A senior at Preparatory Charter High School in South Philadelphia walked through his school with an index card and asked classmates to read a single sentence aloud: “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.” Many could not. One openly said she did not know how to read.
The clip, posted by @whatthevek on April 28, has been viewed more than 15 million times on TikTok. A second installment, with the sentence “The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor’s schedule,” has crossed 2 million views. Yahoo News reports the creator maintains a high GPA and could read and comprehend the sentence himself.
Social media posts circulated claiming the school was pursuing expulsion, banning him from prom, and blocking him from walking at graduation. The school has pushed back. In a statement to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Prep Charter said “the student in question is not facing expulsion” and called the videos “misleading and unfair,” adding that the footage “does not accurately reflect our school community or the values we strive to uphold every day.”
I do not know what is actually happening behind the scenes, and I am not going to assume the worst from secondhand social posts. I do hope the harshest of those rumors are not true. Wherever this lands, one position is firm: this student should not be expelled, banned from prom, or blocked from walking at graduation for asking his classmates to read a sentence.
And — holding both things at once — there is a real opportunity here that should not be wasted.
There is a teachable moment inside the videos themselves: about the ethics of filming peers, even peers who appear to agree in the moment, when those peers may be exposed in ways they did not fully anticipate; about how we shame and how we don’t; about the difference between exposing a system and exposing a child. A wise school community — students, families, and staff together — could turn this into an honest conversation about literacy, dignity, and the responsibilities that come with a platform. That would be a real preparatory education. Threatening or shaming a young person — including peer-to-peer shaming — is not. Dismissing the footage without a serious reckoning on reading is not either.
The clip is sad. It is also not surprising.
Americans, by and large, are not literate to optimal levels. On the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, only 31% of fourth graders performed at or above NAEP Proficient in reading, and 40% scored below NAEP Basic — the highest below-basic share since the assessment began. The 2024 results for high school seniors were equally grim: a record-high share of the Class of 2024 scored “below basic” in reading. Among adults, the most recent international skills survey found 28% of U.S. adults scored at or below Level 1 literacy, struggling with everyday reading tasks.
Far too many people would rather run from those numbers than reckon with them. They want assessments quieted, accountability blurred, and a feel-good slogan to “support schools” that costs them nothing to say. Supporting children is not a slogan. Supporting children means collective accountability — politicians, teacher and principal preparation programs, school boards, superintendents, and the adults who actually lead classrooms and buildings. All of them. At the same time. Out loud.
I doubt this senior knew how viral his videos would go. He probably did not anticipate 15 million views, national news cycles, or the weight of a citywide debate landing on his shoulders. What he did, knowingly or not, was lay bare a gut-wrenching open secret — something a lot of adults already knew and a lot of others did not want to hear. Punishing the messenger, or quietly dismissing what he showed us, is the opposite of accountability. It is the system protecting itself from the children it has failed. To his credit, he has since posted a Part 3 titled “There Is Hope,” and that is the spirit this moment deserves from every adult in the building, too.
Before any more adults rush to discipline messengers or dismiss data, let me say plainly how I think I became literate. Because none of it was an accident, and none of it is a mystery we cannot reproduce.
Lessons From a Porch in West Philly
Long before any classroom, there was a porch.
It was the indoor porch at my father’s cousin’s house, and on that porch Dr. Suzette Abdul-Hakim taught a small group of us how to read. We sounded out letters. We clapped syllables. We learned that the word “cat” was not a picture or a guess, but three distinct sounds you could hold in your mouth and put back together. Phonemic awareness, before I knew the term for it. Phonics, before I knew there was a debate about it.
My cousins Jalilah, Kareemah, and Sharieah were there. So were other neighborhood kids. Dr. Abdul-Hakim never made it feel like school. She made it feel like a gift the grown-ups around us had decided we were worth. I will never forget those lessons. They were the foundation of everything that came after.
That porch is one of the first reasons I am literate.
