ICE shooting comes after bombshell probe finds new recruits 'can barely read or write'
1d 18h ago by lemmy.world/u/Redditsux in politics from www.rawstory.com
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
Illiteracy is a huge and intentional crisis in America and is a major reason we're in the mess we're in now. American education has been steadily hollowed out since public schools were integrated and now those chickens are coming home to roost. We are in for a long, bad time of rebuilding I'm afraid.
Gonna be one of those shithole countries trump was talking about first time around
The strange thing is that is has been, for some of us, for a while now. The screws have been tightening my whole life and people don't realize how close to destitution they are until it hits them. It's like the poverty version of "If my neighbor loses their job it's a recession, if I lose my job it's a depression."
“If my neighbor loses their job it’s a recession, if I lose my job it’s a depression.”
True AF. Cannot stand when people calling the shit "recessions". The epitome of denial.
The US has been for most of its existence
As long as MAGA exists, it already is a shithole.
The rest of us already view it as that.
Yet 54% of U.S. adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level
That's nuts.
My kids school promises literacy by 4th grade and hasn't mentioned it since. They're in 8th grade now. It's brutal, I've been working on thier reading level but it's hard when the school isn't making it a priority.
I strongly recommend the podcast Sold a Story about the way reading has been taught in the US. It may help you, believe it or not. It’s also just fascinating. You can find it wherever podcasts are on offer.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I hate podcasts. I just don't connect with them, they're background noise I don't process.
I'm consuming media I would prefer it to be a solo activity, whether that's reading or watching a video. Audio only content is in some nether place where I comprehend nothing.
From a quick skim of the transcript of the first episode, the correct method is phonics. Which thankfully the school and I both teach, they just stop promising to improve the reading level after fourth grade.
I believe they stop working on literacy early on. I taught 10th-grade English in two US states, and over five years of teaching, I maybe had four students reading at grade level. Yet a majority of my students went on to college. How does that work?
The problem is you weren't allowed to fail them for not reading at 10th grade level.
That should be the bar to pass.
Edit: and that should have been the bar the whole way up. Your job should have been to get them from 9 to 10. Give them lower grades from other things, but not reading level.
I absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately, when the system incentivizes keeping bodies in seats for funding, it creates an environment that is not conducive to learning. Admin forced teachers to adjust grades on numerous occasions. And I suspect standardized tests are manipulated before they are sent in. But that can only last for so long, those tests will eventually be computerized.
I don’t think people understand the impact that an entire generation (or generations at this point) lacking a general education and being functionally illiterate is going to have on society.
Colleges will admit anyone, and pass them too, because it's a business...
I don't like listening to podcasts but they provide the full transcript, which was a good read.
isn't ICE where all the proud boys and oath keepers went after "standing back and standing by" and going in and out of jail?
Not taking literacy advice from an organization that considers you illiterate if you are fluent in Spanish but not English, thanks.
Verbal fluency is not literacy.
Por que? How are you going to communicate with officials if you do not speak English? You pretend that there is no reason for this definition.
Translators. Real statistics, not ones from far right think tanks, put illiteracy around 2% in the US.
If you're wondering why, go read the 14th amendment to the United States constitution and think about how it might apply to access to one's government officials.
I feel ya, but the practical reality is that almost all news, all social media, all politics, all technical information, all medical information, and all official documents are presented primarily or only in English.
Yes America doesn't have an official language, but if you had to pick between living here with fluent Spanish and no English, vs. fluent English but no Spanish, which do you think is gonna give you an easier time by far?
I don't find 21% illiteracy hard to believe. I went to a particularly good high school, and even there about 1/5 kids could only read books aloud in a painfully halting, word-by-word manner. And they could either read aloud or understand what they read, not both. And again this was a top-rated high school in the area by far. And just look at the social media trend of flashing words one by one as captions - people pretend it's for those with sound down or hearing difficulties, but the truth is it makes the content vastly more digestible for people who can't pay attention to words but get overwhelmed by the sight of full sentences. So even the people who can read are fantastically bad at it.
you miss my point. it's not 21% illiteracy. it's 21% english illiteracy. the last time i read the statistics on it (iirc it was the 2022 numbers but i don't really care to find them again) 21% were illiterate in english. 2% were not literate in any language. somewhere between 12% and 18% had something between a 6th and 9th grade literacy level in some written language. I'm not arguing whether it is easier to be literate and/or fluent in the lingua franca. i'm just saying you are taking a shortsighted view if you only look at the english language.
