Assumptions about how children learn to read have been disproven by research

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/557915?single_page=true

by dsr12 • 8 years ago

227 174 8 years ago

I'd say one of the biggest shifts since 1998 is the wider availability of the internet and then computer like devices in school. Instead of doing the rote learning, they make learning into a game. Where everyone advances at a glacial pace from what I've seen.

Now that kids are growing up using handheld phones/tablets for their consumption, the likelihood of them sitting down and reading a book (be it digital or paper) seems less likely than during my childhood when we had to dream about these futuristic gadgets.

__s• 8 years ago

Kind of weird how the internet cuts both ways

For some education was too slow relative to the potential learning of the internet. But now the internet is hampering education

Meanwhile the internet is seen as an equalizer to dispense information globally. Yet software eating the world is siphoning wealth inequality into the hands of a few

Another: it's a medium for the most distributed uncensored encrypted communications, while also allowing intelligence organizations to pry deeper than they've ever in the past

21• 8 years ago

So some days ago there was this article how todays teenagers are bored to death on their phone, and constantly swap between social media apps looking for some engagement.

There was a video to. The most amazing thing to me was that none of these teenagers even considered using the device to educate themselves, like reading an article on wikipedia or watching a documentary on youtube.

brightball2• 8 years ago

For what it’s worth, I basically had to force my son to read the 1st Harry Potter book. It’s slightly above his grade level and I had to actually ban him from electronics until it was finished and we quizzed him on it to make sure he actually read it. There were tears because he felt it was too hard without really trying.

After he finished it, he loved it. He’s on book 3 now, reads every night because he wants to, makes a point to take the books with him, takes the accelerated reader tests for them at school (and aces them).

Now the kid loves reading... :)

rootusrootus4• 8 years ago

Is that because the electronics were more attractive, or because he was still in the 'learn to read' phase and it was work to get through a large book? Crossing the threshold into 'read to learn' skill level is a huge turning point in how a kid looks at books [in my experience].

Izkata3• 8 years ago

When I was a kid, I didn't care for reading very much - but I was into animals. Then one day with my parents at the local drugstore, I spotted a book with a kid turning into a jaguar on the cover [0] and begged my parents to get it. I was a bit lost, since it was in the middle of a series, but it was the first book I remember wanting to read, and it was also my introduction to science-fiction. From then on I always had a sci-fi or fantasy book nearby, and I still have my original copies of that entire series.

Because of that, and from what gradeschool friends have said, I've always been of the opinion that reading is too often introduced to kids the wrong way, through textbooks or very dry non-fiction, instead of through topics they'd actually find interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_(Applegate_novel...

nickysielicki• 8 years ago

The internet makes dumb kids dumber and smart kids smarter.

zaroth5• 8 years ago

Read to your child for 30-60 minutes a day from Day 1 and by Kindergarden there are books piled on every flat surface, books piled in the car, books in the refrigerator, and you won’t be able to tear the book from their tiny little hands.

asaph2• 8 years ago

Anecdotally, I've seen many parents do this with mixed results. YMMV.

zaroth5• 8 years ago

I think the shift to self directed reading will happen at different ages, depending on a million factors.

But there are just so many amazing books to read out there and I think we are so hard-wired for story telling, just make reading a cherished daily activity, and the moment will come at some point from 5-7.

nicksergeant• 8 years ago

Yes. Every child is different.

gilbetron• 8 years ago

Indeed, ours is 9 and has been read to every single night - rarely reads books. Constantly is on his laptop doing things I think are far better than just reading, so I'm largely ok with it. Too much youtube "crap" sometimes, but he usually balances himself out ok - a skill people heavily need that isn't often taught.

p1esk• 8 years ago

In the age of smartphones and tablets?

zaroth5• 8 years ago

Do you mean to imply the books are all on the tablet or that the reading is replaced by apps?

Of course it’s each parents prerogative, but I would never trade the beaten up pile of Gerald and Piggy for an app in a million years.

kurthr2• 8 years ago

The disturbing thing is that you're talking about giving a kindergartner a smartphone/tablet... which is asking for trouble even if I've seen it done. This is exactly because their apps are designed to be so addictive.

rootusrootus4• 8 years ago

YMMV but my kids love their piles and piles of books even if they also want to be on their iPads pretty often. I give 'em a little time each day to watch a bit of TV, a little time on the tablet, as much time playing with friends and reading books as they want ... and they choose books a lot of the time.

I think if you just gave them the tablet and walked away, they might not look for anything else ... but that's true of any human of any age, it seems.

toast0• 8 years ago

My son doesn't read a lot of books during the day, but we let him stay up after bedtime with a book (and a reading light), and the 'breaking the rules' part of that was compelling for him, even when he was questioning reading by himself when he didn't actually have those skills (he would look at pictures). Encouraging reading after bedtime means often he interrupts what I'm doing at night to ask for a new book and sometimes stays up too late and has trouble waking up in the morning, but I think it's worth it. Different kids need different things though.

wvenable• 8 years ago

My son is a smartphone and PC addict but he still reads an insane amount. Way more than I did at his age but about the same as his mom. I think a lot of whether you like to read or not is genetic.

cmiles74• 8 years ago

We let our child read from a Kindle Reader (the black and white kind) if we are out of library books.

ordu• 8 years ago

If parents read books, than child would read also. It is like imprinting: child catches reading behaviour and imitates it. If parents do not read books but playing with smartphones and tablets, than child will not read books. It is simple at the first glance, but the problem is: if parents do not like reading, than it would be hard for them to show their child how they enjoy reading books.

