Remember those bumper stickers that said, “If you can read this, thank a teacher”? It’s time to re-emphasize that subject in our state.
The U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that reading scores for fourth-graders in public schools in Texas ranked 42nd in the nation. That’s pretty bad. What could be worse? Scores for our eighth-graders were 46th in the nation.
All Texans should be alarmed. These students are the young men and women who will carry our state forward in the coming decades. That is, they will if they can. If they lack basic educational abilities, they won’t. And in case you haven’t noticed, our state and nation are becoming more dependent on high technology and people with advanced skills. The path of the future seems pretty clear. The only question is whether Texas and our country will have the people who can keep up in an increasingly competitive and complex environment.