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The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

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Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#51

Post by gcanyon »

wood_spirit wrote: post #4
snapplebobapple wrote: post #3

Well, that was anticlimactic... I was expecting an article on teachers unions being ruled illegal and the significant minority of totally incompetent teachers the union enabled for all these years being fired.....

At school my favourite and most effective teachers were those that my older sisters had disliked enough to warn me about. And, with my kids, it repeats; one will like and learn from a teacher that the other kid struggles with etc. So perhaps it’s about teachers being good and effective for one child but not for another, and few are objectively bad for everyone?

I think they're talking about the notorious room in the NYC school system where the dozens of teachers that have been declared unsuitable for teaching in any capacity, but who are unfireable, are forced to log their days.

They sit and do nothing, in a barren and unpleasant environment, and the school system hopes they'll quit.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#53

Post by mcpackieh »

tialaramex wrote: post #42
failrate wrote: post #16

I find it ridiculous that the author had not already taught their children to read prior to kindergarten.

Children's early aptitudes for all these non-trivial skills vary enormously. There's also minimal later consequence. Basically the fact your five year old can multiply and mine can't count properly actually isn't strongly predictive for which of them is going to be a Fields Medal winner. Kids who exhibit interest in acquiring written language skills should be encouraged, but so should kids who are interested in danci…

It sounds like the author didn't even attempt to teach their children how to read prior to entering 1st grade, due to the "unspoken contract between public schools and parents is that schools will teach their children to read."

Seems nuts to me, I thought the unspoken contract is that parents read to their kids at night and teach them to read at the same time. I guess the author thinks only rich parents can do that (come on now..)

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#54

Post by tatrajim »

mcpackieh wrote: post #47
tatrajim wrote: post #44

Just an observation from an educational outsider. In the 1970s I was a US peace corps volunteer in one of the more impoverished rural counties in South Korea. My job in a health center required learning and using the Korean language. The grammar (with complicated speech levels, etc.) is daunting, but the alphabet remarkably rational and easy to learn. Even in remote villages with a rudimentary standard of living, I n…

Is the lesson that we should switch to Korean? English may not be ideally 'designed' but how would you change how English is written without causing havoc for the billions of people who already learned it?

No, far from it. My point is that the Korean alphabet (essentially 24 symbols, arranged into syllables) is easy enough to learn in a day or two, so that clueless foreigners, such as me, can begin to sound out road signs and menus quickly, without a clue usually to what it means. By contrast, the disconnect between the Roman alphabet and the English sounds it encodes is a mess. We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#55

Post by gcanyon »

failrate wrote: post #16

I find it ridiculous that the author had not already taught their children to read prior to kindergarten.

My parents tried to teach me to read at an early age, and it was a disaster. When I was about five the skill pretty much emerged, full formed and unprompted. I jumped from not reading at all to reading full novels in a few months.

This pattern of me being incapable of learning pretty much anything from my parents continued for the rest of their lives. :-/

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#56

Post by PopAlongKid »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #6

For context, my introduction to elementary school and formal reading instruction began about 1970 in the U.S. My recollection was that we were introduced to the alphabet and the phonetic sounds for each of the 26 letters with an image of a thing that began with that letter. As an example, I remember "m" was for "mice" ... and a picture of a pair of mice neatly represented the two humps of the letter "m". Combined was…

I recall that same color-coded SRA system. I remember doing well at it (climbed to "higher" color levels than many in the class), but I can't say how much it did to teach me, as opposed to measure where I already was.

The three things that did help me a lot were 1) my mom taught me the alphabet before I started kindergarten[0], 2) Dr. Seuss books (first text I was able to read on my own was the The Zax from his Sneetches book[1] after having it read to me a number of times, along with other illustrated stories) and 3) lots of reading material around the house, from Golden Book encyclopedia to Life/Look magazines and newspapers.

So I guess that does support the family & environment effect.

[0]while not from a rich family, it was much more common back then to have stay-at-home mothers

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie...

