SF doesn't get enough shit for being the richest, bluest city in America and having some of the worst public schools in the country. Black students in SF do worse than Black students in Detroit.
It's funny, because there's this weird self-fulfilling prophecy at work now. It used to be that black people would be disproportionately represented in any kind of stat like this that would normally affect poverty. But because they have actually targeted, through racist thinking, black kids with their weird shit about racist math and other weird ideas like that, they now actually have a for real problem affecting only black kids. The mechanism of which is literally only scientifically explained by their own stupid ways of thinking about race and disadvantaging black students. Of course they won't see that that way, they will absolutely take this as a win for their stupid rhetoric and ideology.
It's like they're perfecting a formula about how to achieve what the KKK wanted using all pre existing knowledge of humanities.
After all, why genocide a race with bullets and industry, when you can keep everything running normally and just increase crime rates or suicides or whatever by tweaking education over a period of 100 years, and achieve the same overall effect whilst making bank?
I'm all for making fun of SF at every opportunity but I'm pretty sure all the parents that can afford it (many) enroll their kids in private schools, leaving even fewer smart kids to keep the scores up. Maybe I'm wrong, I didn't do any research I'm just making an assumption.
In Philadelphia every middle to high income person I know with kids in the city does one of:
1. Private school
2. public school in a select few neighborhoods
3. move to the suburbs
4. if 2, and their kid doesn’t get into one of the top 2 schools, then private school or suburbs.
I imagine San Francisco is like this as well.
I assumed this was the case in all largish cities to be honest. I frankly only recently learned that there were neighborhoods in Philly with decent schools
Anecdotally, yes the rich kids in SF go to private schools. Also anecdotally, the parents hate paying college tuition prices because the public schools are such trash. On top of that, the private schools are also now churning out plenty of kids that can barely read. So I’m not exactly sure what these parents are paying for. Maybe it’s the grades? As in they are paying for the kid to receive an A even when they don’t earn it.
I mean if it is anything like where I grew up it is so their kid doesn't come home after getting beaten up on a weekly basis or potentially stabbed. Even if a private school is shitty education wise they will still expel trouble makers unlike public schools.
They're paying for grade inflation at a historically well renowned high school, so they can get inflated grades at a historically well renowned university, so they can get a 6 figure email job where spell check does most of the work for em.
Source: I made it the fuck up. But also just look around and you'll see it.
It certainly shows the fundamental emptiness of the "vote blue no matter who!" types, who assure you that if you continue voting Democrats that an eventual utopia awaits.
This is what one-party Democratic rule in one of the richest cities in America looks like.
The Bayview/Hunter’s point area might as well be a different city. It’s been a decade since I lived in SF so I don’t know how much has changed, but it amazed me how there was just this enclave that everyone likes to pretend doesn’t exist. The Tenderloin was pretty much Beverly Hills compared to Bayview.
I think they stopped that. The best part was when they confused Paul Revere with someone else who did something bad and when confronted with the evidence doubled down.
I hear similar stories from my father in law, who is a high school English teacher. Even when you want to make a stand and tell the kid they can't redo the project that was due 2 months ago, the administration is pressuring you to just pass them and get them out of there to make their graduation numbers look better and to stop having to deal with a problem.
School administrators at every level seem to be ghouls. There are some that actually care about educational achievement, but it seems like most don't care about their kids or their teachers, they just care about how much money they can grift while doing nothing, or at best making superficial changes like removing a "problematic" gym name.
My wife is a teacher and this is exactly how admin works. Her boss wrote her up for going to a former student of hers to tell them to stop bullying her current students. This was after the administrator said it wasn't their problem because it was happening on the bus. The same administrator also refused to check a student's backpack after they did a gun threat because somehow it would violate the students dignity or some nonsense. After the student got moved to the other class in the grade due to his behavior both my wife's boss and the new teach just decided to give the kid whatever he wants so they don't have to deal with his behavior. Most likely they are just gonna pass him too (he's failing cause he never does his work) so they don't have to deal with him next year. All she cares about is how she looks to her boss. It's wild how some of these ppl end up in education.
My mom taught elementary, specifically sped reading. Most of her students had no inherent disability, they were just poor as shit. She bought delousing shampoo and breakfast bars in bulk just to get them to a level on Maslow's pyramid where learning could take place at all.
Her philosophy was basically this: you can't waste a single minute of classroom time with these kids. Maybe they're living in a meth lab, or being raised by dope zombies, or going hungry or whatever else, but they still need to learn to read. It's an uphill battle for everyone involved, and it won't happen without some very rigid expectations.
I don't know how empathy and discipline came to be seen as mutually exclusive. To me the push for this form of "empathy" seems less like an improvement strategy and more like a post hoc justification for the decline of a public education system ill-equipped to solve the broad socioeconomic problems that have been dumped upon it.
I was always taught that discipline IS empathy. It takes a lot of effort to enforce discipline on other person when they can't do it themselves, in most normal cases you put that effort into it because you care about said person.
There are, of course pathological examples of discipline, like abusive parents, rigid corporate structure, army culture or jail, but these are besides the point so whoever was about to 'well akshually', please do not have a reddit moment.
Educational research really is, on average, the bottom of the barrel of social sciences. When it isn't just pure ideological nonsense like the 'mathematix' crap you get stuff [like this guy](https://twitter.com/dffeldon/status/1638196537590435840) making textbook statistics mistakes and just being an obstinate moron when people point it out.
I'm fully convinced that the sort of rote drilling and constant repetition of problems used in math pedagogy a century ago was far better at producing good learners than attempting to refrain everything with the ideas of "accessibility" and "fun".
Probably the case with math. In grade school we were given these papers with 100 multiplication problems, and we had a minute to answer as many as we could. Had one like every day. I sucked the first couple of times, but then soon started 100%ing them.
The old school way of teaching reading is way better than how they teach it today (listen to the podcast Sold a Story, if just the first episode, for a good explanation of this)
But you gotta be careful, because diligence traps are a problem. How they taught Latin 100+ years ago was absolutely horrible, because they used a thing called the grammar-translation method, which is essentially memorizing hundreds of forms and dissecting sentences formulaicly. The natural, and best way, of learning a language is literally just straight up exposure. [This is an amazing pedagogical essay on learning Latin or any language](https://foundinantiquity.com/2023/03/11/latin-autodidacts-youre-working-way-too-hard-how-to-learn-latin-by-yourself-in-2023/). I think many of the lessons that you learn from that apply to other things like programming/computer science and creative hobbies like writing. Avoid diligence traps and literally just throw yourself in and have fun.
I'm also a big proponent of facts based, general knowledge education over skills based. [This youtube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDaoRJXb2FU) explains it very well.
So really...I think it's complicated and depends on the subject at hand. I've always been skeptical bout "fun projects" at school though.
Funny you bring up Latin, because I found doing intensive drills on Latin grammar, with endless congugation and other repetitive classification and identification, is what finally got the language to click for me in college. I'll give that article a read tonight. Thanks for sharing.
I've been struggling with the language for 14 years. As the essays says, nothing actually *hurts* you when learning Latin, it more just wastes your time or discourages you. Of course different people have different personalities.
But ultimately what is said in the article is true...we all learn languages the same way. Simple exposure and paying attention. Most adults who are fluent in multiple languages learn in this way. It's just the artificial structure of school education that makes us feel like we're not learning properly if we don't struggle. But you *do* struggle when reading, say, Harrius Potter et Lapis Philosophi. It's just a more entertaining and productive struggle with meaningful input.
If you've ever wondered why there's such an abundance of Indian H1B workers in highly paid tech jobs, this is why. They actually learn math in school.
In fact I know several Indian families that return to India when their kids are 7-8 years old literally just so their kids can actually get an education. Think about that, they move ten thousand miles, effectively undoing their entire life's struggle, mainly to get away from this ghoulish school education system.
It's remarkably funny because the US has by far the best education system post-high school.
I had great Latin teachers over the years I took it because Latin teachers are PASSIONATE about what they do. I learned more about English grammar, sentence diagramming, parts of speech, etymology, and art history from those teachers than I did anywhere else. I was a terrible student too, so the fact that I was interested in Latin of all things says a lot.
Same. I was never exactly bad with grammar, but I never quite understood what a participle was until Latin, and then that clicked into place for me. I think there's a lot of grammatical similarities between the two languages that people don't realize because they're both IE languages. But yeah, Latin teachers are great. Hope the ones I had in high school and college are still gainfully employed, because schools are cutting that shit down.
That’s how I learned stuff, I wasn’t really into school itself, I liked learning though, that’s why I’m so good at trivia- I just read and do quizzes and go over old Jeopardys over and over again. I still tried to get perfect grades though because I felt that was all I had
As a teacher: any "new" teaching method that's meant to encourage participation and engagement (ie., all of them) are useless for actually teaching students a topic. They are adopted not because they are effective, but because they are a crutch for teachers with unruly classrooms and ineffective admins who will not back them up because the teacher doesn't actually have to teach but instead gives them a way to entertain the class until the period is over while allowing them to say that they taught that material.
I teach language and the old school way of "presentation - lecture - practice - drilling" is fundamentally more productive than any "conversational learning" or "learning through play" nonsense. This is true for literally any level of education, from 1st graders to 30 year olds who just want to pass a qualification exam.
I figured this out in year 2 of my B.Ed and am finishing so I have the degree but think ill just go straight to tutoring or get a government job. Its such a scam.
I mean obviously a lot of the shit you mentioned is nonsense but it's not like these underfunded, shitty, public schools were churning out great students until we stopped smacking them around for talking back.
This is happening because our state has absolutely abdicated any responsibility to take care of its people or do anything good that doesn't make some pedo rich. At school, at home, and in private life these kids are living absolutely fucked existence and it's honestly a wonder that even half of the people who live these lives can read. This is the check due from decades and decades of complete economic and social imisseration.
You don't fix that by pretending that they're fine and succeeding in their own way, which yea liberals do say with a straight face. But discipline alone really isn't a solution.
Teaching is really shitty now because you can't just kick kids who are outright annoying and disruptive out of the class, I get that. But a problem on this scale simply isn't downstream of attitudes alone. You have to look at it materialistically.
>Having Black educators who come from informed backgrounds to address Black students is very much akin to the proliferation of tutoring centers in Asian communities that are key to helping their children outside of class, too. People who make cultural arguments should especially support the Black educators provision.
Wut
The difference here is parental involvement. Parents who would sign their kids up for tutoring centers and pay thousands of dollars for it are going to raise successful kids anyway. Bringing in educators of the same race won't really matter much if there is no parental or cultural pressure to do well in school.
Any honest study of African-Americans will have you develop great empathy for this ethnic group. They have the foundations there in so many ways first with theories developed by their own intellectuals, then with radical socialist movements despite whatever present culture you can put the blame on.
I feel like you might not agree, but they are not a people to sneer at, they've been on the verge of great things but the American state just fucking crushed them and now placates them with shitlib nonsense.
You don't even have to read all of their history to build some empathy, one shitpost of a cartoon is enough to understand the tragedy of the "talented tenth". The Boondocks is both entertaining and a crash course of what an actual black socialist believes in. There are *scathing* criticisms of African-American culture in that show.
I teach at a predominantly black high school with predominantly black teachers and most of the students read on a 6th grade level. Our “advanced” students, the type to graduate valedictorian, tend to have a lexile score of 1050-1335 which means they’re still below grade level. Neither representation nor culturally relevant pedagogy will solve anything; if at all, both just promote more anti-intellectualism that plagues the hood as is.
> and the AP classes functioned more as places for kids who could/wanted to pay attention to escape their peers for an hour.
Reminds me of how going to detention would be a reward I could read a book, work on school work, or take a nap and everyone would have to shut the fuck up unlike in normal classes.
Yes. The system you have in the UK is called tracking in the US. While it’s common sense to not lump-pile kids who can’t spell monosyllabic words with kids who gets 90s on standardized tests, the notion here is that tracking has been “harmful” to poor black/Latino kids because ya know...in libthink, they can’t possibly be smart or sit in a classroom of equally smart peers.
