On Monday mornings, when the students arrive in my middle school classroom still half asleep and clutch laptops they hardly remember to charge, the fluorescent lights hum a little louder. I teach a writing course that was created from the ground up last year after someone in the district finally acknowledged that fifty minutes of English wasn’t sufficient to accomplish all that English is meant to do. The pupils are still unsure of how to interpret it. To be honest, neither do I.
The way they bargain with the page is what most strikes me. With the gravity of a contract attorney, one girl asked me how many sentences I needed to write before she could shut her notebook. Not being defiant, another intelligent but quietly nervous boy told me he’d already had ChatGPT write a first draft “just to see what good looked like.” He was working effectively. Why would he take his time in a society that values productivity?
Observing them gives us the impression that we’re measuring completely incorrect things. The nation experienced its yearly panic when the NAEP results were released.
Eighth-grade reading was at its lowest level since the assessment’s inception in 1992, according to the 2024 results. The proportion of pupils who performed below Basic increased dramatically. Once more, the gap between proficient and struggling readers grew. The policy reflex—expanding vouchers, expanding charters, giving parents the money and letting them walk—arrived in tandem with the cable hits and opinion pieces in a matter of days. The reasoning seems sound. Let families find a system that works if the current one isn’t.
However, it has become more difficult to ignore the data that lies beneath that promise. After four years, students in Louisiana who attended private schools with vouchers scored significantly lower in math, science, and English. Math scores in Indiana continued to decline. The detrimental effects on test scores were deemed overwhelming by Ohio researchers. Only Washington, D.C. displayed results that were nearly identical, and even there, the math scores declined before rising again. According to Joe Waddington, a researcher at the University of Kentucky who has monitored Indiana’s program, these recent findings are remarkably consistent. When he said it, he didn’t sound victorious. He sounded worn out.
It’s possible that the outdated presumptions no longer hold true. Previous voucher programs were typically restricted to low-income students or children enrolled in failing schools. The new wave is universal and is sweeping through states controlled by Republicans. Rich families, children enrolled in private schools, etc. Few questions, private destinations, and public funds. Rigorous research on those larger programs is still lacking. However, the most compelling argument for choice was meant to come from the earlier, smaller experiments. Additionally, the case continues to deteriorate.
What is overlooked in all of this is something Bronwyn Williams wrote in an essay titled “Why Johnny Can Never, Ever Read” back in 2007. According to Williams, America has been declaring literacy crises for as long as it has had public schools, and these recurrent panics frequently reveal more about middle-class status anxieties than they do about children. I’ve never forgotten that line. since none of my pupils lack literacy. They read continuously in ways that the NAEP does not measure, such as group chats, captions, comment threads, and AI prompts that they polish like little poems.
The more difficult question—one that no voucher program can address—is whether anyone has the time to sit with them while they try to make sense of it all. In my experience, institutional competition prevents literacy from flourishing. When a sentence finally makes sense, it blossoms in the silent moment between a teacher and a student.
Parents may have an escape route through school choice. So far, it hasn’t provided kids with much of a destination. Additionally, the children inside the system continue to wait for someone to understand what they are truly trying to say every year that we argue about the system’s architecture.
