Is ‘America250’ and ‘Freedom 250’ the same thing?

America250 is the national, nonpartisan effort to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Congress created the Semiquincentennial Commission in 2016 to plan the celebrations, and the America250 organization is now working with states, museums, local groups and nonprofits on a slate of events meant to help Americans reflect on the nation’s past, celebrate its present and plan for the future.

Freedom 250 is a White House-led initiative to spark interest and create officially sanctioned events related to America’s Semisesquicentennial celebration.

Damon C. Williams is a Philadelphia-based journalist reporting on trending, breaking and service-related topics across the Mid-Atlantic region for the USA Today Network. 

To his credit, Gov. Matt Meyer has acknowledged the crisis. He declared a literacy emergency, launched the Delaware Early Literacy Plan, and backed new reading funding. Those are real steps. But Delaware has seen plans before, and the state’s own education leadership concedes that scores remain essentially flat. A one-point bump is not a turnaround. It is a rounding error.

Delaware does not lack plans. It lacks consequences.

Mississippi and Louisiana have shown the country what serious reform looks like. Mississippi climbed from 49th in fourth-grade reading in 2013 to the top 10 by 2024 — while spending less per student than Delaware. Louisiana went from last in 2019 to 16th in five years, and is the only state to fully recover from pandemic learning loss and surpass pre-pandemic scores. They aligned teacher training to the science of reading, adopted strong instructional materials, built transparent accountability and stopped pretending it was compassion to promote children who could not read.

The lesson is not about better messaging. It is about better systems, better measurement, the political will to keep going when resistance starts and more engaged business leaders.

Delaware’s stated goal is to raise third-grade reading proficiency from 38% to 53% by 2028. Fine. Who owns that number? Who is responsible for hitting it? What happens if they miss?

A target without a consequence is not accountability. It is public relations.

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Will Delaware leaders commit to helping our children?

So here is a direct question for every governor, every legislator and every elected official whose name appears on a ballot: Will you stake your career on this? Will you commit, publicly and on the record, to being judged by whether Delaware’s children are measurably better off in eight years?

If that sounds like too much, consider what eight years means for a child. A third grader today who cannot read on grade level will be entering eleventh grade in 2033 — carrying the same deficit, the same narrowed future the data already predicts. Eight years is not an abstraction. It is the entire arc of a young person’s formative education.

Real accountability means public goals, quarterly reporting, named decision-makers and consequences for failure. It means a governor and legislature willing to say: here is the number, here is who owns it, here is how we will report it, here is what happens if we fail.

Mississippi was the poorest state in America. It decided that was not an excuse. Delaware is wealthier, smaller and easier to govern. We have even less excuse.

The excuses are exhausted. Delaware deserves better.  

Ben duPont is a longtime Delawarean, a venture capitalist and a philanthropist. State Sen. Darius Brown represents the Second Senate District, which includes New Castle, Wilmington and Edgemoor.