US children fall further behind in reading
cnn.com
cnn.com
Looks like some states that re-emphasized phonics in a major way saw improvement, particularly in lower income brackets: https://apnews.com/article/reading-scores-phonics-mississipp...
The problem of phonics being ignored was widespread just three years ago https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2022/10/20/sold-a-story-e...
I am sure a properly performed study which accounted for the time spent on reading, as well as exposure to books, would demonstrate that phonics is no better than any other way of teaching reading.
My children live in a house of books, we have thousands. We read to them daily from soon after birth. They did not read early compared to their friends (though they did memorize some books which made it look as if they were reading pretty young). They didn’t start school until six and spent their early years in a bi-lingual Nordic school system before moving to the US and then Europe once again.
They now read at a very high level indeed, well above their peers. We made zero special effort. They just had access to books and libraries and live in an environment where everyone reads.
While analyses of reading and literacy skills are generally intended to reflect how our educational system is doing.
So obviously, we need to control for immigration rates in these analyses. For assessment of our educational system, ideally we'd only be reporting for children and adults born in the US. (And then breaking out non-native speakers in their own categories to measure their ESL performance rates.)
Because a child (or adult) might have superb literacy in Spanish, but show up as illiterate in English. And these studies generally aren't accounting for that at all.
My father in law is a guidance counselor in Florida. He told me about a school in the county that was ranked very poorly 10 years ago, but is now one of the top. I was curious how they did it, but it apparently had nothing to do with changes in curriculum, but the fact that somehow that area had become a destination for wealthy Chinese international students, and the student body had become dominated by them.
From 1998 to 2022 "English learners" (as its their term) tripled from 5% to 14%. They do offer accommodations, but are tested.
And fwiw I think they should be, just as are students with learning disabilities. It's because this is your student body, which will become the society of tomorrow. Knowing how that society might look, and in which direction it is trending, can inform decisions being made today to help shape a better society for everybody tomorrow.
Immigration rates, and their children come no where close to affecting regular educational metrics.
The reading comprehension is just that bad, and the people in the know understand why it is that way but bureaucracy props it up while everyone waits for Superman.
That's absolutely going to affect regular education metrics.
And it's going to affect it increasingly, as the proportion of foreign-born has risen continuously from 4.7% in 1970 to 14.3% today.
There's nothing misinformed about any of this.
It's quite possible reading is getting worse among native speakers as well. Or not at all. My point is that you can't tell unless you separate out the two populations in the literacy statistics.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/key-findi...
Upward mobility is sold but rarely achievable.
America is a free country, the country and indeed the world is what you make of it. Nobody ever said living free was easy.
There are a great number of studies completing that show that opportunities for upward mobility simply are no longer there for the vast majority.
David Willets summarized and touched on studies done by the Resolution Foundation, and wrote a book on the subject matter extensively, "The Pinch, How the Baby Boomers Stole their children's future".
There's a big difference between living hand to mouth as an individual wage slave, and making enough to be able to support having children, let alone the gross excess of the Zuckerbergs or globalists of the world.
An ambitious man isn't going to care what some "studies" say about how bad and sad and evil the world is. He's just going to do what needs doing and enjoy the fruits of his labors.
You're never going to succeed if you let others' negativity beat you into submission. You're literally in the company of people who create and invest in startups. Who cares what bad things others are saying, it's your life.
What’s the source for this? I have never heard anything about this.
The Department of Education has a massive budget that has ballooned to $268B, much of which is wasted on administrative bloat. If education quality is declining and standards are dropping it seems right to reconsider the existence of the department.
What’s the source for this?
There are points of no return in systems, after which cascading problems prevent any future resolution.
The Misrepresentation of Marie Clay in “Sold a Story” https://readingrecovery.org/the-misrepresentation-of-marie-c...
I figured out why podcasts can be so damn irritating, they can be this patronizing, belabored setup to some ill thought out intellectual takedown you can't argue with in the same way you can with the written word.
