Texas Teacher Breaks Down After Seniors Struggle to Read and Write

TRANSCRIPT:

WILLIAMS: "So, I am on my lunch break. It is, I don’t know, 11:30 or something like that, and I just finished a three-hour class. We have what’s called block, and block is where first and second periods are combined for subjects they needed. And so I literally broke down in the middle of class because I’m teaching seniors. These kids are leaving high school and going to college, hopefully, after they finish. We had two paragraphs to read, one sentence complete to write. I gave them the sentence stems. I basically completed the sentence for them in the model. These are 17- and 18-year-old kids and they couldn’t fill in four words. Four words. I gave them the scenario. We annotated together. I gave them the answers before we even had the problem. And they couldn’t do it. I don’t know. I simply don’t know where the problem is. This is only day two. And I have seniors who simply cannot read and seniors who cannot write. They cannot write. They can reason. They have the ability to defend their reasoning if it’s talking to their homeboy. But applying that to a written text, two paragraphs, and they couldn’t do it. Our young black men, our young brown men, our young black girls, and our young brown girls — oh, God."