And one more point. Maybe I'm wrong, but AFAIR child inclination to read is created from early childhood, so parents should show their reading enthusiasm to 1-2 years old child and older. Showing enthusiasm is not like "let me read to you", its like "of course I would play with you, but let me finish my book first". Reading to a child is also good, but it is not enough, because it shows behaviour "to read to a child", not "to read an interesting book for pleasure of reading" and not "to prefer book over video game".

rosstex2• 8 years ago

I can attests to this. My parents would allow me to read as many books as I wanted before bed each night, and I would often pick out 4-5. I could read much earlier than most other kids, and my reading/writing skills are excellent today.

rosstex2• 8 years ago

...but you can't tell because of my typo :P

wiredfool2• 8 years ago

In the fridge?

That one I haven’t seen.

ghaff5• 8 years ago

It's not clear to me that this article is arguing for methods that improve learning as opposed to improve testing. One of the main points seems to be that, if we taught history etc. in a more standardized way and then tested everyone for reading comprehension on those standard topics, reading comprehension scores would go up because the topics would be familiar. That makes sense to me but it also doesn't suggest to me that the students would actually be any better when reading to obtain new knowledge.

verteu2• 8 years ago

Indeed -- it's become fashionable to replace tests of critical thinking with tests of rote regurgitation, since the former are "biased" towards students with wealthy or intellectual parents.

I'm skeptical this is good idea. Even the famous "oarsman:regatta" SAT analogy, oft-cited as a culturally biased question, had a lower black/white gap than culturally neutral questions on the same exam [1].

In countries that specify the content to be taught at each grade level, standardized tests can test students on what they’ve learned in school. But in the United States, where schools are all teaching different content, test designers give students passages on a variety of topics that may have nothing to do with what they’ve learned in school—life in the Arctic, for example, or the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

[1] https://archive.org/stream/TheBellCurve/bell-curve-richard-j...

acdha4• 8 years ago

Indeed -- it's become fashionable to replace tests of critical thinking with tests of rote regurgitation, since the former are "biased" towards students with wealthy or intellectual parents.

That sounds like a misunderstanding of the issue. It’s not shifting to rote memory but rather being cognizant of where the test implicitly depends on knowledge which isn’t broadly shared — e.g. how well would poor kids do on a question which used a lot of jargon related to sailing or polo? – so it’s only measuring the intended skills.

In the AP tests this has apparently meant making the tests more self-contained so you’re testing someone’s ability to reason about it rather than trivia recall. The science teachers I know (all former postdocs) this has been received positively since that’s closer to how actual science happens — nobody works without an Internet connection.

As for The Bell Curve, linking to decades-debunked pseudoscience is not a good way to start any discussion which will end well. There are less tainted sources for any valid argument.

darkerside• 8 years ago

We don't have a lot of tools for demonstrating that we've improved learning. Testing is one of the earliest indicators. There's nothing wrong with improving test scores; it's generally a good thing. The problem is when we focus on improving test scores to the detriment of learning. Similar to a startup optimizing on metrics to the detriment of actually growing the business.

Building a narrative into the educational process (e.g. by teaching history early and regularly) seems like an effective way to get kids engaged in learning.

motohagiography• 8 years ago

Sort of hoped it was because American students had in fact become better instead...

nxc182• 8 years ago

I've been amazed at how bad people in my peer group (I'm 23) are at reading and writing. Even in college it seemed no one was up to the task of writing a five paragraph essay without major stress. Heaven help them if they tried to read anything above 12th grade reading level or anything written before 1950 (ye olde English is hard, but should be doable).

I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm encouraged by the idea of exposing kids to difficult texts early. Kids can learn really quickly when challenged. As long as it is a safe environment (you're not going to be punished for struggling with a too-hard text) I've seen that be very effective. Treating kids like they're dumb is the #1 way to make them dumb.

seanmcdirmid• 8 years ago

I didn't really learn how to write until grad school. Even though I went to a top tier public university and a highly ranked HS, it was pretty easy to get by without writing more than a couple of paragraphs.

ajmurmann• 8 years ago

or anything written before 1950 This makes me wonder if this problem might at least partially be caused by American society valuing practical application and usefulness for bringing money home much higher than education as a value in itself. Short term as long term thinking probably also plays a role. What would someone read that was written before 1950 that is directly applicable and help getting a well paying job?

threatofrain• 8 years ago

But much of high school education in English involves reading ye olde public domain works, and I'm not sure they're actually that helpful for reading or writing. I feel like what kids are doing is practicing how to carry the pretense of intellectualism, but in a way that they, their peers, their teachers, or anyone else around them, feels is absolutely toy and obvious.

