Reply to when schools focus on the wrong things (from a teacher)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Do you realize that many, many, many kids come to school not knowing the difference between letters and numbers?  Do you realize that some kids have NEVER held a book?  Some have never been read to.  Some are sharing a bedroom with their entire family of 8.  I have families who are refugees, who speak 3 different languages, who came from countries without electricity, etc, etc.  Imo, decoding is one of the smallest issues in education.  In my experience, the biggest issues are that kids don't have the background experiences that middle income kids have.  They don't have the vocabulary....in fact sometimes they only have about a tenth of the vocab of a typical kid.  They don't have any kind of parenting at home and sit in front of the TV the entire time they are not in school.  They don't go out and play, they don't go to camp or music lessons, they don't go to museums, in fact most have never left a 3 mile radius of their home.  Background experiences and vocabulary affects comprehension.  Anyone without a disability can decode, but comprehension is a separate issue.  
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For the 10% to 20% of test scores ... I mean students.... scoring at the very lowest level of our data, the problem in my experience is often due to poor decoding skills.  They are sometimes able to kinda sorta read one syllable words but flail miserably when they get to 4th and 5th grade multisyllable words, and because they can't really understand what they are reading, they don't read a lot for pleasure, which means they don't have any opportunity to learn new vocabulary words through reading.

Yes, this lowest 10% to 20% of test scores includes many students who are identified as Special Education students and as having dyslexia, dysgraphia, or other specific learning disorders.

In a high SES School parents will step in and get a lot of these kids tutors and some of these tutors will manage to give the kids the proper remediation they need.  In a low SES school they might not and because so many kids are also scoring at this level, if they don't learn to decode multisyllable words by 3rd grade they will be, frankly, sunk.  And everyone will say that they lack vocabulary skills, which they surely may, but first and foremost they lack multisyllable decoding skills.

The many interventions I have seen in my 18 years of elementary school teaching have never addressed the decoding issue head on past 3rd grade.  We look at data on the 4th grade level, but since the assessments we use do not typically measure decoding, the lack of decoding ability does not become salient.  We do notice that these children can't spell.  But most high stakes testing doesn't count spelling much, as long as the word is somewhat legible, so the spelling part doesn't usually get addressed.   [/quote]

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