That's according to the latest statistics on education reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The figures for the rest of America's children are also grim. We are getting soft and stupid as a nation.
Parents are up in arms about standardized testing.
In Massachusetts, some parents keep their children home on testing day. When only a minority of our fourth graders can read competently, there must be millions of parents out there who either don't know or don't care that their kids are performing poorly. If they really don't know, testing will help them. And standardized tests do make a difference in school performance. Years before there was even an Education Department in Washington, states were managing to teach children to read.