doomer

Adding this to my job security copium alongside "knowing what a file directory is and how to navigate it"

Are some of the kids you’re teaching not know how to genuinely read?

Gotta love it when this is the person soliciting all the commentary on how kids these days can't read or write. The post is almost incoherent.

I knew things were bad - just statistically (something like 60% of Americans have below a 5th grade reading level) - but it's alarming that it seems to be getting worse according to those on the ground. As far as I can tell, the only reason the United States keeps up is by exerting massive brain drain on the rest of the world. I work at one of those Fortune 500 companies or whatever that shit is and the vast majority of my "high skill" coworkers are people from other countries.

Yeah some of this tracks when I was a substitute. I had kids who didn't know how to write their own names. I asked one kid to write his name and address on a form the office gave me. Kid didn't know how to write either and didn't even know his home address. These were 9th graders (first year of high school, 13 to 14 years old)

Literacy is not a strong suit of the American population in general and it's not getting better.

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.

reason number 13209753985789 that i will be moving abroad before having kids. my hypothetical children deserve way better than this shit hole.

Death to America

This is primarily the result of neoliberalism, yeah. Budgets getting crushed everywhere for decades, not keeping up with inflation, all while being asked to take on more and more work - largely work induced by problems of poverty, itself an intentional creation of neoliberalism. Lower wages also mean it's harder for a parent to spend time with their kids teaching them, helping with homework, having a preschool, helping socialize them. This includes not only an inability to have a stay-at-home parent, but also less time even for working parents, who must pick up longer hours, farther away, and at less regular hours.

As a revealing counterexample, after-school programs have been shown to be widely beneficial for a huge number of outcomes, including academic performance. Simply having something enriching to do, supervised, after school. I think they are mostly smoothing over issues of poverty.

The destruction of the teaching profession is part of this as well. I'd try to be a teacher myself if it didn't mean poverty and 70 hour weeks and an inability to properly teach students due to structural issues like poor teacher:student ratios.

Would make sense as the USA is locked into it's encroachment into burger style fascism that you have generations who can't think critically let alone read/write. Probably going to see an uptick in vilifying socialist countries that properly educate their kids. More libraries turned into private prisons for youngsters coming our way.

I know it’s kind of a given because but the OP of that thread is spouting some reactionary nonsense in those edits.

Also, it feels like there’s an implication in the original question that kids should be being held back. It’s generally agreed upon at this point that retention is almost always detrimental. Kids move up with their peers and then they get individualized intervention depending on their needs.

Passes bill called "No Child Left Behind"

Leaves millions of children behind

??? what the fuck is this country

That threads is a mixed bag. A lot of comments correctly blaming NCLB and the general switch to testing and metrics over teachers autonomy, even some “there are larger socioeconomic issues at play here” takes. But also a lot of blaming parents, blaming kids instead of the systems. And I don’t buy “oh it’s TikTok/YouTube/Instagram”; people been saying the newfangled media is rotting brains since the printing press was invented. Not to get all tooting my own horn, but my kid is reading a couple grade levels above his age and he watches plenty of YouTube. It’s about getting the fundamentals and encouraging them to explore their interests. And yes, some parents check out of the IEP and special ed processes, but if you’ve got single working parents or dual income households and all these processes take time you don’t have and involve meetings you’ve got to try to get out of work to attend, well yeah of course they’re not going to follow through.

I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate

correct

Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright

incorrect

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.

This is all true. And now the literacy crisis will be used as further reasoning to defund public education and promote private/charter options

Idk, man. I've seen counterpoints (sorry I couldn't find a reference that wasn't a joke, but that's just my internet diet).

We've never been more dependent on literacy as a means of navigating the world than in the modern moment. Maybe the shift from text to videos as a means of communication is changing that, but even then... how do you even operate a cell phone without some degree of literacy?

Generally speaking, education rates have only trended upward since the Depression Era. We have a higher percentage of college students, a higher percentage of professional workers, and higher levels of literacy in Gen X and younger than in the Boomer and older cohorts. That's not to say we don't have an absolute mess of an educational institution.

Me, if you asked for my anecdotes about literacy issues in students:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKfupO4ZzPs

dark ages and illiteracy simply go well together

I do reading tutoring for kids and it's pretty dire out there. Like obviously I get kids whose parents are forcing them to do it against their will, and they are just not gonna put in the effort. But holy shit they struggle to read books that were for kids when I was little, they pretty much just read the words one by one without any flow or continuity to any of it, and therefore it's very mentally taxing for them because they don't just absorb the sentences as they come in

"I have students still using sentence stems to write the most basic of paragraphs."

I'm 35 and would have been marked down in any class that i didnt write using boring as fuck sentence stems. it made me the shitty writer i am today

the kids heads are a little too fucked up for the plan of having them all sit silently in classrooms to work out well. the statistics are bad. you need like two kids who have disruptive interactions that give them more dopamine than learning euclidean geometry and you're cooked

Literacy clinics seem to be like such an obvious form of praxis right now. How would one go about getting this going?