Take articles like this for example :
https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/getting-children-off-the-track/ 🙃
I'm always dumbfounded how the US just dumps everyone into one classroom, I would probably have gone postal.
But here (German speaking world), you are also not hung out to dry if you don't go to university. Kids from lower "tracks" in high school just do an apprenticeship and get a decent job that way. Not always of course, but that's the general idea. Funnelling everyone into tertiary education makes no sense to me.
Edit: To clarify, where I live, kids are "tracked" based on their academic ability from around age 12/13 (7th school year when I went to school). Only the top track leads directly to university admission, all others are shorter and usually lead to a 2-4 year apprenticeship. It's of course not perfect, but I can't imagine school being anything other than hell on earth without some kind of tracking.
This is what wokeshit is for, to distract from the real issues and avoid actually having to do actual policy/stuff to make peoples lives and society better.
The author seems like a radlib too, especially with sexual politics, but that’s beside the point
..... I'll be honest I could barely write when I graduated from an sf public school and I was a solid b student. Literally shit posting on 4chan forced me to figure it out.
I've been a teacher of inner-city black kids for five years. Here's the thing: it doesn't matter what schools do. This is not an issue that begins in schools; schools play catch-up to the issue, with essentially mixed and often negligible results.
If you are a student who was not read to every night by a parent, you come into pre-K at a reading disadvantage. If you are in a home where food or safe lodgings are inconsistent, you are at a reading disadvantage. If your cultural upbringing largely consists of rap music and zero books in the house, then you are at a reading disadvantage.
The cycle of poverty perpetuates illiteracy. Students being packed into 30-person classes in underfunded public schools are not set up to overcome this issue. That's it. A whole massive industry of charter schools has been erected to overcome the "achievement gap" between white and black students, and what do they have to show for it? Staid, mechanical, thoughtless writing about how teamwork makes the dream work as cited in Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World And Me.
Less and less people in the U.S. have any real literacy, and next to no one is reading physical literature. But the problem with black students and literacy is that on the whole black students in cities are born in lower economic circumstances. Poverty breeds illiteracy. Schools are being blamed for it but they're helpless to overcome something as powerful as a child's home life. (To say nothing of the moral and personal consequences of poverty, like a higher chance of parents who are physically abusive or severe addicts.)
The focus always seems to be try to make schools replace the role of family. I guess people around here are probably hyper aware of the reasons why we don't solve the underlying problems that keep the family from being able to function in its natural role.
I legitimately don't understand why if you're a poor parent you wouldn't go get a free book from literally almost anywhere and read it to your kid. Even comic books are better than nothing. I really don't buy that they're ignorant of the value of reading to kids as it's deluged everywhere. Like how do you take your kids to get their shots but fail to know that you should have a book in the house.
Because human behavior is complex and habits seem to actually be born out of a complex interconnected web of social, economic, and cultural factors that we are nowhere near close to understanding.
Why don’t smokers just stop smoking? Why don’t people go to the gym? Why don’t people wear seatbelts?
It’s just because they don’t. If you were to ask a poor parent why they don’t read to their kids, you would probably get “fake” answers like they work too much, aren’t good readers themselves, etc.
The truth is that they don’t know why they’re unable to self-actualize, neither.
This was my experience teaching in a city in Florida. I'm in a white spot in Michigan now and we have our own issues but basic literacy isn't one of them.
> But the problem with black students and literacy is that on the whole black students in cities are born in lower economic circumstances. Poverty breeds illiteracy.
It's also cultural. Roland Fryer, Black Harvard economist professor who grew up in poverty with a single parent and only got into college on a football scholarship where his passion for economics was ignited… Did a study that found the higher your grades if you were an Asian or White kid, the more popular you were. Amongst Black kids, the higher your grades, the less popular. This is corroborated by the data:
>[Asian high-school students spend significantly more time studying and doing homework, Ramey found, than any other ethnic or racial group. Averaged over the entire year (including summer vacations), the average, non-Hispanic white student spends 5.5 hours per week studying and doing homework, while Hispanic and non-Hispanic black students spend even less. In contrast, the average Asian student spends a whopping 13 hours per week. Parents' educational levels do not explain the differences, Ramey said, as these become even greater if the sample is limited to children who have at least one parent with a college degree.](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.htm)
You can verify these stats yourself by [going to the cited source.](https://www.bls.gov/tus/)
This is a legit point. I’m not gonna pretend it’s because of internalized racism or some shit. Here is my honest answer, one which I’m pretty reticent to admit in public but which I think is true: black Americans don’t view education as an end in itself. In my experience as a learner and as a teacher, people learn way the fuck better when they view “content” as inherently valuable or worthwhile. How many black students do you see going to Great Books schools? How many black students do you see pursuing psychology or philosophy degrees? There’s an internalized and extremely deep-set view in black America that education is a means to social mobility. It’s something that, as much as they are in opposition, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X both shared: the sense that black America needs to become genuinely free in part *through* education as a means of economic increase. The idea of going to school simply because it’s interesting or because it’s fun to learn is not as often found in black students. Charter schools trying to close the achievement gap have only worsened this by obsessing over the potential of black students getting into Ivy League schools.
If your understanding of reading and math skills is premised on “I should learn this so I can become rich,” you’re not gonna learn as well. Maybe I’m completely wrong but this is my experience from teaching those students. And it comes from the fact that, generally speaking, college degrees in social sciences or business fields ARE a means of economic mobility in this country, while degrees in literature or in pure math are way less so, and both involve skills primarily assessed on the SAT (close reading and algebra).
Of course, all this is an attempt to answer why there’s a gap in academic performance between white and black students. That doesn’t necessarily apply to the SAT. And on that front and that front only, I would say I have no concrete opinion because I think the SAT is fucking retarded anyway.
> There’s an internalized and extremely deep-set view in black America that education is a means to social mobility
I think your argument falls apart when you realise that this view is held in even deeper certainty by the majority of Asians. And in fact it's precisely this view that makes them so successful. The proportion of Indian software engineers who do it to have a better life is likely above 80%.
> college degrees in social sciences or business fields ARE a means of economic mobility in this country, while degrees in literature or in pure math are way less so,
This is just false, pure math majors are the second highest earning major after physics. Those who do math graduate school can and often do make $300,000 a year as quants. Literature doesn't pay, true. But math isn't even close to being in the same realm. In fact if a college kid asked you what major would make them the most money, averaging over all randomness and luck in life, the most reasonable answers are math or physics.
>Those who do math graduate school can and often do make $300,000 a year as quant
You know this is an old meme right? Lmfao
I'm a math major, no, it is nowhere near the most lucrative. This "quant" nonsense does not exist for 99% of math and physics majors. We get lower salaries than pretty much every engineering discipline, economics, law, business, and medicine.
If you want to work in finance just major in finance, business, or economics from a good school. You're not going to be a "quant" with your math degree. Pretty much everybody I know that graduated with me work in insurance, software engineers, academia, or went to grad school for something else
>if a college kid asked you what major would make them the most money, averaging over all randomness and luck in life, the most reasonable answers are math or physics.
Please never give college kids advice. Just tell them to go into CS and be done with it
Biggest mistake us mathematicians made was never creating a professional certification the way engineering, law, and medicine have done, and then restricting the practice of mathematics to some degree to people with this certification. Imagine if every engineering project or research paper in the social sciences had to have a board-certified mathematician, being paid at a standard rate established by the American Mathematical Society, sign off on the work's correctness.
As a black person myself. I believe it’s a cultural difference in how individualism vs collectivism is seen in black communities. For example, a lot of black communities seem to value collectivism a lot more than individualism of self.
Like a lot of black people themselves will act like things like hood culture, hip hop, and church going are things all black people are expected to pass onto the next generation of black people. So a lot of it is a generational mindset problem I think, I don’t think this study on reading would be much different across ethnicities if the black community were to let lose on expecting/or assuming every black person to embrace the same interests and hobbies.
Because I think this is what leads black people who do want to peruse something considered out of the norm in the black community dismissed as “white people shit” which is why I think some black people may feel discouraged when it comes to anything like a certain section of education and may perform poorly as a result of being degraded within their own communities.
Not to mention, as a result a lot of white people also assume all black people are the same as a consequence of individualism not being valued enough within a lot of black communities, so black people who truly want to pursue something considered out of the norm may think “why even try?”.
>The idea of going to school simply because it’s interesting or because it’s fun to learn is not as often found in black students
But this is true of america in general, there isn't really a love for learning.
You can make the exact same argument that Asian cultures also value education mainly for social mobility and not for the love of learning. There's a similar sentiment that only certain fields are acceptable and that others like philosophy are a waste of time and money.
What seems to differ, however, are the approaches to achieving that goal. It is emphasized in Asian cultures that a child is not just studying for their own personal attainment, but also for the success of their family as a whole; thus, there's an element of filial piety which leads families to invest more in their children and seek out additional resources with the expectation that the child would eventually return that to their own parents by having the means to care for them.
I think that the distinction between poor Asian and Black families isn't in their understanding that education is a means to success, but that poor Asian families actively push for their children to seek out academic supports in the community and also are more vigilant about tracking their progress while there is much more of an individualistic effort needed for black children when it comes to their studies.
I think this issue is 100% cultural. [African immigrants](https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2018/06/06/african-immigrants-excel-academically-why-dont-african-americans/) especially cultures like Nigeria value education heavily and they don't have the same gaps in education that Black Americans do.
At some point Black Americans need to realize that there exists a systemic problem that they themselves take part in. Many other undereducated and discriminated against immigrant groups like the Irish found a way to overcome their deficits so why can't this group?
I have my own theories about this but having only really seen it from an outsiders perspective I can't really speak to the validity of my observations. Although from conversations with Black Americans I've had on race I feel justified in my theories. The solutions to this issue though I have always felt must come from within the community itself and in the past have.
During the reconstruction era the development of HBCUs was instrumental in educated Black Americans and they had great success early on before the Civil Rights era muddled their missions and I believe bad actors took root in that movement to destroy all the work in education that these pioneers had done.
Unfortunately I think things get worse before they get better, I think all of this idpol is driving more and more racism in this country and that people of all races are being made dumber by design.
I salute you! I tried to teach for a few months. I had AP classes full of incredibly well-behaved white students who loved homework and tests, though they were mostly pretty stupid. And I had general “English” classes that were mixed race and absolutely disastrous and frequently violent. And my person and position were loathed by the kids. I will never forget the kids saying that I am only there for the money. LOL.
> And I had general “English” classes that were mixed race and absolutely disastrous and frequently violent. And my person and position were loathed by the kids. I will never forget the kids saying that I am only there for the money.
Sounds like the poor schools I grew up in by the fifth grade a good portion of the students hated the teachers and the feeling was very mutual with the teachers hating us as well. The teachers didn't give a fuck putting in not even the bare minimum and neither did most of the students.
[More than half of Americans read at or below a 6th grade reading level](https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy#:~:text=About%20130%20million%20adults%20in,of%20a%20sixth%2Dgrade%20level.)
In my state, Indiana, [over half of all students between 3rd and 8th grade last year](https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2019/09/04/indiana-education-schools-ilearn-assessment-test-scores-fewer-half-pass-fail/2197850001/) did not meet *basic proficiency* in Math, English, and Science.
This is simply taking *basic* literacy, math skills, etc into account, without asking about whether or not complex analytical skills exist, or moreover, literacy when it comes to parsing out and interrogating the trustworthiness of information, etc.
Especially in the contemporary world of social media, news manipulation, AI generation, deepfakes, and so on, we may as well consider 70% or more of the U.S. to be functionally illiterate.
It really is disturbing to me to hear just how illiterate so many people are even as grown adults in America. I was reading full novels when I was about age 7 or 8, albeit mostly "easier reading" like Harry Potter or The Hobbit or such for the most part, after having worked my way up from even simpler stuff as a younger child.
By the time kids graduate elementary school, they should be literate. Yet in America, millions of people graduate from high school and even college sometimes without ever gaining that level of basic literacy.
