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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think back to when I was in elementary school (And not a good one. Several girls had dropped out by high school), and I'm pretty sure I learned about MLK, Jackie Robinson, mummies and Egypt, The Oregon Trail, and I remember reading about topics like Native Americans, pueblos / Zuni silversmiths and jewelry making, and things like ranch hands and cattle. We learned all the state capitals. We had spelling tests. Do your kids know anything about... well, anything? Mine knows a little, but pretty much just things we have talked about at home or read at the library. Is this normal for elementary school?

At school they are taught about math facts and reading skills, and I think he is ok in those areas. Science has been limited to building lego structures and making paper airplanes. History. I think they talked about being a good citizen and voted for a movie to see which movie would win a majority. His teacher last year made mention of "the old days" (like pre electricity, pre-internet) vs now, and they made a then vs now list of ideas, but that's about it. He does very little writing, and no spelling.

When do they start learning more actual content versus learning early skills like reading and math facts? 4th grade?[/quote]

OP this is reason number 255,234,924 to put your kids in private schools. [/quote]

Or just teach them stuff yourself. That’s what my parents did and what DH and I do with our kids. I figure it’s the parents job to make sure the kids know basic history and science (at least in elementary school— HS teaches more) and not assume the schools will teach it. [/quote]

[b]Considering less than 50% of kids are at grade level proficiency for basic reading and math, and now schools aren’t even teaching science and history like they used to, what it is exactly that kids are doing at school for 7 hrs?[/b] [/quote]

[b]According to my daughter one year, "not much" [/b](that was 2nd grade and the year of return to school after the pandemic - my impression was the teacher was drowning in behavior problems that she did a decent job of managing, but it took a lot of her time and energy).

Note that there's shown to be a correlation between not learning content like science and history and not scoring well on standardized reading tests. So that the two are going down together is not surprising. Turns out if you know something about a topic it's easier to understand when you read about it. If you give all kids a piece of writing about something completely made up (so nobody knows anything about it), gaps in their performance on a reading comprehension tests largely disappear.[/quote]

This tracks with what we saw too. Last year, DS switched out of an highly ranked public to a parochial school and came home the third week of school saying he was "way behind" in Spanish. I asked him how that could be, given that he had only had 2 Spanish classes so far. At his old school, his class of 18 students met for Spanish every single day. At the parochial they had classes approaching 25 students and Spanish was only taught 1-2x/week. He said in public school they were basically messing around and not learning anything, while the teacher yelled at the same small handful of kids. We also saw a big difference in grade level expectations for reading, writing/spelling, social studies, and science. The one exception was math.  Public school math level was about the same or maybe they had an edge, since they allowed acceleration on the ipad and DS was able to work ahead.[/quote]

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