Teach kids (and the teachers) the scientific method, apply it everywhere ruthlessly. If you are "teaching reading" but not measuring reading comprehension and adjusting your methods for that student, you aren't teaching reading.
Do science, demand that everyone does science. Stop using magic incantations.
It was frustrating to see the rubric used in some schools. My kids with amazing memory could ace some readings, but only because they memorized the story. To the point that some of the teachers were confused that my kid could fully read back some books to them with perfect recall, but seemed lost if given a new book.
I've been seeing this extend to math. We seem to not be teaching how to read equations. They are things to be computed. With the best many can do is to point to it and say "that is the equation."
I don't know what all the root causes are, but these kids should be getting read to, questioned about what they heard and then reading out loud themselves.
Not defending Clay, but on the surface, "figure it out" is a pretty good heuristic. But we should be sounding out a word, breaking it apart, understanding what it could mean in that context, looking it up somewhere else. But if all you do is kinda fake it from the context, that might help in an emergency, but learning to read shouldn't be an emergency.
We should be creating children that are curious enough to want to solve the puzzle of meaning when they encounter words they don't understand or know how to pronounce.
The CNN article is just a jumble of numbers, cribbed from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/... (which itself doesnt load its charts properly).
Reading comprehension is for all people, at an all time low, and I don't know the causes.
I think we ask too much out of kids in the now and too little in the long term, this reinforces adult exceptionalism, that kids aren't capable.
By in the now, I mean that the kid has to show great 1 or 0 shot performance. Nearly everything is slow to start but gets bigger than we can imagine. More gradual slopes with a slight acceleration.
You mentioned video games in another thread, it was interesting to see the gradient in the combat mechanics in Street Fighter as you beat more characters. I was watching that same kid play, and you could see the difficulty gradient teaching, rewarding and ultimately training the player to feed quarters into is mechanical mouth.
I think there is a lot of overlap between game design and learning theory.
The largest lesson for me, at the moment, is that people love complaining about "rote memorization" but throw out the baby with the bath water, as it were. Memory is a large part of learning, such that trying to do anything that doesn't lean on it feels wrong.
And I don't mean just recall memory. Learning to juggle is one that showed me that memory can be a full body activity. Same for running/cycling. And getting good at things means doing it a lot.
Yes, "deliberate practice" is different than "rote practice." But they look an awful lot like each other. And I don't think anyone has a good trick for how to skip straight to deliberate.
I think because our tests have generally sucked, and people like easy answers to problems, that leaning really hard on rote practice seemed like an easy win. It is necessary, but it is just a small part of a greater understanding.
My philosophy is the following.
Memorization enables fast recall and composition of concepts, which encourages one to be in the flow state, which is very rewarding. But overfitting by too much memorization prevents creative exploration.
My kid doesn't have instant recall for all the products through 12x12, but they can fill in the missing pieces pretty quickly. This is improving, but I also showed them how to round and make back of the envelope approximations, so they aren't calculating the number of eggs needed in a recipe to 3 places of accuracy.
I think the memorization portion of education should see the task of memorizing certain facts as a toolbox, and that with that toolbox you will be able to fluidly work on these kinds of problems. Without out, you will be knee deep in mud.
Damn it is fun to learn a new skill.
Whether or not there is a depth of understanding about the Recovery method that was improperly communicated to teachers is irrelevant. Whatever the shortcomings of the podcast, it did showcase the explicit use of the 3-queuing pattern in live, pandemic-era, zoom classrooms.
It further explored the (very positive) results from parents (with enough resources) making end-runs around school policy and seeking out private, phonetic reading tutors.
There is research to be done (perhaps rediscovered) as to why this may be so; however, what is _known_ is that the skill level for US students has fallen dramatically. The tipping point occurred in the early 1990's which happens to align with the ascension of the 3-queuing, Reading Recovery curriculum within US elementary school systems.
