This is a Reddit comment I found myself writing for longer than I thought, and then learned it was too long, but it's rare for me to get some writing in lately, so here is something for you.
The education and literacy crisis in America is multifaceted and requires solutions at the systemic level inside and outside of schools. People are bad at reading or even basic observational skills. People aren't inquisitive. People are stupid. Not every country has it as bad as America when it comes to education... but also a lot of countries don't even have universal public education so you know, I guess that puts us in the middle.
But the problem is not just under-funding.
Racist Classist Tax Funding Structure
Schools are funded primarily by local property taxes, and municipal boundaries are highly segregated along class lines. So poor communities receive less funding for schools off the bat before any state or federal programs come in to try and off-set that disparity. (And this is also racially segregated since the project of racially integrating schools through bussing was halted before it could go anywhere). One teacher cannot possibly manage a classroom of 50 kids or even 20 kids if they have deep emotional and intellectual issues due to poverty and lead paint. Lack of funding is also why the "balanced literacy" or "cueing" pedagogy for teaching reading became popular; it's a lot easier and cheaper than a proper phonics education and the training you have to give teachers to teach phonics.
Racist Centering of General American English
As an aside, Afro-American Vernacular English really is a creole language that can sometimes be as different from General American English as Jamaica Patois, where it exists on a spectrum from mutually-intelligible dialect to totally not. The "Ebonics" moral panic resulted in most districts banning schools from teaching children about AAVE or in AAVE, which puts children where AAVE is their native language at a massive disadvantage. Black children will get marked down on essays for writing things that are grammatically correct in AAVE but not in GAE, with no acknowledgement that there even is a grammar difference. The schools that were experimenting with Ebonics and teaching children GAE as if it were a second language were showing a lot of good results, but the racist moral panic stopped that project and now every AAVE speaker gets treated like they're speaking "broken English" due to some intellectual deficiency, and not just a different equally valid language. It's like sticking a Hokkien speaker in Beijing and making them learn in Mandarin but nobody will recognize that Hokkien and Mandarin are different.
Hunger and Poverty
Children who are hungry cannot do well in school. We've known this and many school districts have implemented free school breakfasts and lunches but many kids still go home and don't have dinner. Food insecurity and poverty is a big deal for education. And if their parents are starving, then even if the kid is fed, it's harder for the parents to be good parents who can help them with homework. Kids from wealthy families where a parent can help them with homework or hire a tutor are at a massive advantage. You can't fix this problem with school funding alone, you have to address the roots of poverty.
Kids from households rife with abuse, drugs, or even just a single overworked parent who barely has time to be present, are going to struggle in school. Teachers often talk about how many kids are bringing problems to school and how much of their jobs ends up being about managing the social and emotional issues that come with the trauma of poverty. Teachers burn out quickly from this and then aren't very good at teaching. You can't fix this problem with school funding alone, you have to address the roots of poverty.
Lead and environmental hazards (often placed in low income racially red-lined neighborhoods) are very bad for brain development!
Fear, Guns, Safety, Prisons
School shootings and lockdown drills make kids terrified to be at school, and bullying does too. Fear is not conducive to learning. The roots of school shootings can't be addressed by education funding alone, it requires outside-of-school initiatives.
The prison-like nature of many American schools, often considered justified by school shootings and the problem behaviors caused by poverty and hunger, is not very conducive to learning! There are better pedagogies and school structures that make kids less miserable and more interested in learning, but they're only practiced at private schools, hit-or-miss charter schools (there are some real charter school horror stories), competitive magnet schools that require existing academic prowess to get into, or in very wealthy school districts. "Factory schooling" models need to be reformed.