Before that porch became a classroom, I was also a ‘Get Set‘ child — the Philadelphia early childhood program that, alongside Head Start and Follow Through, served generations of Black and Brown children in this city. The grown-ups in those rooms were doing the same work as the grown-ups on the porch, with fewer headlines and the same conviction: lay the foundation early, take the children seriously, and refuse to send them out into the world unready.
And Mama did not stop at the schools that already existed. Our family’s masjid was Masjid Mujahideen, and at one point my Mama looked around and decided it was unacceptable that it was tending to the spiritual needs of adults while the children went without an institution of their own. So she demanded that Masjid Mujahideen start a school. Her argument was simple and uncompromising: how can you claim to address the spiritual needs of adults and ignore the children? That, in her worldview, was an incomplete act — paramount to blasphemous. A people serious about its faith has to be just as serious about its young.
The school happened. And the teachers at that school remain lifelong heroes, mentors, and north stars of mine — the late, great Sister Shakurah Abdul-Samad, Sister Ambra Hook, Brother Luqman Mackey, and, of course, my Mama.
What Nidhamu Sasa Demanded of Us
The next chapter has a name too: Nidhamu Sasa, the independent Black institution that shaped my elementary years and the values I still organize my life around.
At Nidhamu Sasa, every single month, every child was responsible for an independent book report and an independent science project. Every month. Not as enrichment. Not as extra credit. As the floor. We presented our work to our peers, defended our thinking, took questions, took critique. And this was on top of the volume of reading we did inside class every day.
Our curriculum as young elementary school kids was not thin. Political science, martial arts theory, geography, history, science, writing — these were mainstays, not electives. We were trusted with rigorous content and expected to rise to it.
Baba Changa, our Vita Saana (physical education) teacher among many other things, used to remind us constantly: if you are going to speak the truth, you are going to have to defend the truth too. He was not only talking about defending it physically. He was talking about defending it intellectually. That is why Nidhamu Sasa was so insistent that we be able to communicate — verbally and in writing — clearly, persuasively, definitively, and effectively. Literacy at Nidhamu Sasa was never just decoding. It was the equipment you needed to stand on truth and hold your ground when it was challenged.
The learning did not stop when school did. Nidhamu Sasa stayed open during the summer for camp, where we trained physically and mentally. And we read all summer — even on the long drives to and from Mullins, South Carolina, on our yearly summer trips to visit my stepfather’s family. Books in the car. Books on the porch down South. Books waiting at home when we got back. There was no “off season” on our minds.
That kind of consistent, year-round, high-expectation, high-rigor practice is far closer to what actually turned around two Philadelphia schools later in my career than any of the shortcuts I keep hearing people propose. Low expectations, low rigor, and a low understanding of how to teach and motivate children will be the death of us all.
We have to interrupt the distractions. The whole village has to help young people build positive racial identities, a firm sense of purpose even when they don’t yet know exactly where they are headed, and a desire to be on a lifelong learning journey — cradle to grave — while cultivating their creativity along the way. This is bigger than any one of us. It will only be answered by all of us.
Developing a positive racial identity in an anti-Black world is paramount. So is accurate history, taught honestly. So is the celebration of Black creativity and the deliberate development of leadership in young people. None of those are separable from literacy. A child who can read but cannot see herself in the canon will still be diminished. A child who can name her people’s history but cannot decode a paragraph will still be locked out. We have to do both, fully, at the same time.
That belief showed up in real budget moments. When we lost $1 million from our school budget, we refused to cut the social worker, the writing class, the science class, the art teacher, or the music teacher. Class sizes ballooned enough to make me cry. But the bones of the program remained. I was dismayed to watch peers in other schools cut those same supports — the very things their children most needed — as if they were optional. They were never optional.
It Takes a Village
Literacy did not stop at the school door, and it did not start there either. My grandfather got us subscriptions to Highlights, National Geographic, and my absolute favorite, Ranger Rick. Those magazines were not props. They were read, traded, dog-eared, returned to.
