Darius Cooks has a point about America’s literacy crisis. The internet isn’t sure he should be the one making it
TheGrio...
Online food personality Darius Cooks Williams speaks out about America’s literacy crisis after two days in the classroom.
Darius Cooks has resurfaced with an, albeit unlikely, very good point.
The online food personality and restaurateur-turned-teacher, whose real name is Darius Williams, shared a video on his Threads on Tuesday, urgently and tearfully addressing the literacy crisis plaguing America after reaching day two of the school year at his high school, and the seniors are finding reading and writing challenging.
In the video, he explains he was just in a three-hour class with 17- and 18-year-olds when they were unable to complete an assignment that involved them filling in four words after reading two paragraphs.
“I literally broke down in the middle of class,” he said. “We annotated together. I gave them the answers before we even had the problem, and they couldn’t do it.”
He continued, “I don’t know. I simply don’t know where the problem is. This is only day two, and I have seniors who simply cannot read, and seniors [that] cannot write. They cannot write. They can’t reason.”
The educator added, “They have the ability to defend their reasoning, if it’s talking to their homeboy, but applying that to a written text, two paragraphs, they couldn’t do it. Our young Black men, our young brown men, our young Black girls, and our young brown girls. Oh, God.”
In the caption, he wrote, “I thought long and hard about posting this. But we have got to do something. Something is broken somewhere. It has to be. To see this level of engagement with students who simply don’t have literacy skills is completely disheartening. Whew. Yall did not prepare me for this. Whew.”
Since the video has begun circulating, the conversation both about who he is has erupted just as much as what he’s saying. He has been facing steep backlash, with people going as far as to say he perfectly epitomizes what’s wrong with education today. Why, you might ask? Perhaps that’s because the food blogger-turned-cookbook author-turned restauranter-turned-credit repair entrepreneur, who has spent years facing allegations of scamming customers and harassing critics, has now resurfaced as a molder of minds for the next generation.
Williams, who hails from Chicago before launching his platform while based in Atlanta, began sharing recipes and cooking videos online in the late 2000s, but his profile took off in 2011 after Food Network personality Sunny Anderson invited the then-Chicago food blogger onto her show, “Cooking for Real.” From there, he built a sizable online following under the Darius Cooks moniker, publishing cookbooks and eventually expanding his brand into restaurants and other business ventures.
He went on to operate Greens and Gravy in Atlanta and Soul Crab locations in College Park, Georgia, and Chicago. In February 2020, all three restaurants abruptly closed. Williams said at the time that the closures were related to mental health issues and denied that they were connected to legal trouble surrounding another one of his businesses.
That trouble involved Above 701, a credit repair company solely owned and operated by the entrepreneur. In December 2019, the company and Williams entered into a $145,750 consent judgment with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office to resolve allegations that they had operated an illegal credit repair business. The state alleged that the company accepted payments before providing services and made misleading claims about its ability to permanently remove debts and bankruptcies from customers’ credit reports. Under the settlement, Above 701 was required to provide $110,000 in restitution to consumers and pay a $35,750 civil penalty, $10,000 of which could be waived if the company fully complied with the agreement.
Then, in 2021, Williams became the subject of an even larger reckoning online when former employees, customers and others in the food world came forward to accuse him of a wide range of misconduct, such as failing to fulfill orders, stealing recipes, harassment, doxxing and abuse. Several prominent Black women in the food industry were among those who publicly spoke out about Williams, including food blogger and cookbook author Angela “The Kitchenista” Davis and Anderson, who later distanced herself from Williams. Williams has denied several allegations made against him.
“Are schools no longer doing background checks for teachers anymore?!” one user on Threads began in a post in response to his video. “Because how did Darius Cooks scamming a— get hired as a culinary arts teacher?!?! 🤢 They could’ve just searched his name on socials and see all the complaints and comments about his food practices + scamming!”
Others have been calling out the video for potentially being “performative,” as the alarm around declining literacy rates among children and adults in America has long been rung.
“I’m an educator at heart so I absolutely hate seeing performative teaching/teachers,” another user on Threads wrote. “Cause why am I seeing a video of a new teacher crying on the 2nd day of school, talking about the kids can’t read/write…You did not gather all of that based on data collection overtime. It’s the 2nd day of school!”
She added, “Just regurgitating what’s seen on social media from other teachers and wanting engagement. Cause there’s no way you’re providing assessments and scaling academic capabilities on day 2 of the first week.”
Among those calling him out, however, are those who still see the urgency in his message. In May, after scholars at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth analyzed state test scores from third to eighth grade for over 5,000 school districts in 38 states, they found only five states, plus the District of Columbia, had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025, CNN reported. Nationally, students remain nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic reading scores and only slightly better in math.
While schools have focused on catching kids up since the COVID-19 pandemic upended education, the nation’s reading problems predate the pandemic. National Assessment of Educational Progress data shows reading performance had already begun declining before 2020. In 2024, the latest NAEP report card found that scores for 12th-grade students were down in both reading and math. Forty-five percent of high school seniors performed below NAEP Basic in math, while 32% performed below NAEP Basic in reading.
“People saw Darius Cooks video and went right to roasting. Didn’t give a damn about what he was saying. Thats why the village is… where that video at?” a user on Threads wrote.