The danger of blaming teachers for a system's failures

The Great Education Blame Game: Project 2025, School Funding, the Science of Reading, and the Campaign to Make Teachers the Scapegoats

By Sean Taylor, M.Ed. | Reading Sage | October 20, 2026

America's public schools face a genuine academic problem. Reading scores have declined, too many students are not reading proficiently, and children who need intensive help often don't get enough of it, early enough.

But acknowledging a crisis is not the same as accepting every explanation offered for it.

For more than two decades, educators have worked through wave after wave of reform: standards, high-stakes testing, school accountability, benchmark assessments, Response to Intervention (RTI), Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), mandated professional development, packaged curriculum, data dashboards, and fidelity requirements.

Now a new narrative is gaining momentum: teachers were never trained to teach reading, whole language and balanced literacy caused the crisis, and the answer is to replace what exists with a more explicit, standardized, science-of-reading-centered approach.

Some of that argument is supported by research. Some of it is oversimplified. And the political and financial consequences of the proposed remedies deserve just as much scrutiny as the instructional methods themselves.

The questions that matter

•         Who is responsible for the decline in student achievement?

•         What evidence supports the claim that teachers don't know how to teach reading?

•         How much instructional time has been consumed by testing and accountability?

•         What would changes in federal funding mean for public schools, students with disabilities, and low-income families?

•         What does Project 2025 actually propose for public education?

•         Is there evidence that these reforms are meant to make Americans less educated and more politically malleable, or is that an inference that goes beyond the evidence?

My thesis is simple: educational failure should be investigated as a systems problem, not automatically blamed on teacher incompetence. Reading instruction matters enormously. So do teacher preparation, school resources, instructional time, poverty, disability services, curriculum choices, and the accountability structures that govern classroom decisions.

The danger is not only that America might choose the wrong reading program. It is that a legitimate educational problem becomes the justification for a political and commercial restructuring of public education, without sufficient evidence that the restructuring will fix anything.

Part I: What is actually happening to education funding?

Start by separating three things that headlines tend to collapse into one:

1.       Funding enacted by Congress: money legally appropriated for programs.

2.       Funding proposed by the administration: a request that may change during the budget process.

3.       Administrative restructuring: moving responsibilities, staff, grant management, and enforcement between agencies.

These have different consequences. A program can remain legally funded while the agency running it loses staff, its payment system changes, or the technical assistance schools rely on gets harder to reach.

The federal picture

The figures below reflect the FY2027 administration request and the FY2026 appropriations information available at the time of writing. Proposed figures are not guaranteed future allocations.

•         Title I: about $18.4 billion (FY2027 request). Title I-A funding for schools serving low-income students is proposed to stay near its FY2026 level. That doesn't guarantee every district will receive the same allocation or that every Title I-supported service will survive intact.

•         MEGA grants: $2 billion (FY2027 request). The proposed Make Education Great Again grant would consolidate 17 K-12 grant programs into a larger, state-administered pool, with at least 25% going to evidence-based literacy activities and at least 25% to mathematics. States would have more discretion over the rest.

•         IDEA: nearly $16 billion (FY2027 request). The proposal includes roughly $15.4 billion for Part B state grants and $590 million for Part C early intervention, with several separately funded programs consolidated into state grants. That could change how support for personnel training, technical assistance, preschool services, and parent resources is distributed.

•         Department of Education restructuring: underway. Federal responsibilities are being transferred or shared with other agencies. That is not the same as Congress repealing the laws that authorize Title I, IDEA, or other programs.

Why consolidation can matter more than the headline number

Imagine a district that relies on several distinct grants to pay for literacy coaching, professional development, summer instruction, family engagement, and services for vulnerable students.

Under a consolidated grant, that district may still be permitted to fund all of those things. But if the state prioritizes other allowable uses, the district may receive less for the services it counted on.

Permission to spend money on a service is not the same as a protected funding stream for that service.

The administration argues that consolidation reduces bureaucracy, gives states flexibility, and focuses attention on academic outcomes. Critics argue it can weaken specialized services and make funding less predictable. Both are describing real trade-offs, and which effect dominates will depend on enacted appropriations, state decisions, allocation formulas, and implementation.

When federal responsibilities move elsewhere

The Department of Education doesn't pay for most of American public education. State and local governments provide the great majority of school funding. Still, federal money plays an outsized role in specific areas: poverty, disability, English-language learning, and targeted interventions.