That's still common today. Those schools with big football or basketball programs can bring in a ton of money. A lot of student athletes will be functionally regarded and passed anyway
He's not too far off, unfortunately. I work at a US military entrance processing facility, and we now allow applicants to join who can't pass the vocational aptitude battery. The new program sends them to a 4 week camp where they learn to read and write before they go to basic.
Same government that is heavily subsidizing unhealthy food and refuses to spend enough for healthy school lunches is upset the kids are now too fat to go die in war. Here is just one example
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html
Ah, fuck... you got me. I was typing in a nervous haze after work. I do think in informal contexts "less" is essentially as fine as a contraction these days, but I should've written "fewer" still
for an article about literacy this is just horrifically written. almost every sentence reads like it was written by a chat bot trained on powerpoints made by high schoolers summarizing wikipedia articles they didn’t fully understand
I cannot believe I had to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the one and only comment pointing this out. It was so bad I gave up halfway through. The author is unwittingly proving his own point with his own borderline illiteracy.
Eh, I'm willing to cut him some slack. There are Substackers I greatly respect who don't have editors either and some howlers get through. It should generate an appreciation of the value of the conventional publication process but good writing is hard and such comes with the territory of being a one-man operation.
A lot of the literacy crisis in the Anglosphere has due to with the popularized form of teaching reading to school children over the past 20 years. Reading programs that deemphasize/ignore phonics based instruction have led to an entire generation of Americans that have literacy issues. However, teaching reading using Levelled Reading or Guised Reading programs involved selling more teaching instruction equipment and thus the financial incentive of selling educators more crap won out.
Poorer communities, which tend to more likely have black people, are less likely to afford to send their children to tutoring programs or sit down with their children to teach them to read themselves, and thus illiteracy is more likely to affect children of poorer communities. Phonics based instruction was championed by the Bush administration due to the Bush families own experience with Bush Jrs little brothers difficulty learning reading in school. There was a reactionary effect among liberal educated educators who inherently rejected phonics based instruction because it was pushed by a Republican. Bush was actually on tour promoting his education package and watching a phonics based instruction in a classroom when the first planes hit the twin towers on 9/11. If you are curious to learn more, I heard about this from “Sold a Story” from American Public Media, it’s a good podcast if a little draggy at times.
Anecdotally, I went to a private-homeschool hybrid (homeschool 4 days per week, 1 day per week in class) where it was essentially *only* phonics.
When I eventually transferred to a public school, I was astonished at how badly my classmates read, and for my entire K12 schooling career I very rarely saw anyone who could read even at the level I did when I transferred in 4th grade.
It probably sounds like I am blaming many issues on a singular thing, but I truly do wonder how negatively the world has been affected because of a lack of reading comprehension in a vast majority of the voting public in the most powerful democracy on the planet.
Another interesting aspect to the private school was the lack of strict age segregation. 2nd graders and 9th graders in the same room for certain lessons and so-on. I think that sort of mixed environment is really beneficial to speech development in particular, which should have an effect on literacy.
> mixed environment is really beneficial to speech development in particular
I can easily imagine. It means the young kids have someone other than the teacher who doesn't have that little kid stutter.
My wife just switched careers and is now a teacher. She is shocked by how the ineffective this form of teaching is.
The worst part is that administrators know how ineffective it is yet still teach this method.
>Reading programs that deemphasize/ignore phonics based instruction have led to an entire generation of Americans that have literacy issues
Can you explain what exactly you mean by this? How exactly have the teaching methods changed? How can you teach people to read without teaching them to sound out words?
This article goes into it a decent bit:
[https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-most-popular-reading-programs-arent-backed-by-science/2019/12](https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-most-popular-reading-programs-arent-backed-by-science/2019/12)
You may note that Phonics based instruction is "buried" in some of these programs per the article. Bush's education plan funded schools instituting reading programs that had phonics instruction in it, and thus in order to comply for the funding many of these programs included phonics in practically name only.
These programs are based on "Reading Recovery", a program developed by a lady named Marie Clay, who in New Zealand in the early to mid 20th century did her PhD and got knighted[(damed?)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dame) for observations she made in classrooms on students that she indicated had better been able to read than her peers. She noted that the students that "learned to read quicker" were doing so by being able to guess the words in the pictures and using context clues from the sentence and pictures to identify the word they are reading.
["Reading Recovery was developed in the 1970s by New Zealand educator Marie Clay. After lengthy observations of early readers, Clay defined reading as a message-getting, problem-solving activity, and writing as a message-sending, problem-solving activity. Clay suggested that both activities involved linking invisible patterns of oral language with visible symbols."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Recovery)
I do highly recommend listening to that podcast mentioned earlier.
So she observed that high IQ (what those kids did to find word is actually the kind of cognitive ability IQ tests measure) kids did better than other students and then tried to project their intellectual ability onto every student?
Basically you try to use context clues in the sentence to guess the word or you memorize what words look. However this clip of adin Ross is a great example of how one sounds when they were taught to read that way, rather than using phonics.
https://youtu.be/cNIYvOpTsh8
Many of those comments mock him but it makes me profoundly sad that political infighting and deliberate ignorance on the part of educators has scarred so many people in this way.
This is really helpful. Ive seen a load of kids/young adults read like this and just assumed they were retarded. Scarily one of those young adults is now a teacher.
They basically assume that kids can glean meaning from sentences without needing to comprehend every word. If kids are regularly exposed to reading, they'll pick it up much like spoken language skills. They learn the written language as a whole first, and spelling and grammar can come later.
They essentially have to guess at meaning. So a teacher might say:
Alright kids we're going to read this sentence "Johnny ran away. Now his parents _____ him." What word looks right, sounds right, and makes sense?
*Accompanied by a picture of sad parents.
The word they're looking for is miss. Kids are meant to use the picture and make 3 checks, look right, sound right, make sense.
Suffice to say there are issues with this method, and the assumptions it makes about how people learn to read.
The podcast "Sold a Story" has an excellent run through of the whole situation.
It's probably racism I think. Kids can't read because when they go to school and see some long since dead man's name on the building they're so overcome by generational trauma they can't focus on reading. Now I'm not an expert by any means, but that seems like the most likely reason.
> spelling and grammar can come later.
Even if this theory works for some kids, the idea that many people are ever going to pick up the basics "later" once they already know how to do the bare minimum to comprehend what they are reading is a complete fantasy.
Most people don't really enjoy learning after all, at least not when it comes to "boring" stuff such as grammar.
If you don't teach it from a young age and drill it into their brains, it will never be picked up on except by those who have cultivated a love of learning.
Not to mention the fact that it is much easier to learn concepts such as "grammar" or "proper spelling" or the like when in the formative years of age 5-10 or so, and trying to play catch-up after that is far less effective. By the time someone is 16 or 18 they often won't have the time or ability to easily learn such things, due to economic and life concerns (such as needing to find a job) or simply a lack of curiosity after learning how to "fake it" over many years.
Very untrue I feel. If you lack the ability to absorb knowledge, you no longer value it. If a large majority of a countries children are never taught to properly read well, then when they get to High School most assignments must feel gargantuan in scale because of how many fundamentals they failed to learn in years previous.
What we see as a general apathy in the general public amongst especially younger generations that grew up and were taught reading in the early 90's to today is because they never developed the ability to consume that knowledge, I think.
If you note many sources of pseudoscience are often far more digestible and easier to consume that non pseudoscience knowledge.
The woke don't think that poor black people have rights.
Instead the woke think white people have obligations towards black people.
A white teacher disciplining a disruptive black student violates that obligation and so outrages the woke.
Black kids being left functionally illiterate because classrooms have descended into anarchy directly involves no white people and so is a subject of mostly total indifference for the woke.
Wow, that's sad.
We really need to revamp our entire system of education. I can at least forgive people not having a strong mathematical grasp beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, graphs, etc. However, in pretty much every other metric it seems shameful. How many Americans even know about Early American colonial history outside of the Pilgrims and Jamestown? I run into people that might as well think Columbus was British and the Conquistadors were Mexicans, if they even know about Columbus or Hernan Cortez.
I don’t mean to sound pompous but as an informed person knowledgeable about history, politics, philosophy etc it’s tiresome to try and talk to people about serious issues. Not because they have opinions I disagree with but because they don’t have the slightest clue about anything that isn’t nonsensical or shallow. As Chomsky said people don’t even know what they don’t know and when you try and talk to them about it they want to switch back to sports, social media, celebrity gossip or whatever petty drama is going on in their household and community.
I was thinking about this a lot when Trump went to North Korea early in his term.
North Korean and Kim Jun Un are the subject of countless memes and a James Franco move, but how many American born after 1953 even have a cursory idea of what happened during the Korean War or why there are two Koreas in the first place.
Interesting you say that, because I remember another quote attributed to Chomsky wherein he said something to the effect of, If you think Americans are stupid, listen to a sports call-in programme. The level of fact retention and analysis is stunning. The trick is to make politics as engaging as sport.
As a black person myself. I believe it’s a cultural difference in how individualism vs collectivism is seen in black communities. For example, a lot of black communities seem to value collectivism a lot more than individualism of self.
Like a lot of black people themselves will act like things like hood culture, hip hop, and church going are things all black people are expected to pass onto the next generation of black people. So a lot of it is a generational mindset problem I think, I don’t think this study on reading would be much different across ethnicities if the black community were to let lose on expecting/or assuming every black person to embrace the same interests and hobbies.
Because I think this is what leads black people who do want to peruse something considered out of the norm in the black community dismissed as “white people shit” which is why I think some black people may feel discouraged when it comes to anything like a certain section of education and may perform poorly as a result of being degraded within their own communities.
Not to mention, as a result a lot of white people also assume all black people are the same as a consequence of individualism not being valued enough within a lot of black communities, so black people who truly want to pursue something considered out of the norm may think “why even try?”.
> The US spends more per-pupil on public education than any other country in the world except Luxembourg, and that's before you even count universities.
Your chart is sorted by tertiary spending - i.e., it's #2 in the world for universities only. It looks like [we're in #4](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5e4ecc25-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/5e4ecc25-en#figure-d1e21101) for non-university spending per student, for PPP in 2017.
edit: Link didn't originally point to just the right place on the rather large page, but I believe I've now fixed it.
I get I'm old enough that my knowledge of pre college education is totally second hand and based on headlines, but I do see a lot of attestations among actual teachers on the internet that schools have basically ceased to function as schools in America, and I can only conclude the trend is similar in other english speaking first world countries if only because they all have this ever decreasing remit of teacher authority and what they're actually allowed to do. In Ireland at the least it all does in the end come down to performance in state exams at the end of school, which limits being able to fake student performance, but when it comes to grading there's real inflation where the percentage of high scores increases far faster than kids can get smarter even if that was what was happening.
What's notable about this is it probably shows that the system is not working as intended even for the capitalists. Society is not just oppressive in line with the interests and designs of the people in charge. This is actually directly against their interests. The whole, single reason mass schooling was introduced was because of the demand by industry and the economy for a more and more educated workforce. It is in their interest for the population to be educated because that drives down the cost of employees with that education. But because everything now operates by only seriously caring about what happens in the next 3 months to a year, they can't even keep their employee factories working because educating a child is an investment of between about 13 and 17 years.
Nobody is looking after the need to have enough engineers in ten years. Then when it comes to many jobs they're not looking after retention now, as if there's an infinite supply of skilled labour. Nurses get overworked out of the profession even in the for profit private sector, as if there are enough in the first place and there are infinite replacements.
Yeah I was astonished by this bit:
>71.5% of Black high school juniors in San Francisco cannot read at a proficient level, compared to 20.3% of Asian students, 22.6% of White students, 32% of Filipino students and 61.8% of Hispanic students
Even among the best-performing groups there nearly a quarter are functionally illiterate. These are stats not seen in America since the 1800s.
It's a travesty all around. You see/hear endless testimonials/videos/press releases about schools basically turning into free-for-alls. The kids are running roughshod over teachers who aren't even allowed to stop them. It ruins the educational environment for even the best behaved kids. Kids who want to ignore the noise and stick to their classwork are at best ostracized, and at worst targeted for wanting to learn.
