Transcription
Well, y'all, you got to be kidding me. You got to be kidding me. Ain't no guy, ain't no way. Ain't no way, Maurice. Ain't no way you don't know this word, bro. How old is you? 17. And and how old are you? 17. Exactly. Sound like God. 17. And you don't know this word? How you don't know that? Look, I'm I'm going to show y'all. I'm going to show y'all.
Now, I'm finna tell him. What does that say, Maurice? Reindeer. What it say? Reindeer. You got to be lying. You got to be lying. Like, oh my god, that's that that don't make no sense. You really sitting there. Let me. Okay, let me show you something. Okay. So, look, look at this. Look, okay. So, okay. What's this? A deer. It's a what? A deer. So, you know what that is, right? Okay. All right. Okay. Okay. And what and what and what that say? Reindeer. It say reindeer. Reindeer. Boy, that don't make no damn sense. And you sitting there. You you probably think it say the same thing. You probably think it say the same thing. He's What? What? What the hell he's saying? Look, look at this. I'm going to show y'all something. I want y'all to see what I'm saying. I know I ain't tripping. What? What that say, Makai? Pigeon. It say what? Pigeon. Pigeon. That say pigeon. Boy, ain't no. Boy, ain't no goddamn. Uh, let me show y'all something. Let me show y'all something. Now, watch this. Let me show y'all something. What's this? A pigeon. This a pigeon, right? So, you know what that is? It's a bird. It's a bird, right? You know what a deer is, right? Uh-huh. That's. It's not a damn eagle, man. It's. He just said it's a pigeon. It's a pigeon. You talking about it's a damn eagle. No, it's not an eagle, man. And what that say? Pigeon. It say what? It say, Maurice? Pigeon. Boy, ain't no. Ain't no. Y'all. Y'all. Ain't no way, dog. Y'all got to be skipping class or something. Y'all must not be going to class. How y'all know what pictures is but don't know how how to spell the words of the. Y'all too. Bro, that don't make no sense, bro. Y'all how y'all going to walk off cuz y'all don't know nothing? Y'all going to walk off cuz y'all don't. Look, y'all don't know how to open the dang old doors. Piggy eye and reindeer, 17 years old. A 17-year-old third-grade sentence and a room full of people read pretending they didn't just see that. We've got kids crossing the stage at graduation who cannot read their own diploma. And instead of telling the truth, we are handing out participation trophies and calling it progress. The system failed them, yes, but here's the part that makes people uncomfortable. The system didn't raise them. Someone did or didn't, and that gap, that's where this story actually starts. We've thrown billions at schools, reading scores are dropping. So, maybe, just maybe, this system. The problem is not in the classroom. What if the crisis isn't about funding? What if it's about what's happening or not happening between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.? That's the real school, and it's been closed for decades. I want to stay with me for the next couple of minutes because this video might be the most important conversation your community isn't having. So, let's get into it. I got these clips waiting at the very end. Credits to all the creators of these clips, by the way. Watch. I will be back with my final critic, this historic. Read that ending score for me. She wore a full clothes that were. Who's this for? Extraordinary but somewhat gertcher? Now, explain what that means. I I know. She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extra ordinary, whatever, bro, but somewhat Gucci. What does that mean? She wore a lot. Wait, she wore. Bro, I don't know, bro. Can you take the card back, please? She wore a. Oh, baby. She wore a silhouette of clothes that were. So, I don't know that word. I don't even know how to read. I don't know why I did this. She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary, but somewhat gauche. All right, now, what does that mean? I have no idea. Like it's clothes that's nice or something like that. She wore a. I don't know what this say. I don't know what this say. I don't know what this say. I can't read it. Can't read it. Can't read it. I can't read this script. What the does that say? Why am I reading this? No, I'm not reading this. This say a whole bunch of. The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. What does that mean? Wait, he's asking the choir to accommodate to the governor's schedule, right? Yeah, in your own words. There's a governor's schedule, and so the the colonel was asking. The colonel was asking the choir to accommodate to it. Uh, in your own words. I don't know, bro. The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. All right, what does that mean? Right, they asked the people to sing for the governor's schedule. I don't know what this means. The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. What does that mean? He asked the choir to accommodate. I don't know. I don't know, bro. It means he asked them to read the schedule. So, like, you know what I mean? The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. What does that mean? To sing with the governor. Sean, I want you to read this. She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche. Do you understand it? Mhm. Clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat weird-looking. I want you to read this. I don't trust. She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche. Extraordinary but not in a good way. This is why you make your kids read every single day. Start going to these PTSA meetings and these district meetings. They are passing so many policies and they're banking on the fact that parents and families are not going to show up. You need to know what them what those policies are and how they're affecting your children. Particularly black and brown children, they know families can't or won't show up. You need to be more involved with your students' schooling. Their life quite literally depends on it. So now what? What are y'all going to do? The kids can't read. Guess what? Their parents probably can't read either. So now what are you going to do? Hundreds of videos on this app, y'all get on here, you tell us the kids can't read, we already know, you get millions of views, and then now what? Cuz I'm doing the work. You see, this room I'm in? I teach. 