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Parents with children in elementary school should take a look at this short video. At this moment, tens of thousands of public schools are making millions of little children memorize sight-words. This malpractice will retard their education and cripple their reading ability. This four-minute video explains why. Sight-words are, of course, the problem that Rudolf Flesch wrote about in 1955 in his famous book "Why Johnny can't read." Our Education Establishment is relentless in pretending that phonics is no good and must be replaced by various "modern" methods. These methods had many names over the last 80+ years. But it...

As a writer, editor, mother, and book lover for as long as I can remember, every time I stepped foot in the room called "Library Media Center" at Greenville High School, a little bit of my heart was broken. I began to think of the space as a giant metaphor for everything wrong with education. As a former educator, it gave me insight into where students in rural America are often coming from in terms of literacy. It has always been part of my teaching philosophy that you meet the student where he or she is and you build from...

Herewith, a simple way to understand the destructive failure of most reading instruction in the United States. Consider our eyes. Their purpose is to grasp quickly what objects are: food or predator, useful or irrelevant? This is often a matter of life and death. How do eyes do their job? Eyes twitch, jerk, and flick rapidly from detail to detail in order to identify an object. There are no built-in sequences, no shortcuts. The eyes must twitch – perhaps dozens of times – until a positive identification is made. The technical term for these twitches is a saccade (which rhymes...

Public schools are expert at creating illiteracy. Our K-12 system can usually guarantee that students don't become fluent readers. The system is nearly foolproof. Parents and teachers can make children illiterate or semi-literate simply by following this well-tested seven-step formula: 1) FORGET ABOUT THE ALPHABET. Do not teach the alphabet, the sounds, or the blends. Reading maestro Frank Smith maintained in Reading Without Nonsense (1973): "I have said that children should not be taught the alphabet[.] ... Until children have a good idea of what reading is about, learning the names of letters is largely a nonsense activity."

Good bad or ugly----what are FReepers reading? I always get a lot of good ideas from these threads.

Since the revolt by parents against New York State’s reading and math tests last year, education officials at the state level have been bending over backward to try to show that they are listening to parents’ and educators’ concerns. The tests, which are given to third through eighth graders and will begin this year on April 5, were shortened, time limits were removed, and the results will not be a factor in teacher evaluations, among other changes.

Whether or not a student can read in the early grades is a clear indicator of future success. Schools should not keep sending kids onto the next grade if they lack basic reading skills. This “social promotion” often does more harm than good. As the state Legislature debates House Bill 4822 and strategies to advance early literacy, the Battle Creek Enquirer’s editors have laid down a strong claim. Their March 10 editorial argued against any use of the strategy of third-grade retention (holding back students) — presumably out of a desire to protect kids. To follow their recommended course, though,...

A Reading, MA, man with dozens of prior arrests stood bloodied today before a district court judge facing charges that he held his girlfriend against her will, beat her, cut her hair with a knife, and threatened to “slit her throat” if she altered authorities. Woburn District Court Judge Stacey Fortes ordered Brian English, 30, held without bail pending a dangerousness hearing after prospectors described a harrowing ordeal during which they say English kept his on-again, off-again girlfriend hostage in his home for more than two hours early Saturday morning. English struck her across the face with an open hand,...

Bill Gates is one of Americas greatest business geniuses. But when he turned to education, his magic touch vanished. He is now known as the man who squandered several billion dollars trying to foist Common Core on a combattive public. Indeed, Common Core is so unpopular that its very mention quickly doomed Jeb Bushs presidential campaign. Today, Donald Trump casually promises that he will get rid of it forever; and audiences cheer. Why Bill Gates felt he should promote this thing is a major mystery. Here is a possible theory. When a tycoon decides he wants to help public schools,...

In less than 10 minutes a day, you can read the whole Bible-Genesis to Revelation-in one year. (There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divided by 365, that's 2,123 words a day. The average person reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divided by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 minutes a day.] If you want to listen to a narrator read the Bible (which you can do so for free at ESVBible.org), they are usually about 75 hours long total, which means at 12 minutes a day you can listen to the whole Bible in a year.

[SUMMARY: K-12 schools force children to learn to read the hard way. Therefore, few children learn to read.]--In all reading theories, there is a fundamental concept known as automaticity. This means you know or can do something instantly, automatically. Reading happens fast. If you do not know something with automaticity, you might as well not know it at all. So the question quickly becomes: what exactly are children supposed to learn (that is, memorize) with automaticity? Traditionally, children memorized 26 English letters. Virtually the entire population can do this in a month or two, even at a young age. At...

Students at Myron L. Powell Elementary School in Cedarville, N.J. aren’t just learning about reading, writing and arithmetic this fall. They’re also getting homework assignments with hypothetical scenarios about going to “an awesome party,” getting wasted, having sex with random people they don’t know and and ending up with a nasty case of genital herpes.

Has been many years since i ubscribed to Readers Digest. Back in the 90s or 00s , i read an online article explaining the editorial staff changed to liberal hands. Do any FReepers out there still subscribe to or have a take on the Readers Digest magazine ?

It's a not-so rosy report card for the nation's schoolchildren. Math scores slipped for fourth and eighth graders over the last two years, and reading grades were not much better, flat for fourth graders and lower for eighth graders, according to the 2015 Nation's Report Card. ... Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged parents, teachers, and others not to panic about the scores as states embrace higher academic standards, such as Common Core.

A recent survey, by YouGov for the children’s publisher Scholastic, revealed last week that many parents stop reading to their children when they become independent readers, even if the child isn’t ready to lose their bedtime story. The study found that 83% of children enjoyed being read aloud to, with 68% describing it as a special time with their parents. (“It felt so warm, so spirit-rising,” as one 11-year-old boy put it.)

Hundreds of websites still casually assert what is probably the most destructive sophistry in the history of education: The Dolch Sight Words [created in the 1940s] are a list of the 220 most frequently used words in the English language. These sight words make up 50 to 70 percent of any general text….Dolch found that children who can identify a certain core group of words by sight could learn to read and comprehend better. Dolch's sight word lists are still widely used today and highly respected by both teachers and parents. These sight words were designed to be learned and mastered by the third grade....

Yesterday, at a neighbor's house, his 4th grade daughter read something very well and I asked her what grade she was in and complimented her on her reading .....

In total, 39 English language books were found at bin Laden's Pakistan compound along with a wealth of other written materials: The 2030 Spike by Colin Mason A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam by I. A. Ibrahim America's Strategic Blunders by Willard Matthias America's 'War on Terrorism' by Michel Chossudovsky Al-Qaeda's Online Media Strategies: From Abu Reuter to Irhabi 007 by Hanna Rogan The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast The Best Enemy Money Can Buy by Anthony Sutton Black Box Voting, Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier...

Anthony Horowitz writes adult novels, teenage spy thrillers, children’s books, TV series, films, plays, journalism as well as fiction-in-the-style of other great writers. He has written in the ‘voice’ of Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming. He is also responsible for the widespread belief that there is a murderer behind every bush in a place called Midsomer in England, not to mention creating Foyle's War.

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it...