter how intrigued you may be by the topic, when you get to around here, the words begin to fa l t e r.
T h e s e n t e n c e s s l o w d o w n.
Y o u ha ve t o co n cen trat e s o h a r d t o e n s u r e t h a tyo u ca n r em em ber th e b eg inn i n g o f th e sen t e n ce b y t h et i m e
y o um a k e i t t o t h e en d.
And you wonder: What would it be like to make it to the bottom of an article?
Your mind twists around a question: How is it possible that some people can do this so easily? Yet you can’t.
It’s a visceral experience. Of frustration. And raw insecurity.
It feels like the words have given up on you.
It’s tempting to skip to a short paragraph. You should be able to make your way through that. But without context, even a short paragraph doesn’t make sense; you’re confused.
How is it that so many people use these forms to gain a grasp of the world? When you can hardly grasp each word.
I know this experience of reading because for much of my childhood it was my own. For me, the cause was alternating exotropia. I see out of one eye at a time, and every few seconds the words jump back and forth on the page. For others it is dyslexia or ADHD, or simply a lack of resources.
Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, America’s reading scores have plummeted. Students at the top are still succeeding. But a record percentage of eighth graders failed to meet even the lowest “basic” benchmark.
Thesearestudentsforwhomforwhomakingtheirwaythroughtexttheirwaythroughtextfeelslikethis.
These students are soon to be victims of America’s great reading absurdity: Precisely at the moment when reading scores have reached an all-time low, the Trump administration and the Republican Party are stripping away the protections and resources that help children who struggle to read.
On the federal level, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has already taken an ax to critical research initiatives. This includes canceling Education Department contracts with organizations such as the Regional Educational Laboratories, one of which played a major role in the “Mississippi Miracle,” helping the state jump from 49th to 29th in fourth-grade reading scores between 2013 and 2019. (The department has said it will enter into new contracts.) On Tuesday, more than 1,300 Education Department workers were fired, including almost half of the office responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination protections for students with disabilities.
At the state level, school voucher programs are siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars away from public school systems into private schools, which are not required to offer the same level of support to disabled students.
Meanwhile, 17 states sued the Department of Health and Human Services last year in response to updated Biden administration regulations, asking the courts to declare Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act — the bedrock of disability rights legislation in the United States — unconstitutional. The suit poses a threat to the roughly 1.6 million children in America who depend on the law for accommodations like assistive technology and modifications to testing procedures. (While many of the attorneys general on the lawsuit have since said they are not seeking to overturn Section 504 entirely, some legal experts are skeptical.)
Collectively, these measures amount to an attack on those struggling to read — those who, at this point, would not be able to identify the position of this article, its core argument, or what is at stake.
F o r ast r u ggli ng r e ade r, r ea c hin g t h e b ot tom o f the pa ge ca n fe el like a dre am.
You wonder if there will ever be a time when your eyes reach this point on the page and you’ll carry with you an understanding of all the words stacked above.
For decades, Republicans and Democrats have agreed that no matter where you grew up or how your brain sees and processes these shapes, our public school system should help you to understand the words on this page. Reading is a basic right.
But as long as our answer to low scores is to slash support for struggling readers, we risk turning this right into a privilege.
The post For So Many Children, This Is What Reading Feels Like appeared first on New York Times.
