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54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

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Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and yet homeschoolers spend vastly less in comparison to public and private schools (Finding a public source for spending that I am comfortable with is a little hard, so I am basing this on what I know of spending in my local homeschool groups. The test score comparisons are fairly easy to find.). That seems...off. I would actually appreciate a source there because I just did some back of the napkin math. If you are…

That would seem reasonable, except we are not talking about opportunity cost. We are talking about actual financial burden comparison. I can educate both my children to a higher standard in a far more personalized education form for less than $5,000 per child per year in actual financial cost. This includes progressive curriculum materials, paid external learning opportunities (things like park/nature center passes,…

>Opportunity cost tends to be more subjective and harder to realize because the success of opportunity is hard to predict.

Sure - in an effort to limit that I chose $18 per hour as a wage, which is lower than the median individual wage in the US ($22). It's a pretty conservative estimate of lost income.

If you didn't want to add that in I would say remove all salaries from the cost of education, generally, and then compare the cost per pupil. So you're comparing like to like - mostly just the cost of supplies, facilities and educational trips.

Your pluses are great, I'm not taking away from that, but they are at least somewhat represented in the increase in overall score, no?

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#222

There's a strange circularity to the title. It's almost like saying "90% of Americans have below median literacy skills." In that one it is obviously false, since we define median as being at 50-percentile. But this is not a lot different. To me "6th grade reading level" should mean "the reading skills of a 50-percentile 6th grader." But then the statement can't be true, unless you accept that the typical 6th grader…

> So.... how do you define "6th-grade reading level"? The standard required to pass the 6th grade, I guess? Possibly people are reading at that level but then forget how to do it later in life? That's definitely the case with for example knowledge of maths.

But obviously they did pass 6th grade.

I mean, where does the standard come from? Does it have nothing to do with what the typical student in a typical school is able to accomplish? If not, it is just arbitrary and meaningless.

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