Opinion: America Must Teach Children to Read, Not Track Their Futures

If a child can’t read by third grade, that rings dollar signs for the prison industry. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 31 percent of fourth graders read at or above the NAEP Proficient level, down from 2022 and 2019, while 40 percent fell below NAEP Basic.

The “Mississippi Miracle” proved gains are possible even in the hardest-hit places, but schools serving low-income and predominantly Black students know that waiting for Superman is futile. If there were ever a time for a national education emergency plan, it is now. Our economy and our democracy depend on it.

That urgency should flow from the U.S. Education Department. Instead, the agency is dismantling itself, cutting support programs and eroding the protections of the Office for Civil Rights. Its latest move is to appeal to elementary schools not with tutoring, teacher training in the science of reading or proven enrichment, but with workforce development for plumbing, electrical work and mechanics. If this sounds like tracking, it is.

Asked on CNN whether elementary school was too early to steer children toward the trades, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said, “I don’t think so.” Schools, she added, should examine students’ interests and “direct them down a pathway.”

Yes, artificial intelligence is reshaping the workforce, college is increasingly unaffordable and a degree no longer guarantees a good job. But our students deserve more than an education secretary committed to tracking. They deserve every option available and the chance to dream as far as their abilities will take them.

I take this personally. As a first grader, I struggled so much with reading that my teacher wanted to retain me. My mother said no, pulled me out of the district and homeschooled me for five years. I reentered public school on the honor roll, designated gifted and eligible to skip a grade. I graduated from college and graduate school with high honors. Under McMahon’s ideology, I could have been written off at the age of six and tracked into a trade.

None of this is an argument against the skilled trades. Plumbers, electricians and mechanics do essential, well-paying work every student should be free to explore. But exposure is not tracking, and exploration is not deciding a child’s future before she has discovered her potential. A girl raised on food stamps and Medicaid should not be limited by someone else’s shortsightedness.

It sounds dystopian, but it is a tale as old as time. In “The Republic,” Plato sorts people by perceived ability into fixed classes with no path out. That is incompatible with America’s creed. Yet it is what our education secretary is echoing.

We are a nation of dreamers. Imagine this country if our founders had been told at six that they could only become tradesmen.

We can and must do better: refuse to write any child off, reform public education to support all learners. The day we give up on our children’s dreams is the day we give up on our nation and its promise.

Ameshia Cross is a Democratic Strategist and former Obama campaign advisor