If the site breaks following a deployment, the deployment gets rolled back. The retrospective happens _after_ customers are no longer cursing your name. Its more complicated with humans, but time spent blaming lock-downs or (as a recent academic article complained of) a mysterious reticence of college students to read entire books, doesn't help anyone.
Phonetic teaching methods were used for centuries to create the peak from which we've fallen.
In the mean time, while the magic is sorted into science, those incantations that worked reasonably well from the 17th through the end of the 20th century might just pull us out of the fire long enough to be able to accomplish the research you yearn for.
If there is research that desperately needs to be explored, right now, it should be within the realm of how to help people who were put through the Reading Recovery program and are suffering the results.
I was and am not defending Reading Recovery.
I will admit that I was not able to get to the core of the thesis in the podcast (s) and that I was being led around. I never experienced Reading Recovery first hand.
3-queuing seems like a heuristic that escaped the lab. Useful, but it should be the method of last resort if you can't ask an adult or find a dictionary.
I am also not saying that everything needs to have a scientific study to be shown effective. I learned to read by being read to, and having the joy of reading instilled at a very young age. I was encouraged to ask about passages or words I don't know.
Your writing is excellent.
Even if it wasn't intended, anything that as a byproduct, encourages kids to makeup definitions of words or skip over anything is an affront to our collective body of knowledge.
Regardless of the process, a voter's vote is a vote and the sum of the votes (including voters who do not vote, "I don't care." is a valid vote) is the democratic will of the people one way or another.
Also, if you truly do want to argue that voters should vote a certain way then you should plainly say so instead of being disingenuous.
But how many people can name even a single person on their local school board? How many can account for what that person's platforms are regarding the school? How many can account for anything that person has done while on the board? Where would you even go to find out what your local school board is doing? How many of your school board members have observed the day-to-day goings on of your local schools?
The system seems fundamentally broken to me. It's no wonder school administrations are so incompitent - especially in larger districts.
Learning, attentional control and action video games https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3461277/
Not nerd sniped at all.
> in other words, an end in and of itself — we have recently considered the possibility that enhanced attention is instead a means to an end, with that end being better probabilistic inference [54]
Improved probabilistic inference as a general learning mechanism with action video games [54] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20833324/
"The effects of mobile phone use on academic performance: A meta-analysis" [0]
"Results indicate the summary effect of mobile phone use on student outcomes is r = −0.16 with 95% CI of −0.20 to −0.13."
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
Refers to a more recent meta analysis from 2023 of 12000 kids and basically found no substantial negative effects from screen time
My wife is a teacher and phones are a constant problem but the administration refuses to do anything about them. It seems they recognize that some parents will freak out if they do not have access to their kids at all times and the admins are too spineless to take a stand against those few parents for the sake of everyone's education. It's absurd.
Several schools in my state (including one in the same school district as my wife) have been participating in an experimental phone ban for the last year and the results have been better than I could have expected. Grade levels and attendence are up by over 10%, fights are down significantly, and the overwhelming majority of parents are supportive. It's only a tiny few who object. But even with the numbers right in front of them, many admins are unwilling to adopt the bans in their schools. At this point it will probably take a mandate from the state government before they do the common sense thing.
Calling out just one question is pretty disingenuous I'm willing to admit, but this is giving me flashbacks to probably countless examples like this on reading tests I took.
I haven't seen the text this came from so maybe the context is obvious, or maybe it's listed first in every 8th grade English textbook, but I apparently didn't know what 'industrious' meant. And I read quite a bit.
- pandemic school closures
- youth mental health crisis
- high rates of chronic absenteeism
- widespread environmental exposure to lead
- gutting of public education funding during several presidencies
- cultural decline in prestige and respect towards the teaching profession
Flint's lead water problems lasted for ~18 months from 2014-2015 (ending when they transitioned back to their original water source!), and as of about 4 years ago, they've fully replaced all of their lead water pipes.
Flint population at the time: 100k
US population at the time: 318M
The Reading Teacher 47, 1993-1994 https://archive.org/details/sim_reading-teacher_1993-1994_47...