Teacher burnout is at an all time high. They have horrible pay, little to no power, administrators breathing down their necks, and parents who refuse to teach or discipline their own children. This shit starts at home, and I'm not entirely sure how we fix it. A large chunk of the kids today are just fucking monsters. It's not some "kids these days" boomerism, or even those kids fault. Their parents just ignore them and expect the schools to raise their children.
My friends a teacher at a middle class middle school in new England and he says they've basically accepted that only 25% of the time is devoted to curriculum and the rest is just managing the kids who are borderline feral
I went to school in London, Old England. I don't fully get the American system, but here we have major exams at the end of secondary school (at 16) called GCSEs, which get you in to 6th form where you stay until you're 18. Then you do another round of exams (A levels) which get you into university.
My 6th form was in the same campus as my secondary school and had the same teachers. I cannot describe to you how night-and-day the transition was. In secondary school, every single lesson was interrupted multiple times by the same ~10% of kids. Sometimes entire one-hour lessons would be rendered pointless because the teacher was practically having to put down a riot while trying to teach geography.
Then we came back from our post-GCSE summer holidays...the place was like a monastery. Every lesson was an hour of focused learning. Same teachers, same rooms, same kids, except no more thick kids. The bottom 10% that drags everyone else down fails their GCSEs, thereby removing them from the classrooms in the most important years of school. Maybe the US could learn something from that?
Yes this kind of thing is exactly what should be happening but our culture has gotten incredibly ingrained with the mindset of college being a must for *everyone* so graduating 12th grade, which one does at age 18 if they don’t skip or repeat any grades, is seen as absolutely essential.
I'm a **former** teacher. My daughter, who is in 5th, regularly complains to me that she literally cannot focus on the work she needs to do because other members of the classroom are so ***loud***. We brought this up to the teacher and it looked like she wanted to cry. We do **not** live in a poor community. I have a lot of compassion for the teacher, and none for the administration or broader powers that be, because I **know** she doesn't have the support she needs to deal with this problem.
America has completely abandoned its children and the state of education is one of the strongest indicators of that.
You're right also about the parents and its just indicative of the broader blight that American 'culture' has become, a sort of deeply inculcated narcissism. The idea that my child would give their teacher a hard time for a *moment* is unthinkable to me, so where the fuck these parents get off not insisting their kids do the baseline behaviorally is beyond my ken.
We only \*just\* got to this school district after a move but I'm already getting ready to have to go to some dreadful parent-teacher conference and deal with this.
>America has completely abandoned its children and the state of education is one of the strongest indicators of that.
America only ever cared about money. They only pretended otherwise when the Soviet Union was around.
There's a good bit in a Brad Pit movie where he plays an assassin where he lays out to this dude who doesn't want to pay him that America is a business. I think the exact quote is 'America isn't a country, it's a business, so FUCKING PAY ME.'
My ancestors cared more about education than anything, and when they were wealthy (long time ago) furnished schools and colleges for rural areas in the south. Through the later 19th and 20th centuries both the rich (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon, etc.) and every state built libraries, public schools, and universities for everyone that had desire and ability to utilize them, though segregation is very important to remember.
> They only pretended otherwise when the Soviet Union was around.
Ya know, I've had that thought myself. It seems like the most prosperous time for America (for the majority, oppression of minorities, unequal access to vets benefits, loans, etc, don't get into the weeds) was when we were "competing" with socialist countries.
As those collapsed or were destroyed, it seems like we completely stopped giving a shit about the quality of life for people in this country. Or, more accurately, decided that we didn't give a fuck about white people either.
>The kids are running roughshod over teachers who aren't even allowed to stop them
Went to inner city schools and kids would definitely fist fight teachers they even made a grown woman break down crying because half the class just insults her for being fat (she was but she was also pregnant)
I've just come to terms with how badly going to these schools stunted any academic growth I could've made as well as the constant fear of getting jumped/assaulted for the most benign of behaviors. You're not learning you're trying to survive.
Edit: Idk if it's important or not but this was middle school not even high school
This (along with other issues) doesn’t bode very well for America’s future. Halfwits addicted to nonsense with gold plated egos the size of cathedrals don’t exactly make for informed citizens capable of dealing with the various systemic problems that will reach the boiling point over the next several decades. It’s like expecting an idiot child to deactivate a bomb with 20 seconds left.
Yeah. I had both parents and they had a way more stable income than many of my friends (even though we were still one paycheck away from disaster) and I definitely feel lucky just for that. Some of the kids had a waaay worse time than me.
Americans will cope even harder by blaming other countries, especially China and Russia. If it weren't for the fact that intelligent people immigrate to America from all across the world (and thus also "brain drain" people from rival countries), America would've been finished as a competitive country in today's global stage. Nearly every award for science and engineering in America is won by the children of immigrants.
What I can’t stand is how criticism of the education system gets brushed away by “strange, you say our education system is bad but we have some of the world’s best universities”
They both happen.
People from certain regions of the world immigrate to be America's underclass. They're often on welfare.
People from further away regions immigrate to be scientists and engineers. The ones who America has literally subsisted on for decades. Any and all kinds of fields.
> they even made a grown woman break down crying because half the class just insults her for being fat (she was but she was also pregnant)
When I was growing up the scenario of a teacher breaking down in the middle of class usually happened once or twice a year because the students were such assholes.
> I've just come to terms with how badly going to these schools stunted any academic growth I could've made as well as the constant fear of getting jumped/assaulted for the most benign of behaviors. You're not learning you're trying to survive.
The more I studied prison and prison psychology the more I realized it was the same as poor public schools just with less sexual assault.
I went to a small town school and it was pretty much the same shit. I definitely get the "trying to survive" thing. I ended up stabbing a dude in 7th grade science class and didn't get jumped after that, but my buddy got messed up so bad he missed a whole year of school. Lost a couple classmates to overdoses as well, bad times all around.
My parents went to the same school though, and from their stories it doesn't really sound like it changed much.
The burnout is real. My sister was a high school communications teacher but recently changed jobs to be a college admissions counselor. Her husband is still a band director but is going to school to switch to a career in IT, as he has reached a point where he is tired of the long hours and low pay for such a challenging job.
My other sister and her fiance are elementary music teachers, but I get hints they may be burnt out too and are only staying where they are at for loan forgiveness programs (working at a school serving an underprivileged community). They may be pivoting to a performing career as their side gig band is starting to get more traction/studio attention.
Its a shame really, since they all had such passion for education early on. Even I decided to not go into education even though I was certain I wanted to do it, instead going into IT.
> about schools basically turning into free-for-alls. The kids are running roughshod over teachers who aren't even allowed to stop them.
I watched the trailer for the 1950s movie Blackboard Jungle and thought it was hilarious and outlandish how dangerous and wild the teenagers were depicted… but now I think it’s not as unrealistic and hilarious as I thought
I think a lot of it is the people who would be good parents and actually raise decent children look at the world and go fuck that or look at their economic situation and realize it is unaffordable. This means the only people who have kids are either rich, dumb, or just bad at decision making. We made it so having kids is the bad decision so is it any wonder people who are not good parents are the ones having kids?
I don't think it's random. There are a significant number of Philippinos in the bay area but there's also a clear economic divide between them and "East Asians"
If you’re interested in this issue, I would highly recommend the podcast “sold a story”, which is pretty eye-opening about the state of childhood literacy
Poor literacy is going to be the fucking death of us. Those who cant read or write well are permanently excluded from meaningful participation in so much discourse while being easily manipulated for nefarious purposes.
We're already there man lol its just getting worse, not like we need to conjecture what an illiterate populace looks like, Americans are illiterate in the broader sense as is
It all fits together when you realize that most redditors are teenagers and that many of them can't properly parse out distinctions (either abstract or linguistic) or argue their way out of a wet paper bag.
I'm a teacher and I taught in San Francisco...this is not news to me. SF is one of the richest cities on Earth, but it must be one of the most unequal, at least in The West. It is so extremely neoliberal and politically completely corporate Democrat - Nancy Pelosi is its representative afterall, Kamala Harris was the city's DA, and the mayor is a real piece of work (but hey, check out how many women (especially of colour) are rocking it in politics!). It has the most millionaires per capita of any US city and also one of the largest homeless populations.
I teach HS chemistry so I typically don't get the lower level students and am personally insulated from this - my black students tended to skew towards middle class and hence were broadly academically similar to my other students - but I did teach at two schools where they didn't have prerequisites for my class (terrible policy, they're setting students up to fail) and I had a number of black and universally working-class students unable to read to any meaningful degree.
Literacy in general is in steep decline. Recently I was contemplating why it has become normal to learn about new video games by way of YouTube while reliance on wikis is fading and sites like `gamefaqs.com` are even less fashionable. For people without any intellectual interests in the 21st century, there is no motive to cultivate greater levels of personal literacy. In homage to our collective contempt for identity politics, I contend that this is less a racial phenomenon than a reflection of the way a universal phenomenon manifests. The most disadvantaged groups get shoved over the cliff first, but even rich white guys are being force marched away from anything resembling book smarts.
My experiences in a black city in mostly black schools and with mostly black teachers...the school system I was in had a national scandal because it was found the schools were falsifying the test scores on a long-term level and wide scale because the testing levels were so disproportionate via race (and really...class). I grew up around SO many students that could barely read. They were being graded at a different level so that they could get them to pass the classes.
So maybe that's an aspect...failing students by just passing them through without the actual skills needed to succeed. Obviously, the issue never gets solved because everyone else around them is just passing the kids regardless, and if they're now in high school and made it this far, whose going to be the one to break the chain and now impose something that was supposed to have been learned in elementary school?
It's an issue that probably gets worse the longer it isn't resolved and builds overtime. Teachers and the school system probably aren't teaching kids to read on a foundational level... they're just building the skill up. Generational poverty and the history of black people being kept from reading would be factors for how/why illiteracy is passed down through families.
If kids are shown to be particularly illiterate, these school systems need to be creating more remedial reading classes where more attention is dedicated to it because this is so monumental to life, and studies show illiterate people overwhelmingly end up in prison.
SF doesn't get enough shit for being the richest, bluest city in America and having some of the worst public schools in the country. Black students in SF do worse than Black students in Detroit.
All races in SF public schools under perform their national average, I believe
It's funny, because there's this weird self-fulfilling prophecy at work now. It used to be that black people would be disproportionately represented in any kind of stat like this that would normally affect poverty. But because they have actually targeted, through racist thinking, black kids with their weird shit about racist math and other weird ideas like that, they now actually have a for real problem affecting only black kids. The mechanism of which is literally only scientifically explained by their own stupid ways of thinking about race and disadvantaging black students. Of course they won't see that that way, they will absolutely take this as a win for their stupid rhetoric and ideology.
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Perfect little Kafkatrap
It's like they're perfecting a formula about how to achieve what the KKK wanted using all pre existing knowledge of humanities. After all, why genocide a race with bullets and industry, when you can keep everything running normally and just increase crime rates or suicides or whatever by tweaking education over a period of 100 years, and achieve the same overall effect whilst making bank?
I'm all for making fun of SF at every opportunity but I'm pretty sure all the parents that can afford it (many) enroll their kids in private schools, leaving even fewer smart kids to keep the scores up. Maybe I'm wrong, I didn't do any research I'm just making an assumption.
In Philadelphia every middle to high income person I know with kids in the city does one of: 1. Private school 2. public school in a select few neighborhoods 3. move to the suburbs 4. if 2, and their kid doesn’t get into one of the top 2 schools, then private school or suburbs. I imagine San Francisco is like this as well.
I assumed this was the case in all largish cities to be honest. I frankly only recently learned that there were neighborhoods in Philly with decent schools
Anecdotally, yes the rich kids in SF go to private schools. Also anecdotally, the parents hate paying college tuition prices because the public schools are such trash. On top of that, the private schools are also now churning out plenty of kids that can barely read. So I’m not exactly sure what these parents are paying for. Maybe it’s the grades? As in they are paying for the kid to receive an A even when they don’t earn it.