Moving administrative responsibilities to other agencies can affect:

•         How quickly grants are awarded and distributed

•         Which personnel understand the educational purpose of the programs

•         How districts obtain technical assistance

•         How families navigate complaints and compliance

•         Whether oversight is consistent across states

•         How easily the public can tell who is accountable when a service fails

The stated rationale is to cut federal bureaucracy and return authority to states and families. The concern is that a smaller federal footprint may also mean less consistent oversight and fewer resources for families who can't easily replace lost services.

A transition that promises efficiency should be judged by results. Are funds reaching schools on time? Are children receiving services? Are complaint investigations getting completed? Are students learning more? Redrawing an organizational chart doesn't answer any of those questions.

Part II: Project 2025 and public education

Project 2025 is not simply a proposal about how children learn to read. It is a much broader plan to restructure federal authority, education funding, school choice, civil rights enforcement, and the relationship between families, states, and public institutions.

The education chapter, written by Lindsey Burke, appears in the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The document explicitly calls for ultimately eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and shifting education decisions toward families and states.

The major policy objectives

Objective	What it means in practice	The central question
Eliminate the federal Department of Education	Transfer or discontinue functions, subject to statutory and congressional constraints	Who preserves federal oversight and expertise?
Expand school choice	Increase the ability to use public support for alternatives to assigned public schools	Does this expand access, or shift resources away from public schools?
Phase out Title I over time	Reduce the federal role in funding high-poverty schools, leaving states to decide whether to replace the support	Which communities can afford to replace those dollars?
Reduce federal control over IDEA	Greater state flexibility, including changes to the structure of disability funding and accountability	How will students' rights and services be protected?
Reshape federal civil rights policy	Change the federal role and priorities in enforcing education-related protections	Who can challenge discrimination, and how consistently?
Reduce federal involvement in curriculum and higher education	Shift authority to states, families, and institutions	How will quality and equal access be maintained?

These are proposals, not proof that every element has been enacted. Several would require congressional action, and the likely consequences are hotly disputed.

Is Project 2025 trying to dumb down America?

This question deserves a serious answer, not a dismissive one and not an unsupported conspiracy theory.

The policy document itself doesn't establish that its authors' objective is to make Americans less intelligent or easier to manipulate. Its stated arguments emphasize parental authority, state control, school choice, reduced federal bureaucracy, and conservative cultural priorities.

But intent and consequence are different questions. A policy can be promoted as expanding freedom while creating conditions that weaken opportunity for some children. If funding for high-poverty schools shrinks, if disability services become less consistent, or if rural students have no realistic alternative to their local public school, those students may end up with fewer opportunities even if the stated goal was more choice.

That is why I'd rather examine mechanisms and likely effects than speculate about hidden motives.

Public education serves several purposes at once. It develops literacy, numeracy, reasoning, and scientific understanding. It gives children opportunities beyond their family's economic circumstances. It teaches history, government, and civic participation. It prepares young people for work, trades, further education, and adult life. And it provides a shared institution in a society with sharply differing incomes, beliefs, and opportunities.

Shifting authority to families and states could expand meaningful choices for some households. It could also produce more unequal opportunities if well-resourced families can buy or reach alternatives while poorer families depend on underfunded local services. That is a legitimate, testable concern. It doesn't require claiming that every supporter of school choice wants an uneducated population.

Following the money: Title I

Title I directs federal assistance toward districts and schools serving large numbers of children from low-income families, and it reaches rural, suburban, and urban communities alike.

Project 2025 proposes phasing Title I out over ten years rather than preserving it indefinitely. That would be a major change in the federal government's role in supporting disadvantaged students.

If a district lost a significant share of its Title I support, the plausible consequences include:

•         Fewer interventionists and instructional aides

•         Reduced capacity for tutoring and extra learning time

•         Less money for professional development and coaching

•         Less targeted support in high-poverty schools

•         Pressure to shift costs onto state and local budgets

These are plausible consequences, not predictions that every district will lose the same services. The Center for American Progress estimated that phasing out Title I could put more than 180,000 teaching positions at risk nationally. That is a modeled estimate, not a count of jobs already lost.

For Arizona, state and district leaders would have to decide which federal services could be replaced locally, which would be reduced, and how the changes would land in rural communities and high-poverty schools.

