Allie Beth Stuckey

The majority of high school seniors today do not even have an eighth grade reading level.

There are a large percentage of seniors today that don't have above a fourth grade reading level, okay?

There are middle schoolers and high schoolers, a huge number of middle schoolers and high schoolers in America today that have a kindergarten reading level.

That's actually probably what we just saw there.

That was literally probably kindergarten, first, second grade reading level that we are seeing in high schoolers.

The decline is because of a trend to teach kids to guess words.

This is what I think anyway.

And if you've watched the Sold a Story podcast, I really highly recommend the Sold a Story podcast.

She talks about this strategy of teaching kids to guess words, so use deductive reasoning rather than sounding them out based on a very pervasive but incorrect theory.

This happened in the early 2000s where we switched from phonics to

this deductive reasoning, sight words.

And sight words became not just it or this or that or the or a, but even longer words like weird or like beautiful.

Those became sight words that kids were just supposed to memorize and never have really any understanding of why that word makes that sound.

This is the whole language approach and it ditches phonics and

It emphasizes immersion, so-called, in language.

There was a researcher named Marie Clay.

She popularized these ideas in the mid-20th century with her reading recovery program.

And the popularity of this approach really rose in the 1970s, but it became super popular in the 1990s, in the early 2000s.

And the idea is that children are naturally going to learn to read just like they naturally learn to speak just by being immersed.

So you just...