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Comment by anoonmoose | Hacker News Reader

One simple explanation would be that the problem just isn't as bad as you think it is.

What is your opinion on the NPR Reveal podcast episode about how the prominence of reading recovery instead of phonics has led to 1/3 of children by fourth grade reading at a substandard level?

That we can microbenchmark any aspect of the education system looking for improvements but and the end of the day colleges are packed and you'll be hard pressed to find someone who is genuinely illiterate -- you'll find people who don't read and write English super well but it's because it's their second language and they're perfectly literate in their native tongue.

We need to remember the average adult only reads at a 6th grade level... Not that that's good, but I'd say there's many other factors involved than just the schools (parental involvement, do they read outside school, etc)

This is an awful excuse. The whole purpose of public education is to give students who don't have support at home an education. Passing the buck to parents makes the whole point of public school moot -- if kids with involved parents read and those without don't, why put kids in school at all at that point?

It's not an excuse - it's just the way it is. If kids don't have parental encouragement or involvement at home, they won't see the value in education. I taught in a rural district in the South that epitomized this. Cultural/familial attitudes towards education matter a lot more than anything the school can do. After all, kids still spend more time with their parents and family than they do at school; those attitudes rub off.

And it's not passing the buck to the parents; we're not asking the parents to teach them, merely to be involved, take an interest in the kid's education and show them the value of an education and encourage them to do the stuff they learn outside. The school can't do it all, nor should it have to (I'd argue teachers are already doing a lot more than they were ever trained to do because parents often don't have time to do it in our current society).

Yes, parents should be involved, but the point of public education is it should work at least to a minimal level of standard even if the parents are literal sponges living under rocks.

The article being discussed here is "less than half of California students reading at grade level", so my opinion on "one third of fourth grade students reading at substandard level" is basically the same as my opinion on that, because they're not very different statements.

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