School choice is not automatically educational equality

Choice can give families an important alternative when a school isn't meeting their child's needs. But choice policies should be judged by who can use them, what they cost, and what happens to the students who stay behind.

Questions worth asking:

•         Can a family afford transportation to a school outside the neighborhood?

•         Does the alternative school accept students with complex disabilities?

•         Are admissions policies transparent?

•         Are outcomes independently evaluated?

•         What happens when a student needs services the new school doesn't provide?

•         Does the public school still have enough funding to educate the students who remain?

These aren't arguments against every private school, charter school, or education savings account. They are tests of whether a particular policy actually improves access and outcomes.

Part III: The reading crisis, and what the evidence really says

This is where the debate hits closest to home for Reading Sage.

The United States has a real reading problem. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that average reading scores fell two points for both fourth- and eighth-graders compared with 2022. Twelfth-grade reading scores also declined from 2019, reaching the lowest average in the history of that assessment.

Those results demand a response. But the scores alone don't tell us which single policy caused the decline. They don't show that teachers are incompetent. They don't show that whole language alone caused the crisis. And they don't show that standardized testing caused it either.

"9 out of 10 teachers don't know how to teach reading"

The podcast Sold a Story brought needed attention to instructional approaches that encouraged beginning readers to use context, pictures, and sentence structure to identify unfamiliar words instead of reliably decoding them. Its reporting raised legitimate questions about Reading Recovery, balanced literacy, leveled books, and the influence of major curriculum developers.

But the statement that "9 out of 10 teachers don't know how to teach reading" needs a precise source before it can be treated as a verified statistic. I could not substantiate that exact figure from the sources I reviewed, and it shouldn't be repeated as fact without identifying the original survey, its sample, the question asked, and what counted as "knowing how to teach reading."

Several very different claims get compressed into that slogan:

•         Teachers received insufficient preparation in the structure of written English.

•         Teachers were trained in methods that didn't provide enough systematic phonics.

•         Teachers lack confidence in particular instructional techniques.

•         Teachers don't use a particular curriculum or sequence.

•         Teachers cannot successfully teach children to read.

Those are not interchangeable. A teacher may understand phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, and comprehension and still have too little time, poor materials, or a curriculum that limits her decisions. Another may have excellent training and still need support for a child with dyslexia or a significant language disorder. A survey showing teachers need more training in a particular practice does not show that nine out of ten are incapable of teaching reading.

The burden of proof belongs to the person making the numerical claim.

Whole language was not a conspiracy that left every teacher without phonics

My own experience is part of this historical picture. I met whole-language ideas in teacher preparation in the late 1990s, saw the controversy around them, and still taught phonics-heavy instruction as a Success for All teacher. That is consistent with a more complicated national story than "American teachers were universally taught to ignore phonics."

The National Reading Panel's 2000 report described whole-language instruction as generally treating letter-sound relationships as one component of reading, often taught incidentally within meaningful reading and writing, as opposed to systematic phonics programs that teach planned sequences of sound-symbol relationships explicitly. Whole language did not necessarily mean "no phonics." Many teachers using it taught some phonics, but the sequence, explicitness, and amount of instruction could differ a great deal from systematic programs.

Nor was the debate new. Educators had argued about phonics, whole-word approaches, and the role of meaning for generations, and by the 1990s many teachers were already blending explicit skill instruction with literature, language-rich activities, and writing.

This doesn't mean all approaches were equally effective. It means we need to be historically accurate about what teachers were taught and what they actually did.

Success for All is a useful example. It developed a structured, school-wide approach that included sequenced instruction, collaborative teaching arrangements, frequent assessment, and intervention for students falling behind. Teaching in that setting is evidence that systematic approaches existed during the era now often labeled "the whole-language years." It isn't proof that every teacher-preparation program or school was effective, but it does challenge the sweeping claim that systematic phonics was absent from American classrooms.

A serious historical investigation would examine teacher-preparation syllabi, state standards, district curricula, adopted programs, professional development, and classroom observations. It would not assume every teacher received the same training or used the same approach.

What the National Reading Panel actually found

The National Reading Panel was convened after a 1997 congressional request, and its 2000 report reviewed a large body of research on how children learn to read. Its findings supported explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, systematic phonics, fluency, and comprehension. It found that systematic phonics was more effective than instruction with little or no phonics, particularly for beginning readers and children with reading difficulties.