No disrespect, but I believe you have missed my point - I understood that you're pointing out that only looking at English literacy is shortsighted. I'm suggesting that English literacy is by far the only significant metric when it comes to someone's ability to function, especially with poltical wisdom, in the United States. It doesn't really matter if half the population is fluent in Vietnamese when all the political debates are in English. This forces them to rely on third-party (questionable) commentary and interpretation for all their news and understanding of the political environment.
If we were talking about a country like Switzerland, where signage, documents, and official material is easily accessible in multiple languages, and where political discussion widely occurs im multiple languages, then I would agree that measuring only German literacy is misleading and not meaningful. But the United States is not that type of country, so it is specifically English literacy that matters, especially when we're talking about being politically informed.
TLDR; if I speak fluent Latin, but no other languages, and I live in Kentucky, it is pretty fair to describe me as illiterate. The literacy I do possess functionally does not exist.
Sorry idr if this from source article or one linked in it:
Training was slashed from 16 weeks to six, with sit-ups eliminated because recruits couldn't handle them.
These nazis are so fucking pathetic in every conceivable way lol
it would be so much funnier if they weren't destroying lives and killing people
But we can't have women in 'men's jobs' because they can't meet the physical requirements...
In most states hairdressers need more training than that.
In my state the license to become a hair stylist is 7-8 times as long as it takes to become an ICE agent. It also takes about half as long to become a cop instead of a hair stylist. Which begs the should hair stylist get qualified/absolute immunity?
You need a licence to cut hair???
How else are you going to legislate your competition away?
So we fired hundreds of thousands of competent civil servants, including highly specialized scientists and doctors, and hired these stupid fucking losers?
Awesome. Glad that waste, fraud, and abuse is gone I guess.
I mean we don't have to worry about them writing bad checks at least
These special cases won't write anything by hand, but their guns can do a little something, unfortunately.
Yeah, who uses checks anymore?
The shooter is a 10+ year veteran of the agency. ICE has always been bad and filled with violent nationalists.
Also, this is far more damning of our education system. It should be difficult to find and recruit that many illiterate people.
"The explosive Daily Mail report..."
Not to defend ICE or nothin', but Daily Fail isn't exactly known for accurate journalism...
I've always called it the Daily Heil.
They kinda liked the Nazis.
"Kina liked" as in openly promoted.
Thanks, that mnemonic device will help since I always seem to forget between them, SkyNews, and The Telegraph which one is the sketchiest source of info lol
On the other hand, if even the Daily Mail with their pretty prominent right leaning bias is putting out this report, I find that more alarming than the same report coming from, say NYT.
Yeah, that made me do a doubletake too lol
All I could think of
My thought went to "This particular individual is unscannable" cops from Idiocracy. Reality is curving towards the Judge-verse but not the fun parts.
Assuming you're talking about the Judge Dredd universe, what fun parts?
Neh, Mike Judge, creator of both KOTH and Idiocracy.
Ohh, that's quite different.
It's gotta be the slow motion drugs, cuz I know Rob Schneider isn't filed under "the fun part."
Obligatory:
LAWWWWWWW
Perfection.
They offered lots of money to join ICE to the worst people. Why is this surprising? They wanted thugs, they got thugs, not Harvard grads.
"This isn't the department of baking cookies," one source said. "This is the Department of Homeland Security, where you can be deported from the country. And we're now employing people who are not equipped to tie their own shoelaces”
And giving them firearms…
THAT is an American tradition.
For a country as obsessed with firearms as the USA the level of knowledge on how to use them safely is shockingly low.
That's what happens when gun ownership is a right. It doesn't matter how fucking stupid, irresponsible, or psychopathic you are, you still get access to firearms and there's no pressure to learn how to handle them safely.
And saying everyone should have a class on it is called tyranny because who cares about a three year old grabbing a gun from between the couch cushions.
I mean, if you can read and write, you can probably get a real job.
Being a pedophile protector isn't a real job. It's a temporary job where you either get killed, arrested, or commit suicide.