We also lived at the library. So much so that our neighborhood librarian, Audrey Murrell Roll — the Wynnefield branch librarian for years — was a guest at my sister Nzinga’s baby shower and my sister Haajar’s wedding. That is what it looks like when literacy experts are embedded in a community: the social fabric tightens around them, and they around it. She was part of that fabric, part of our network, and part of my Mama’s black-belt-level revolutionary team.
My Mama did not view the library as a backup or an enrichment stop. She viewed Ms. Roll as an essential partner in her mission to raise readers. That is the disposition I wish more parents and more institutions held: the librarian is not an afterthought. The librarian is a co-conspirator.
This is what our people have always called alloparenting — the practice of aunties, uncles, grandparents, neighbors, librarians, and teachers helping to raise, protect, and develop children alongside their parents. “All the children are ours” is not just a slogan in Black tradition. It is a centuries-old organizing principle, rooted in African kinship networks and sharpened in this country by the necessity of keeping our children alive and whole.
Black tradition is collectivist. The dominant American story is individualist. The modern “don’t say nothing to my child” posture is not consistent with Black culture. It is closer to white supremacy’s nuclear-family individualism than to anything our ancestors practiced, and it has to be rejected. We need more elders correcting, more neighbors noticing, more librarians and teachers and play-cousins reading with our children — not fewer.
And as my sister Nzinga has said, the child benefits, the parents benefit from the support, and so does the adult doing the alloparenting. Childless adults are still effective and purposeful beings when it comes to raising the next generation. They get a chance to nurture and develop that part of themselves — the part that pours into a child, that teaches, that protects, that reads aloud, that shows up. Raising children is not a side gig of the biological parents. It is a public good and a personal calling, available to everyone willing to step in.
For most of my childhood between ages one and ten, we did not have a TV. When we did, what we watched was very carefully curated. We were given books, Legos, and animal figurines as rewards and gifts. The message was consistent across porch, school, library, and home: your mind is the thing being built here.
That message lined up with what years of evidence and reporting have since made plain. Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story,” investigation walks through how a generation of children were taught to guess at words instead of decode them, and how a whole industry sold that approach to schools long after cognitive scientists had shown it didn’t work.
Many of those children were never taught the specific skills good readers need. Chemistry teacher Lindsay Turk made a similar point years ago in a piece titled “It’s OK To Be Illiterate As Long As You Are ‘Woke’”, arguing that too many teacher-prep programs spent more time on theory than on the actual mechanics of teaching a child to read. That is not a mystery. That is a choice the system made and is still working to undo.
The Right2Read Philly campaign, which has reached 100,000 families across the city through partnerships including the Center for Black Educator Development’s Freedom Schools Literacy Academy, gets this right: literacy is built through joyful, evidence-based interactions across home, neighborhood, and school. SEPTA buses, double-dutch ropes, alphabet songs, sing-alongs, signs, books in hands. The same kind of saturation my grandfather understood instinctively when he renewed those magazine subscriptions year after year.
Learning Spaces Filled with Noise
Now picture a child today trying to learn at a desk that holds — simultaneously — a record player, a TV, a radio, a computer, a video player, and an open notebook. Then ask that child to focus.
That is what a smartphone in a classroom is. That is what a smartphone in a child’s pocket is during a lesson on fractions or Animal Farm, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, A Soldier’s Story, or The Man Who Cried I Am.
Around the country, districts are now moving to ban or restrict smartphones in schools. We were doing this more than a decade ago because the struggle was already obvious to anyone paying attention to what kids were actually doing with their hands and eyes during instruction. Plenty of educators called us draconian. If anything, knowing what we know now about attention, mental health, and learning loss, my younger self should have been more resistant to phones in school, not less.
Watching these videos go viral of our young people struggling to read, and witnessing the discourse it spawned is both painful and a powerful reminder. Stay tuned for part two, where we can dive into what accountability looks like and where we go from here…