20 years I've been doing this. I'm doing the work. What are y'all doing? Part of my business, I'm helping high schoolers get scholarships and get into college. I see they can't read. They can't write either. And then when they get to college, it's even worse. I'm helping them also. Nation-wide I'm helping these kids. What are y'all doing? Because it's quite literally by design. They want an illiterate populate. Why do you think that is? So what are y'all going to do about it? Are you teaching? Are you volunteering? Are you mentoring? Are you fighting at the policy level? Cuz guess what? Federal, state, and local policy makers and stakeholders don't give a damn. They don't want these kids to be able to read and be successful. What are you going to do about it? What are you doing? Every year at open house, I let parents know the success of your child is not only on you and not only on me. It's like a four-legged stool. There are four components to your child's success. Number one, the child has to buy into it. Number two, you mama, daddy, granny, auntie, you've got to be involved. Number three, the teacher, me, I got to do my job at the highest level, effectively. And number four, stakeholders, community members, and policy makers have all got to be invested in our children and do their jobs effectively. So now, what part of that four-part solution are you a part of? Outdated teaching methods are hurting our kids. Lack of access to early literacy programs is hurting our kids. Big box curriculum, like what do we use here? My View? That nonsense is hurting our kids. A lack of qualified veteran teachers in the lower foundational grades is hurting our kids. Fact that they don't actually teach teachers in college how to teach reading to these kids is hurting our kids. The banning of books across this country is hurting our kids. The right to read is being taken away from our kids. What are we going to do? A lot of people are confused about the literacy crisis because they don't know what illiteracy actually looks like. Now, as someone who taught third and fourth graders, I can confirm that the literacy crisis is a very real thing and everyone should be concerned about it. It affects so much. It's way bigger than you think. So, let me just drop some stats really quick. I got the stats. 21% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate. Even more concerning is that 54% of adults in the US at or below a sixth grade level. And 66% of fourth graders in the US as of 2024 are reading below grade level. That is concerning. So, let's break it down. What is illiteracy? Because a lot of people when they think about illiteracy, they think you literally just look at words and you can't decode it or you can't say what that word is. When I say decode, think about if you saw c a t, a lot of people will think, of course you're illiterate if you see c a t, you don't automatically say cat, right? But there are a lot of functionally illiterate people and children that will be able to decode a cat. And so, you're looking at them and they're saying the words that are on the page, so you're thinking, how could they be illiterate? And then that's when you're like, there's no literacy crisis because I see my child and you know, they're reading a book. But here is the problem. A lot of people confuse decoding and actually comprehending what you're reading, understanding what you're reading. And that is the problem, right? And this all started with No Child Left Behind, which was passed in 2002 under the Bush administration. Now, the problem with that was a lot of kids got left behind. They didn't get left behind physically, but they got left behind intellectually. And we are seeing the fallout from this and it's also continuing, right? With No Child Left Behind, that's when they started annually testing children. So, I know people that are my age, millennials, younger millennials, of course Gen Z. That's just a thing that we've always done is test every single year. You test in the spring, towards the end of the school year typically. Those test scores are what determine if you're going to the next grade. So, I know it used to be if you got all A's, B's, maybe even C's, right? As long as you didn't fail a class, you can go to the next grade. But what happened with No Child Left Behind was, oh, you have to pass the standardized test, a multiple choice test, in order to go to the next grade. But also, they had this accountability clause in there, right? So, they're holding the schools accountable, which I don't think on a basic level, holding schools accountable is not a bad thing at all. But, what happened was it was more about the numbers. How many kids do you have that are passing the test that are reading on the correct grade level? And then, the school got rewarded monetarily. So, their budgets for the next year were directly tied to the test scores of the previous year. Of course, this causes all of this corruption because everyone's getting pressure from the people at the top. It's all about money. It's all about numbers. It's all about the stats, right? So, they're trying to fudge these numbers. You get a lot of cases