Reading is Everything

For 40 years, my mother was a remedial reading teacher – over time also teaching lower grades and art – in Maine. She loved reading, teaching, and kids. She knew: A child who cannot read is lost.

Yet here we are, the 2025 “national report card” (NAEP) showing reading scores facing minimal recovery (or none) after the disaster of COVID shutdowns. In some states, mental health and education losses are accelerating and radiating, growing worse, compounding over time.

One such state is Maine. While 13 states showed marginal reading improvement, Maine is not one of them. There, 75 percent of 4th graders cannot read, and 74 percent fail in basic math. Adding to this retreat in education is a lack of motivation for teachers, poor pay, mounting mental and physical health access issues, and a preoccupation with one-party Democrat leadership with activism and indoctrination.

Maine is the posterchild for leftist failure, a Democrat indifference to policies objectively failing, and how bad blue states get. Beyond public corruption and Medicaid fraud, the state schools lag badly.

Families are moving out, homeschooling, and going private, as Democrats bring thousands of illegal aliens into the state – presumably for illegal voting. 7,200 Maine students cannot speak English, with the leading languages being Spanish, Somali, Chinese, and African dialects. This erodes quality.

Like other blue states, Maine is creating disincentives for success, not the other way around. The education scores, despite record spending, are the worst in 30 years. Record low outcomes are matched by low teacher morale and pay, failing student discipline – but record union dues and pay.

In these radical, one-party Democrat states, the world is inverted, upside down– traditional, objective measures of success, reading and math to labor, addiction to trafficking, illegal alien dependence to record numbers of dead children in state custody, represent a total failure.

If a circle can be joined at any point along the circle, these failures – overtaxing, overspending, overregulation, pro-drug, pro-illegal, radical social policies – can be said to start in schools.

If a child is not educated – for any reason – much less affirmatively misled or miseducated, put in harm’s way, made anxious, fearful, given no expectations, hard work but allowed excuses, made dependent, no critical thinking or life skills, soon parents are the same, the state is in radical decline.

Nothing foretells this more than – the inability to read. Without that skill, students get into a vicious cycle of frustration, crime, dependence, abuse, poverty, and more of the same. Rather than a “virtuous cycle” – education, jobs, home, upward mobility, health, good parenting, and independence. The state slides toward lawlessness and crime, not lawfulness and productivity.

Worse, we only get one childhood. If someone cannot read by 4^th grade, do basic math by 8^th, they do not get to go back to elementary school at 40. They are put on a track of misery, kept there, and exploited by Democrats who profit from their misery.

What is the alternative – in any of these failing Democrat states, from Minnesota to Maine? It is ending failure, ending public corruption, and stopping the miseducation and non-education of our children. It is restoring objectivity, parental and individual rights, the rule of law, pro-family norms, high expectations, and accountability at all levels, merit-based outcomes in government, society, and schools.

At root, that also means – it must mean – restoring real learning, reading, writing, math, sciences, history, trades, and the relationship between these objective outcomes and good jobs.

To many, this will sound like common sense. It is. It flies in the face of those who excuse failure, refuse to acknowledge what they have done to our kids – pushing boys into girls’ showers and dead ends with indoctrination and conformity, failure and mediocrity over basic life skills for success.

Maine is just one of the blue states failing miserably, but a good example of socialism’s dark end. Here, mental health crises, depression, anxiety, addiction, and homelessness perpetuate each other. Lack of fiscal management, overspending, taxing, and regulations, no housing, jobs, lack of healthcare, and falling public schools and safety are replacing what a strong civic structure was.

But reading – simple as it sounds – is foundational. If that failure is not recovered in Maine and nationally, darker times await. This mid-term cycle is when this is reversed, or the slide accelerates. We cannot let this become the “new normal.” We must remove the Democrats who failed us.

I am reminded of a quote by Carl Sagan: “The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.” In other words, teach kids to read, and we will survive; don’t, and we won’t.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!