DEI and the death of Excellence — and literacy

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https://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/12/18/dei-and-the-death-of-excellence-how-ideological-selection-degrades-culture-over-time-n4947236

And absoluted related:

David Strom, HotAir:

Why Johnny Can't Think

College professors have been complaining that students are incapable of reading anything longer than a few pages and often struggle to achieve that modest goal. 

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

Columbia University is one of the most elite schools in the world, a member of the highbrow Ivy League, and literature students can't sit down to read a book because they were never asked to. 

While I am as conspiratorial as the next guy when it comes to our cultural elite, in this case I think the problem lies more in laziness, the ignorance of teachers themselves, and a curriculum in most schools that emphasizes checking boxes. We love to romanticize our own school experiences and likely had much better educations than today's children, so most Americans have no idea how bad the average education has become. It's not that there aren't good teachers and good schools, but when a student can arrive at an elite school without ever having read a single book in school, you should be hearing alarm bells. 

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

The Times' story on this phenomenon focuses on the major publishers that produce the texts on which curricula are based, and no doubt they have a point: this is a significant component of the problem, which is the result of a perfect storm of horrible trends that include the degrading attention span caused by electronic overstimulation—I have noticed my own attention span declining even though I don't use the most dopamine-inducing social media apps—ignorant and politicized educators and unions, a focus (likely necessary due to declining educational attainment) on metrics, and an ideological focus on social justice. 

Many were longtime teachers who reported assigning fewer whole books now than they did earlier in their careers. Some complained about the effect of technology on students’ stamina for reading and interest in books. But more pointed toward the curriculum products their schools had purchased from major publishers.

Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.

Students typically access the content online, often using school-issued laptops.

These practices begin in elementary school, and by high school, book-reading can seem like a daunting hurdle.

Students using excerpt-based curriculums are often assigned snippets of classic novels, which they access through a web interface. This program, StudySync, offers an 859-word segment of “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison.Credit...StudySync

Popular curriculum programs like the one above were created by publishing companies, in part, to help prepare students for state standardized tests. Many schools and teachers are under significant pressure to raise students’ scores on these end-of-year exams, which feed into state and federal accountability systems. Test results are also prominently featured on school-ranking and real estate websites.

Why Johnny can’t read

https://hotair.com/stephen-moore/2025/12/20/why-johnny-cant-read-n3810101

Teacher shocked by students’ lack of basic classroom skills: ‘It’s scaring me’

A concerned middle school teacher recently took to social media to explain the lack of reading and problem-solving skills in her teen students.

“I don’t understand how these kids ended up at this point,” a Dallas, Texas, teacher named Ms. L said about her 8th-grade students in a now-viral TikTok video.

“I teach 8th-grade history and I have 110-ish students — two of them are reading at grade level right now. 18 of them are at a kindergarten level, 55 of those students are between a second and fourth grade level,” she continued. “It’s typical of what I’ve seen lately from students.”

This baffled educator couldn’t believe that her 13 and 14-year-old students lacked such basic skills.

“They cannot apply inference; they cannot process questions that are longer than a sentence. They cannot connect cause and effect. They can’t track multi-step ideas…” Ms. L explained. “It’s scaring me a little.”

The sad reality is that this isn’t just a one-off case — it seems to be a nationwide issue in schools.

The 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress, aka the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed that 70 percent of young teens scored less than “proficient” in reading, while 40 percent scored “below basic.