WATCH — Texas Teacher Laments Teen Students’ Inability to Read or Write: ‘They Couldn’t Do It’

A high school teacher in Texas showed deep concern this week for the senior students in his classroom whom he said were unable to read or write.

In his video, Darius Williams, who works for the Houston Independent School District’s Wheatley High School, said he became emotional in front of the young people when he realized something was very wrong, the New York Post reported Thursday.

The New Education System Career and Technical Education staffer said he broke down 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,” Williams continued.

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“Our young black men, our young brown men, our young black girls, and our young brown girls… oh, God,” he concluded.

Indeed, students in many areas across the nation have been struggling when it comes to reading and writing.

Breitbart News reported in 2015 that an expert said most college freshmen in America were reading at a 7th grade level, and a study released in 2020 found a historic drop in national reading and math scores among U.S. students since Common Core was adopted.

In the years after the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, students continued struggling with reading and math, according to a U.S. Department of Education assessment reported in January of 2025.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education, per Breitbart News:

Throughout his campaign, Trump pledged to eliminate the Department of Education and send power back to states, communities, and parents. The department was created under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago to help states establish thriving school systems, but the Trump administration argues it has not lived up to its intended purpose.

Earlier on Thursday, the White House noted that the U.S. Department of Education has spent over $3 trillion “with virtually nothing to show for it” since its inception and said spending per pupil has increased more than 245 percent during that period with “virtually no measurable improvement in student achievement.”

In September, UPI reported that math and reading scores among high school students across the nation had sunk to the lowest level in several years.