The evidence-based reading framework

1.       Phonemic awareness: hearing, identifying, blending, and manipulating individual sounds in spoken words.

2.       Systematic phonics: teaching letter-sound relationships in an organized sequence, with chances to apply them to unfamiliar words.

3.       Fluency: reading accurately and automatically, with appropriate phrasing and expression.

4.       Vocabulary and comprehension: building language knowledge, background knowledge, and the ability to construct meaning from text.

This framework is not a prescription for one identical lesson or commercial curriculum for every child.

One of the panel's most important qualifications is easy to lose in the current debate: phonics is a means to an end. Children must apply decoding to meaningful reading and writing, and phonics alone doesn't supply the vocabulary, background knowledge, fluency, or comprehension that proficient reading requires.

A complete reading program teaches the code systematically, and it surrounds that code with books, oral language, conversation, storytelling, knowledge-building, writing, and real chances to use what children have learned. The research supports teaching children how written English works. It does not support reducing literacy to an endless sequence of isolated drills, or treating the use of one commercial program as proof that a school is teaching reading well.

Where the criticism of balanced literacy is justified

There is a defensible criticism of some balanced-literacy implementations. When children are encouraged to guess at unfamiliar words using pictures, context, or sentence meaning instead of working through the letters and sounds, they may never develop a reliable decoding strategy. A child who can guess a word from an illustration may look successful without being able to read the word independently.

That is especially worrying for children with dyslexia and other reading difficulties, who often need explicit, cumulative, systematic instruction with plenty of repetition and application. A 2001 meta-analysis of the studies reviewed by the National Reading Panel found an overall positive effect for systematic phonics compared with less systematic or no-phonics instruction.

But three conclusions do not follow from that evidence:

1.       That every teacher who used balanced literacy failed to teach phonics.

2.       That every child who struggles to read does so because of a teacher's instructional philosophy.

3.       That replacing one branded curriculum with another guarantees better reading outcomes.

The criticism is strongest when it names a specific practice, shows why it's inadequate, and shows what a better alternative would accomplish. It is weakest when it treats an entire profession as incompetent or turns a complicated, multi-decade history into a morality play with a single villain.

Part IV: The accountability machine

The hidden cost of testing is more than the test

Good assessment is not the enemy. It helps teachers see what a student knows, where learning breaks down, and what to teach next.

The problem arises when the machinery built to improve instruction starts displacing instruction. Think about the full cycle of a typical accountability system:

1.       Standardized testing: collect scores, benchmarks, and performance indicators.

2.       Data analysis and accountability: compare students, classes, schools, and targets.

3.       Intervention requirements: assign tiers, document deficiencies, select approved interventions.

4.       More monitoring: repeat assessments, track progress, report compliance.

5.       The critical question: how much time is left for teaching, practice, feedback, reading, writing, and real learning?

This is a conceptual model, not proof that every school follows it or that every assessment is wasteful. The cycle becomes counterproductive when its demands grow without evidence that each additional measurement improves instructional decisions.

Twenty days of testing: what should we count?

If a school spends 20 instructional days on assessments, those days deserve scrutiny. But a defensible national claim has to distinguish time spent taking tests from time spent preparing for them, administering them, analyzing results, attending meetings, and documenting interventions. Some of that overlaps with instruction rather than replacing it.

A useful audit would ask each district to report:

•         Days and instructional hours devoted to required assessments

•         Hours spent on benchmark testing and progress monitoring

•         Teacher planning and meeting time devoted to data and compliance

•         Time spent on interventions that grew directly out of those assessments

•         Whether the assessments changed what teachers actually taught

•         The relationship between time invested and student outcomes

That would turn a widely shared concern into a measurable policy question. The goal isn't to abolish assessment. It is to demand a reasonable return on the instructional time and professional labor it consumes.

RTI and MTSS: paperwork is not intervention

RTI and MTSS were designed to help schools identify needs and provide increasingly targeted instruction. A student struggling with phonemic awareness might get extra explicit work on sound identification, blending, and segmentation. A student who decodes accurately but slowly may need fluency practice. A student with solid decoding but weak comprehension may need vocabulary, oral language, and background knowledge.

Those are sensible responses. But an intervention system is only as good as its ability to change what happens for the child. A school can have an impressive MTSS spreadsheet, a detailed intervention plan, weekly progress data, and a stack of compliance documents while a student continues to receive too little instruction. Meanwhile a skilled teacher can spot a problem quickly, adapt, monitor progress, and produce real gains without generating a mountain of paperwork.

