More (not so) fun facts:
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.
21% read below a 5th grade level, which is considered functionally illiterate.
High immigration numbers don’t fully explain it either, as first gen immigrants only make up about 1/3 of those with low literacy.
This was back in 2012ish when the Republican Party platform was the following.
“Knowledge-Based Education We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
Yeah, can’t have it in high school because that’s lib-rule college shit.
That’s around when the tea party movement was taking off, so that tracks. You see the seeds of what we see today back even in 2008, too; but to bring it back to reading deficits, we’ve had problems long before then (which, obviously, snowball into what we see today, e.g. Florida banning sociology and such).