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I have got to stop reading teacher anecdotes about literacy issues in students, this is messing me up
(old.reddit.com)
Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
American literacy education is like this. Most kids would pick up basic reading skills on their own through immersion as long as they’re surrounded by written language, which almost all of us are. The American education system counts all of those kids as wins to justify whatever they’re currently doing. Then we figure out how to fix the system for the remainder of the kids. And then we refuse to implement the necessary reforms. So we essentially do nothing to improve while patting ourselves on the back for it. Early intervention works wonders for literacy but is usually underfunded or done poorly with boxed programs that don’t give rigorous feedback or are purpose-built and then misapplied.
I was pretty shit at writing until I started writing comments in BBS forums and Digg.com in the early 2000's
You'd get this sort of natural feedback that teachers just couldn't or wouldn't do. Instead of pointing out rules or passive voice or counting the amount of whatever dumb bullshit, you'd get people pointing shit out that you had already said, but weren't clear about. And I learned to be conscious of linebreaks and how they affect the visibility of certain parts of the text