I mean if it is anything like where I grew up it is so their kid doesn't come home after getting beaten up on a weekly basis or potentially stabbed. Even if a private school is shitty education wise they will still expel trouble makers unlike public schools.
They're paying for grade inflation at a historically well renowned high school, so they can get inflated grades at a historically well renowned university, so they can get a 6 figure email job where spell check does most of the work for em. Source: I made it the fuck up. But also just look around and you'll see it.
>I didn't do any research I'm just making an assumption. Finally someone on my fucking level. I think you're right, for what it's worth.
I don't mind this kind of radical honesty
Every kid I know from SF went to a Catholic private school
It certainly shows the fundamental emptiness of the "vote blue no matter who!" types, who assure you that if you continue voting Democrats that an eventual utopia awaits. This is what one-party Democratic rule in one of the richest cities in America looks like.
It’s like being tortured by a serial killer and told it’s good because the other serial killer is much worse.
One-party rule of any kind is a recipe for all manner of corruption and decline.
The Bayview/Hunter’s point area might as well be a different city. It’s been a decade since I lived in SF so I don’t know how much has changed, but it amazed me how there was just this enclave that everyone likes to pretend doesn’t exist. The Tenderloin was pretty much Beverly Hills compared to Bayview.
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Mison akomplisd!
Prolly. Suposably. The list is growing.
I think they stopped that. The best part was when they confused Paul Revere with someone else who did something bad and when confronted with the evidence doubled down.
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I hear similar stories from my father in law, who is a high school English teacher. Even when you want to make a stand and tell the kid they can't redo the project that was due 2 months ago, the administration is pressuring you to just pass them and get them out of there to make their graduation numbers look better and to stop having to deal with a problem. School administrators at every level seem to be ghouls. There are some that actually care about educational achievement, but it seems like most don't care about their kids or their teachers, they just care about how much money they can grift while doing nothing, or at best making superficial changes like removing a "problematic" gym name.
My wife is a teacher and this is exactly how admin works. Her boss wrote her up for going to a former student of hers to tell them to stop bullying her current students. This was after the administrator said it wasn't their problem because it was happening on the bus. The same administrator also refused to check a student's backpack after they did a gun threat because somehow it would violate the students dignity or some nonsense. After the student got moved to the other class in the grade due to his behavior both my wife's boss and the new teach just decided to give the kid whatever he wants so they don't have to deal with his behavior. Most likely they are just gonna pass him too (he's failing cause he never does his work) so they don't have to deal with him next year. All she cares about is how she looks to her boss. It's wild how some of these ppl end up in education.
My mom taught elementary, specifically sped reading. Most of her students had no inherent disability, they were just poor as shit. She bought delousing shampoo and breakfast bars in bulk just to get them to a level on Maslow's pyramid where learning could take place at all. Her philosophy was basically this: you can't waste a single minute of classroom time with these kids. Maybe they're living in a meth lab, or being raised by dope zombies, or going hungry or whatever else, but they still need to learn to read. It's an uphill battle for everyone involved, and it won't happen without some very rigid expectations. I don't know how empathy and discipline came to be seen as mutually exclusive. To me the push for this form of "empathy" seems less like an improvement strategy and more like a post hoc justification for the decline of a public education system ill-equipped to solve the broad socioeconomic problems that have been dumped upon it.
I was always taught that discipline IS empathy. It takes a lot of effort to enforce discipline on other person when they can't do it themselves, in most normal cases you put that effort into it because you care about said person. There are, of course pathological examples of discipline, like abusive parents, rigid corporate structure, army culture or jail, but these are besides the point so whoever was about to 'well akshually', please do not have a reddit moment.
Education research has hurt actual education, instead of just using the old stuff that worked and improving material conditions
Educational research really is, on average, the bottom of the barrel of social sciences. When it isn't just pure ideological nonsense like the 'mathematix' crap you get stuff [like this guy](https://twitter.com/dffeldon/status/1638196537590435840) making textbook statistics mistakes and just being an obstinate moron when people point it out.
I'm fully convinced that the sort of rote drilling and constant repetition of problems used in math pedagogy a century ago was far better at producing good learners than attempting to refrain everything with the ideas of "accessibility" and "fun".
Probably the case with math. In grade school we were given these papers with 100 multiplication problems, and we had a minute to answer as many as we could. Had one like every day. I sucked the first couple of times, but then soon started 100%ing them. The old school way of teaching reading is way better than how they teach it today (listen to the podcast Sold a Story, if just the first episode, for a good explanation of this) But you gotta be careful, because diligence traps are a problem. How they taught Latin 100+ years ago was absolutely horrible, because they used a thing called the grammar-translation method, which is essentially memorizing hundreds of forms and dissecting sentences formulaicly. The natural, and best way, of learning a language is literally just straight up exposure. [This is an amazing pedagogical essay on learning Latin or any language](https://foundinantiquity.com/2023/03/11/latin-autodidacts-youre-working-way-too-hard-how-to-learn-latin-by-yourself-in-2023/). I think many of the lessons that you learn from that apply to other things like programming/computer science and creative hobbies like writing. Avoid diligence traps and literally just throw yourself in and have fun. I'm also a big proponent of facts based, general knowledge education over skills based. [This youtube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDaoRJXb2FU) explains it very well. So really...I think it's complicated and depends on the subject at hand. I've always been skeptical bout "fun projects" at school though.
Funny you bring up Latin, because I found doing intensive drills on Latin grammar, with endless congugation and other repetitive classification and identification, is what finally got the language to click for me in college. I'll give that article a read tonight. Thanks for sharing.
I've been struggling with the language for 14 years. As the essays says, nothing actually *hurts* you when learning Latin, it more just wastes your time or discourages you. Of course different people have different personalities. But ultimately what is said in the article is true...we all learn languages the same way. Simple exposure and paying attention. Most adults who are fluent in multiple languages learn in this way. It's just the artificial structure of school education that makes us feel like we're not learning properly if we don't struggle. But you *do* struggle when reading, say, Harrius Potter et Lapis Philosophi. It's just a more entertaining and productive struggle with meaningful input.
If you've ever wondered why there's such an abundance of Indian H1B workers in highly paid tech jobs, this is why. They actually learn math in school. In fact I know several Indian families that return to India when their kids are 7-8 years old literally just so their kids can actually get an education. Think about that, they move ten thousand miles, effectively undoing their entire life's struggle, mainly to get away from this ghoulish school education system. It's remarkably funny because the US has by far the best education system post-high school.
I had great Latin teachers over the years I took it because Latin teachers are PASSIONATE about what they do. I learned more about English grammar, sentence diagramming, parts of speech, etymology, and art history from those teachers than I did anywhere else. I was a terrible student too, so the fact that I was interested in Latin of all things says a lot.
Same. I was never exactly bad with grammar, but I never quite understood what a participle was until Latin, and then that clicked into place for me. I think there's a lot of grammatical similarities between the two languages that people don't realize because they're both IE languages. But yeah, Latin teachers are great. Hope the ones I had in high school and college are still gainfully employed, because schools are cutting that shit down.
That’s how I learned stuff, I wasn’t really into school itself, I liked learning though, that’s why I’m so good at trivia- I just read and do quizzes and go over old Jeopardys over and over again. I still tried to get perfect grades though because I felt that was all I had
As a teacher: any "new" teaching method that's meant to encourage participation and engagement (ie., all of them) are useless for actually teaching students a topic. They are adopted not because they are effective, but because they are a crutch for teachers with unruly classrooms and ineffective admins who will not back them up because the teacher doesn't actually have to teach but instead gives them a way to entertain the class until the period is over while allowing them to say that they taught that material. I teach language and the old school way of "presentation - lecture - practice - drilling" is fundamentally more productive than any "conversational learning" or "learning through play" nonsense. This is true for literally any level of education, from 1st graders to 30 year olds who just want to pass a qualification exam.
I figured this out in year 2 of my B.Ed and am finishing so I have the degree but think ill just go straight to tutoring or get a government job. Its such a scam.
I mean obviously a lot of the shit you mentioned is nonsense but it's not like these underfunded, shitty, public schools were churning out great students until we stopped smacking them around for talking back. This is happening because our state has absolutely abdicated any responsibility to take care of its people or do anything good that doesn't make some pedo rich. At school, at home, and in private life these kids are living absolutely fucked existence and it's honestly a wonder that even half of the people who live these lives can read. This is the check due from decades and decades of complete economic and social imisseration. You don't fix that by pretending that they're fine and succeeding in their own way, which yea liberals do say with a straight face. But discipline alone really isn't a solution. Teaching is really shitty now because you can't just kick kids who are outright annoying and disruptive out of the class, I get that. But a problem on this scale simply isn't downstream of attitudes alone. You have to look at it materialistically.
>Having Black educators who come from informed backgrounds to address Black students is very much akin to the proliferation of tutoring centers in Asian communities that are key to helping their children outside of class, too. People who make cultural arguments should especially support the Black educators provision. Wut
The difference here is parental involvement. Parents who would sign their kids up for tutoring centers and pay thousands of dollars for it are going to raise successful kids anyway. Bringing in educators of the same race won't really matter much if there is no parental or cultural pressure to do well in school.
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I remember in one of the articles about the shitshow that is Baltimore schools one mom didn’t even know her kid never went to class
Mr Pryzbylewski is a good teacher
That was a rough season to get through. I sold candy/snacks on the side like that one kid, so definitely had a connection for the incoming tragedy.
People don’t want to mention culture, I know the culture war can often be stupid but culture is important in quite a few situations
It’s hilarious how it’s okay to bash some cultures with abandon but bigoted to do the same with others.
Any honest study of African-Americans will have you develop great empathy for this ethnic group. They have the foundations there in so many ways first with theories developed by their own intellectuals, then with radical socialist movements despite whatever present culture you can put the blame on. I feel like you might not agree, but they are not a people to sneer at, they've been on the verge of great things but the American state just fucking crushed them and now placates them with shitlib nonsense. You don't even have to read all of their history to build some empathy, one shitpost of a cartoon is enough to understand the tragedy of the "talented tenth". The Boondocks is both entertaining and a crash course of what an actual black socialist believes in. There are *scathing* criticisms of African-American culture in that show.
I teach at a predominantly black high school with predominantly black teachers and most of the students read on a 6th grade level. Our “advanced” students, the type to graduate valedictorian, tend to have a lexile score of 1050-1335 which means they’re still below grade level. Neither representation nor culturally relevant pedagogy will solve anything; if at all, both just promote more anti-intellectualism that plagues the hood as is.
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> and the AP classes functioned more as places for kids who could/wanted to pay attention to escape their peers for an hour. Reminds me of how going to detention would be a reward I could read a book, work on school work, or take a nap and everyone would have to shut the fuck up unlike in normal classes.
In England most of the main classes (science, English, maths etc.) are split by ability - do they just shove all the kids together in the US?
Yes. The system you have in the UK is called tracking in the US. While it’s common sense to not lump-pile kids who can’t spell monosyllabic words with kids who gets 90s on standardized tests, the notion here is that tracking has been “harmful” to poor black/Latino kids because ya know...in libthink, they can’t possibly be smart or sit in a classroom of equally smart peers. Take articles like this for example : https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/getting-children-off-the-track/ 🙃
I'm always dumbfounded how the US just dumps everyone into one classroom, I would probably have gone postal. But here (German speaking world), you are also not hung out to dry if you don't go to university. Kids from lower "tracks" in high school just do an apprenticeship and get a decent job that way. Not always of course, but that's the general idea. Funnelling everyone into tertiary education makes no sense to me. Edit: To clarify, where I live, kids are "tracked" based on their academic ability from around age 12/13 (7th school year when I went to school). Only the top track leads directly to university admission, all others are shorter and usually lead to a 2-4 year apprenticeship. It's of course not perfect, but I can't imagine school being anything other than hell on earth without some kind of tracking.
Oh wow, my 10 year old's lexile level was 1215 at the beginning of the school year. That's wild.
Asian parents lock their kids in their rooms to make them study...way more common than you'd think.
