Speaking of disservice to kids in school, I recently learned about the “Three-Cuing” system and how it is basically making kids less literate by having them simply guess the meaning of things they don’t understand instead of teaching how to read context, subtext, and use critical thinking skills or basic phonics… It kinda pissed me off. Especislly since I had already been noticing a trend of young people online putting words into others’ mouths or defining words wildly differently than the norm and misunderstanding the entire thing they just read.

I heard about this too, and it’s so insane.

I saw an article recently about Mississippi (and/or Alabama?) 4th graders beating out California and New York on reading, and many were crediting that the state mandated phonics over this “take a guess” nonsense.

Where? This isn’t something I’ve seen in CA schoolwork. My teacher friends have a lot of problems with matriculation right now but guessing at definitions isn’t one of them.

There were a bunch of articles when the data came out from the NAEP report card.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/mississippi-schools-transformation

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/mississippi-not-california-is-the-education-future/

It’s often being referred to as the “Mississippi Miracle” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle

I mean, both of those are right wing sources though.

I thought the second one might be (unfamiliar with it, it was just in the search results), but NYT is definitely not right wing, and the NAEP and Wikipedia are fairly neutral.

NYT has proven in the past few years its a trash rag propping up shitty right wing policies. See also the Washington Post.