Too much Lucy Calkins. Go back to the basics—teach phonics, spelling, grammar, penmenship, vocabulary, direct instruction, etc.

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.

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.

Ha, I am too busy trying to teach my students to write complete sentences. I would like to indoctrinate them into literacy, that’s it.

Have you been in a classroom lately? This is not surprising.

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.

No amount of intervention will fix low literacy, checked out parents.

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

No phonics was taught in years and years in what some think was a good school

Blame Lucy Calkins.

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

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.

It's not going to get better. It's just like penmanship. Generally gone. Forever.

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.

Not a surprise. Kids barely read anymore, even in school. They are taught how to read short test passages and answer questions. Some students have gotten to high school without even reading an entire book.

Plus, public schools are a majority poor. It’s been that way for about 10 yrs now. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the scores are low.

Horrific. This will have massive, long term consequences for these kids and their communities.

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/reading-skills-naep.html?smid=nytcore-android-share