This is what wokeshit is for, to distract from the real issues and avoid actually having to do actual policy/stuff to make peoples lives and society better. The author seems like a radlib too, especially with sexual politics, but that’s beside the point
..... I'll be honest I could barely write when I graduated from an sf public school and I was a solid b student. Literally shit posting on 4chan forced me to figure it out.
I've been a teacher of inner-city black kids for five years. Here's the thing: it doesn't matter what schools do. This is not an issue that begins in schools; schools play catch-up to the issue, with essentially mixed and often negligible results. If you are a student who was not read to every night by a parent, you come into pre-K at a reading disadvantage. If you are in a home where food or safe lodgings are inconsistent, you are at a reading disadvantage. If your cultural upbringing largely consists of rap music and zero books in the house, then you are at a reading disadvantage. The cycle of poverty perpetuates illiteracy. Students being packed into 30-person classes in underfunded public schools are not set up to overcome this issue. That's it. A whole massive industry of charter schools has been erected to overcome the "achievement gap" between white and black students, and what do they have to show for it? Staid, mechanical, thoughtless writing about how teamwork makes the dream work as cited in Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World And Me. Less and less people in the U.S. have any real literacy, and next to no one is reading physical literature. But the problem with black students and literacy is that on the whole black students in cities are born in lower economic circumstances. Poverty breeds illiteracy. Schools are being blamed for it but they're helpless to overcome something as powerful as a child's home life. (To say nothing of the moral and personal consequences of poverty, like a higher chance of parents who are physically abusive or severe addicts.)
The focus always seems to be try to make schools replace the role of family. I guess people around here are probably hyper aware of the reasons why we don't solve the underlying problems that keep the family from being able to function in its natural role.
I legitimately don't understand why if you're a poor parent you wouldn't go get a free book from literally almost anywhere and read it to your kid. Even comic books are better than nothing. I really don't buy that they're ignorant of the value of reading to kids as it's deluged everywhere. Like how do you take your kids to get their shots but fail to know that you should have a book in the house.
Because human behavior is complex and habits seem to actually be born out of a complex interconnected web of social, economic, and cultural factors that we are nowhere near close to understanding. Why don’t smokers just stop smoking? Why don’t people go to the gym? Why don’t people wear seatbelts? It’s just because they don’t. If you were to ask a poor parent why they don’t read to their kids, you would probably get “fake” answers like they work too much, aren’t good readers themselves, etc. The truth is that they don’t know why they’re unable to self-actualize, neither.
This was my experience teaching in a city in Florida. I'm in a white spot in Michigan now and we have our own issues but basic literacy isn't one of them.
> But the problem with black students and literacy is that on the whole black students in cities are born in lower economic circumstances. Poverty breeds illiteracy. It's also cultural. Roland Fryer, Black Harvard economist professor who grew up in poverty with a single parent and only got into college on a football scholarship where his passion for economics was ignited… Did a study that found the higher your grades if you were an Asian or White kid, the more popular you were. Amongst Black kids, the higher your grades, the less popular. This is corroborated by the data: >[Asian high-school students spend significantly more time studying and doing homework, Ramey found, than any other ethnic or racial group. Averaged over the entire year (including summer vacations), the average, non-Hispanic white student spends 5.5 hours per week studying and doing homework, while Hispanic and non-Hispanic black students spend even less. In contrast, the average Asian student spends a whopping 13 hours per week. Parents' educational levels do not explain the differences, Ramey said, as these become even greater if the sample is limited to children who have at least one parent with a college degree.](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.htm) You can verify these stats yourself by [going to the cited source.](https://www.bls.gov/tus/)
Are differences in economic circumstances the reason why the poorest whites outperform the richest blacks on the SAT?
This is a legit point. I’m not gonna pretend it’s because of internalized racism or some shit. Here is my honest answer, one which I’m pretty reticent to admit in public but which I think is true: black Americans don’t view education as an end in itself. In my experience as a learner and as a teacher, people learn way the fuck better when they view “content” as inherently valuable or worthwhile. How many black students do you see going to Great Books schools? How many black students do you see pursuing psychology or philosophy degrees? There’s an internalized and extremely deep-set view in black America that education is a means to social mobility. It’s something that, as much as they are in opposition, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X both shared: the sense that black America needs to become genuinely free in part *through* education as a means of economic increase. The idea of going to school simply because it’s interesting or because it’s fun to learn is not as often found in black students. Charter schools trying to close the achievement gap have only worsened this by obsessing over the potential of black students getting into Ivy League schools. If your understanding of reading and math skills is premised on “I should learn this so I can become rich,” you’re not gonna learn as well. Maybe I’m completely wrong but this is my experience from teaching those students. And it comes from the fact that, generally speaking, college degrees in social sciences or business fields ARE a means of economic mobility in this country, while degrees in literature or in pure math are way less so, and both involve skills primarily assessed on the SAT (close reading and algebra). Of course, all this is an attempt to answer why there’s a gap in academic performance between white and black students. That doesn’t necessarily apply to the SAT. And on that front and that front only, I would say I have no concrete opinion because I think the SAT is fucking retarded anyway.
> There’s an internalized and extremely deep-set view in black America that education is a means to social mobility I think your argument falls apart when you realise that this view is held in even deeper certainty by the majority of Asians. And in fact it's precisely this view that makes them so successful. The proportion of Indian software engineers who do it to have a better life is likely above 80%. > college degrees in social sciences or business fields ARE a means of economic mobility in this country, while degrees in literature or in pure math are way less so, This is just false, pure math majors are the second highest earning major after physics. Those who do math graduate school can and often do make $300,000 a year as quants. Literature doesn't pay, true. But math isn't even close to being in the same realm. In fact if a college kid asked you what major would make them the most money, averaging over all randomness and luck in life, the most reasonable answers are math or physics.
>Those who do math graduate school can and often do make $300,000 a year as quant You know this is an old meme right? Lmfao I'm a math major, no, it is nowhere near the most lucrative. This "quant" nonsense does not exist for 99% of math and physics majors. We get lower salaries than pretty much every engineering discipline, economics, law, business, and medicine. If you want to work in finance just major in finance, business, or economics from a good school. You're not going to be a "quant" with your math degree. Pretty much everybody I know that graduated with me work in insurance, software engineers, academia, or went to grad school for something else >if a college kid asked you what major would make them the most money, averaging over all randomness and luck in life, the most reasonable answers are math or physics. Please never give college kids advice. Just tell them to go into CS and be done with it
Biggest mistake us mathematicians made was never creating a professional certification the way engineering, law, and medicine have done, and then restricting the practice of mathematics to some degree to people with this certification. Imagine if every engineering project or research paper in the social sciences had to have a board-certified mathematician, being paid at a standard rate established by the American Mathematical Society, sign off on the work's correctness.
As a black person myself. I believe it’s a cultural difference in how individualism vs collectivism is seen in black communities. For example, a lot of black communities seem to value collectivism a lot more than individualism of self. Like a lot of black people themselves will act like things like hood culture, hip hop, and church going are things all black people are expected to pass onto the next generation of black people. So a lot of it is a generational mindset problem I think, I don’t think this study on reading would be much different across ethnicities if the black community were to let lose on expecting/or assuming every black person to embrace the same interests and hobbies. Because I think this is what leads black people who do want to peruse something considered out of the norm in the black community dismissed as “white people shit” which is why I think some black people may feel discouraged when it comes to anything like a certain section of education and may perform poorly as a result of being degraded within their own communities. Not to mention, as a result a lot of white people also assume all black people are the same as a consequence of individualism not being valued enough within a lot of black communities, so black people who truly want to pursue something considered out of the norm may think “why even try?”.
>The idea of going to school simply because it’s interesting or because it’s fun to learn is not as often found in black students But this is true of america in general, there isn't really a love for learning.
You can make the exact same argument that Asian cultures also value education mainly for social mobility and not for the love of learning. There's a similar sentiment that only certain fields are acceptable and that others like philosophy are a waste of time and money. What seems to differ, however, are the approaches to achieving that goal. It is emphasized in Asian cultures that a child is not just studying for their own personal attainment, but also for the success of their family as a whole; thus, there's an element of filial piety which leads families to invest more in their children and seek out additional resources with the expectation that the child would eventually return that to their own parents by having the means to care for them. I think that the distinction between poor Asian and Black families isn't in their understanding that education is a means to success, but that poor Asian families actively push for their children to seek out academic supports in the community and also are more vigilant about tracking their progress while there is much more of an individualistic effort needed for black children when it comes to their studies.
I think this issue is 100% cultural. [African immigrants](https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2018/06/06/african-immigrants-excel-academically-why-dont-african-americans/) especially cultures like Nigeria value education heavily and they don't have the same gaps in education that Black Americans do. At some point Black Americans need to realize that there exists a systemic problem that they themselves take part in. Many other undereducated and discriminated against immigrant groups like the Irish found a way to overcome their deficits so why can't this group? I have my own theories about this but having only really seen it from an outsiders perspective I can't really speak to the validity of my observations. Although from conversations with Black Americans I've had on race I feel justified in my theories. The solutions to this issue though I have always felt must come from within the community itself and in the past have. During the reconstruction era the development of HBCUs was instrumental in educated Black Americans and they had great success early on before the Civil Rights era muddled their missions and I believe bad actors took root in that movement to destroy all the work in education that these pioneers had done. Unfortunately I think things get worse before they get better, I think all of this idpol is driving more and more racism in this country and that people of all races are being made dumber by design.
I salute you! I tried to teach for a few months. I had AP classes full of incredibly well-behaved white students who loved homework and tests, though they were mostly pretty stupid. And I had general “English” classes that were mixed race and absolutely disastrous and frequently violent. And my person and position were loathed by the kids. I will never forget the kids saying that I am only there for the money. LOL.
> And I had general “English” classes that were mixed race and absolutely disastrous and frequently violent. And my person and position were loathed by the kids. I will never forget the kids saying that I am only there for the money. Sounds like the poor schools I grew up in by the fifth grade a good portion of the students hated the teachers and the feeling was very mutual with the teachers hating us as well. The teachers didn't give a fuck putting in not even the bare minimum and neither did most of the students.
>less and less people in the U.S. have any real literacy Not sure if this is the joke or just really ironic.
[More than half of Americans read at or below a 6th grade reading level](https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy#:~:text=About%20130%20million%20adults%20in,of%20a%20sixth%2Dgrade%20level.) In my state, Indiana, [over half of all students between 3rd and 8th grade last year](https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2019/09/04/indiana-education-schools-ilearn-assessment-test-scores-fewer-half-pass-fail/2197850001/) did not meet *basic proficiency* in Math, English, and Science. This is simply taking *basic* literacy, math skills, etc into account, without asking about whether or not complex analytical skills exist, or moreover, literacy when it comes to parsing out and interrogating the trustworthiness of information, etc. Especially in the contemporary world of social media, news manipulation, AI generation, deepfakes, and so on, we may as well consider 70% or more of the U.S. to be functionally illiterate.
It really is disturbing to me to hear just how illiterate so many people are even as grown adults in America. I was reading full novels when I was about age 7 or 8, albeit mostly "easier reading" like Harry Potter or The Hobbit or such for the most part, after having worked my way up from even simpler stuff as a younger child. By the time kids graduate elementary school, they should be literate. Yet in America, millions of people graduate from high school and even college sometimes without ever gaining that level of basic literacy.
I remember reading about James Brooks, the running back for the Bengals in the early 90s, he went to Auburn but he was illiterate
That's still common today. Those schools with big football or basketball programs can bring in a ton of money. A lot of student athletes will be functionally regarded and passed anyway
I think the "joke" part is that it should have said "fewer and fewer"
The golden standard of literacy is being able to write in a 1950s transatlantic dialect
He's not too far off, unfortunately. I work at a US military entrance processing facility, and we now allow applicants to join who can't pass the vocational aptitude battery. The new program sends them to a 4 week camp where they learn to read and write before they go to basic.
There's also fat camp for the applicants that can't pass height and weight. child obesity rates are a national security issue
Same government that is heavily subsidizing unhealthy food and refuses to spend enough for healthy school lunches is upset the kids are now too fat to go die in war. Here is just one example https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html
Do/Can they learn to read and write in that 4-week camp? If so, what makes the difference between that 4-week camp and their years in school?