It's one thing to begin riding with training wheels, and it's another to keep them on even past high school. For some, indefinitely.

I feel what's important for future optimism is improvement on specifically scientific literacy and observational writing, and not Catcher in the Rye type assignments where nobody, you included, is expected to believe in anything you write. I don't think that's a healthy attitude for the next generation.

nxc182• 8 years ago

This is a really good point. I agree that there are much more important things to learn, and reading old material (old enough that the English is barely recognizable) isn't generally valuable. More scientific literacy would be a great start!

I remember in high school freshman year science class involved reading and reflecting on science in the news. I thought it was bullshit at the time, partially because most science journalism that I was aware of was bullshit. I do think I could have read actual scientific papers at that time. Some students would struggle, but struggle = learning, imho.

ghaff5• 8 years ago

There's something to be said for learning the "canon" but high school English only does that in a very superficial way under the best of circumstances. There are fairly classic books--at least some of which are admittedly more recent than ye olde public domain--which are pretty readable today. But IMO Henry James, Bronte sisters, Tolstoy, etc. are going to be a pretty tough slog for most modern readers, especially at high school age.

jdietrich• 8 years ago

In Britain, the subject is split into "English Language" and "English Literature". The former focuses on the practical skills needed to communicate effectively, while the latter is based around the study of set texts. English Literature is entirely optional for pupils aged 14-16. Students from 16-18 have a free choice of three or four subjects, with no mandatory elements.

projektir4• 8 years ago

I generally enjoy reading but I had a lot of trouble with reading books in high school and it has pretty much killed my ability to read separately for about 5 years or so.

The problem, as I recall it, was twofold:

- I had no context, and no reason, to care about a particular work. It would be from some time period I know nothing about, regarding a subject I have no stake in;

- my opinion on the work was irrelevant, and the important opinion was that of literary critics. There was generally a fairly specific interpretation of the work and what it was saying, and one had to figure out what that interpretation was and arrive at it. Is it that surprising that everyone went for Sparknotes?

So it all felt rather disconnected.

In contrast, in college, I took a military simulation and gaming class. This was a programming class. But our initial assignment was to... read a few books on WW1 (i.e., Guns of August). There were lots of other materials, as well. We were engrossed in the WW1 period, which made all the reading we were doing much more relevant and interesting.

I generally found that background information, or some sort of hook (I.e., why I would care about it) is very important to my enjoyment of the book. And, over time, this also develops a sort of respect for books (and other forms of text, such as, hehe, video game lore), where even reading material from an unknown time period can be interesting.

But I am not sure why this would all be present for a high school student who's probably not getting enough sleep and has no idea who Emily Bronte is.

sotojuan• 8 years ago

Most high school students, including top students, are in classes where the teacher teaches towards a test (state exam, AP test). Because the actual test follows a format you can game, so does the class. Students therefore learn to write in a format that specific teacher likes and with the right amount of fancy words. If that gets them an A, that’s all they care about. Same with books - the focus was on what we need to know from this book to pass the test.

In college it can be difficult to transition to professors that expect you to actually be able to express yourself eloquently and with creativity. Most students aren’t reading old or difficult books for fun (if any at all). It’s not surprising their level is poor.

applecrazy2• 8 years ago

As a high school student at a relatively high-performing school, I see this all the time. Many people even skip reading the book entirely and write an essay based solely on online summaries of the book. It’s quite disappointing, as the literature we read actually holds some cultural value. For example, To Kill a Mockingbird highlights racial tensions in the 60s and Animal Farm highlights the dangers of an authoritarian society.

I also could get into studying a subject for the sole purpose of passing a test and then forgetting the content after (meaning the topic held no significance to the student). This is a huge problem in high schools all around the US.

Edit: fix mobile formatting

_ptgt• 8 years ago

I agree with the first paragraph, but my experience with college professors wasn't that much different from teachers high school. School rewards playing to grading system, and grade inflation means that professors don't expect anywhere near the level writing of their peers from their students.

al2o3cr• 8 years ago

One ultimate result of this was truly bizarre: students who couldn't write a narrative, but instead produced 5-paragraph persuasive essays.

I encountered this scoring high-stakes state tests years back; the 10th-grade students were prompted explicitly with "tell me a story about XYZ." (more verbiage omitted, but the question was clear about the requested mode). About 10% of students would write a clearly on-topic response starting from "here are 3 things about XYZ".

The state specified that those responses were to be scored "Off Mode", an invalid score which meant that the students would fail the test (and potentially fail to graduate).

The truly mindblowing part is that younger students will write you a narrative for ANYTHING given half a chance. (Think of a little kid telling you a story - "and then this happened, and then this, and then this...") These high-schoolers had literally had that instinct drummed out of them through essay-writing practice. :(

jseliger• 8 years ago

FWIW, a lot of people have been discussing the decline in reading skills for a long time: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/02/13/reading-anyone.

