41–50 of 106 posts
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doesnt alabama have sundown towns? is this what i hear called "southern hospitality"?
Arab/Skant City is the most 'in your face' example. They don't try to hide it at all up there.
Shout out to Granny's Restaurant in Skant City. Best breakfast in the area.
Note when they say "shot up the national rankings" they mean relative, since Alabama remained static on scores, but others slipped. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/... https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g... They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing succ…
Also, y'know, not a phrase I would use with American schools.
Let's have less shooting eh?
Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders. So, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this. It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might…
>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resour…
2) "They know the letter of the law, but not the spirit." No common shared understanding of the purpose/point/value motivations.
3) "Time marches on." There is a constant influx of new kids to educate and you can't realistically block the flow without rupturing something.
- Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school.
- Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made popular by extensive marketing in teacher training programs. (And consequently popular in Blue districts.)
- Have lots of people teach reading. Birmingham uses college students as tutors. Steubenville uses ALL teachers (including phy-ed, art, music) and volunteers.
- Have more school. Birmingham does summer sessions, Steubenville does free pre-K.
Steubenville's preK programs teach grammatical sentences, the alphabet phonetically, and prereading.
The Steubenville schools sort reading classes by student ability rather than grade level, so that stuggling classes can be smaller and those students can get closer to one-on-one attention. They famously consistently get to third grade with no students reading below grade level. It is more expensive per student, but they make up for it with fewer students repeating grades.
So a lot of this falls under the category of "stops you can pull if you really want to," but the methods that have evidence showing they work [2] are not profitable for publishers, so teachers don't get trained on them. They also require teachers to carefully follow a script, which is boring and rubs against idealism.
[1] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2025/02/20/sold-a-story-e...
[2] https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair to gruez, the chart was made by the economist and not by them. To be less fair to the economist, "adjusted by poverty level" is a heck of a spin, we've had many generations as a developed nation now, your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. And that's without even speculating about what "demographic factors" means or implies.
> your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. bad teachers dont make an area poor. a poor area doesnt have the money for good teachers, youve got it the wrong way around.
Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.
When and where I was growing up, phonics was really only used remedially with kids who couldn't figure out how to read any other way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“No child left behind”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
Iirc Obama era policies actually made things worse. There was a plain English episode about it. To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
When you click on the NCLB wiki link it states it was signed by George W Bush.
When you click your link it doesn't mention Obama or NCLB. It just talks about how kids cant do math, that predates Obama.
Why link to something that has nothing to do with what you said? It seems quite disingenuous.
Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.
Teachers use phonics all the time. “Teachers don’t use phonics anymore” is just a thing people say. It’s odd.
Two ways poor school districts could work on serving the kids are take some money from administration salaries to pay teachers and take some money from administration salaries to pay for breakfast and lunch for students.
Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.
I'm here in Alabama, I'm teaching my kids reading through phonics at home about 2 years ahead of them starting in school. They're learning what they call "sight words" in class. My kids are so far ahead of the others that our specific teacher has now moved to teaching the rest of the class phonics and almost abandoning sight words altogether. I think the rubber on the road reason for not teaching phonics is that it's…
I guess I didn’t consider phonics to be hard.. it seems self evident. But yeah, I also read to my kid a ton and have been throwing some phonics practice in there. I don’t know how else to give a toddler footholds to comprehend what’s on the page.