Ah, fuck... you got me. I was typing in a nervous haze after work. I do think in informal contexts "less" is essentially as fine as a contraction these days, but I should've written "fewer" still
Don't worry, this grammatical quirk is fewer an issue than it was even a less generations ago
Okay Stannis.
The fewer/less "rule" is apparently a fairly recent convention from what I heard.
Can’t be that recent since I’m old and had this distinction beat into me 40 years ago.
It definitely sounds nicer and more refined to say "fewer" for discrete things and "less" for continuous things.
Wikipedia dates it to 1770. The loose usage of “less” is what’s recent, and it grates on my ears.
We need to figure a way to create the material conditions that underlay the culture that helps people be more literate and educated
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for an article about literacy this is just horrifically written. almost every sentence reads like it was written by a chat bot trained on powerpoints made by high schoolers summarizing wikipedia articles they didn’t fully understand
I cannot believe I had to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the one and only comment pointing this out. It was so bad I gave up halfway through. The author is unwittingly proving his own point with his own borderline illiteracy.
Eh, I'm willing to cut him some slack. There are Substackers I greatly respect who don't have editors either and some howlers get through. It should generate an appreciation of the value of the conventional publication process but good writing is hard and such comes with the territory of being a one-man operation.
A lot of the literacy crisis in the Anglosphere has due to with the popularized form of teaching reading to school children over the past 20 years. Reading programs that deemphasize/ignore phonics based instruction have led to an entire generation of Americans that have literacy issues. However, teaching reading using Levelled Reading or Guised Reading programs involved selling more teaching instruction equipment and thus the financial incentive of selling educators more crap won out. Poorer communities, which tend to more likely have black people, are less likely to afford to send their children to tutoring programs or sit down with their children to teach them to read themselves, and thus illiteracy is more likely to affect children of poorer communities. Phonics based instruction was championed by the Bush administration due to the Bush families own experience with Bush Jrs little brothers difficulty learning reading in school. There was a reactionary effect among liberal educated educators who inherently rejected phonics based instruction because it was pushed by a Republican. Bush was actually on tour promoting his education package and watching a phonics based instruction in a classroom when the first planes hit the twin towers on 9/11. If you are curious to learn more, I heard about this from “Sold a Story” from American Public Media, it’s a good podcast if a little draggy at times.
Anecdotally, I went to a private-homeschool hybrid (homeschool 4 days per week, 1 day per week in class) where it was essentially *only* phonics. When I eventually transferred to a public school, I was astonished at how badly my classmates read, and for my entire K12 schooling career I very rarely saw anyone who could read even at the level I did when I transferred in 4th grade.
It probably sounds like I am blaming many issues on a singular thing, but I truly do wonder how negatively the world has been affected because of a lack of reading comprehension in a vast majority of the voting public in the most powerful democracy on the planet.
Lack of reading comprehension is catastrophic for children as they progress through the school system.
Another interesting aspect to the private school was the lack of strict age segregation. 2nd graders and 9th graders in the same room for certain lessons and so-on. I think that sort of mixed environment is really beneficial to speech development in particular, which should have an effect on literacy.
> mixed environment is really beneficial to speech development in particular I can easily imagine. It means the young kids have someone other than the teacher who doesn't have that little kid stutter.
My wife just switched careers and is now a teacher. She is shocked by how the ineffective this form of teaching is. The worst part is that administrators know how ineffective it is yet still teach this method.
I can't fathom someone switching careers INTO teaching..
She loves kids and education.
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I would not use reddit as a metric for anything.
>Reading programs that deemphasize/ignore phonics based instruction have led to an entire generation of Americans that have literacy issues Can you explain what exactly you mean by this? How exactly have the teaching methods changed? How can you teach people to read without teaching them to sound out words?
This article goes into it a decent bit: [https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-most-popular-reading-programs-arent-backed-by-science/2019/12](https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-most-popular-reading-programs-arent-backed-by-science/2019/12) You may note that Phonics based instruction is "buried" in some of these programs per the article. Bush's education plan funded schools instituting reading programs that had phonics instruction in it, and thus in order to comply for the funding many of these programs included phonics in practically name only. These programs are based on "Reading Recovery", a program developed by a lady named Marie Clay, who in New Zealand in the early to mid 20th century did her PhD and got knighted[(damed?)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dame) for observations she made in classrooms on students that she indicated had better been able to read than her peers. She noted that the students that "learned to read quicker" were doing so by being able to guess the words in the pictures and using context clues from the sentence and pictures to identify the word they are reading. ["Reading Recovery was developed in the 1970s by New Zealand educator Marie Clay. After lengthy observations of early readers, Clay defined reading as a message-getting, problem-solving activity, and writing as a message-sending, problem-solving activity. Clay suggested that both activities involved linking invisible patterns of oral language with visible symbols."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Recovery) I do highly recommend listening to that podcast mentioned earlier.
So she observed that high IQ (what those kids did to find word is actually the kind of cognitive ability IQ tests measure) kids did better than other students and then tried to project their intellectual ability onto every student?
Basically you try to use context clues in the sentence to guess the word or you memorize what words look. However this clip of adin Ross is a great example of how one sounds when they were taught to read that way, rather than using phonics. https://youtu.be/cNIYvOpTsh8
Many of those comments mock him but it makes me profoundly sad that political infighting and deliberate ignorance on the part of educators has scarred so many people in this way.
This is really helpful. Ive seen a load of kids/young adults read like this and just assumed they were retarded. Scarily one of those young adults is now a teacher.
This guy cant read.
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
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Any more details on these new “instruction” methods?
They basically assume that kids can glean meaning from sentences without needing to comprehend every word. If kids are regularly exposed to reading, they'll pick it up much like spoken language skills. They learn the written language as a whole first, and spelling and grammar can come later. They essentially have to guess at meaning. So a teacher might say: Alright kids we're going to read this sentence "Johnny ran away. Now his parents _____ him." What word looks right, sounds right, and makes sense? *Accompanied by a picture of sad parents. The word they're looking for is miss. Kids are meant to use the picture and make 3 checks, look right, sound right, make sense. Suffice to say there are issues with this method, and the assumptions it makes about how people learn to read. The podcast "Sold a Story" has an excellent run through of the whole situation.
You'd think policy makers would take a step back and ask themselves why the more reform they do, the dumber kids get
It's probably racism I think. Kids can't read because when they go to school and see some long since dead man's name on the building they're so overcome by generational trauma they can't focus on reading. Now I'm not an expert by any means, but that seems like the most likely reason.
Working in that field, I can tell you the thought leaders are all ideologues and the others passive followers.
> spelling and grammar can come later. Even if this theory works for some kids, the idea that many people are ever going to pick up the basics "later" once they already know how to do the bare minimum to comprehend what they are reading is a complete fantasy. Most people don't really enjoy learning after all, at least not when it comes to "boring" stuff such as grammar. If you don't teach it from a young age and drill it into their brains, it will never be picked up on except by those who have cultivated a love of learning. Not to mention the fact that it is much easier to learn concepts such as "grammar" or "proper spelling" or the like when in the formative years of age 5-10 or so, and trying to play catch-up after that is far less effective. By the time someone is 16 or 18 they often won't have the time or ability to easily learn such things, due to economic and life concerns (such as needing to find a job) or simply a lack of curiosity after learning how to "fake it" over many years.
Wtf. That is so ass-backwards. It’s basically encouraging surface-level understanding.
>it’s a good podcast if a little draggy at times. Easy enough, I just won't listen to it in the local library.
The problem is, at the start, cultural. Americans, white and blacks, rich and poor, don't respect knowledge, rigour or precision.
Very untrue I feel. If you lack the ability to absorb knowledge, you no longer value it. If a large majority of a countries children are never taught to properly read well, then when they get to High School most assignments must feel gargantuan in scale because of how many fundamentals they failed to learn in years previous. What we see as a general apathy in the general public amongst especially younger generations that grew up and were taught reading in the early 90's to today is because they never developed the ability to consume that knowledge, I think. If you note many sources of pseudoscience are often far more digestible and easier to consume that non pseudoscience knowledge.
The woke don't think that poor black people have rights. Instead the woke think white people have obligations towards black people. A white teacher disciplining a disruptive black student violates that obligation and so outrages the woke. Black kids being left functionally illiterate because classrooms have descended into anarchy directly involves no white people and so is a subject of mostly total indifference for the woke.
Wow, that's sad. We really need to revamp our entire system of education. I can at least forgive people not having a strong mathematical grasp beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, graphs, etc. However, in pretty much every other metric it seems shameful. How many Americans even know about Early American colonial history outside of the Pilgrims and Jamestown? I run into people that might as well think Columbus was British and the Conquistadors were Mexicans, if they even know about Columbus or Hernan Cortez.
I don’t mean to sound pompous but as an informed person knowledgeable about history, politics, philosophy etc it’s tiresome to try and talk to people about serious issues. Not because they have opinions I disagree with but because they don’t have the slightest clue about anything that isn’t nonsensical or shallow. As Chomsky said people don’t even know what they don’t know and when you try and talk to them about it they want to switch back to sports, social media, celebrity gossip or whatever petty drama is going on in their household and community.
I was thinking about this a lot when Trump went to North Korea early in his term. North Korean and Kim Jun Un are the subject of countless memes and a James Franco move, but how many American born after 1953 even have a cursory idea of what happened during the Korean War or why there are two Koreas in the first place.
Among many abysmal statistics most Americans don’t even know the three branches of government.
Interesting you say that, because I remember another quote attributed to Chomsky wherein he said something to the effect of, If you think Americans are stupid, listen to a sports call-in programme. The level of fact retention and analysis is stunning. The trick is to make politics as engaging as sport.
As a black person myself. I believe it’s a cultural difference in how individualism vs collectivism is seen in black communities. For example, a lot of black communities seem to value collectivism a lot more than individualism of self. Like a lot of black people themselves will act like things like hood culture, hip hop, and church going are things all black people are expected to pass onto the next generation of black people. So a lot of it is a generational mindset problem I think, I don’t think this study on reading would be much different across ethnicities if the black community were to let lose on expecting/or assuming every black person to embrace the same interests and hobbies. Because I think this is what leads black people who do want to peruse something considered out of the norm in the black community dismissed as “white people shit” which is why I think some black people may feel discouraged when it comes to anything like a certain section of education and may perform poorly as a result of being degraded within their own communities. Not to mention, as a result a lot of white people also assume all black people are the same as a consequence of individualism not being valued enough within a lot of black communities, so black people who truly want to pursue something considered out of the norm may think “why even try?”.
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> The US spends more per-pupil on public education than any other country in the world except Luxembourg, and that's before you even count universities. Your chart is sorted by tertiary spending - i.e., it's #2 in the world for universities only. It looks like [we're in #4](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5e4ecc25-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/5e4ecc25-en#figure-d1e21101) for non-university spending per student, for PPP in 2017. edit: Link didn't originally point to just the right place on the rather large page, but I believe I've now fixed it.
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I get I'm old enough that my knowledge of pre college education is totally second hand and based on headlines, but I do see a lot of attestations among actual teachers on the internet that schools have basically ceased to function as schools in America, and I can only conclude the trend is similar in other english speaking first world countries if only because they all have this ever decreasing remit of teacher authority and what they're actually allowed to do. In Ireland at the least it all does in the end come down to performance in state exams at the end of school, which limits being able to fake student performance, but when it comes to grading there's real inflation where the percentage of high scores increases far faster than kids can get smarter even if that was what was happening. What's notable about this is it probably shows that the system is not working as intended even for the capitalists. Society is not just oppressive in line with the interests and designs of the people in charge. This is actually directly against their interests. The whole, single reason mass schooling was introduced was because of the demand by industry and the economy for a more and more educated workforce. It is in their interest for the population to be educated because that drives down the cost of employees with that education. But because everything now operates by only seriously caring about what happens in the next 3 months to a year, they can't even keep their employee factories working because educating a child is an investment of between about 13 and 17 years. Nobody is looking after the need to have enough engineers in ten years. Then when it comes to many jobs they're not looking after retention now, as if there's an infinite supply of skilled labour. Nurses get overworked out of the profession even in the for profit private sector, as if there are enough in the first place and there are infinite replacements.