That being said, I teach English and thus have rare, direct knowledge regarding the situation. Pretty much anyone who doesn't read, at least somewhat, for pleasure (or on their own time) won't develop good reading skills: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/twilight-of-the....

IMO, too many students who dislike school and abstract symbol manipulation are funneled into college, where they fail or barely succeed (https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz...). We should be working towards more apprenticeship programs: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost... that are both congruent with the labor market and with student interests.

Attempting to teach in an era of "college for all!" has shown me many of the shortcomings in that program.

walshemj8• 8 years ago

The problem is that real apprenticeships that lead to well-paid skilled jobs do require fairly good school results.

Apprenticeships where never for unskilled low archivers at school for example where I lived in the UK if you left school with poor results you didn't get an apprenticeships with the local engineering firms or the government - you worked in the brick pits for LBC

korethr• 8 years ago

Pretty much anyone who doesn't read, at least somewhat, for pleasure (or on their own time) won't develop good reading skills

This matches my own experience. For as long as I can remember, I've read. My parents read to me as a very young child, and as I grew older, I was encouraged to read. I had access to the local public library, the Scholastic Book Club, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. By the end of middle school, I'd read every Star Wars Extended Universe book and every Pern novel published to date (and the former was not a small list, even then).

So then, come high school, everyone was tested for the new reading program that was supposed to get everyone's reading ability caught up. My test results came back as reading at above college level, no intervention needed. That surprised even me at the time. I was told I couldn't be removed from the mandatory program, but I didn't need the points either, and so I should just read whatever I wanted from the approved books list and not worry about it.

I recount this, not to toot my own horn, but to point out that by having been such a voracious reader as a youth, I probably had far more practice at reading than many of my peers. And practice is what really develops and cements a skill. All those years spent reading gave me a great deal of practice. And if someone's not reading for pleasure on their own time, as you said, they're not getting those opportunities for practice.

burfog5• 8 years ago

That goes the other way too: Pretty much anyone who doesn't develop good reading skills, at least somewhat, won't read for pleasure.

Past a certain age, there are no interesting things to read that are also readable for a person with weak skills. You won't find a romance novel with a vocabulary like The Cat and the Hat.

Correcting the problem is not cost-effective for a school. I did it once, for a 14-year-old I cared about. I had him read college-level science textbooks out loud. At first, I had to correct him every few words, repeatedly explaining phonetical rules and insisting on proper phrasing. ("You just blew past that comma.", or "There was no comma or period. Try again.") This tedious routine went on for several chapters. No normal school will do that for a child.

cgag• 8 years ago

I had to peer review papers in some writing 101 class and I'd say quite a few of them were basically illiterate.

smallbigfish• 8 years ago

up to the task of writing a five paragraph essay without major stress

I'm in my late 30s and I wouldn't compose a "five paragraph essay" if my life depended on it.

Yet still (at least in my time) we were not taught what I call basic writing skills:

* how to write or respond to a friend/family/boss letter.

* how to structure sentences so they easily express what you mean.

* how to format text so it's easy to read.

I write and read lots of emails nowadays and it's quite "amazing" that people fall into two categories: they either use 100 words to express basic ideas or they do the opposite, write 3 words sentences that need 3 follow-up emails to get right.

And don't get me started on text formatting... People can't seem to express ideas without bold, colors, custom bulleted lists and emoji.

sanderjd• 8 years ago

This isn't totally on topic, but when you said lots of your peers in college got stressed when required to write essays, it really reminded of my own experience.

I strongly relate to that. I never wrote a paper in school without deep stress and lots of procrastination, and I think I only wrote one paper throughout both high school and college that I was proud of, the rest were just the bare minimum of competency that I thought I could turn in without dying from shame. But contra that experience, I've always been a voracious reader of all kinds of texts.

Now that I've had a long time to look back on this (I'm about a decade older than you), I think a big part of my problem was that I never felt like I had anything to say on the topics of those assignments. I never found hidden meaning to deconstruct in the fiction I read, I just knew that I loved how the best authors constructed worlds alongside the characters who belonged in them; but that didn't seem like what I was supposed to write about. I never knew how to write about the non-fiction without just re-stating it. I never felt like I had a substantive extension to the arguments made by philosophers, economists, and political scientists, and I never felt I had the expertise to disagree with them. All of this is to say: my problem wasn't with writing per se, but with having something to write. I'm also not saying that this is a problematic approach to an education in writing, it's just that I was rubbish at it.

What finally helped me was to write a lot about things I know: emails and documents at work where I have expertise in the topics being discussed, and writing about my thoughts privately and with my family.

Maybe your peers in school were like me?

isodude2• 8 years ago

It's just that I was rubbish at it. Glad you sorted it out.

I feel with you because this is how I experienced all of school

It's still there though, for me though the hinder lies in expectations I set for myself (most likely inherited from my parents). I always hoped I would have someone on my shoulder saying, it's ok to be rubbish, as long as you keep writing, because eventually it will be better.

