Posted on 02/13/2023 1:31:37 PM PST by JSM_Liberty
A lovely aphorism holds that education isn’t the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
But too often, neither are pails filled nor fires lit.
One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.
Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire.
Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998.
One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read. There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.
“Too much reading instruction is not based on what the evidence says,” noted Nancy Madden, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who is an expert on early literacy. “That’s pretty clear.
“At least half of kids in the U.S. are not getting effective reading instruction.”
Other experts agree. Ted Mitchell, an education veteran at nearly every level who is now president of the American Council on Education, thinks that easily a majority of children are getting subpar instruction.
Others disagree, of course. But an approach called the “science of reading” has gained ground, and it rests on a bed of phonics instruction...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Mark
But phonics be rascis!
(Sigh)
I DO know I was excited to read and read everything (cereal boxes, my father's financial magazines . . . ANYTHING) . . . right up into high school when I discovered girls . . . . .and everything went downhill from there.
Forcing kids to wear face diapers, reducing oxygen supply certainly didn’t help.
Idiots, of course PHONICS. These dummies are re-inventing the wheel! :(
Without clicking on the article, sounds like the point is that much more government money is needed, at both the K-12 and university levels. At K-12, for the super effective “tools” and to pay the “great teachers,” and at the university level for the “cutting edge research.”
Reading is racist.
How to Fix It
Turn off TV computer and have your child read a chapter to you twice a week.
I did that with my kid and now she reads about three books a month time well spent.
As one well-read, highly articulate individual put it, “Well, duh”.
There are 23 high schools in Baltimore that have zero, (that’s 0, nil, goose eggs, none) students proficient in math. So it’s not just reading. You can squarely blame that on a combination of parents, teachers, administrators and school boards. This is an indictment of the educational establishment. That can be clearly identified by anyone having an Ed degree. As for the parents, there’s not much you can do about them except hope that they want a better future for their children. Give parents the choice and the power to change things. Give parents education tax dollars and allow them to choose how to educate their children. Eliminate all requirements for education degrees and teacher’s certification. Eliminate state and federal departments of education. Defund college and university education programs. Get government out of education.
***Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire. ****
How true! I had a hard time learning to read due to moving around in my elementary years. Then, in 1960, I discovered in the school library an adventure book. CAPTAIN BLOOD by Rafiel Sabatini, and Coronado’s Children along with Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. Dracula! Manila Galleon, Beat to Quarters, Beau Geste! The Odyssey, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne and Issac Asimov sci-fi books and many others.
Captivated, I devoured these books and soon many others. I have read hundreds of books since that time, EXCEPT those horrid dull, DULL, English books like Silas Marner and other ones that were forced on us in Literature class in High School. They would make a kid give up reading forever!
The library kept me sane in some trying years. I managed to get an ADULT library card when I was 13. None of that Juvenile crap for me!
My two daughters have followed me in reading. They have lots of books they read and they are surprised to fine some of the books they read I read 50 years ago.
Bookmark
👍
When my daughter was in elementary school in early 1980s she and a black kid named Michael were the best students in their classes. When they got to 7th and 8th grades, Michael's grades went to hell in a handbasket, so my daughter asked him why. He said making good grades in school marked him as "too white" in his neighborhood, so he quit trying. I'm not sure if he even finished high school.
Yep, they are discovering that the tried and true method works and the “whole word” method pushed by the current schools churning out teachers and they are trying to pretend it’s something new.
Kristof is an idiot. He doesn’t know how to fix jack.
The grifter market in education is HUGE!Which is why we were given a "new and better" pedagogical strategy to implement at the beginning of every school year, only to be replaced by the next best thing the next year.
Sad, really sad. And somehow that is the fault of whitey according to our libtard masters.
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