The distinction is between measuring a problem and solving it. A useful RTI/MTSS audit asks:

Question	Evidence that matters
Was the learning deficit identified correctly?	Diagnostic evidence that pinpoints the missing skill
Was the intervention appropriate?	A clear link between the deficit and the instructional method
Was enough instruction provided?	Actual minutes, group size, frequency, and duration
Did the student improve?	Repeated measures of the target skill and application to real reading
What happened when progress stalled?	Changes in instruction, intensity, group size, or specialist involvement

If a system keeps measuring failure without improving the instruction students receive, the system itself needs examining.

Accountability can make teachers less responsive to children

When educators are judged heavily on standardized outcomes and adherence to prescribed procedures, the incentive is to prioritize what is measured, documented, and easily compared. That can discourage teachers from adapting to a child's developmental readiness, interests, language needs, disability, or emerging strengths.

The effect isn't inevitable. Standards and accountability can also expose students who were overlooked, reveal inequities between schools, and create pressure to provide resources. The real distinction is between accountability that supports professional judgment and accountability that substitutes for it.

A productive system asks: What is this child struggling to learn, what evidence do we have, and what should we do next?

A counterproductive one asks only: Did we follow the sequence, complete the assessment, enter the data, and hit the target?

Both use data. Only the first keeps the child's learning at the center.

Part V: Who benefits when education becomes a market?

The United States has built a large ecosystem of curriculum publishers, assessment vendors, tutoring companies, ed-tech providers, consultants, professional-development organizations, and data platforms. Many offer useful products, and their existence is not evidence of wrongdoing.

The structural concern is that a system spending ever more on interventions, assessments, and instructional products can create commercial incentives that don't always line up with the public interest.

The cycle of reform and replacement

1.       A problem is identified. Reading scores decline or achievement gaps persist.

2.       A new solution is marketed. A curriculum, assessment, software platform, or training model promises improvement.

3.       Districts buy and implement it. Teachers are trained, schools collect data, and fidelity becomes a compliance target.

4.       Results disappoint or vary. The next reform promises to do better.

5.       The public pays again. New purchases, training, implementation, and evaluation begin.

This is a model of a possible cycle, not a finding that every product fails or that every reform is profit-driven. The right questions are whether an intervention has independent evidence of effectiveness, whether it works for the students who need it, whether it adds value beyond existing practice, and whether the benefits justify the total cost, which includes training, implementation, technical support, staff time, replacing existing materials, and the opportunity cost of the time spent.

Can the science of reading become another sales pitch?

It can, if the label replaces the evaluation of evidence.

The science of reading is a broad body of research on how reading develops and how instruction affects learning. It is not a single product, company, or daily schedule. Explicit, systematic phonics has strong research support. That doesn't mean every product branded "science of reading" is equally effective, every implementation succeeds, or every student needs the same intervention.

A responsible purchasing process asks:

•         Is the approach supported by relevant research?

•         Does the evidence apply to this age group and student population?

•         Does the program address the actual skill deficits identified?

•         Does it include enough practice and chances to apply learning?

•         Can teachers adapt when students don't respond?

•         Are outcomes independently evaluated rather than inferred from product usage?

•         Is the cost justified compared with other effective options?

The same scrutiny should apply to whole-language materials, structured-literacy programs, online platforms, AI tutors, and any other instructional product. The problem isn't that education uses evidence-based methods. It's when a marketing label is treated as a guarantee of results.

Part VI: The danger of blaming teachers for a system's failures

Teachers occupy a peculiar place in public policy. They're expected to deliver outcomes shaped by dozens of factors while controlling very few of them. A teacher may be held responsible for reading proficiency with little say over class size, instructional minutes, curriculum selection, intervention staffing, assessment schedules, attendance policy, or access to specialists. When scores disappoint, the public story quickly becomes a story about teacher quality.

Teacher preparation may well need improvement. Professional development may be inadequate. Some instructional approaches need to change. Individual teachers sometimes make poor decisions. But none of that establishes the teacher as the principal cause of a system-wide problem.