of just teaching to the test. You hear this a lot in education, teaching to the test. Where we're going to just teach the kids how to answer the questions, not how to think, not how to actually read and comprehend what you're reading, but how can we get as many kids as possible to answer the questions on the test in a way that will boost the score and the prestige of the school and therefore of the county, that feeds into the state. So, it stopped being about learning and thinking for yourself. It just started being about answering the question in the right way. And because it doesn't look good to have a lot of children that they didn't pass the test, they can't go to the next grade. That's going to be a lot of logistical issues. That's what people don't realize. It's a lot of logistics. And then also, when the higher-ups are looking at the numbers for the schools, when they're dispersing the money, it doesn't look good if most of your fourth graders are staying in third grade and then you're promoting second graders to third grade. Now, you got a bunch of third graders, right? You have no fourth graders. That doesn't look good on paper. So, they were doing a lot of things in order to promote kids who they knew couldn't read on the fourth grade level to fifth grade. Now, what does that look like on the standardized test, right? The multiple choice test. There are four different levels of questioning that a child will get. The goal is, in order to pass, you should be able to answer the lower level questions. Everyone should be able to answer the majority of the lower level questions. So, I'm going to give you an example. The cat wore blue mittens. So, let's say that a child gets the sentence in a test. The cat wore blue mittens. There are four levels of questioning that they could get for the sentence, right? These are called DOK levels, depth of knowledge. So, the first level, which is the lowest level that everyone should be able to get, and that's just recalling the information, right? So, the question might be, what did the cat wear? The issue is that most kids are not getting these questions correct. If they were, they would be passing the test. Not They wouldn't get a high score, but they would get enough. It would show that they are reading on grade level, right? Barely, but reading on grade level. So, you can literally look at a kid and they would read, "The cat wore blue mittens." You think that they know how to read, right? There's no literacy issue. Then you ask them that level one basic question, "What did the cat wear?" And they're looking at you like, Now, think about if I'm not even verbally asking you that question, you're taking a standardized test, I can't help you, I can't say anything, you have to read this in your mind and then answer the question. You don't understand what you're reading, you don't even know this is about a cat. So, how could you tell me what the cat wore? Then the next level of questioning, level two, would be conceptualizing, right? So, question for that, with the same sentence, could be something like, "Why do you think the cat wore mittens?" The answer would be probably something like, "It was cold outside. It's snowing. It's winter." Even more kids are not getting this one, because again, they're not getting the basic level question, so they can't even conceptualize that the cat has mittens. Now, I want to infer, why do I think that the cat had mittens on? Cuz it's cold outside, right? Level three would be strategic thinking would be, okay, let's change the sentence up. What if the sentence said, "The cat refused to wear mittens." How would that change the meaning of the sentence? If you don't even know that the cat wore mittens, you don't even comprehend that, how are you going to answer the question of if the sentence changed, "The cat refused to wear mittens." How does the meaning change? They can't do it. Then, the highest level is always going to be create. So, a create question would be something like, "Write a short story about how the cat ended up with mittens." That's the highest level. How does this affect us as a society? As Whitney said, the children are our future. If the kids are failing the test, but still getting promoted, that's a whole different conversation. I can go into that in a different video. But, if the kids are failing the test, but for the numbers, for the funding that schools want to get, all of these things, they're still getting promoted to the next grade, you could have a third grader that's reading on a first grade level. They're going to get promoted. Even if they had amazing teachers, you only have a year. You have 10 months with these kids. Even if they worked with that child every single day, and then that child goes from a first grade reading level to a second grade reading level, if you still promote the child, then they're going to be a fourth grader reading on a second grade level. They're falling even more behind, because with each year, the reading gets more complex. And then, what happens is, when you get to around fifth, sixth grade, it's less about reading the stories, reading just to learn how to read and comprehend, cuz you're supposed to do that a little bit earlier, right? So, when you get to sixth grade, that child is probably reading at a third grade level now, but they probably have reading for science. They have articles that they have to read for science. They need to read different texts for history, right? So, now it's like subject matter things and they are missing out on all of this because they don't have the basic foundations of reading, understanding what you are reading. So, they're just falling up behind even with content knowledge. This is when you get on TikTok, you have adults that they