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US children fall further behind in reading
- lysace 2y agoThe article alludes to these causes: - pandemic school closures - youth mental health crisis - high rates of chronic absenteeism
- cf100clunk 2y agoThrow in some long term, multi-generational factors previously discussed at HN: - widespread environmental exposure to lead - gutting of public education funding during several presidencies - cultural decline in prestige and respect towards the teaching profession
- lysace 2y agoLead exposure going up during the past 1-2 decades? This seems unlikely.
- cf100clunk 2y ago> long term, multi-generational factors
- lysace 2y agoPlease expand.
- cf100clunk 2y ago> previously discussed here at HN
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- ElevenLathe 2y agoAt the very least this is true in Flint, MI.
- jcranmer 2y agoNo, it's not. Flint's lead water problems lasted for ~18 months from 2014-2015 (ending when they transitioned back to their original water source!), and as of about 4 years ago, they've fully replaced all of their lead water pipes.
- lysace 2y agoAlso: Flint population at the time: 100k US population at the time: 318M
- ElevenLathe 2y agoRight: 18 months 10 years ago, when the class of 2025 was 8.
- tootie 2y agoI have yet to see the finger pointed at the growing anti-education policies being pushed by the right but that seems like a worthy area of study. States that are now leaning on vouchers are starving public schools in favor of privates.
- taeric 2y agoGoing to be hard not to look long and hard at the school closures during the pandemic. Sucks, as it is also going to be hard to avoid the political hazard involved.
- shortrounddev2 2y agoThe US Government dropped 190bil (with a B) on education to cope with learning loss from the pandemic, and we still slid. That's like a 20% increase in funding, and we still didn't get shit from it. Let this be a lesson to people who think the problem with our education system is a lack of funding: we throw good money after bad on a bloated administrative system instead of actually spending money on kids.
- grazing_fields 2y ago[dead]
- gumperbumper 2y agoReading is like 5000 years old. It requires almost no resources to learn and do. I don’t think this is a spending problem.
- ivell 2y agoIt could be a spending problem if we need to overcome cultural restraints. Poor communities often do not have encouragement towards reading and if the teachers are not sufficiently staffed or not skilled enough to inspire kids, I can see why kids are not interested in reading and learning.
- tayo42 2y agoCome on, this isn't true. Only the rich is old societies were educated and could read.
- cf100clunk 2y agoCheck into monastic cultures with mendicant traditions, who were absolutely literate and minded towards archival research. They were not rare, just extremely private and usually secretive to avoid those either in power or led by paranoia who would destroy them.
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- gladiatr72 2y agothis: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
- sitkack 2y agorebuttal to this podcast series The Misrepresentation of Marie Clay in “Sold a Story” https://readingrecovery.org/the-misrepresentation-of-marie-clay-in-sold-a-story/ https://readingrecovery.org/the-misrepresentation-of-marie-c... I figured out why podcasts can be so damn irritating, they can be this patronizing, belabored setup to some ill thought out intellectual takedown you can't argue with in the same way you can with the written word. Teach kids (and the teachers) the scientific method, apply it everywhere ruthlessly. If you are "teaching reading" but not measuring reading comprehension and adjusting your methods for that student, you aren't teaching reading. Do science, demand that everyone does science. Stop using magic incantations.
- taeric 2y agoMy experience leans more to the Sold a Story line. Schools were quite active in not teaching phonics. To the point that I am meeting people with the absurd notion that "English is not a phonetic language." It was frustrating to see the rubric used in some schools. My kids with amazing memory could ace some readings, but only because they memorized the story. To the point that some of the teachers were confused that my kid could fully read back some books to them with perfect recall, but seemed lost if given a new book. I've been seeing this extend to math. We seem to not be teaching how to read equations. They are things to be computed. With the best many can do is to point to it and say "that is the equation."