The conditions that shape reading outcomes

Factor	Why it matters
Teacher preparation	Teachers need a strong grasp of language, decoding, fluency, comprehension, and assessment
Instructional time	Students need enough opportunities to learn and apply new skills
Class size and staffing	These shape the ability to give feedback, small-group instruction, and individual support
Curriculum quality	Materials should support explicit instruction, meaningful reading, and appropriate practice
Intervention capacity	Struggling students need timely, targeted, sufficiently intensive instruction
Student attendance	Frequent absences reduce access to instruction and continuity
Disability and language needs	Students may need specialized methods, accommodations, or more time
Leadership and working conditions	Teachers need stable systems, useful coaching, resources, and professional agency
Assessment burden	Testing and documentation consume time that must be weighed against their instructional value
Family and community circumstances	Access to books, language experiences, stability, and learning support varies widely

These factors interact, and their relative weight differs across students and schools. NAEP establishes that reading performance is a serious national concern. It does not tell us which combination of factors explains the decline in any particular district.

What a genuinely accountable system would do

It would hold everyone responsible for the part of the system they can influence.

•         Teacher-preparation programs would demonstrate that graduates can teach foundational reading skills.

•         District leaders would ensure teachers have the materials, time, training, and intervention support they need.

•         Curriculum providers would demonstrate effectiveness, not just advertise alignment with research.

•         State agencies would evaluate whether their policies improve student learning.

•         Federal agencies would assess whether their funding and oversight produce meaningful benefits.

•         Legislators would examine what their funding decisions do to children and schools.

•         Teachers would use assessment evidence to improve instruction and seek support when students aren't progressing.

That is accountability with reciprocal responsibility. It is fundamentally different from a system where teachers answer for outcomes while policymakers, vendors, and administrators are insulated from comparable scrutiny.

Part VII: What happens to the children who need the most?

For students with dyslexia and other disabilities, the funding and instructional debates are especially consequential.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) sets federal requirements for special education and related services, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act adds protections for eligible students. Administrative restructuring doesn't itself repeal those obligations, and schools can't stop providing required services simply because federal responsibilities are reorganized.

But legal rights and practical access are not the same thing. A student can have a clear legal entitlement and still face delays, uneven implementation, staffing shortages, or trouble getting effective instruction.

Why consolidated disability funding deserves scrutiny

If separate funding streams for professional preparation, technical assistance, parent support, and specialized services are consolidated, states gain discretion over how resources are distributed. That flexibility could help some states direct money to their most pressing needs. It could also make specialized support depend more heavily on state priorities and budget decisions.

The critical questions are whether the new arrangements preserve adequate resources, maintain expertise, and let families get timely help. For a child with dyslexia, this is not an abstract administrative issue. Early identification and effective instruction can change the whole trajectory of reading development. The same holds for children with language disorders, intellectual disabilities, autism, and other learning needs. A funding change should be judged by whether students keep receiving the services and instruction they need, not by whether the overall budget looks stable.

An intervention is not a label

In special education, identifying a deficit is only the beginning. A child who struggles to read needs more than a classification, a score, or a line on a spreadsheet. The child needs an intervention matched to the actual difficulty:

•         Trouble identifying and manipulating sounds may call for targeted phonemic-awareness instruction.

•         Trouble connecting sounds to letters may call for explicit, cumulative phonics.

•         Slow, effortful word reading may call for more practice building accuracy and automaticity.

•         Limited vocabulary or background knowledge may call for rich oral language, discussion, explicit vocabulary teaching, and knowledge-building.

•         Persistent difficulty despite appropriate instruction may call for a more comprehensive evaluation and intensified support.

A system that spends heavily on assessment but fails to deliver appropriate intervention isn't demonstrating accountability. It is documenting a problem without addressing it.

Part VIII: Is the goal to make Americans more malleable?

The worry that a less educated population is easier to manipulate is understandable. Literacy, historical knowledge, scientific reasoning, and media literacy help people evaluate claims, spot misleading arguments, and take part in democratic life.

But it helps to separate three levels of argument.

Established policy direction. Project 2025 explicitly seeks to reduce federal involvement in education, expand school choice, and transfer authority toward states and families.

Reasonable concern about consequences. Reduced support for disadvantaged students, inconsistent disability services, or unequal access to alternatives could widen educational disparities. These outcomes should be tested against actual funding, implementation, and student-performance data.

Claim requiring further evidence. The assertion that the deliberate purpose is to make Americans less intelligent and easier to manipulate goes beyond the documented objectives in the policy sources I reviewed. Establishing that motive would take additional direct evidence.