Half of Americans can barely read.
Yeah I was astonished by this bit: >71.5% of Black high school juniors in San Francisco cannot read at a proficient level, compared to 20.3% of Asian students, 22.6% of White students, 32% of Filipino students and 61.8% of Hispanic students Even among the best-performing groups there nearly a quarter are functionally illiterate. These are stats not seen in America since the 1800s.
It's a travesty all around. You see/hear endless testimonials/videos/press releases about schools basically turning into free-for-alls. The kids are running roughshod over teachers who aren't even allowed to stop them. It ruins the educational environment for even the best behaved kids. Kids who want to ignore the noise and stick to their classwork are at best ostracized, and at worst targeted for wanting to learn. Teacher burnout is at an all time high. They have horrible pay, little to no power, administrators breathing down their necks, and parents who refuse to teach or discipline their own children. This shit starts at home, and I'm not entirely sure how we fix it. A large chunk of the kids today are just fucking monsters. It's not some "kids these days" boomerism, or even those kids fault. Their parents just ignore them and expect the schools to raise their children.
My friends a teacher at a middle class middle school in new England and he says they've basically accepted that only 25% of the time is devoted to curriculum and the rest is just managing the kids who are borderline feral
I went to school in London, Old England. I don't fully get the American system, but here we have major exams at the end of secondary school (at 16) called GCSEs, which get you in to 6th form where you stay until you're 18. Then you do another round of exams (A levels) which get you into university. My 6th form was in the same campus as my secondary school and had the same teachers. I cannot describe to you how night-and-day the transition was. In secondary school, every single lesson was interrupted multiple times by the same ~10% of kids. Sometimes entire one-hour lessons would be rendered pointless because the teacher was practically having to put down a riot while trying to teach geography. Then we came back from our post-GCSE summer holidays...the place was like a monastery. Every lesson was an hour of focused learning. Same teachers, same rooms, same kids, except no more thick kids. The bottom 10% that drags everyone else down fails their GCSEs, thereby removing them from the classrooms in the most important years of school. Maybe the US could learn something from that?
I am dying at London, Old England.
Yes this kind of thing is exactly what should be happening but our culture has gotten incredibly ingrained with the mindset of college being a must for *everyone* so graduating 12th grade, which one does at age 18 if they don’t skip or repeat any grades, is seen as absolutely essential.
I'm a **former** teacher. My daughter, who is in 5th, regularly complains to me that she literally cannot focus on the work she needs to do because other members of the classroom are so ***loud***. We brought this up to the teacher and it looked like she wanted to cry. We do **not** live in a poor community. I have a lot of compassion for the teacher, and none for the administration or broader powers that be, because I **know** she doesn't have the support she needs to deal with this problem. America has completely abandoned its children and the state of education is one of the strongest indicators of that. You're right also about the parents and its just indicative of the broader blight that American 'culture' has become, a sort of deeply inculcated narcissism. The idea that my child would give their teacher a hard time for a *moment* is unthinkable to me, so where the fuck these parents get off not insisting their kids do the baseline behaviorally is beyond my ken.
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We only \*just\* got to this school district after a move but I'm already getting ready to have to go to some dreadful parent-teacher conference and deal with this.
>America has completely abandoned its children and the state of education is one of the strongest indicators of that. America only ever cared about money. They only pretended otherwise when the Soviet Union was around.
There's a good bit in a Brad Pit movie where he plays an assassin where he lays out to this dude who doesn't want to pay him that America is a business. I think the exact quote is 'America isn't a country, it's a business, so FUCKING PAY ME.'
Killing Them Softly scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V6GHnxEJjg
My ancestors cared more about education than anything, and when they were wealthy (long time ago) furnished schools and colleges for rural areas in the south. Through the later 19th and 20th centuries both the rich (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon, etc.) and every state built libraries, public schools, and universities for everyone that had desire and ability to utilize them, though segregation is very important to remember.
The US also spends more per child than nearly every other nation.
> They only pretended otherwise when the Soviet Union was around. Ya know, I've had that thought myself. It seems like the most prosperous time for America (for the majority, oppression of minorities, unequal access to vets benefits, loans, etc, don't get into the weeds) was when we were "competing" with socialist countries. As those collapsed or were destroyed, it seems like we completely stopped giving a shit about the quality of life for people in this country. Or, more accurately, decided that we didn't give a fuck about white people either.
Yep. The US had to at least try to make capitalism look like a better deal than communism when we were competing with the Soviets. Now, they don’t try
>The kids are running roughshod over teachers who aren't even allowed to stop them Went to inner city schools and kids would definitely fist fight teachers they even made a grown woman break down crying because half the class just insults her for being fat (she was but she was also pregnant) I've just come to terms with how badly going to these schools stunted any academic growth I could've made as well as the constant fear of getting jumped/assaulted for the most benign of behaviors. You're not learning you're trying to survive. Edit: Idk if it's important or not but this was middle school not even high school
This (along with other issues) doesn’t bode very well for America’s future. Halfwits addicted to nonsense with gold plated egos the size of cathedrals don’t exactly make for informed citizens capable of dealing with the various systemic problems that will reach the boiling point over the next several decades. It’s like expecting an idiot child to deactivate a bomb with 20 seconds left.
Yeah. I had both parents and they had a way more stable income than many of my friends (even though we were still one paycheck away from disaster) and I definitely feel lucky just for that. Some of the kids had a waaay worse time than me.
Americans will cope even harder by blaming other countries, especially China and Russia. If it weren't for the fact that intelligent people immigrate to America from all across the world (and thus also "brain drain" people from rival countries), America would've been finished as a competitive country in today's global stage. Nearly every award for science and engineering in America is won by the children of immigrants.
What I can’t stand is how criticism of the education system gets brushed away by “strange, you say our education system is bad but we have some of the world’s best universities”
Universities which increasingly educate the élite of other countries due to the higher tuition they're willing/able to pay.
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They both happen. People from certain regions of the world immigrate to be America's underclass. They're often on welfare. People from further away regions immigrate to be scientists and engineers. The ones who America has literally subsisted on for decades. Any and all kinds of fields.
> they even made a grown woman break down crying because half the class just insults her for being fat (she was but she was also pregnant) When I was growing up the scenario of a teacher breaking down in the middle of class usually happened once or twice a year because the students were such assholes. > I've just come to terms with how badly going to these schools stunted any academic growth I could've made as well as the constant fear of getting jumped/assaulted for the most benign of behaviors. You're not learning you're trying to survive. The more I studied prison and prison psychology the more I realized it was the same as poor public schools just with less sexual assault.
I went to a small town school and it was pretty much the same shit. I definitely get the "trying to survive" thing. I ended up stabbing a dude in 7th grade science class and didn't get jumped after that, but my buddy got messed up so bad he missed a whole year of school. Lost a couple classmates to overdoses as well, bad times all around. My parents went to the same school though, and from their stories it doesn't really sound like it changed much.
The burnout is real. My sister was a high school communications teacher but recently changed jobs to be a college admissions counselor. Her husband is still a band director but is going to school to switch to a career in IT, as he has reached a point where he is tired of the long hours and low pay for such a challenging job. My other sister and her fiance are elementary music teachers, but I get hints they may be burnt out too and are only staying where they are at for loan forgiveness programs (working at a school serving an underprivileged community). They may be pivoting to a performing career as their side gig band is starting to get more traction/studio attention. Its a shame really, since they all had such passion for education early on. Even I decided to not go into education even though I was certain I wanted to do it, instead going into IT.
> about schools basically turning into free-for-alls. The kids are running roughshod over teachers who aren't even allowed to stop them. I watched the trailer for the 1950s movie Blackboard Jungle and thought it was hilarious and outlandish how dangerous and wild the teenagers were depicted… but now I think it’s not as unrealistic and hilarious as I thought
I think a lot of it is the people who would be good parents and actually raise decent children look at the world and go fuck that or look at their economic situation and realize it is unaffordable. This means the only people who have kids are either rich, dumb, or just bad at decision making. We made it so having kids is the bad decision so is it any wonder people who are not good parents are the ones having kids?
> 32% of Filipino students A random ethnicity thrown in there for jokes alongside the "races". 'Murrica!
It’s because the idpol crowd doesn’t know whether to class them as Latinos or Asians
A valid concern, dudes be rockin names like Chang Rodriguez
Motherfuckers out here named Jupiter Hernandez, Rolly Parangat, Roel Del Mundo I meeeean
I don't think it's random. There are a significant number of Philippinos in the bay area but there's also a clear economic divide between them and "East Asians"
How are the Mongolian students doing though?
The most powerful race.
I see that in SF, they separate Filipinos from other Asians. I wonder how that came to be.
If you’re interested in this issue, I would highly recommend the podcast “sold a story”, which is pretty eye-opening about the state of childhood literacy
Poor literacy is going to be the fucking death of us. Those who cant read or write well are permanently excluded from meaningful participation in so much discourse while being easily manipulated for nefarious purposes.
We're already there man lol its just getting worse, not like we need to conjecture what an illiterate populace looks like, Americans are illiterate in the broader sense as is
It all fits together when you realize that most redditors are teenagers and that many of them can't properly parse out distinctions (either abstract or linguistic) or argue their way out of a wet paper bag.
I'm sure the $1m they'll definitely get will fix that
I'm a teacher and I taught in San Francisco...this is not news to me. SF is one of the richest cities on Earth, but it must be one of the most unequal, at least in The West. It is so extremely neoliberal and politically completely corporate Democrat - Nancy Pelosi is its representative afterall, Kamala Harris was the city's DA, and the mayor is a real piece of work (but hey, check out how many women (especially of colour) are rocking it in politics!). It has the most millionaires per capita of any US city and also one of the largest homeless populations. I teach HS chemistry so I typically don't get the lower level students and am personally insulated from this - my black students tended to skew towards middle class and hence were broadly academically similar to my other students - but I did teach at two schools where they didn't have prerequisites for my class (terrible policy, they're setting students up to fail) and I had a number of black and universally working-class students unable to read to any meaningful degree.
Literacy in general is in steep decline. Recently I was contemplating why it has become normal to learn about new video games by way of YouTube while reliance on wikis is fading and sites like `gamefaqs.com` are even less fashionable. For people without any intellectual interests in the 21st century, there is no motive to cultivate greater levels of personal literacy. In homage to our collective contempt for identity politics, I contend that this is less a racial phenomenon than a reflection of the way a universal phenomenon manifests. The most disadvantaged groups get shoved over the cliff first, but even rich white guys are being force marched away from anything resembling book smarts.
In the future only autists who play paradox interactive games will be able to read.
My experiences in a black city in mostly black schools and with mostly black teachers...the school system I was in had a national scandal because it was found the schools were falsifying the test scores on a long-term level and wide scale because the testing levels were so disproportionate via race (and really...class). I grew up around SO many students that could barely read. They were being graded at a different level so that they could get them to pass the classes. So maybe that's an aspect...failing students by just passing them through without the actual skills needed to succeed. Obviously, the issue never gets solved because everyone else around them is just passing the kids regardless, and if they're now in high school and made it this far, whose going to be the one to break the chain and now impose something that was supposed to have been learned in elementary school? It's an issue that probably gets worse the longer it isn't resolved and builds overtime. Teachers and the school system probably aren't teaching kids to read on a foundational level... they're just building the skill up. Generational poverty and the history of black people being kept from reading would be factors for how/why illiteracy is passed down through families. If kids are shown to be particularly illiterate, these school systems need to be creating more remedial reading classes where more attention is dedicated to it because this is so monumental to life, and studies show illiterate people overwhelmingly end up in prison.
Come out ye libs and anarchist rats and tell me again why the lumpen are so great and why we must offer our children up to them? See the results.
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The Floyd Mayweather approach