- sitkack 2y agoMy kid pulled that trick on me when she was about 4. She memorized a passage, and could point to each word as she read it and tricked us that she could read, she took such great joy in it. "Ha ha, not so smart now are you adults!" :) I don't know what all the root causes are, but these kids should be getting read to, questioned about what they heard and then reading out loud themselves. Not defending Clay, but on the surface, "figure it out" is a pretty good heuristic. But we should be sounding out a word, breaking it apart, understanding what it could mean in that context, looking it up somewhere else. But if all you do is kinda fake it from the context, that might help in an emergency, but learning to read shouldn't be an emergency. We should be creating children that are curious enough to want to solve the puzzle of meaning when they encounter words they don't understand or know how to pronounce. The CNN article is just a jumble of numbers, cribbed from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/national-trends/?grade=4 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/... (which itself doesnt load its charts properly). Reading comprehension is for all people, at an all time low, and I don't know the causes.
- fishcrackers 2y ago[dead]
- crazygringo 2y agoOne factor behind decreasing US literacy rates and reading performance is the uptick of immigrants who don't speak English well. While analyses of reading and literacy skills are generally intended to reflect how our educational system is doing. So obviously, we need to control for immigration rates in these analyses. For assessment of our educational system, ideally we'd only be reporting for children and adults born in the US. (And then breaking out non-native speakers in their own categories to measure their ESL performance rates.) Because a child (or adult) might have superb literacy in Spanish, but show up as illiterate in English. And these studies generally aren't accounting for that at all.
- cf100clunk 2y ago[flagged]
- echelon 2y agoIdeally we'd capture many more features for analysis. Immigration history, socioeconomic status, parental education, etc. If we want to improve outcomes, more data helps.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoThe claim was that immigrant children were likely to be less literate in English. Your claim that immigrants (as an entire group) may certainly have higher English literacy than US-born is a bit more tenuous, and ignores lower income/lesser educated immigrants from Mexico/central/America/Eastern Africa in favor of more educated immigrants from India/Philippines/China (well, Asia in general). But I don't think the numbers really bare your claim out, even if we don't throw in illegal immigrants and/or refugees.
- cf100clunk 2y ago> I don't think the numbers really bare your claim out I'm not claiming any numbers. My words bear that out.
- hooverd 2y agoScrew it, I'm blaming phones.
- tootie 2y agoSurprisingly enough studies have never been able to reliably correlate phone or screen usage to declines in cognitive ability of well-being. Some weak effects appear and disappear in different studies but you'd think if the effect is this profound on society the results would jump out in studies. I can buy that it's a factor but there's more going on.
- taeric 2y agoI blame voice acting in video games. :D
- sitkack 2y agoI blame the shallow state machines and repetitive action cycles of NPCs in video games.
- taeric 2y agoRepetition is surprisingly effective for learning. Such that that may have actually been a hidden benefit back in the day. :D
- sitkack 2y agohttps://www.phind.com/search?cache=ef2ftkexs44l8t5u5vzmgkg1 https://www.phind.com/search?cache=ef2ftkexs44l8t5u5vzmgkg1 Learning, attentional control and action video games https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3461277/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3461277/ Not nerd sniped at all. > in other words, an end in and of itself — we have recently considered the possibility that enhanced attention is instead a means to an end, with that end being better probabilistic inference [54] Improved probabilistic inference as a general learning mechanism with action video games [54] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20833324/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20833324/
- cdme 2y agoDissolving the department of education and pushing (a single) religion in schools will be sure to accelerate the decline.
- MPSFounder 2y agoPrivate schools can afford to tailor education for their students and train them for Ivy League access. The poor will suffer most from this, as is often the case. Lower income individuals will occupy their kids with tech, while the rich can afford private lessons (like Zuckerberg received). America is the land of opportunity, but this is bound to get worse with the current administration (they had Betsy Devos last time!)
- cdme 2y agoAmerica left the whole land of opportunity thing behind a while ago. It's more the land of struggle to get by and hope the rich don't trample you now. Upward mobility is sold but rarely achievable.
- Dalewyn 2y agoThat depends entirely on your own perspective, namely if you're ambitious or wallowing in despair. America is a free country, the country and indeed the world is what you make of it. Nobody ever said living free was easy.
