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

You make some good points, but I want to focus on one particular part of your comment:

"I also see other commentors jumping to trashing schools or the education system for this. Does a flat number really point to education? What about poverty levels, general cultural attitudes towards literacy, accounting and definition of proficiency, etc."

If you only look at a specific segment of students (e.g. Socio-economically disadvantaged Hispanic 3rd graders), you can compare school districts and individual schools, without having your data polluted by different poverty levels etc.

If you look at the careads web site, you'll see they compared districts in California, and found (i) significant variation between districts, and (ii) worse-performing districts had a higher prevalance of using F&P/Calkin type reading curricula.

The folks who run that site didn't compare individual schools (so as not to over-interpret random variation). I was curious so I looked at the data for the schools in San Francisco.

For my local school (Glen Park Elementary), the % of that segment reading at grade level or above was 4%.

For Hillcrest Elementary, for the same segment of students, it was 65%.

In each case, the sample included at least 15 students.

What explains the large difference in results between schools, even after we control for poverty and home language?

Any individual statement from the list will suffice. This is already clear in the Overcoming Bias post, but it's equally clear in the source, which says this:

> Correct Answer:

> Any statement such as the following: to enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community; to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community; and to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community

It is technically true that "Acceptable answers include statement such as:" is grammatically incorrect, but the error is so obvious that it would normally be called a "typo" and not a "grammatical error".

MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it!

I couldn't write a coherent sentence until I was 24 years old. A couple years after high school I discovered reading starting with "Cannery Row" however it still took significant effort to learn to write despite thousands of hours of reading. Once I understood the basic mechanics of grammar, fitting words into meaningful structures became second nature. I still can't spell the word coherent without assistance from a spell checker, nevertheless, I write and communicate the meaning I intend to convey.

People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. Sure teachers especially in public schools are over worked, however, what happened to me is abuse. It was always I who failed and never the teachers or my parents who strangely both have PhDs. The onus to understand how to learn was the responsibility of a child and not the adults. We expect children who fail to understand pedagogy? They told me to think harder, to work harder. What does it mean to think harder? I suffered anxiety attacks and mental breakdowns trying to keep up. They ushered me along through graduation because I never had antisocial behavioral problems.

I taught myself a trade so I could survive. Then taught myself how to write. Then taught myself a second trade for fun and a third. At some point, I'll change my focus to educational software. There have been several individuals, groups, and initiatives over the past few decades since I graduated who have developed amazing tools I wish existed when I was in school with the Khan Academy at the top of that list. Nonetheless, the people at the Khan Academy who designed their course on grammar also happen to be people who are naturally talented at grammar, the fundamental crux teaching. I have one paradoxical advantage: my disadvantage which plagues every working moment gives me a perspective nobody has, er, correction, 46% of people who also happen to be the people doing the teaching with higher education degrees don't have.

One thing is for sure, I would be an idiot to expect a child to solve pedagogy for her or his self. When children fall behind they give up, they don't contemplate the philosophy of how they learn.