What you write about is also something that I think is wrong with how it's supposed to be when I was at school. I would most likely be more adept if I was writing about something that I was really caring about, and then getting help with the constructs, identifying them and restructing the text. Not what the teacher picked out.

Maybe there's a middle ground, if the early years are all about getting _your_ flow from thought to paper is what matters, the teacher have a piece of cake hammering down the structures later on, which in turn would make it possible to take on any kind of task. I know there's some work in our schools today, but I'm not that positive about it (since they ignore spelling pretty much). It will be great to read some results from it whenever it appear though.

alexashka• 8 years ago

You're likely under the assumption that other people are like you, but a little different.

That's causing you a great deal of confusion if that's the case. People are not the same - if you look at people's height, some are 6 feet, others are 4 feet.

Our brains is made up of many many sub-fields responsible for somewhat specific tasks. While height can range from 4 feet to 6 and it's obvious, the physical size of the sub-fields in the brain can vary in size up to 10 times!! This accounts for someone not being able to sing 'happy birthday' in tune, while there existed Mozarts and Bachs. It's just not obvious that they're more than species apart in their ability to appreciate and create music.

This a long winded way of saying, look around you, people are very very different, and there is no need to try and teach a pig to sing, you'll frustrate yourself AND the pig.

The right answer is the answer everyone already knows, they're just afraid to say it in this 'equality' culture - people should stick to what they're good at, unless they themselves are motivated to do otherwise.

agumonkey• 8 years ago

I would bet 100$ that over the last 30 years, qualities such as the one you described dropped massively.

I saw an old picture of a biology note book from a junior high school kid from the 50s. It was masterful and so beautiful. Writing, phrasing, vocabulary, layout, drawing aesthetics. These are all 'useless' in our days of IoT and neural network, but to me it hints at the fact that kids before were way finer raised than today.

isodude2• 8 years ago

If you're interested in diving into a real experiment, over at Sweden there's a movement[0] to try to increase the vocabulary early. Teachers in lower grades are quite worried that the entry bar has been lowered over the years. I didn't find any material in English, but Google Translate at least made it somewhat readable.

This is interesting because it's focus is not the kids, but the teachers, and how they should interact, what resources they should use etc, which benefit the kids.

I'm exposed to it because I have a kid on daycare, they make a thing about having themes where they read all about certain books. And the constant mantra is to never hold back on 'advanced' words, but rather explain them and try to use them in normal conversations. The kids will pick it up, no need to be easy on them. Hopefully it will turn out for the best ;)

My dream is that we will fully enact parental support from inception until the kids are 18. From what I've read there should be actual scientific studies about it where there were massive improvements for the kids, which at least I think that would lead to _a lot_ less stress in the system in general.

[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

Clubber2• 8 years ago

Students from less educated families are usually the ones who are most handicapped by gaps in knowledge.

Entire article can be boiled down to this. Takeaways: education is controlled by the states, and many states don't make it a priority. Over the past 20 years or so, the federal government has shifted the burden of education to the states by cutting subsidies as well, making matters worse.

My family has a lot of teachers in it. They've all retired in the 1990s, and it's far worse today than it was yesteryear. I would enjoy teaching, but wouldn't do it for the world.

It's not all the states fault either. There are some students that just don't want to be there, yet we force them to be there and disrupt the students that do. When I was growing up, they sent those students to "bad kid" schools to keep the rot away.

sverige2• 8 years ago

Over the past 20 years or so, the federal government has shifted the burden of education to the states by cutting subsidies as well, making matters worse.

Prior to 1980, there was no federal Department of Education, and prior to 1953 when the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was created, the federal government's involvement with education was limited to an Office of Education hidden away in the Federal Security Agency, and prior to 1939 it was a little bureau in the Department of the Interior.

Philosophically, the U.S. initially emphasized local control of education. The federal government's involvement with public education didn't really become so heavy-handed until the mid-60s. The states were not that involved until relatively recent times, either; rather, education was pretty much controlled by local school boards. Regardless of which philosophy you personally favor (decentralized vs. federal control), it's very difficult or impossible to argue that Americans as a whole are better educated now than they were 50 or 100 years ago.

ghaff5• 8 years ago

And what that history tends to highlight is that, at least in a classroom setting without a lot of 1:1 instruction, there's probably only so much that schools can do to move the needle by themselves absent the right kind of home environment and involvement. For example, there's very little correlation between per student spending and test achievement between towns and cities in a state.

watwut4• 8 years ago

If you count blacks too, it is easy to argue that education as a while is getting better. That demographic and it's education made big leaps against back then.

But also, I have yet to see compelling argument for why whites as a whole did not made progress - if you include drop outs and people who barely finished elementary school too. Those were more frequent back then.

dorchadas• 8 years ago

I would enjoy teaching, but wouldn't do it for the world.