A rigorous argument doesn't need a hidden conspiracy. It can simply ask whether a policy reduces access, narrows what students are allowed to learn, weakens their ability to evaluate evidence, or makes high-quality education more dependent on family income. Those questions matter on their own.

Public education has always been contested because it shapes not only economic opportunity but also what citizens know about their country, their institutions, and the world. Changes to funding and oversight deserve scrutiny from people across the political spectrum.

The best protection against manipulation isn't partisan messaging in the opposite direction. It is a public that can read carefully, check evidence, reason independently, and disagree intelligently.

Part IX: What Reading Sage asks of policymakers

A serious reform agenda would put measurable learning, equitable access, and responsible use of public money ahead of political branding. Here is a practical framework for evaluating the current changes.

1.       Require a complete reading curriculum. Integrate explicit, systematic foundational-skills instruction with fluency, vocabulary, oral language, comprehension, writing, and access to meaningful books.

2.       Audit instructional time. Publish the actual time spent on required testing, progress monitoring, data meetings, and compliance, and show that each major assessment contributes to a meaningful instructional decision.

3.       Improve teacher preparation without scapegoating teachers. Verify that preparation programs provide sufficient knowledge and practice in evidence-based literacy instruction, and give current educators ongoing coaching and practical support.

4.       Publish funding impacts before restructuring programs. Explain which services, positions, and student populations may gain or lose support, and don't assume a consolidated grant automatically replaces every existing service.

5.       Protect disability services and accountability. Monitor IDEA implementation, intervention capacity, family access to help, and timely delivery of required services through any administrative transition.

6.       Evaluate programs independently. Compare outcomes, costs, instructional time, and implementation quality, and require evidence that a new curriculum or platform improves learning beyond what effective existing practice could achieve.

7.       Restore meaningful professional agency. Give teachers the knowledge, resources, and discretion to respond to individual students, while holding districts and policymakers accountable for providing effective conditions for learning.

The bottom line: follow the evidence, follow the money, follow the child

The current debate contains several truths that shouldn't be allowed to cancel one another out.

America has a real reading problem. The evidence supports explicit, systematic phonics as an important part of effective reading instruction. Some balanced-literacy practices deserve serious criticism, especially when they encourage children to guess at words instead of decoding them.

But none of that proves teachers as a group don't know how to teach reading, and none of it shows that one instructional philosophy explains decades of uneven achievement.

Likewise, reducing federal bureaucracy and expanding school choice are identifiable policy goals. Whether they improve education depends on what happens to funding, services, accountability, access, and outcomes. The intention to increase flexibility doesn't guarantee equitable results, just as the intention to improve reading doesn't guarantee that a particular curriculum will work.

The public deserves more than slogans from any side. It deserves to know how much money is being spent, which programs are being consolidated, what services students will receive, how much instructional time is really available, and whether children are actually learning more.

For Reading Sage, the principle stays the same:

Teach the child, not the spreadsheet. Use evidence to improve instruction, not to replace professional judgment. Demand accountability from every level of the system, not only from the people standing in front of the classroom.

A child who struggles to read needs effective instruction, meaningful practice, skilled intervention, and adults who refuse to give up. That child doesn't benefit from a political argument that blames the teacher, a commercial promise that sells the next miracle curriculum, or an administrative system that measures failure without correcting it.

The question for policymakers isn't whether they can announce another reform. It's whether their decisions produce better learning, stronger schools, and more equitable opportunities for the children those schools serve.

Sources and further reading

1.       Project 2025 primary document: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Heritage Foundation, especially Chapter 11 on the Department of Education. Full PDF

2.       Federal reading research: National Reading Panel, NICHD

3.       National reading outcomes: 2024 NAEP Reading Results

4.       Independent policy analysis: Brookings, Project 2025 and education

5.       Federal budget request: FY2027 Department of Education Budget Summary, which reflects the administration's proposal, not enacted appropriations

6.       Title I background: Bipartisan Policy Center, What is Title I?

7.       Implementation reporting: ProPublica, How the Education Department is changing public schools

8.       Balanced vs. structured literacy: Research review, Springer Nature Link, a recent exploratory analysis and not a definitive evaluation of every program carrying either label

Editor's note: Budget requests can change, and national funding figures alone don't establish the effect on any particular Arizona district. Before publishing, verify the latest congressional appropriations, agency implementation guidance, and the original source of any numerical claim attributed to Sold a Story or another outlet.