Why You Can Stop Crying About the 'Literacy Crisis,' Blacksplained by Dr. Ahmad R. Washington

Are we actually in a literacy crisis? Or is the hand-wringing about this so-called “literacy crisis” about who gets to determine the books and the newspapers and the stories that are deemed “serious”?I knew just the person to ask.Dr. Ahmad R. Washington is the department chair and an associate professor in the Department of Counseling and Human Development at the University of Louisville. Besides winning a slew of awards for his research on using hip-hop as a tool for counseling and educating Black males, he was inducted into the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars and served as an inaugural antiracism commissioner for the American Counseling Association, the largest organization for professional counselors in the world.His research explores multicultural school counseling and anti-Blackness in education and the helping professions. And since he’s responsible for educating the people who become teachers, counselors, and—this is the important part—the people who determine what is worthy of learning, how we develop students, and how we determine if we’re doing it right, who better to Blacksplain what we get wrong about America’s literacy crisis?