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#57

Post by Kamq »

api wrote: post #7
kalikrates wrote: post #5

I wish educational systems were less eager to jump into the latest fads, and more conservative in their approach (and I say that as a progressive). In my country we didn't have this particular fad as far as I know, but we are harming kids with the trend of making everything digital. With nonsense such as classrooms of 3-year-old kids where they solve a puzzle by dragging images of the pieces on a big screen, rather t…

Yeah, there’s nothing progressive about not teaching kids to read. The “just throw them in the pool and expect them to swim” approach is particularly harmful to kids with ADD type difficulties. Replace conservative with evidence based. This sounds like one of those “sounds right to me” ideas pushed by someone with charisma who was positioned properly in the educational world to be listened to. In any field there occa…

> Replace conservative with evidence based.

Sure, but that implies a system of pilot studies and increasingly larger studies to make sure that the intervention scales and it wasn't working due to factors inherent to the original population. You need to create an entire body of evidence, because every random fad has at least a single study to back it up. But single studies aren't that predictive, that is to say P(discovering some new fundamental truth | single study published) is rather low, as the replication crisis is showing us. Your changes are probably going to take 20-40 years to iron out all the details and suss out all the subtleties. And real, useful, interventions are going to be delayed in exchange for preventing harmful interventions from propagating.

That puts you pretty deep into conservative, risk-adverse, territory. Firmly in the Eisenhowerian "Let us make our mistakes slowly" camp. I feel like the characterization is accurate here.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#58

Post by zozbot234 »

tialaramex wrote: post #42
failrate wrote: post #16

I find it ridiculous that the author had not already taught their children to read prior to kindergarten.

Children's early aptitudes for all these non-trivial skills vary enormously. There's also minimal later consequence. Basically the fact your five year old can multiply and mine can't count properly actually isn't strongly predictive for which of them is going to be a Fields Medal winner. Kids who exhibit interest in acquiring written language skills should be encouraged, but so should kids who are interested in danci…

> Unless your kid's main hobby is torturing flies or something

That's called research on model organisms. As long as the kid has gotten proper approval by the ethics review board, they'll do just fine.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#59

Post by mcpackieh »

tatrajim wrote: post #54
mcpackieh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the lesson that we should switch to Korean? English may not be ideally 'designed' but how would you change how English is written without causing havoc for the billions of people who already learned it?

No, far from it. My point is that the Korean alphabet (essentially 24 symbols, arranged into syllables) is easy enough to learn in a day or two, so that clueless foreigners, such as me, can begin to sound out road signs and menus quickly, without a clue usually to what it means. By contrast, the disconnect between the Roman alphabet and the English sounds it encodes is a mess. We need a more rational alphabet tailore…

> We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes.

That would cause absolute havok for the billions of people who already know how to read English, but realistically you could never roll this out to the whole world... it would just become another teaching fad that cripples the kids subjected to it, by failing to teach them how to read English as the rest of the world writes it. You would be teaching kids to read and write using a system their own parents can't comprehend. It would be an absolute disaster.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#60

Post by giantg2 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #35
giantg2 wrote: post #13

Too much focus on phonics could turn off some kids. It's not a one size fits all. The other half she's referring to could better spend their time reading since they already know how to instead of spending additional time on phonics. I hated how long they taught phonics, which is really saying something considering I don't remember too much else from that early. How is the political group using the science of reading…

Contrary to stereotypes, kids are not "turned off" by more direct instruction methods. They enjoy the challenge, it's quite fun for them as long as they're not failing completely at it or being bored to death by something that has become trivial. Think about how videogames are designed to be engaging and almost addictive, good instruction should follow along the same principles.

"Contrary to stereotypes, kids are not "turned off" by more direct instruction methods."

I'm not aware of that sterotyoe at all. That highly depends on what the instruction method is, as wella s the child. In this case it was because it became trivial because they dwelled on it for years.

It seems they're looking for a one size fits all solution. I don't believe that exists. If half the kids do well in one method and the other half do better in a different method, then perhaps they should figure out which is the "standard" method and create a second track or IEP for the others.

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