[WS:] The problem is that most US public schools do not try to develop broad cognitive skills (of which reading is only one.) Instead they teach to standardized multiple choice test that you can pass without having good reading comprehension and without being able to think in way that is typically required in academic work.
The fundamental goal of standardized multiple choice testing in the US it to produce "normal distribution" of scores, i.e. some below the mean, many within the mid-range and some well above the mean. To achieve this goal, standardized multiple choice testing asks students to solve cognitively trivial tasks (requiring 6th grade analytic skills), but subject to artificial time pressure (e.g. 30 minutes). Although the tasks themselves could be solved by any average student, not everyone can solve all of them within the allotted time. Only a few people trained in test taking can accomplish this. If you try to solve the tasks instead of speed-guessing the right answer, you lost. This is how the "Bell curve" is produced.
The criminality of this exercise lies in the fact that in order to achieve a score "above the curve" you have to take special test taking training which cost a lot of money. Hence the correlation between parental income and high scores on standardized tests. After the passage of No Child Left Behind, which threatened teacher job security if students do not attain certain scores on multiple choice testing, every public school started doing what the rich kids did before - teach to the standardized test and dump all other teaching activities.
So if students do not know how to think for themselves, write, read, solve problems etc. - thank standardized testing and legal mandates that effectively require teaching to such tests. In other words, thank politicians, and organic intellectuals of the capital who created this monstrous testing-industrial complex.
Wojtek