As for the impact of screen time on reading ability, it's important to discuss what literacy means from an educational standpoint. Literacy is much more than "Can you read the words on the page, or speak them aloud"; modern literacy is broken into understanding prose, documentation, and quantitative analysis. This is why when the article says "US children are falling behind on reading" they mean "1/3 of Eighth graders could not make an inference on a character's motivation after reading a short story" and similarly did not know that 'industrious' means 'hard working'.
Since you've asked about screen time, it's not so driven by 'screen time' as it is by the activity performed with screen time. When you say screen time, are you referring to someone reading a book on a Kindle, or doomscrolling on the social media of their choice? Both have been very well studied, with a wealth of publications on their impact.
The tl;dr of the research: Both have words on the screen, yes, but one (reading on a Kindle) is shown to have positive effects on literacy while the other (consuming social media) is shown to have detrimental effects across the board (not just limited to decreased literacy performance). Notably (and a point discussing the 'resources' in terms of time and energy investment), parents co-viewing content with their child has been suggested to improve overall language abilities, children who are left to their own devices (pun intended) experience poorer vocabulary acquisition and retention. [1]
1. Effects of Excessive Screen Time on Child Development: An Updated Review and Strategies for Management https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10353947/
* P.S. I read manga and play video games in Japanese to study and practice the language. It's been incredible for reading speed and basic comprehension, but I'm still years of daily effort away from reading legal documents.
Also, I’ll push back on the notion that people historically learned to read in order to read the Bible. Maybe 1000 years ago, but even in the beginning of the late Middle Ages people were reading vernacular in Europe. Hangul, created in 1443, was created specifically to increase literacy amongst the masses. And of course, the first written languages are thousands of years older than the Old Testament.
That said, education certainly needs major reforms. I like how Sweden is going full Luddite for learning: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/sweden-says-ba...
A more interesting study would be to see how many of those dollars actually reach the student, or the teachers - as opposed to administrators or other positions that have less direct influence over the quality of education.
The problem with education is a lack of funding. Many of the funds you speak of expired without use, and another 13-20 billion is set to expire this year.
What happened? Schools cut staff hard during the pandemic. At my particular school, faculty and staff were laid off in droves or accepted furloughs (20-60%) to keep their role at severely reduced pay. Among the fired were grant managers, the people who figure out how to use ESSER funds. When these huge windfalls (ESSER) came in, it also came with restrictions on how to use the funding. Unfortunately nobody at my school knew how to navigate the process anymore. The school tried to hire people back, but nobody applied because who wants to be underpaid working at a failing school that runs more rounds of layoffs than a major tech company?
It is now the end of ESSER. My school is $2 million in the hole, they are about to cut another 25% of staff (including me), and they spent only a tiny amount of the allocated funds because they fired their grant manager in 2021. My salary has already been cut $5,000. What little they figured out how to spend was used trying (and largely failing) to renovate our decaying and crumbling buildings. Those buildings have broken HVAC, networks, outdated teaching equipment, and burnt out projectors. Not exactly an inspiring teaching environment.
Around this time I was also involved in a startup providing online language and reading tools (Bamboo Learning). During ESSER we secured contracts with major school districts (Los Angeles, Rochester NY, Arizona, Texas). Something to the tune of 50,000-150,000 licenses. All of them trying to burn the ESSER funds. They couldn't figure out how to access the money and asked us to grant the licenses now and they'd pay us later. We couldn't afford that, and our investors wanted to see income before moving us into a Series B. We starved out in 2023 and closed before any of the districts figured out ESSER.
Admin is a common finger to point at, "we pay them too much money!", and yes I do not have positive opinions of any admin beyond my immediate dean. However the problem with ESSER isn't bloated admin, it's educators leaving enmass to work for literally anyone else.
Extremely bleak, yes, and it isn't set to get any better. However while the broad public argues over some nebulous problem, our schools will fail and close.
Either way, Im looking forward to February's "Who's Hiring" thread.