What to know
- Houston teacher Darius Williams broke down after some of his senior students struggled to complete a sentence despite receiving a model, sentence starters, and guidance.
- Toronto educator Matthew R. Morris says students do not reach high school with literacy gaps overnight, describing the issue as a systemic problem that develops “one grade at a time.”
- He cautions against assuming young people are less intelligent, noting that many demonstrate strong reasoning and communication skills even when they struggle with traditional written work.
- Ontario and Canadian assessment data show persistent literacy gaps, but do not support broadly characterizing today’s students as a generation that cannot read or write.
- Morris argues that social media is also a form of literacy and says schools should combine traditional reading and writing with the ways young people communicate today.
A Texas high school teacher’s emotional video about students struggling to read and write has sparked a broader conversation about youth literacy, including whether the same concerns exist in Canada.
Darius Williams, a teacher at Wheatley High School in the Houston Independent School District, broke down while describing a reading and writing exercise he gave his senior students on the second day of classes.
Williams said the students were given two paragraphs to read and asked to complete one sentence using a model and sentence starters he had provided.
“These are 17- and 18-year-old kids, and they couldn’t fill in four words. Four words,” Williams said in the video.
“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.”
Williams said the students could reason and verbally defend their ideas but struggled to apply those same skills to a written text.
“This is only day two, and I have seniors who simply cannot read and seniors who cannot write,” he said. “Our young Black men, our young brown men, our young Black girls and our young brown girls.”
Williams’ account has since drawn widespread attention online, with some viewers pointing to social media, technology and gaps within the education system. Others questioned whether an experience in an American classroom was relevant to Canadian students.
Toronto-based educator and author Matthew R. Morris, however, says Canadians should not dismiss the conversation entirely — although he believes it requires more nuance.
“He’s right, but I see the side of it being misguided as well,” Morris, the author of Black Boys Like Me, told Now Toronto.
“In the video, he talks about how his 11th- and 12th-graders can’t read and can’t write, but at the same time, they have the capacity to reason, to make logical arguments and to have dialogue verbally.”
Students do not fall behind overnight
Morris said Williams’ experience may reflect an acute problem in his classroom, but students do not suddenly reach their final years of high school without literacy skills.
“This shows that, yeah, there is a problem clearly in his class, right? And we may extend it to a generational or a geographical, or in this case, a U.S.-Canada argument. And studies do show that there is a decline amongst Black and Brown students when it comes to literacy.”
“These students don’t get there overnight. This decline happens one grade at a time,” he explained.
Although Morris did not teach high school, he previously worked with Grade 7 and 8 students. He cautioned against turning legitimate concerns about reading and writing into another argument that today’s youth are less intelligent than previous generations.
“This is not a new argument,” Morris said, pointing to books and historical commentary that have repeatedly characterized younger generations as intellectually unprepared.
“Inherent in this argument of these kids can’t read and write is this fallacy that these generations are inferior, and it’s not necessarily true.”
He said the risk becomes greater when the conversation focuses specifically on Black and brown students, who have historically faced assumptions about their intelligence and abilities.
“We’re not talking about a question of intelligence,” Morris said. “We’re having a public debate about literacy and what literacy looks like.”
The concern is not entirely foreign to Canada. The latest EQAO results show that 74 per cent of English-language Grade 3 students in Ontario met the provincial reading standard during the 2024-25 school year, while 65 per cent met the writing standard.
The results improved by Grade 6, when 86 per cent met the reading standard and 85 per cent met the writing standard. Meanwhile, the latest Pan-Canadian Assessment Program, released in January, found that Grade 8 reading scores across Canada increased by five points compared with the adjusted 2010 baseline. Ontario students recorded the highest average reading score in the country.
These broader assessments are not directly comparable to Williams’ experience with one group of students. However, they suggest that while literacy gaps persist, the evidence does not support characterizing an entire generation as unable to read or write.
Could this be the most literate generation?
Social media was among the most common explanations offered beneath Williams’ video, but Morris believes technology’s role is more complicated than simply distracting students from books.
“Of course, social media has something to do with it if there’s statistical evidence of decline in traditional literacy,” Morris said. “But at the same time, there’s a generation of children that are born with a tablet in front of them by the age of two or three.”
Young people are constantly reading captions, writing messages and communicating with their peers online, Morris explained. Those activities may not resemble the essays and novels traditionally associated with literacy, but they still require students to read, interpret information and express ideas.
“The argument could be made that, in fact, they are one of, if not the most literate generation of the past 40 or 50 years,” he said.
“I’m not saying that it’s true. I’m just saying that it’s disingenuous to say that they’re not literate when they engage in forms of literacy through social media on a daily basis, but perhaps we don’t recognise it as such.”
That does not mean traditional reading and writing skills should be abandoned. Morris said students need early intervention, beginning in kindergarten and Grade 1, along with support from educators, families, communities and the wider school system.
He believes education must preserve essential communication skills while recognizing that the ways young people read, write and share ideas continue to evolve.
“We might need to take a step back and look at what we consider literacy,” Morris said.
“Blend traditional literacy with nuanced and contemporary literacy. Hold on to the most important parts of communication, because ideally that’s what we are striving for, but at the same time, ensure that we are teaching students in a way that is engaging, relevant and contemporary to them.”
