Posted on 02/01/2006 5:52:39 AM PST by cinives
With public schools spending more than $100,000 per student on K-12 education, you'd think they could teach students how to read and write.
South Carolina is one of many states to have trouble with this. It spends $9,000 per student per year, and its state school superintendent told me South Carolina has been "ranked as having some of the highest standards of learning in the entire country." So let's ask the infamous question, "Is our children learning?"
Dorian Cain told me he wants to learn to read. He's 18 years old and in 12th grade, but when I asked him to read from a first-grade level book, he struggled with it.
"Did they try to teach you to read?" I asked him.
"From time to time."
His mom, Gena Cain, has been trying to get him help for years. If Dorian were in private school, or if South Carolina allowed parents to choose schools the way we choose other products and services in life, Dorian and Gena would be "customers" and able to go elsewhere -- if any school were dumb enough to serve a customer as poorly as Dorian has been served. But since Gena is merely a taxpayer, forced to pay for the public schools whether they do her any good or not, she can't even demand a better education for her son. "You have to beg," she said. "Whatever you ask for, you're begging. Because they have the power." They do. What are you going to do -- go elsewhere? Gena can't afford that.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
MAYBE MOM CAN'T READ EITHER.
I've heard that the push behind teaching whole word is that is how most adults read. You don't sound out each letter unless it is an unfamiliar word, you just look at the word and know what it means. So the education "experts" figured that since that is the point where people end up, you might as well start there. However, that makes as much sense as prohibiting infants from crawling and insisting on teaching them to walk immediately. Without learning the motor skills needed to crawl, only a lucky few would be able to learn how to walk. Similarly, without early phonics only a lucky few will become skilled readers with the hole word method.
I had a teacher in an elite private school explain to me that "all kids can't learn to read via phonics" so they use a compromise called the whole word method so they appeal to all kids' types of learning modalities.
I explained back that since 87% of the English language is phonetic, it makes a hell of a lot more sense teaching phonics and having the kids memorize the relatively few irregular words than the other way around. Schools teaching exclusively low-IQ kids use phonics, so why not regular schools ?
Rudolph Flesch used the system to teach Chinese characters with the whole word AKA Look-Say method - why teach a phonetic language just like the Chinese have to learn their image-based written language ?
If the results of home schooling were the same as the results as public schooling, home schooling would be banned.
Most public schools already get more than adequate funding, so it's not the money. This article made a big deal about funding and that's just a red herring. Schoolss in other countries spend far, far less than we do per child, but their results are consistently better.
Discipline and the beating the importance of education into kids are clearly a necessity, but I don't think it's only that, either.
Why was there no info in this article about the types of teachers they hire (NEA types ?), and the type of curriculum they use ? Without that info, you cannot apply these schools as a complete model for anything. You can teach kids discipline and attention, but if they're paying attention to garbage, all you get is garbage regurgitated.
Education bureaucrats and their politician friends are still trying that approach.
bump
Key phrase. Doesn't matter if it's publik skrewl kids or homeschool kids. What helps them succeed is that we as parents try hard enough.
It's all about loving them more than ourselves. We've cut back and done without alot of "things" in our life to make it possible for my wife and I to teach our kids.
Ditto that. It's all about priorities, eh what?
Bring back the I.Q. tests.
"See and say" or "whole word" was invented to teach the deaf to read. "See and say" was primarily championed by William S. Gray and was adopted by the educational establishment in the 1930's and 1940's (the "Dick and Jane" books).
Q1. Why? Good question. Phonics had been successfully used to teach reading in a multitude of languages for thousands of years. The most likely reason for the switch is that overeducated, fundamentally arrogant and stupid people with no common sense or grounding in reality acquired great power in the field of education and foisted a completely unrealistic and whimsical reading theory on millions of innocent children. A more cynical reason might be that the education establishment wanted a certain percentage of children to fail so they could expand their empires by having to hire special ed teachers, remedial reading teachers, and so forth. Also, the sellers of textbooks are not averse to selling multiple books on reading, remedial reading, AV materials and computer programs to first do, and then undo, the damage inflicted by "whole word" instead of selling the pack of phonics drill cards that work "first time (almost) all the time".