Damn, if only they were qualified, surely things would be better. Sorry, seriously who gives a shit at this point, these people are all nazi scum, i don't care if they are fat and cannot read, the issue is what they are doing and what they believe.
To boot, sex harassment accusations emerged, with a source describing to the Daily Mail predatory behavior during training.
I went to nazi boot camp and they guys there were all nazis
shocker
USA recreating Hitlers SA "Brownshirts"
"Hitler also relied on terror to achieve his goals. Lured by the wages, a feeling of comradeship, and the striking uniforms, tens of thousands of young jobless men put on the brown shirts and high leather boots of the Nazi Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilungen). Called the SA, these auxiliary policemen took to the streets to beat up and kill some opponents of the Nazi regime. "
These ICE thugs and their direct leaders should also turn a few more pages in a history book to find out what Hitler did to the SA brownshirts:
"Night of the Long Knives, in German history, purge of Nazi leaders by Adolf Hitler on June 30, 1934. Fearing that the paramilitary SA had become too powerful, Hitler ordered his elite SS guards to murder the organization’s leaders, including Ernst Röhm. Also killed that night were hundreds of other perceived opponents of Hitler."
high school grads who can "barely read or write"
'Merica.
Looks like the decades-long reputation of educational institutions is finally crumbling and Americans will at last be forced to suffer through the same "Back in my country, I was doctor. But since my degree is considered no good here, now we run a convenience store" cliche.
I never in my life would have imagined that Idiocracy Movie would be used as a playbook to USA politics.
Idiocracy on the front and cyberpunk in the back.
I would still vote for Kamacho over Trump or any other conservative any day. Kamacho valued intelligence and worked for the people.
Considering all the dystopian models the USA is trying out, Idiocracy doesn't seem that bad in comparison.
The trigger men for the killing fields of Cambodia and the Tiananmen Square Massacre were illiterate peasants from rural areas...
Why is that a bombshell? Most of these recruits probably came from terrorist cells like the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers and other Nazi groups.
I mean... a good chunk of the US (and apparently also at least Western Europe) can't read or write. That is a sadly normal problem at this point. And the rest? We actively teach kids to pattern match and "guess" what the other words are from the ones they recognize. Think about that the next time it is painfully obvious that someone replying to you didn't read what you actually said.
A friend who teaches middle school has come to accept that a good chunk of why their students (and presumably the adult populace) flock to "AI Assistants" is that it is literally giving them text to speech and putting things into a format they understand. Which... combined with the tendency towards hallucination and overly praising the user is fucking horrifying.
We actively teach kids to pattern match and “guess” what the other words are from the ones they recognize.
Unless you're talking about something totally different, that just sounds like using roots and context clues – a normal, healthy, and constructive way of understanding language.
No. They are talking about how phonics and “sounding out” words wasn’t taught for a while. It was a very damaging fad in academics. It produced a generation of kids who cannot read and cannot spell.
Very similar to what happened with “new math” mess of the 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math
For meaning? Yes. For the actual words being written? No
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading is from the perspective of someone comparing it to their own reading disability that has plagued them throughout life.
The alarming stat is that 21% of American adults are functionally illiterate, meaning they unable to complete basic reading tasks.
Over half of the adults read below sixth grade level.
About 130 million U.S. adults (54% of those aged 16–74) read below a sixth-grade level, according to modeled estimates.
https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-facts/
We actively teach kids to pattern match and "guess" what the other words are from the ones they recognize.
Yes, I call that learning to read. Upside down and without vision correction, sometimes, because you are pretending to be someone without glasses, this is a profoundly useful skill. But also yes, just learning to read is you know, good.
I like what you wrote and it also gave me a chuckle.
We are so fucked.
Sorry, but yeah you are all fucked unless you do something now.
But they can eat.
Some real Meal Team Six holding the thin crust line.
Gravy Seals
Meal Team Six made my day. Cannot stop laughing when looking at this dude.
That's hardly an argument in case of US. Afteral folks out there aren't sharpest pencils...
