Reply to 40% of 4th graders cannot read in 2026

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t think we can blame parents. It’s not fair to expect parents to spend an hour a day tutoring what should be taught in the 7 hours they’re in school daily.

I blame edtech. Get rid of the laptops and force reading from paper books and textbooks. It’s not the same to read on a screen.  [/quote]

There are reports showing on 37% of parents of toddlers read tot heir kids daily with 55% reading to their toddlers 5 days a week. That is the start of the problem. Kids who are read to regularly, preferably daily, are exposed to sounds, letters, blends, and the basic skills needed for reading early on. The majority of those kids will learn to read by K. The kids who had been read to regularly and struggle with reading themselves tend to have learning issues.

But when kids walk into K and don’t know their sounds or basic letters because no one was reading to them regularly as toddlers and pre-K they are behind.

So yeah, not reading in early ES is on the parents. Asking teachers to make up for 5-7 years of not being read to at home at school is ridiculous.

The reason the education gap exists is because people who had parents who had the time and money and did things like read to their kids tend to produce kids who end up with jobs who have the time and money and knowledge to read to their kids. People who did not do well in school or dropped out or never really attended because their parents didn’t care tend to have similar kids and the pattern persists. Asking teachers to fix a problem that is 1) generaational 2) parent based is unreasonable. It tells me you don’t understand how the brain develops or how education works.[/quote]

Is it generational and parent-based though? I read to my kids WAY more than my parents ever read to me. When I was a kid I was not read to much at all (certainly not daily) and I also had plenty of TV exposure -- I know my parents used the TV as a babysitter all the time and some of my earliest memories are sitting on the floor watching TV (including Sesame Street, though also lots of BS cartoons). But I still learned to read. It was the 80s, so kids were not expected to read fluently in Kindergarten. I'm sure some did; I did not. I learned to read in 1st grade and have clear memories of reading my first "See Spot Run" type book on my own while sitting in my first grade classroom.

It seems like most kids used to learn to read in school. I'm sure there were many parents who were more diligent about reading to their kids than mine were, but do you really think it was more than 40% of the population? Literacy rates used to be way lower than they are now, which means plenty of people grew up in families in the 20th century where their parents were not capable of reading to them.

This was one of the main reasons public education was developed -- it was a way to educate kids who came from uneducated families. I really do not think it's too much to expect of schools that they be capable of teaching young children to read, even in situations where the parents do not or cannot contribute to that project. Obviously it's better if the parents support reading at home, but it has never been the case that most parents actually do that, so schools need to be set up to teach reading even when the ideal home environment isn't available.[/quote]

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