In 1955, "see and say" was completely exposed for the fraud it is by Rudolf Flesch in his famous book Why Johnny Can't Read And What You Can Do About It. There have been dozens of studies fully documenting the inferiority of the "whole word" method of teaching reading compared to phonics. And yet some 80 percent of all public school districts still use "whole word" or its equivalent.
Q2. Why? Good question. See the possible answers under Q1.
So true. Where did you find your quote ?
They missed one point. John Dewey didn't think it was important to teach reading to kids. A child's socialization skills were considered by Dewey to be much more important to society, and it's still the primary argument used against homeschoolers.
It really is a whole package deal: parents, teachers, discipline, environment, money and resources.
and
The trick and the challenge is to apply the successful military school model to districts, students and parents such as those in this South Carolina school.
In reply, you wrote:
This article made a big deal about funding and that's just a red herring. Schoolss in other countries spend far, far less than we do per child, but their results are consistently better.
Which countries? Which schools? How would you define consistently better results?
Discipline and the beating the importance of education into kids are clearly a necessity, but I don't think it's only that, either.
Remember, I said it was a package deal. Not just any one element of the package. Don't understand how you want me to understand the word "beating."
Why was there no info in this article about the types of teachers they hire (NEA types ?), and the type of curriculum they use ?
Obviously, they hire teachers who teach, be they NEA types (whatever that is) or some other type.
The military school districts have the same curriculum as the rest of the public schools in the State. They are all subject to the same testing and the same oversight performed by the Texas Education Agency.
You can teach kids discipline and attention, but if they're paying attention to garbage, all you get is garbage regurgitated.
I'm presuming you really did read the articles, or at least browsed through them.
Schools in those districts continue to rack up national and state recognitions for excellence. And their students who graduate and go to college at higher-than-average rates are regularly among the city's top performers in state, federal and college entrance exams
I have my own criticisms and doubts about the military model as generally presented in these columns, but it is really hard to frown down at the obvious success these little districts achieve--consistently.
--I taught my children to read and there are certain things a PARENT needs to take responsibility in. Once a kid is sent to school, he HAS to apply himself and want to learn. This type of kid, as IMHO, didn't apply himself and screwed around in school all his life and it finally caught up with him. If he wasn't even able to read at a first grade level and hadn't asked for help in earlier years, then it is obvious he didn't give a crap whether he could read or not. If his mother is just now noticing, where has she been all these years? Under a rock?
This is a little OT, but check out DeMint in action.
Countries - Singapore, Hong Kong, Belgium and plenty of others - look at the results of the international competitions among countries, then look at their per child funding. Consistently better results would be rankings in international exams, literacy rate, and the like.
Sorry, I used that term very loosely. "Emphasizing" and acting consistently to suport are probably better ways to describe what I meant.
Obviously, they hire teachers who teach, be they NEA types (whatever that is) or some other type. The military school districts have the same curriculum as the rest of the public schools in the State. They are all subject to the same testing and the same oversight performed by the Texas Education Agency.
NEA - National Education Association - predominant teacher's union in the USA, also well-known for its militant socialism.
The articles did not mention the curriculum specifically. I know here in PA the school districts are free to use any curriculum they choose, so I cannot make the assumption, as you did, that the curriculum is exactly the same in all school districts. Maybe you have evidence otherwise - I don't.
So, I say again, the teachers in the military school must be teaching something more worthwhile, and teaching it better, than the schools that are failing.
Schools in those districts continue to rack up national and state recognitions for excellence. And their students who graduate and go to college at higher-than-average rates are regularly among the city's top performers in state, federal and college entrance exams.
We all know that state exams are not rigorous - there's been a lot of press in particular about the problems with the exams in Texas. Additionally, the SATs have been consistently dumbed-down over the years, most recently this year, so they may be performing well at a level relative to this dumbed-down yardstick.
Read this: http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com/texmath.htm
Before we congratulate any school for achieving "excellence", we should first determine whether "excellence" was really achieved.
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