- trod1234 2y agoImmaterial. There are a great number of studies completing that show that opportunities for upward mobility simply are no longer there for the vast majority. David Willets summarized and touched on studies done by the Resolution Foundation, and wrote a book on the subject matter extensively, "The Pinch, How the Baby Boomers Stole their children's future". There's a big difference between living hand to mouth as an individual wage slave, and making enough to be able to support having children, let alone the gross excess of the Zuckerbergs or globalists of the world.
- ulfw 2y agoFuture voters. There is no democracy if people don't know who or what they are voting for. Ignorance isn't bliss when it comes to making a democratic choice.
- Dalewyn 2y agoThis oft repeated notion that any vote outside of The One True Approved School of Thought(tm) is "not democracy" is dangerous. Regardless of the process, a voter's vote is a vote and the sum of the votes (including voters who do not vote, "I don't care." is a valid vote) is the democratic will of the people one way or another. Also, if you truly do want to argue that voters should vote a certain way then you should plainly say so instead of being disingenuous.
- ulfw 2y agoI didn't say that at all. But reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, so I won't bother trying to argue with you.
- CivBase 2y agoIn my experience, the biggest issue with US public schools is incompitent administrations. Those administrations ultimately report to school boards, whose members are selected via public election. But how many people can name even a single person on their local school board? How many can account for what that person's platforms are regarding the school? How many can account for anything that person has done while on the board? Where would you even go to find out what your local school board is doing? How many of your school board members have observed the day-to-day goings on of your local schools? The system seems fundamentally broken to me. It's no wonder school administrations are so incompitent - especially in larger districts.
- WesleyLivesay 2y agoI wonder if this is at least partially related to the move away from phonics over the last 20 years (which is now coming back): https://apnews.com/article/phonics-science-reading-c715dea43f338f163715b01b83bb1066 https://apnews.com/article/phonics-science-reading-c715dea43... Looks like some states that re-emphasized phonics in a major way saw improvement, particularly in lower income brackets: https://apnews.com/article/reading-scores-phonics-mississippi-alabama-louisiana-5bdd5d6ff719b23faa37db2fb95d5004 https://apnews.com/article/reading-scores-phonics-mississipp...
- dambi0 2y agoThe second article also mentions a whole raft of other measures alongside phonics that could have contributed to the success.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoThe US has been moving towards phonics recently if anything. Most of the country was always using phonics anyway.
- SiempreViernes 2y agoThe fact they could move towards phonics just illustrates the point that previously they were some ways off from phonics. The problem of phonics being ignored was widespread just three years ago https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2022/10/20/sold-a-story-e1-the-problem https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2022/10/20/sold-a-story-e...
- HDThoreaun 2y agoThe vibes based system has always been most popular in NYC. Since much of the media is based out of NYC they made it a largely deal than it was in the rest of the country imo.
- MrSkelter 2y agoLarge parts of the world don’t use a phonics system and for a long time it didn’t exist. I am sure a properly performed study which accounted for the time spent on reading, as well as exposure to books, would demonstrate that phonics is no better than any other way of teaching reading. My children live in a house of books, we have thousands. We read to them daily from soon after birth. They did not read early compared to their friends (though they did memorize some books which made it look as if they were reading pretty young). They didn’t start school until six and spent their early years in a bi-lingual Nordic school system before moving to the US and then Europe once again. They now read at a very high level indeed, well above their peers. We made zero special effort. They just had access to books and libraries and live in an environment where everyone reads.
- ApolloFortyNine 2y ago>and some were unable to identify that the word “industrious” means “to be hard working.” Calling out just one question is pretty disingenuous I'm willing to admit, but this is giving me flashbacks to probably countless examples like this on reading tests I took. I haven't seen the text this came from so maybe the context is obvious, or maybe it's listed first in every 8th grade English textbook, but I apparently didn't know what 'industrious' meant. And I read quite a bit.
- oldandboring 2y agoPersonal anecdote. I have an elementary schooler and a middle schooler. Both of them score high on the standardized reading tests. Neither of them show much interest in actually reading books. The younger one will read graphic novels like "The Bad Guys" and the older one literally will not crack a book, says he hates it. I have friends whose kids are bookworms. Can't tell what to even expect anymore.
- HDThoreaun 2y agocliche but enjoying reading is literally just about finding a book you enjoy.