Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read

[rangerrebew]

Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read
Emily Hanford reveals how America’s educators adopted a flawed system for teaching reading to kids—and, as a result, completely failed them.

By The Free Press

February 11, 2023

 
Many parents saw America’s public education system crumble under the weight of the pandemic. Stringent policies—including school closures that went on far too long, and ineffective Zoom school for kindergarteners—had devastating effects that we are only just beginning to understand.

But, as with so many problems during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily cause these structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with.

How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.

American Public Media’s Emily Hanford uncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-65-percent-of-fourth-graders

[mountaineer]

The End of the English Major
Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?
By Nathan Heller
February 27, 2023

The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent.

“It’s hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they’re doing,” Meg Macias, a junior, said one afternoon as the edges of the sky over the campus went soft. It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. “They always know there’s someone who wishes that they were doing something else.” ...

For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? ...

“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall.

She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”   ...

Complete article at New Yorker magazine
We are raising a generation of dummies.

 @Gefn - thought you might appreciate this.

[mountaineer]

ANALYSIS: Schools are abandoning progressive curricula from teachers colleges
Recent reports attribute the nationwide low reading proficiency for K-12 students, in part, to progressive curricula from teachers colleges.
Progressive approaches to teaching reading, one education advocate said, come from a 'desire to ... move away from what had been thought of as the drudgery and pain of institutional style education.'
Shelby Kearns | Associate Editor
February 27, 2023

Recent reports show that school districts are ditching progressive curricula from teachers colleges and returning to best practices for reading.

The nationwide low reading proficiency for K-12 students is attributed, in part, to these curricula. Though Campus Reform has identified teachers colleges as sites of social justice and anti-racism, a popular approach to reading sold by teachers colleges failed to close achievement gaps.

The fallout from progressive curricula is widespread, with a headline from a Feb. 10 episode of The Free Press’ podcast declaring, “65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read.” ... Campus Reform

[Free Vulcan]

Seriously Republican leadership, get your heads out of your collective assets. If you have control of your state govt, you need to start enacting laws to reel in the teachers, administrations, and unions to teach what they are supposed to, and only that.

Primary and secondary schools have zero authority to stray into all their little woke issues or get penalized. Jail time needs to be part of that.

[Polly Ticks]

Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read
Emily Hanford reveals how America’s educators adopted a flawed system for teaching reading to kids—and, as a result, completely failed them.

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-65-percent-of-fourth-graders

The whole memorization of "sight" words is the stupidest thing.  Get back to Hooked on Phonics and see how much more quickly they learn. 

[berdie]

The whole memorization of "sight" words is the stupidest thing.  Get back to Hooked on Phonics and see how much more quickly they learn.

My dearly departed was taught to read by flash cards and told to remember the word. His reading ability was severely impaired. It wasn't that he wasn't smart...he just didn't know how. To me, it was tragic. It affected his self esteem.

Although we were the same age, I was taught phonetically. (and also read to every night by my mom) in a different area of the state. It made a huge difference.

I think they are doing the same thing with the way math is taught. Although, in this case memorization is valuable, it seems it is being taught in very convoluted methods. IMHO, 2 +2 = 4. It always has been and always will be. Now it seems like they want to teach how you came to that conclusion.

[Elderberry]

I was shocked when I saw my First Grade Teacher, on the first day of class, write assignments on the black board. I had to elbow the kid next to me to know what she had written and what was it I was supposed to do. I picked up reading and writing very fast in that first grade class. She was the hardest 1st grade teacher in the whole school.

[sneakypete]

Future serfs don't really  need to read. Their masters will tell them anything they need to know.

[Smokin Joe]

Seriously Republican leadership, get your heads out of your collective assets. If you have control of your state govt, you need to start enacting laws to reel in the teachers, administrations, and unions to teach what they are supposed to, and only that.

Primary and secondary schools have zero authority to stray into all their little woke issues or get penalized. Jail time needs to be part of that.

Our entire school board is being petitioned to recall. Yes, Virginia, it's that bad.

[Smokin Joe]

The whole memorization of "sight" words is the stupidest thing.  Get back to Hooked on Phonics and see how much more quickly they learn.

That was how I taught my granddaughter. I told her every letter has a name, but it also makes a sound. So we went through what sound each letter was, instead of their names.
It was funny (in retrospect) when she came out of school one day, just thoroughly demoralized, nearly in tears, and told me she couldn't read. I wrote on a piece of paper "I love you!" and handed it to her, and she said "I love you too Papa".
"I thought you couldn't read, but you just did."
She thought because she was encountering words she did not know, that she couldn't read, until I informed her that that is normal. I find new words every day. She seemed surprised by that until I told her how many words there are, just in English (about 250,000, any given day), and that's only one language.

I learned phonics, too, not 'sight reading'.

[mountaineer]

Future serfs don't really  need to read. Their masters will tell them anything they need to know.

Yeah, I seem to recall that teaching slaves to read in pre-1863 America generally was discouraged by their (Democrat) owners.