National reading scores are at all time lows

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's telling that many Silicon Valley families are raising their children in a mostly tech-free environment, including private schools that have banished screens. I think going forward there is going to be increasing separation between the well-educated families who are mindful and vigilant about the damage screens can do to neurological development in children and families that don't care or who are unaware. The ability to concentrate and read longform is going to be a prized skill in the years ahead. It's kind of sad that reading with your toddlers is basically tiger parenting now.

Lol. I may have been a Tiger parent since my kids were born. Regardless of what the rest of the world is doing, I make sure that my kids get both the socialization of public school and the curriculum of a classical education at home.

In 20 years, some people will look back and wish they had been tiger parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's telling that many Silicon Valley families are raising their children in a mostly tech-free environment, including private schools that have banished screens. I think going forward there is going to be increasing separation between the well-educated families who are mindful and vigilant about the damage screens can do to neurological development in children and families that don't care or who are unaware. The ability to concentrate and read longform is going to be a prized skill in the years ahead. It's kind of sad that reading with your toddlers is basically tiger parenting now.

No one I know in Silicon Valley allows their own kids to use screens.

Kids are using screens in Silicon Valley.

The Waldorf Schools are usually tiny and on par with being homeschooled. It’s old hippy stuff and they don’t embrace change especially technology.

Here’s an example of how they view math -

The researchers found that in Waldorf education math is taught in multiple ways. Students move their math, sing their math, paint, draw and build their math, and it is brought into other lessons like history

Their approach to learning how to read.

children build their foundation to reading and writing organically, learning letters and sounds through stories, songs, word games, and more. This low-stress, natural approach starts in preschool and is integrated into every subject, every day.

The schools are usually too small to have much in the way of activities the bigger schools have the normal sports where any student can sign up for.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I blame parents giving their children devices before they learn to read

I would love to remove all devices but the teachers keep assigning homework in apps. Get rid of the garbage apps.

I agree there is a little too much dependence on apps (thanks to underfunded & overcrowded schools), but Lexia is a great app.

Lexia is awful. My 6th grader has her 2nd grade sister do her assignments because it's so easy. It goes so so slowly.

At they beginning when they first introduced Lexia they let kids move ahead if they passed a placement test, but now they require kids to do Lexia for their grade level. It's so remedial. A total waste of time.

Lexia is not awful.

It’s a tool that can either be used effectively or not.

Yes it is. It moves incredibly slowly. It also has set levels so if a kid needs to work on one skill, but excels at others, they still have to wade through hours and hours of content that is far too easy. And if you click the wrong thing (usually trying to rush and move faster) then you have to sit through asinine recordings to "teach" the missed content. My kids equate Lexia to torture and I agree with them.

Talk to your kids’ teachers. They can adjust the levels.

They won't. Levels correspond to grade levels and they no longer allow kids to work above their grade level because then they run out of levels in upper grades.

No - wrong reason.

The school administrators and school boards are refusing to allow kids to work above grade level, citing “equity” - which is part of DEI.

I will post a few examples from national news sources:

Our schools won't let kids move ahead because if they finish the elementary Lexia levels in 2nd or 3rd grade, then the kids have nothing to do during Lexia time in 4th and 5th grade, and they don't have a subscription for elementary kids to use the middle school version. It's purely pragmatic.

So, they won't just let upper elementary kids read books during Lexia time if they've already passed through all of the levels? That's idiotic.

DP. Same with my middle school kids. They were allowed to work ahead, but they finished all the content in middle school content maybe 6th grade or early 7th grade and just have to sit there and redo it to get their weekly completed minutes all through the end of 8th grade. So dumb and such a waste of time

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's telling that many Silicon Valley families are raising their children in a mostly tech-free environment, including private schools that have banished screens. I think going forward there is going to be increasing separation between the well-educated families who are mindful and vigilant about the damage screens can do to neurological development in children and families that don't care or who are unaware. The ability to concentrate and read longform is going to be a prized skill in the years ahead. It's kind of sad that reading with your toddlers is basically tiger parenting now.

Lol. I may have been a Tiger parent since my kids were born. Regardless of what the rest of the world is doing, I make sure that my kids get both the socialization of public school and the curriculum of a classical education at home.

In 20 years, some people will look back and wish they had been tiger parents.

Same. And it is a lot of work. We heavily supplement at home to keep them actually learning new content

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's telling that many Silicon Valley families are raising their children in a mostly tech-free environment, including private schools that have banished screens. I think going forward there is going to be increasing separation between the well-educated families who are mindful and vigilant about the damage screens can do to neurological development in children and families that don't care or who are unaware. The ability to concentrate and read longform is going to be a prized skill in the years ahead. It's kind of sad that reading with your toddlers is basically tiger parenting now.

Lol. I may have been a Tiger parent since my kids were born. Regardless of what the rest of the world is doing, I make sure that my kids get both the socialization of public school and the curriculum of a classical education at home.

In 20 years, some people will look back and wish they had been tiger parents.

Same. And it is a lot of work. We heavily supplement at home to keep them actually learning new content

What exactly are they not learning ?

