On his second day of teaching at Wheatley High School in Houston, former food influencer Darius Williams faced a problem that has plagued U.S. classrooms for decades: his students couldn’t read or write on grade level. But he didn’t call a colleague or email a district literacy specialist. Instead, he posted a video.
In the clip, Williams sat in front of the camera, crying over the futures his students would be denied. "We have got to do something,” he wrote in the caption. “Something is broken somewhere. It has to be. To see this level of engagement with students who simply don't have literacy skills is completely disheartening. Whew. Yall did not prepare me for this."
To be sure, there are valid arguments about the decline of literacy skills in America. The Nation’s Report Card that provides national, state, and district-level data on student achievement has shown steady declines in math and reading. A Connecticut student sued her high school after alleging that she couldn’t read but still graduated with honors. The crisis is real, and the data confirms it. But data doesn’t go viral, despair does.
As a professor of literacy education, I have questions about how Williams reached his conclusion by day two. Assessing students’ literacy abilities takes diagnostic tools, time, and training he didn’t have. What he had was a seemingly unresponsive classroom and a camera. What he offered viewers was the performance of crisis, a tear-filled soliloquy that went viral within hours. Meanwhile, the teachers who have spent years speaking out about the need for literacy support have been largely ignored.
And they will continue to be ignored because the tedium of teaching isn’t “content-worthy.” Slow reading gains, small group interventions repeated for months, and a kid moving from a fifth-grade reading level to a seventh-grade one across a full school year–that’s the kind of progress that shows up across months of data, not a one-minute video or fifteen-second clip.
A crying man, a shocking statistic, and a school board meeting gone wrong travel because they’re fast and they’re finished. They’re single moments people can watch and feel something about. The solution can’t compete on those terms. The teacher who meets with a student every Wednesday and the curriculum change that won’t show results for three years are everyday solutions. But nobody claps for that. Nobody shares it. And that silence is the real crisis.
We’ve built an attention economy that pays out for despair and offers nothing for the sluggish work of fixing it. And it’s not new. Every generation gets its own literacy panic.
In 1955, Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read And What You Can Do About It accused American schools of abandoning phonics and set off a public panic over reading instruction that has lasted decades. In 1983, A Nation at Risk warned the public about the rising tide of mediocrity that threatened “our very future as a nation and as a people.” The country responded with new standards and tests. In 2001, No Child Left Behind promised to close the achievement gap through accountability, and schools have spent decades chasing test scores–tied to funding–instead of teaching kids to read. In 2022, a podcast called Sold A Story produced a narrative of failure in how children were taught to read, and it swung the pendulum back to Why Johnny Can’t Read’s phonics-first argument, treating the whole language model as the villain instead of one tool among several that a developing reader might need. The “science of reading” movement it helped launch is now repeating the same mistake: chasing a single fix and calling it science.
Each solution promised a reckoning. None of the solutions included funding tutors, ensuring smaller class sizes, increasing teacher pay, or supporting the years of unglamorous work literacy development actually requires. Not one addressed the intersecting issues: the difficulty of building a reading culture in a system of intense testing, the connection between literacy and poverty, the reality that each reader (struggling or not) needs individualized support. Because each of those fixes costs money, and money for education is, like the reading scores, consistently in decline.
I agree with Williams that something is broken, and we have to do something. But picking up our cameras to lament the literacy crisis isn’t it. Instead, we need to learn how to celebrate when a student writes one beautiful sentence, to cheer when a toddler writes their name correctly for the first time, to honor the young person who reads a book on their own for the first time. We need to give as much attention and support to the teachers who don’t run to social media to cry on camera–who choose, instead, to show up every day, struggle alongside their students, and do the actual, unexciting work of literacy education.
Sharing a viral video isn’t advocacy. It’s an emotional response that eventually passes. The real work won’t go viral.
Stephanie Toliver is a Public Voices Fellow and a member of the OpEd Alumni Project sponsored by the University of Illinois.