On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
What portion of that 21% considered illiterate are actually literate, but just not in English. I'm sure there are many who grew up in other countries and moved here but never bothered properly learning English. Like that would be like saying 1 in 5 people cannot use a phone, because surely they have to be able to read to know how to sign in to websites and search things, and I find it hard to believe that many Americans can't use a cell phone
Spanish-speaking immigrants are often also illiterate in Spanish. It's a big challenge for educators. My kids are bilingual (not in Spanish) and their teachers perceived that as a problem. It wasn't.
And there are other immigrants who are better educated and more fluent in English than 99% of Americans.
And there are degrees of literacy. All of that 21% are not fully illiterate, they're below a standard that this institute defined. Still shameful, but not catastrophic.
You'd have to ask the literacy institute...
It looks like around one third of the illiterate group was not born in the U.S, so I would guess it's somewhere around there. That still means over half of the illiterate group was born and raised in the U.S, which to me can only be a fault of education whether they're fluent in other languages or not.
Sounds like the target audience of MAGA
Ding ding ding! If you don’t educate your populace, they are much easier to control and manipulate. Can’t read or write? Here’s a $50k sign up bonus to do what we tell you and not ask questions.
There's a price on everything if you tolerate currency and land deeding.
I've said this before and I'll say it again... I remember reading reports during the election campaign where Trump rallies had sign-up tables for those attending could sign up for jobs with the federal government. Given that many people attending were semi-illiterate white supremacist gun nuts, it's logical to assume this is where they found a ton of these new ICE 'agents'.
So standard American cops are ICE. Tracks.
So they couldn't graduate from 6th grade?
Well doesn't this all sound like 1932 all over again.
I hope Germany can save us. I wish that was a joke.
The South Park episode about ICE recruiting was hilarious.
If you need a job, it's a job to have!
Gotta get my "nut". 🙄
So educated people AREN'T looking for jobs that egregiously violate everything law enforcement is supposed to be? Color me surprised.
They're not sending their best...
I think they are...
I kinda want to sign up for ICE just to record and leak everything that goes on. I don't think I'd be able to stomach a second of being around these Nazis though.
There must be at least some samaritans that joined with this plan in mind. I regret to think that there will never be a way of sorting them from the bastions of evil when they're brought to courts though.
Yeah that was one of my fears. Not the courts necessarily, I think you could put together a good defense if you worked with a reputable reporter to leak. Its more I would feel so ashamed if someone I knew saw me suited up on the news. Even if I wasn't the one busting skulls.
Resistance comes in many forms and I like that you're considering what actions you can take
Prob aren’t gonna be considered unless you have swastikas or SS tattooed on yourself somewhere
Didn't consider that. I could not in good conscience do that. I'd go as far as a Punisher tatoo, they love that shit too.
I'd love to see Borat join or something like that lol
That would be epic.
That is why that crowd and police like AI so much to offload writing and thinking for them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjGHf7OvglM
Ooh he just did a new one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El0CLduLgew
Then why are we paying them signing bonuses that are more than many people's yearly salaries?!
Deport them they can't speak English. That's how it's supposed to work right?
/s
Except to /s
Well yeah, the same guy nearly got run over twice. That's dumb
Maybe he should stop standing in front of vehicles that have frantic drivers being harassed by ICE because they are suspected of existing.
I mean it work in an industry with a lot of dumb people and even we don't need to educate people, that if the engine is running don't stand in front or behind the vehicle
Apparently a group of armed men were shouting conflicting orders as well. She was complying to one, just not the murderous one.
I don't need to read or write
Just show me who to fight
McNamara wasn't expecting that his plan to recruit idiots will work but against his fellow Americans! What an irony!
Lumpen elements
Omg 😱 no way!!! /s
I think the only requirement they need is to be able to tell if someone "looks foreign"
Okay, but the shooter had working at ICE for 10 years.
Y'all got a suitable amount of Illiteratophobia and ilithiophobia now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGex0kLgNok [Jam: Thick People ("Yes I know what a parking meters are."]
and they're armed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7w7_zStmIA [Idiocracy: Pepper Spray "What?"]
Prole "Hey Virtual Buddy, is this because ICE agent applicants are especially ignorant, or is this because the pool they are taken from is generally ignorant, or what?"
Virtual Buddy "That's a fascinating question! Ice is a wonderful, use it to cool your drinks on a hot summer day! You can purchase ice for 1.99 a bag, and delivery is free! I've placed an order for you. I love you."