Guest commentary: The quiet cost of low expectations – and the courage it will take to rebuild
By Martha Salas
After reading The Atlantic’s “America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy,” I couldn’t help thinking — some of us saw this coming years ago. We said that lowering standards was not compassion but surrender. The collapse didn’t begin with COVID or smartphones; it began when adults decided that feelings mattered more than fundamentals.
For anyone wondering whether the problem was the students or their communities, the answer is no. This failure has consequences: some students have spent twelve years learning to function within the framework of low expectations. They arrive in college carrying the quiet scars of that system — the consequences of Whole Language over phonics, the culture of lowered standards, and the confusion of living inside the mind of a low-performing student who never knew what he missed.
They’ve been rewarded for effort instead of mastery, passed along instead of prepared. Universities have become triage centers, reteaching the fundamentals others abandoned—the quiet heroes left to clean up the mess.
From that reality, I founded Fund My Textbooks. This California-based platform helps students raise funds for required course materials, with all proceeds sent directly to campus bookstores. Students never touch the money; every dollar goes straight to the source, ensuring transparency and academic purpose.
By removing the financial barrier between enrollment and readiness, Fund My Textbooks builds accountability into affordability. It helps students begin classes on equal footing, with every required book and supply in hand.
That small but critical difference can determine whether a student keeps going or quietly gives up. When students can fully participate from day one, they stay longer and achieve more. That’s what retention really is—not just a metric, but a message that someone believed in their potential and grit to stay the course.
Under principal Jo Ann Caines, a bear of a leader who believed rigor was love, a school serving nearly 90 percent Latino students, most from low-income families, once outperformed wealthier campuses across Santa Barbara.
Around 2013, La Cumbre Middle School approached the state’s target score on California’s older exams, and by 2016, about half its students met or exceeded new reading standards — a modest victory in a state where even that coin-flip of proficiency was considered success. The demographics never changed. The expectations did.
Across California, charter schools have shown what happens when expectations rise. They follow the same standards and take the same tests, yet their results diverge.
Oakland Charter Academy, serving a 96% Latino student body, has ranked among the state’s top middle schools. KIPP LA College Preparatory, serving similar demographics, reports roughly 70% meeting or exceeding state reading standards, more than double the statewide average.
They teach the same material, take the same tests, and draw from the same neighborhoods. The difference isn’t demographic. It’s cultural — the expectation that students can and will meet the bar.
Ruth Green, former State Board of Education president and one of California’s earliest literacy reformers, reminded Santa Barbara in 2023 that adoption alone does not teach a child to read. “If you don’t implement with fidelity, the job will not get done,” she said. Her warning carried the weight of history for those who remembered the first fight for phonics.
Mississippi, one of the poorest states in the nation, proved what happens when fidelity meets belief. After passing rigorous phonics-based literacy laws and investing in early reading instruction, its students surged. In the most recent national assessments, Black fourth graders ranked third in the nation, Hispanic students first, and economically disadvantaged students first as well, proof that gains reach those long left behind.
The lesson is not geography, but governance: when a system believes its children can read, they usually do. Systems don’t teach children to read. Teachers do, and their mindset and training will make or break the system around them.
The goal is simple: to teach them to read and to inspire the confidence and curiosity to explore.
But first, we must admit that we mistook condescension for compassion and treated the underprivileged, of every color, as too fragile to master rigor.
The Atlantic piece names the crisis. This one names the aftermath.
It’s time to stop treating literacy as an optional virtue and start recognizing it as the foundation of freedom, the quiet power that transforms pity into potential, and potential into purpose.
• Martha Salas is the founder and CEO of Fund My Textbooks, a California-based platform that helps college students afford required course materials by forwarding raised funds directly to campus stores.