don't understand facts versus opinions or how you take facts, you use those facts to form your own personal opinions. But, the facts are still the facts. You can have your opinion about things, but the facts are still the facts. You have people who don't understand this cuz if you're not reading to understand, then you can't research. The thing about reading is that it is a very dynamic skill that you have to continue to practice and flex that muscle. It affects not only how you're understanding and analyzing information when you are just reading, but also when you're listening to other people. But, at the end of the day, it's easier to have and to control a society of people who don't form their own opinions based off of factual information because they're not reading it. It's easier to control those groups of people because they're going to rely on a small group of thought leaders. The average American child can't read well at age 15. And this is not a black statistic as many think. The average American child can't read, can't do math, can't make change without the cash register telling them give back three ones in a quarter. They can't write proper handwriting that is legible. The system that they're being educated in is deteriorating rapidly and now we got a leader who's busted it up. The ministry to handle education no longer exists. This is not just an educational issue. And when you look back at our history with trauma, I don't know any more any other way we could be more traumatized than slavery. Right. And so I don't excuse or negate trauma. But trauma is being used in classrooms to justify why black students cannot read. Say that. And I'm trying to tell you that's a full-fledged lie because history has already proven that our people who had faced trauma, who faced rape, who faced death to read. We We understood something that has been removed. And it is part of my aim, and I'm asking you all to come along with me to bring back the value of literacy. There is a value to it. That's right. And we got to put we got to push that to our children so they understand the value. You got to bring the value of literacy, and that's what our ancestors understood. And they understood what Frederick Douglass said, "Once you learn to read, you will forever be free. Once you learn to read, you will have the power to impact the change for yourself and for your children's children." But it starts with the value of literacy. And so while we were reading in the dark with a flashlight at night because we were afraid of what was going to happen if these anti-literacy laws that had been enacted and that started in Virginia. That's why we did the Black Literacy Matters conference in Virginia. We set the spiritual tone that we are reclaiming literacy, and we are going to rewrite what history has already told us can be done. And what was that? To take our literacy rate from almost 90% to less than 30% in a 30-year time frame. So I'm not here for the it's the poverty, it's this. We have the most knowledge and scientific research than we've ever had. And you're telling me our people back then in the 1860s could do what we can't do with all that we have at our disposal now? You're telling me that a child who has experienced trauma can't learn to read when traumatic things that happened to our ancestors, they didn't have no counselors, they didn't have no teachers in the classroom counseling them. And I'm not negating any of those things, but we cannot get conditioned to justify the illiteracy of black students because we are subconsciously pushed this is the reason. A high school student in Philadelphia exposed how his classmates are struggling to read easy words and comprehend relatively simple sentences. In a viral series of videos, and he may be punished for doing this according to the report. Watch this from TikTok. Read that in this card for me. She wore a suit clothes that were. Who's this for? I don't know. She wore a saholat of clothes that were extra doringly, whatever, bro. But somewhat Gucci. What does that mean? She wore a lot. Wait, she wore. Bro, I don't know, bro. Can you take the card back, please? She wore a. Oh, baby. She wore a solo hat clothes that were. So, I don't know that word. I don't even know how to read. I don't know why I did it. She wore a solo hat of clothes that were extraordinary, but somewhat gosh. All right, now what does that mean? I have no idea. Like it's Gucci or laces or something. I would post part three, but the school board is trying to expel me, stop me from going to the prom, and stop me from walking um at graduation. I'mma just say this. I teach seventh grade, the artists still perform on the fourth grade level. Seventh grade English teacher here. Um I teach in northern Houston, and I teach at one of the more affluent schools. Um when I tell you that these babies cannot read, they cannot write, and they cannot comprehend. I'm not being funny. I'm being dead serious. It It doesn't exist. I have kids constantly asking me, "How do I spell window? How do I spell important? How do I spell though?" And they'd be serious. They're dead serious. I can ask them, "Who is the main character of your story, the story that of four paragraphs that we just read?" Can't tell you. They don't know. They don't know. They don't know. It took us four weeks, four weeks to get through how to answer a question in a complete sentence. Good people, welcome back to channel. And allow me to paint you a picture. A viral video drops. Teenagers, high schoolers, 16, 17 years old are asked to read sentence, simple words, subject, verb, object, and they're stumbling, stuttering, sounding it out like they are 6 years old meeting the alphabet for the first time. The comment sections explode. Half the people are