I just read a story in the Dec 20, 2025 Jan 5, 2026 New Yorker Magazine about dyslexia and other reading difficulties that people experience. It makes the point that reading is a necessary skill that some people have great difficulty acquiring. People want to be able to read because not to be able to do so leads to such shame that children act out in school to avoid admitting they cannot do it. The story says that "the correlation between illiteracy and incarderation has been known for a long time." It tells us that over 40% of incarcerated persons in the U.S. are dyslexic and "as many as eight in ten are functionally illiterate."
It is a problem that seems to school administrators to solve itself, "since many sufferers drop out before graduation" but it is a real problem for society, since literacy is needed for so many jobs, and since it is a very costly problem in that it costs a half million or more each year a erson is incarcerated.
A better solution is to catch the problem very early and provide the painstaking teaching needed to correct it. New York has public schools that do this, but poor children are unlikelly to get the testing that would provide them with entry into such a program. There are also private schools that provide help, but it is also unlikelly that poor children will go to them.
Part of the problem is lack of phonetics in the teaching of reading but I am not clear that this is the entire problem.Reading to a child may not solve the problem. A child can listen and apper to be fine, but then enter school and be unable to learn to read. Part of the problem is that people assume a child can read and just neglect to find out whether they can. Sometimes all that is required is a simple question: Can you read? or When you were in the early grades, which subject was really hard for you?
I have been writing about Trump a lot recently, and will post some of my thoughts soon but this article made me compare the State of the State address by Governor Newsom with the thoughts and actions of Trump and realize that Newsom was all about making the lives of Californians better when possible, while Trump seems to be about hurting people while finding the people he can hurt and still stay in power.