As a current teacher in the states, this has become my attitude. My mom is a teacher (retiring this year, actually) and I never seriously considered it, to be honest. Yet, once I got started, I found out how enjoyable it was, and that I really liked it (even though I hate teaching Algebra II to kids who can barely multiply...). But I'm in a red state, and tired to have to constantly worry about funding, whether I'll have a job in a few years because of budget cuts, whether I'll have insurance and/or a pension, etc. etc. It's absolutely awful and really draining on you. I am, sadly, looking at getting out.

I think part of the problem is how our system is set up. We need to move to a system like Germany, in my opinion. After middle school, if you're a decent student, you can get put on the track to go to college; otherwise, you get put on a "career path". My school already has those, but, unfortunately, they still make those students take the useless classes, like Algebra II. This just kills the desire to learn.

It also doesn't help that smartphone addictions are a huge problem to overcome, and there's still teachers pushing for more technology integration into the classroom when I honestly believe we need less.

It sucks, because I do enjoy teaching, but with the current trend of things, I really want out.

rayiner2• 8 years ago

Entire article can be boiled down to this. Takeaways: education is controlled by the states, and many states don't make it a priority.

Education is a classic state issue. Why shouldn’t people be able to deprioritize it?

dctoedt• 8 years ago

As long as there's some minimum floor for public education. Otherwise there's a grave risk that we end up with even more class stratification and impeded economic mobility than we have now.

Clubber2• 8 years ago

Why shouldn’t people be able to deprioritize it?

They should to a degree, but of course it depends on the level. Plus, having an educated population is good for national and economic security. Really now more so than ever in our history given the competitive landscape of the world economy today.

In other words, as a national security issue, I don't believe states shouldn't be allowed to neglect education as much as some have. One of the pillars to building and maintaining an economic powerhouse is a well educated population.

zanny• 8 years ago

There has to be an argument that when you deprioritize education so kids can't read or do basic arithmetic yet are expected to do taxes and follow arcane laws immediately upon hitting age 18 that its extremely harmful to future generations to defund it.

Basically, if you vote on a single issue to change speed limits everyone having the law inflicted upon them is also a voter. Or at least a hairs length away from being one if you get your license as fast as possible at 16.

If you vote to defund public schools so the power goes out intermittently and there is black mold in the ceiling and cockroaches in the lockers, you are directly harming those who have no say in what happens to them.

It comes back to general issues of regional politics in a global world. If China wants to manipulate their currency and violate IP or if Russia wants to invade and conquer its neighbors or if the US wants to occupy countries for decades on end the citizens of, say, Greece never had anything close to a say in any of those happenings but are still subject to the consequences of them. Just because you get to write your own laws doesn't mean those without a voice in your decisions will be heavily, often negatively, impacted by them.

In the US that problem is more pronounced, because the freedom of movement within the US means that states that actually educate their population have to deal with the influx of uneducated that enter them when their economies prosper with an educated employed population and the states that didn't educate their people have crippled economies incapable of growing because nobody can read beyond a 4th grade level.

wadeboggs• 8 years ago

Hard to get better when ur the best

quantumofmalice2• 8 years ago

The article is the usual more-effort-is-needed pablum one expects from articles on education.

Any analysis of American children that ignores demographics is silly. 44% of California children don't speak english at home. What on earth do you expect from these children if you test them in english proficiency?

sverige2• 8 years ago

The percentages of kids who didn't speak English at home were pretty high 100 years ago, too, but they definitely were better at reading English then. The problem isn't effort. The problem is recognizing that there is value in learning to read.

quantumofmalice2• 8 years ago

pretty high 100 years ago

irrelevant: there are no hard numbers for that and that's not the timeframe the article is discussing (since the 90s)

concrete-faucet• 8 years ago

Where I live, there are gifted schools for kids that speak Polish, Spanish and Russian. Their only goal for English is to make sure the child is proficient by the 6th grade.

The kids section at the local library branch (there is one in every neighborhood) will have half the books in English and the rest in whatever languages are common in that neighborhood.

Language barriers are only a problem if your local city makes them one.

My son is in 3rd grade and his NWEA MAP reading score put him at the 11/12 grade level, so he got put into an advanced reader class. In the fall, they read books about history, wrote about and discussed them in class. This spring, the teach chose a young adult novel that I guess is entirely appropriate from a reading-level point of view. But some of the subject matter goes way over the heads of the kids and other stuff in the book is disturbing to them. Our son simply refused to finish reading the book. The teacher wasn't going to switch books because a couple kids didn't like it, and the class depended on discussing what they read... What can you do but stop reading and/or drop out of the class?

gaius2• 8 years ago

It's a miracle that in the UK they can read at all given the quality of teaching

zokier• 8 years ago

While there is undoubtedly a lot to improve in education, it is worth noting that (if I'm reading the article right) American students haven't gotten any worse at reading either. Considering how much critique education generally receives (as is apparent in this thread), I'd say that this is half-good outcome. I'm not sure even upon what the assumption of ever-improving results is built upon. Maybe we are just reaching the tail end of the S-curve in education, which doesn't sound completely implausible considering that reading is one of the oldest subject matters to be taught generally.

helloworld• 8 years ago

The implication here is that American students, on average, should have gotten better at reading over the last 20 years.