heartbroken, half are angry, and almost everyone is pointing at the in different direction, at teachers, at politicians, at racism, at poverty. But almost nobody is pointing at the mirror. I'm Tariq. On this channel, we point at the mirror first. Not because the system is innocent, it is not, but because the mirror is where change actually starts. So, let me give you the context. What the data says, and here's what the viral footage confirms. We have a literacy crisis concentrated in black communities in America, and it is generational. It is deepening, and it is being ignored in polite conversation because telling the truth about it makes people feel like they are betraying the community. But, silence is not loyalty. Silence is how you lose the next generation. Now, let us talk about the money because that's usually where the conversation goes. You want to know something? Follow the money. America has poured billions into public school funding over the last 4 years. Title I funding, Head Start, Reading First programs, equity initiatives, and yet reading scores in low-income black communities have not moved meaningfully. In some districts, they've gone backwards. So, if money was the solution, we'd already be celebrating. We are not celebrating. Now, here's the argument I'm going to make, and I want you to sit with it before you react. The first school for every child is not the building on the corner with the government funding. The first school is the home. The kitchen table, the bedtime story, the parent who sits down and says, "Read this out loud again. Now, explain it to me." Research, not opinion, research consistently shows that children who are read who who are are read to daily in early childhood develop vocabulary, comprehension, and confidence at significantly higher rates. It also shows that father absence correlates directly with lower academic outcomes, higher dropout rates, and behavioral disruption in school across all racial groups. This is not a black problem. Specifically, it is a family structure problem that has hit the black community at a disproportionate scale. 65% of black children in America are growing up in single parent households. Many of those mothers, and I want to honor those mothers because they are working miracles under impossible conditions, are working two jobs, sometimes three. They are exhausted. They do not have time for bedtime reading. They do not have the bandwidth to drill homework at 9:00 p.m. That's not a moral failure. That's a structural collapse, and that collapse has a name, the disappearance of fathers from the home. When that second parent is gone, stability goes with them, and chaos at home means chaos in the classroom. Teachers can be brilliant, but a teacher cannot override what's happening or not happening in those 12 hours after the school bell rings. Now, here's where the diaspora lends matters because this channel speaks to people who've watched their communities navigate to walls. Look at the immigrant communities, South Asian, East African, West African, Korean, Nigerian. You know what those communities share? It's not wealth. Many of them arrived with nothing. What they share is an almost religious commitment to academic excellence. Parents who drill reading, who make the library feel like church, who treat a bad grade like a family emergency. I'm not saying those cultures are perfect. I'm not saying the pressure doesn't sometimes break people, but I'm saying that when an 8-year-old from Hyderabad can sit down and read and explain a passage that stumps a 17-year-old in Detroit, we have to ask why. Not to shame anyone. To understand the gap. And part of that gap is cultural. We have normalized in certain pockets of black American youth culture, the idea that academic ambition is suspicious, that having a wide vocabulary means you're acting white, that street credibility out trumps intellectual credibility. That is not African. That is not a legacy. That is a wound, and it needs to be named. I need you to feel these, but those kids in those viral videos, they are not stupid. They are not lazy by nature. They are children who were failed before they ever walked into a classroom. Failed by a culture that stopped expecting greatness from them. Failed by the by the absent fathers. Failed by systems that lowered the bar instead of raising the child. Failed by adults who confused pity with love. And the cruelest thing you can do to a child is tell them through your actions that you do not expect much from them. That is not protection. That is abandonment with good intentions. So, what are we going to what are we going to do actually with this? First off, we rebuild the home. Fathers come back, stay, be present, be accountable. Your presence is not optional. It is not a bonus feature. It is foundational infrastructure for your child's future. Second, create the reading environment. Turn off the TV. Put the phone down for an hour. Sit with your child and read every day. It costs nothing, and it changes everything. Number three, reject anti-intellectualism loudly and publicly. Celebrate the kid on the honor roll with the same energy you celebrate the kid with the highlight reel. Make excellence contagious. Number four, number four, hold schools and families accountable simultaneously, not one or the other, both. Because the truth is your child deserves high expectations, not pity, not lowered bars, not the soft bigotry of adults who have given up. They deserve someone who looks them in the eye and says, "I know you can. Now, prove it." That's the energy this community needs right now. And if nobody's going to say it, Tariq will. I'm going to say it. Thank you for Thank you for watching. Thank you for being here. I hope to see you in my next one.