Read Before They Take Your Book Away

“WHY NOT TEACH EVERY SCHOOL KID TO READ WELL.” 

Every day, I walk from the Brooklyn Bridge subway station to school and pass a sign. A 77 year-old man with grey hair, a hat, and a jacket stands by the lamppost and smiles at every person walking by, hoping that someone would understand the importance of his sign. His name is Bill Gunlocke. “Some people come up to me and tell me that it’s grammatically incorrect that my sign doesn’t end in a question mark. What they don’t understand is that I’m just trying to make a statement,” Gunlocke told me. 

Gunlocke is an avid bookworm who writes for the newspaper A City Reader; he talks about books and the inspiration behind his sign. One day, as he was meditating in his apartment, he got an idea to make a sign about books and kids. He couldn’t ignore that idea. So, he made it, and he decided to stand in front of the Board of Education on Chambers Street. “I didn’t know how long I would be standing here for. One month? Two months? A week?” His eyes shone as he smiled and said, “It’s been 10 years.” 

“I love seeing young people, old people, Black, white, all going to work or taking their kids to work, or seeing Stuyvesant students walking quickly,” he expressed. “And sometimes I get a thumbs up or two from people when they see my sign, or mostly just confused faces. But there I can tell who has had a good literacy education. After all, my sign ends with a punctuation mark. It’s a statement. There are people who get that, and there are people who don’t. I hope that people do get that.” He said that college professors have come up to him during his 10 years of standing under the lamppost of the Board of Education. They have told him that around 25 percent of their students can’t proficiently read. Then, he would point at all the buildings around City Hall except for the Board of Education. “They all have banners and signs. We know what each of those buildings are.” Then he points to the building next to him. “The Board of Education has no sign at all. It’s as if they are hiding from us; from the preschool right next to them; from the elementary school a little further down; and from Stuyvesant. They’re hiding.” 

Gunlocke stressed the importance of literacy and challenged the Department of Education (DOE). According to the New York Times, in 2023, only around “half of third to eighth graders are proficient in reading.” Moreover, according to the World Population Review, New York is ranked the second to lowest state in literacy as of this year. The major issue of illiteracy may be systemic; children of low income families have less access to quality education in New York. New York City teachers have attempted to solve this chronic problem by creating a new reading curriculum and developing teaching methods to improve literacy rates so that all children can read. The effects of this have not yet been seen, but literacy rates remain stagnant. Illiteracy will not only suppress the knowledge of the future generation but also the amount of information of the government and human rights that every person is entitled to. 

Recently, President Donald Trump signed an executive that would dismantle the Department of Education. According to CBS News, Trump falsely claimed that the United States is 40th internationally in education, yet it spends the most money per pupil, thus wasting taxpayer dollars on faulty education. If Congress doesn’t stop him, Trump would most likely cut staff from the Department of Education and shave resources from already struggling schools and students. One way the federal government could cut the DOE’s budget is by annulling the state test—an assessment for elementary and middle schools used to allocate proper funding for schools with struggling students. Not knowing which schools need funding to help students who aren’t able to read at grade level would further worsen the literacy crisis, subsequently blocking reading material and the spread of knowledge. By making literacy more rare, fewer children would have access to books and information, especially children from low income families. Eliminating the DOE would widen the gap between the educated and uneducated, perpetuating the continuation of systemic poverty.  Moreover, as information becomes a privilege for the wealthy and elite instead of the public, the federal government would be able to control its constituents rather than have people understand their very own human rights. Therefore, not being able to read doesn’t only mean lower grades on assessments in school, but it also makes one’s participation and presence in their society obsolete.

Literacy is necessary in order to make a change. Reading a book can change a person’s perspective of the world. Gunlocke stated that the DOE is “hiding”; they shy away from the responsibility of teaching children how to read with this new burden. With the DOE already hiding and now under threat, the illiteracy rate will only grow. However, hiding cannot achieve any goal, so we must motivate the next generation to pick up a book and start reading before somebody rips the next few chapters out, leaving us with only the end, cover—nothing in between.