Libraries and Lack of Lifelong Learning
As I have written about before, Libraries are under-funded and their mission of promoting lifelong literacy and learning is not valued. The Urban Libraries United organization has done a lot of work publishing on this. Many schools don't have school libraries or school librarians at all anymore. Public Libraries are treated as day shelters and given increasingly more "mission creep" with no extra funding that has nothing to do with literacy or education. Librarians who want to do programming on critical thinking, information literacy, or adult basic literacy are treated as wasting their time. Money is not provided for core reference materials because "everyone can just google it these days" even though with AI slop you very much *cannot* "just google it" (and a lot of people don't know how to use a computer at all!). A lot of people don't even know why they'd use a real encyclopaedia anymore. The federal government is actively hostile to immigration programs and there are conspiracy theorists accusing librarians of being pedophiles and threatening to shoot up or bomb libraries. The "shadow mandate" of being the customer service department for failing municipal governments leaves librarians with very little time to actually do librarian-work, and instead have a higher PTSD rate than military veterans due to all the problems of society that get shoved into the library to hide them from public view, and all the ways desperate frustrated people take it out on library staff who just don't have the resources to fix every problem. The media constantly frames libraries as "not just books" as if being books is not valuable, and funding for up to date materials is often lacking. Some cities treat public libraries like an alternative to safe-injection sites for heroin users and decide librarians should be there to administer Narcan. Families end up not feeling safe bringing their kids to the library, and the entire mission of promoting comprehensive literacy and lifelong learning is totally neglected. The result is a society where after you turn 18, if you don't have the money to go to college, you just stop learning. Since schools are pressured to just pass people even if they can't actually read, they're left without the institution that is supposed to take the place of school for adults who still have things they need to learn.
The solution to the opiate epidemic is universal housing and healthcare, by the way. People get addicted to painkillers because they don't have the healthcare to treat actual bodily pain and their lives are fucking miserable. Living on the street will give you a lot of health problems pretty quickly but with no housing or healthcare it can only get worse, and as expensive as it is, opiates are cheaper than housing and healthcare.
Everything has gone digital, which means poor people and elders can't fucking do anything to interface with society. If you didn't grow up with computers, and these days they don't even teach kids how to type and use a desktop computer in schools, then they simply are not intuitive. Digital literacy is atrocious and the only solution is "go to the library and ask the librarian for help" which is a piss poor solution to this systemic issue. But is funding provided for computer labs and digital literacy/computer skills courses? No of course not. The people up top making decisions just assume everyone has a smartphone and a laptop and knows how to use both to do anything online. People who work at tech companies don't understand how just signing into your email account can be a 30-minute ordeal these days for normal people, and whoops their only access to their email, a library computer, has a 30 minute time limit because there's only 3 working computers and a long line of people waiting to use them. I'm talking people waiting hours to use the computer for 30 minutes to check for an email from their landlord, and half of it gets spent trying to sign into their email.
Total Systemic Failure
It's no wonder so many public school teachers and librarians become communists and anarchists. How could you not when you see this underbelly of capitalism first-hand every day. But it wouldn't even take full communism to fix this. Any competent government interested in properly investing in big systemic solutions to big systemic problems could fix it. Social Democrats could do it. Even competent Keynesian capitalism could do it. But American politics is uninterested in systemic problems. Everything is focused on personal choice, personal responsibility, personal moral, no-hand-outs, bootstraps, stupid bullshit nonsense that just does not work. Even the Biden administration had been making some headway on some of these issues in little ways, through the "whole of government approach." The Pandemic funding for distribution of tablets and free internet made a huge impact on the digital divide in Philadelphia, but it was not enough.
Now, Trump is trying to executive order the Department of Education to close. Stupid uneducated people are easier to manipulate and control. Marx once wrote that universal public education, through the factory schooling model, was been implemented by the Bourgeoisie initially as a way to decrease the cost of labor and extract more surplus labor value per worker by requiring less on-the-job training—but that teaching workers to read and think would be the seed of capitalism's downfall as it would lead to the ability of workers to learn of their own exploitation and organize for their advancement. Early socialists valued literacy education as top priority, with the USSR even ensuring the most remote communities in Siberia had well-stocked libraries and schools providing materials in indigenous language.
Perhaps the bourgeoisie of today have realized Marx was right, and that is why they are dismantling universal public education. Who needs to read when an app can say everything out loud to you and tell you exactly what to do at every turn, like the Amazon and Whole Food warehouse workers whose very footpaths are dictated by an app.
I believe in the value of universal comprehensive literacy and education. To succeed at this, we must also address systemic poverty, homelessness, and healthcare. Someday, the fascists will be dethroned, and when that happens, rebuilding from their mess will take a lot more than four years. I hope we do not yet again forget how we got to where we are. Neoliberalism is why nobody can read, not TikTok or Instagram.