Even if literacy is adjudicated as a fundamental human right,
https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2019/06/07/dana-nessel-education-michigan/1379493001/
there’s a painfully obvious gap between teaching it and the outcome.
Pearl-clutchers’ frustrations will bleed into over-generalized and unenforceable laws just as ineffective as most laws, and a concerned public can sigh some relief, clear its conscience, and deceive itself that there’s another problem solved. Long before Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s ‘tangle of pathology’ and ‘benign neglect’, long after Rudolf Flesch’s ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’ and Jonathan Kozol’s ‘Shame of a Nation’, the corrective cure has always been and will always be the ability to read.
Ambition cannot be legislated. Mandating by fiat that kids read well is as hopelessly will ‘o the wisp as the weather in Camelot, where “The crown has made it clear the climate must be perfect all the year.”
Legislating literacy is futility. But it gives a person pause. As in Camelot, those are the legal laws.