But might their performance in fact be asymptotic to some maximum possible achievement level, as constrained by general intelligence?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

ticviking2• 8 years ago

That would imply that the G factor might have something to do with the gap in achievement though. And if that were the case we'd have very little justification for aiming to improve low income scores.

Since we have evidence that students do better as family income increases I'm thinking we are wondering why we can't close the gap called by other things.

rayiner2• 8 years ago

This is extremely misleading. The lack of increased scores in the student body as a whole is the result of a large growth in the proportion of students from disadvantaged and ESL backgrounds. Reading scores have been going up within each of those demographics, however. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf (Figure 3). In fact scores for black, Asian, and Latino students have gone up faster than for white students.

komali22• 8 years ago

Wouldn't that be a separate, socioeconomic analysis issue? The fact remains that as a whole, Americans are not getting better at reading. So the country still suffers regardless if specific classes of people managed to improve.

watwut4• 8 years ago

His argument is that people with low scores were not tested before. They dropped out before being tested.

If it is true, it is not separate issue.

wpietri2• 8 years ago

It matters in thinking about solutions. And, of course, in the ever-popular hobby of assigning blame. The title I see is "Schools Are Failing to Teach Kids How to Read". If rayiner is correct, then the actual title should be, "Schools Doing Fine, But Their Job Is Getting Harder".

klodolph2• 8 years ago

So the country still suffers regardless if specific classes of people managed to improve.

The phrase “specific classes of people” seems to miss the entire point of the parent comment… according to the linked study, all groups of people improved from 1992 to 2015, not just “specific” groups. This is a classic example of Simpson’s paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

Imagine, for a moment, that you start a school that teaches reading and writing. You have 10 ELL students and 90 native students. When you test them in 2015, the ELL students score 50 points on average, and the native students score 100 points on average. The average score for the school is 95.

Now imagine that your school is well-known now, and you hire better teachers (all test scores go up 10 points), and 40 more ELL students join your school. Now you have 50 ELL learners averaging 60 points, and 50 native learners averaging 110, so the average score is 85.

Even though everybody’s test scores went up by 10 points, the average test scores went down by 10 points because the demographics changed.

To be honest, this is horribly unfair. Somehow ELL students are seen as “behind” the native speakers when that’s only when you measure them in English. This propagates the idea that it’s better to be an excellent English speaker than it is to be bilingual but less proficient at English. And it’s unfortunate that ELL students who study, e.g., science may get poor grades at times because even though they understand the concepts and know the terminology, the terminology is from their native language.

simonh• 8 years ago

...as a whole, Americans are not getting better at reading

And this fundamental miss-understanding of the point is why misleading titles are such a pernicious problem.

The contention is that no, Americans are actually getting better at reading, but more low achieving students are now being included in the test. This is dragging down the recorded scores, even though students who would have been included previously are getting better scores now (which is the only really meaningful comparison), and also those previously untested demographics are almost certainly also doing better than they were when they were dropping out of the testing regime.

dang• 8 years ago

The title is misleading in another way too: the bulk of the article is really about how the standard approach to teaching reading has been contradicted by research. Since that's more interesting, we changed the title to a representative phrase from the article. Hopefully the discussion can get more specific, too.

(No doubt a hair-pulling America-is-falling-behind lament is better for clicks, since headline writers know what they're doing, but undoing their deeds is part of the job here.)

Terr_• 8 years ago

That makes me think of Simpson's Paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

redwyvern• 8 years ago

"But if readers can’t supply the missing information, they have a hard time making sense of the text."

This is what angers me the most about the ACT exam. I recall that passages with vague and uninteresting topics were difficult to comprehend. What was even more infuriating was a passage on a capacitor physics experiment in one exam. I initially enjoyed the passage because I had a thorough understanding of capacitance and voltage across two plates, but it turned out that for the sake of the "comprehension," the equation for capacitance was INTENTIONALLY rearranged in a way that violated the laws of physics. In other words, the meaning and relevance of the content of a passage in a comprehension exam like the ACT was intended to be misleading for the sake of testing attention to one tiny detail.

ouid• 8 years ago

when I took the SAT, I first took a practice test and scored quite poorly on it, but when I realized that all of the things I had missed were tiny details, or very literal interpretations of questions, I scored very well on the actual test. The same was true of the math test, as well. The SAT is basically testing how easy it is to fool you with a trick question.

However, in defense of the SAT, I'd wager that this is pretty strongly correlated with critical reasoning and ability to succeed in college and beyond.

asfgionio• 8 years ago

I have read that the SAT is basically an IQ test in disguise. If that's true, there's no need for it to correspond to real-world skills. That's not what it's meant to test, and the only reason it deals with vocabulary and mathematics is to dodge the controversy surrounding IQ tests.

This is by no means the only perspective on the SAT, but it's a reasonable one.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...

