Crimes Against Learning: The Fallout

The republic was designed to run on readers

The founders did not treat education as a nice-to-have. They treated it as the operating requirement of the government they had just built. James Madison, writing in 1822 to William T. Barry of Kentucky to applaud that state's new appropriations for public schools, put it as plainly as anyone ever has:

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowlege [sic] will for ever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governours, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."^[1]

That spelling of "Knowlege" is Madison's own, preserved in the National Archives text. Thirty-three years earlier, Thomas Jefferson had made the same argument to the philosopher Richard Price while the Constitution was being ratified:

"wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."^[2]

They were not alone. Washington told the First Congress in 1790 that "Knowledge is in every Country the surest basis of public happiness," and that in a government run on the sense of the community, it is "proportionably essential."^[3] John Adams argued in 1765 that "liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people," who have a right to that knowledge "from the frame of their nature."^[4] John Jay called knowledge "the Soul of a Republic" and wrote that nothing should be left undone to give every rank of people the means of obtaining an education "at a cheap and easy Rate."^[5]

One caution, because credibility matters here. The line you have probably seen on posters — "A well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy," attributed to Jefferson — appears nowhere in his papers. Monticello's own researchers catalog it among the spurious Jefferson quotations; it is a modern paraphrase of the authentic 1789 letter quoted above.^[6] The real quotes are stronger anyway. The founders staked the entire American experiment on schools doing their job.

The broken link

So how is the job going?

In the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 31 percent of American fourth graders read at or above NAEP Proficient. Forty percent could not reach even NAEP Basic, the largest share below Basic since 2002.^[7] By eighth grade the picture does not recover: about one third of eighth graders scored below Basic in 2024, the largest percentage ever recorded for that grade.^[8]

These students grow up. In the 2023 PIAAC survey of adult skills, 28 percent of U.S. adults aged 16 to 65 performed at Level 1 or below in literacy, meaning they can handle only short, simple texts. In 2017 that figure was 19 percent. It grew nine points in six years.^[9]

Madison's requirement was popular information "or the means of acquiring it." Reading is the means of acquiring it. Right now, more than one in four working-age American adults does not reliably have it.

The fallout lands on the student first

We talk about reading scores as a national problem, and they are. But before the fallout reaches the country, it lands on one child, and it stays with that child for decades.

It starts with a diploma. Children who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade fail to graduate from high school on time at four times the rate of proficient readers, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's longitudinal study of nearly 4,000 students.^[10] Third grade is roughly when school stops teaching children to read and starts expecting them to read to learn. A student who never got the first part is carrying a hidden weight through every class that follows.

Then it becomes a paycheck. In 2024, the median full-time worker with a bachelor's degree earned $1,543 a week with 2.5 percent unemployment. A worker with only a high school diploma earned $930 a week at 4.2 percent unemployment. A worker without a diploma earned $738 at 6.2 percent.^[11] The gap between the diploma-only worker and the degree holder is over $600 a week, more than $31,000 a year, every year of a working life. Attainment is not the same thing as literacy, but the two travel together: among adults who left school without a diploma, 55 percent score at the lowest literacy level, against 32 percent of high school graduates and 13 percent of those who went further.^[9]

It shows up in the prison population. The 2014 PIAAC survey of incarcerated adults found they averaged a literacy score of 249, versus 270 for the general household population; 30 percent of incarcerated adults had not finished high school, compared with about 12 percent of adults outside.^[12] This is a correlation, not a life sentence written in third grade. No one's future is fixed by a reading score, and we should be suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise. But the pattern is real: the people our schools failed to teach are heavily overrepresented in the places where life went hardest.

And it ends at the ballot box. In the November 2024 presidential election, 77.2 percent of bachelor's degree holders and 82.5 percent of adults with advanced degrees reported voting. Among adults whose education stopped at a high school diploma, turnout was 52.5 percent.^[13] A twenty-five point participation gap, running right along the line of educational attainment. This is the founders' fear made measurable: the citizens least equipped by their schooling are also the least present in their own government.

Add it up from the student's side of the desk. A child who is not taught to read well loses, in probable sequence: the diploma, the earnings that follow it, a measure of protection against the worst outcomes, and a full voice in the republic that Madison and Jefferson built on the assumption that voice would be informed. The country loses too; Madison's farce or tragedy is a fair description of a self-governing nation where 28 percent of adults struggle with a simple text. But the country's loss is diffuse. The student's loss is total, and it is personal.

This was the crime all along

In 2017, my co-authors Kit Marshall, Becky Salato, and I gave our book a deliberately uncomfortable title: Crimes Against Learning: Solving the Serial Failure of School Reform. Some people flinch at the word "crimes." The numbers above are why we kept it.

Look again at that chain of fallout. At no point in it did the student do anything wrong. A third grader does not choose the reading curriculum. An eighth grader does not decide whether teachers received real coaching or a one-day workshop. The failure is upstream, in decades of reform initiatives adopted, half-implemented, and abandoned, each replaced by the next before anyone checked whether teaching actually changed inside classrooms. That serial failure is an adult failure, a system failure. Yet the consequences fall entirely on the student, in lost wages and narrowed lives and a diminished say in their own government.

When a school fails to teach a child to read, the school commits the crime. The student serves the sentence.

The way back is implementation, not another initiative

Here is the hopeful part, and it is genuinely hopeful: none of this requires a discovery. We know how children learn to read: the Science of Reading has settled what must be taught, including phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. We know how to deliver it: systematic, explicit instruction with a gradual release of responsibility, where no student is moved to independent work until the teacher has documented that student's mastery. What districts have lacked is not knowledge. It is implementation: instructional leadership that knows the model well enough to lead it, coaching that reaches every classroom, evidence that adult practice is actually changing, and a shared conviction among the adults, what the research calls Collective Efficacy, that every student can learn and every adult is responsible for the results.

That is the work Gary D. Soto Consulting does with multiple school districts: not another initiative to sit beside the last one, but the disciplined follow-through that turns what we already know into what students actually receive. After 52 years in education, I can tell you the difference between a district that trained and a district that implemented is visible in about ten minutes of classroom walkthroughs.

The founders told us what the schools are for. The data tells us what happens to a child when the schools fall short. If your district is ready to close that gap, and to stop sentencing students for a failure the system committed, we should talk.

© 2026 Gary D. Soto Consulting, Inc. All rights reserved.