[Anonymous]

Reading is twofold. IF students become proficient decoders, THEN they need the background knowledge and vocabulary to understand what they are reading. Public schools have been majority poor for the last 10 years. Poor kids aren’t known for having adequate background knowledge to comprehend what they are reading.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Reading is twofold. IF students become proficient decoders, THEN they need the background knowledge and vocabulary to understand what they are reading. Public schools have been majority poor for the last 10 years. Poor kids aren’t known for having adequate background knowledge to comprehend what they are reading.

Schools using the Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) curriculum will be teaching that background knowledge and vocabulary as a natural part if the curriculum.

I think APS and MCPS are migrating to CKLA. FCPS went with Benchmark, sadly.

It takes 4-5 years of any new curriculum to have enough data on how well it works. Often teachers still are adapting and learning best ways to teach the new curriculum during the first 1-2 years. Have to wait until K students with the new curriculum hit 4th grade before the outcomes are clear.

[Anonymous]

I'm a late boomer (1961) and we could read before/during K.

What are schools doing these days? Looking at screens? Dumb.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm a late boomer (1961) and we could read before/during K.

What are schools doing these days? Looking at screens? Dumb.

Speak for yourself. In the 1960s only about half of American kids went to kindergarten. Kindergarten back then was 100% play based. Learning to read started in first grade.

Technology is not the problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm a late boomer (1961) and we could read before/during K.

What are schools doing these days? Looking at screens? Dumb.

Speak for yourself. In the 1960s only about half of American kids went to kindergarten. Kindergarten back then was 100% play based. Learning to read started in first grade.

Technology is not the problem.

Some places had (private or religious) Montessori preschools even back then, and kids in those schools routinely learned to read before K. The need to pay tuition means the population self-selected for parents focused on education, so not a reliable sample for the whole population.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I blame Tiktok, Youtube, etc. Kids have super short attention spans and want to be fed content with minimal effort. My kid is a 4th grader and usually has to be forced to read. There are just so many other options. When I was a kid, there wasn't a whole lot else to do. And at least when we watched tv, it wasn't presented in infinite 30 second clips.

Super!

You know who I blame? Parents.

Even if you both work, it's your job to teach your kids to read and then to make them read. Back in the dark ages, parents taught their kids and like my parents, made us read. We didn't have so many distractions so a book was often your gaming system but parents can set rules but don't.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The shift towards accountability in the last twenty years has backfired. What matters now to school systems is standardized test scores, so that’s what teaching is geared towards improving. Using various online programs seems like an easy solution to improving test scores, and school systems continue to pour money into them despite the dropping reading scores. Anecdotally I think kids read much less at home now and they definitely read less at school (rather than reading when they aren’t in a reading group with the teacher, now they are on online programs). And kids are coming into school with fewer and fewer pre literacy skills. The Sold a Story Calkins stuff doesn’t help, but it’s certainly not the entire problem.

Parents, teachers, and school systems need to agree this model is failing. The instruction piece is improving, now we need to ensure kids spend less time on devices and more time reading.

to that last sentence tack on "at home." Parents have to enforce this and they aren't. No one I know cares that their kids aren't reading. I know some parents limit screen time but they aren't pushing their kids to read.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I blame Tiktok, Youtube, etc. Kids have super short attention spans and want to be fed content with minimal effort. My kid is a 4th grader and usually has to be forced to read. There are just so many other options. When I was a kid, there wasn't a whole lot else to do. And at least when we watched tv, it wasn't presented in infinite 30 second clips.

and I blame schools too focused on gender stuff, DEI and other indoctrination. Every time some new flavor of the week trend is introduced into the schools, some traditional subject like reading, writing, math or science has to be forfeited.

Bull shite. There is very little time spent on this stuff in school. Parents expect teachers to cover more advanced classes as early as possible.

You teach your kids to read. It's your job. The schools weren't closed for jollies. Remember idiot?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes, but scores are also down in math, not just reading. In fact, the decline started in 2018, pre-pandemic. So covid doesn't explain it completely, and neither does the lack of reading books (since math is also down, at about the same rate).

But the timing corresponds perfectly with the point at which most schools completed their redesigns of curriculum to cater to math and reading tests, as a result of NCLB (and later, Race to the Top). It also corresponds to the rise of vouchers and charters, which were part of NCLB.

Exactly. What most parents don't realize is the pressure each principal feels for their school and that principal may have the teachers forgoing everything but working toward the SOLs. One es my kids were at was horrible for dropping everything to go over the SOL stuff again and again. It was boring and repetitive.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:also closing schools for (in some areas) over 2 years didn't do us any favors.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/students-aren-t-recovering-from-covid-test-scores-are-getting-worse/ar-AA1y32Zf?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=bed906f67f484690924890be737eb4a1&ei=40

Fcking liar.

Schools were not closed for over two years.

NP. School buildings may not have been closed for two full years, but if you don't think that the lack of in-person learning for more than a year played a role in declines, you aren't being honest.

The 4th graders being tested had virtual kindergarten. It's crazy to think that didn't have an effect on learning.

I didn't go to k back in the 60s. None of the neighbor kids did either. A lot of our schools didn't offer it.