Mononokay4• 8 years ago

Personally, I heavily prefer the SAT over the ACT—it's a very no-nonsense, clean way to see the capabilities of a person, and isn't relying too heavily on questions related to a specific subset of a topic.

It's definitely a better indicator of performance and capability than a GPA, in my opinion.

madengr• 8 years ago

Yes, it’s really more about eliminating the wrong answers, than getting the correct one.

kafquaesque2• 8 years ago

I have known people that didn’t budge on their scores and people that shifted by 200 points on the old 1600 point scale. Not sure how much it has changed over the years. I would wager that test taking in general is at least somewhat of a skill. The more multiple choice tests I took the better I became at them. There seems to be an underlying pattern most teachers use.

36bydesign2• 8 years ago

Do you recall when you took the test? I’d like to find the test because I work with ACT tests daily and have never seen a passage where the laws of physics were intentionally violated for sake of “comprehension.”

Additionally the ACT reading passages are very focused, not vague. They may be uninteresting but much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things. The ACT is designed to predict how students will perform in college, not how “smart” they are or how “good of a reader” they are.

Azeat• 8 years ago

No wonder the test costs money. If you can pay for uninteresting material that won't benefit you in the real world, you're prepared for college.

gumby• 8 years ago

much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things.

Wait, what?? That was certainly not my experience, and judging by the barrage of texts I get from my now college-attending child, isn't his experience either.

He did find a lot of what he was given in his California high school was boring. Enrolling in it was a bit of a shock after his prior experience.

pirocks• 8 years ago

Anecdotally as a recent high school student I recall taking numerous standardized reading tests with less than accurate science passages.

kurthr2• 8 years ago

I similarly had a question on my 4th grade qualification exam. In the science section they asked a multiple choice question as to what would change the weight of a glass of water. One of the "wrong" answers was heating it... luckily I knew that I wasn't supposed to know relativity so I answered it correctly.

th3byrdm4n• 8 years ago

They may be uninteresting but much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things.

Wow. What a revelatory statement.

Some reflecting observations. 1. Since when is an institution designed to increase your knowledge uninteresting?? That signals a broken institutional approach.

2. The number one real world skill is being able to filter for signal against noise.

If you're inserting a bunch of noise into the test, the most highly-adapted minds are going to be filtered out with low results.

cma• 8 years ago

I initially enjoyed the passage because I had a thorough understanding of capacitance and voltage across two plates, but it turned out that for the sake of the "comprehension," the equation for capacitance was INTENTIONALLY rearranged in a way that violated the laws of physics. In other words, the meaning and relevance of the content of a passage in a comprehension exam like the ACT was intended to be misleading for the sake of testing attention to one tiny detail.

Seems like it could be a good test for people who will be in the future reviewing scientific papers.

dboreham2• 8 years ago

Something odd about the word "gotten" in the context of student literacy? Or is it just me?

I see the headline here has since been edited to remove that word.

Perhaps this is some clever "English as she is wrote" kind of joke that flew over my head??

jwilk• 8 years ago

What's wrong with "gotten"?

dboreham2• 8 years ago

To me (British English native) it sounds like a non-word. I'm well aware of its meaning and that many "Americanisms" are actually old English usage. It still sounds to me like something a cartoon weasel would say.

fjsolwmv2• 8 years ago

Perhaps it's a sly hint to the fact that you can go online to learn the meaning of words you don't recognize:

https://www.google.com/search?q=define+gotten

kwhitefoot• 8 years ago

Gotten is the past participle of to get in both standard American English and Scottish English (I won't say Scots because that is often regarded as almost a separate language from English). I wouldn't say it myself but then it isn't part of my south western English (North Wiltshire) dialect, my wife on the other hand used it all the time (she was from Orkney).

gaius2• 8 years ago

The last person you should ask about education is a teacher. It would be like asking the waiter about farming or the supply chain or vetinary medicine.

wisty• 8 years ago

No, the last person you should ask about education are the people who teach teachers. Unless they're the kind who looks at meta-analysis and goes "huh, the textbook is encouraging stuff that's essentially a placebo".

mrob2• 8 years ago

"A sixth-grader at one of his schools was frustrated that a passage on a reading test she’d taken kept repeating a word she didn’t understand: roog-bye. The unfamiliar word made it hard for her to understand the passage. When Rowe asked her to spell the word, it turned out to be rugby."

I wonder if the test conditions are to blame. In real life, if you don't know a word then you look it up in a dictionary. It takes a few seconds, and you always have a dictionary with you (a smart phone). If you don't know a concept then you can look it up in Wikipedia. Rugby is an unpopular sport in the US, so I think it's reasonable that a sixth-grader hadn't heard of it. For a general reading test, and not specifically a vocabulary test, I think she should have been allowed to look up a definition. Are dictionaries generally allowed in reading tests?

walshemj8• 8 years ago

How do you get a oo sound from u ?

mrob2• 8 years ago

Suit, super, sue, suicide, suet, etc.

dahart• 8 years ago

The long-standing view has been that the first few years of elementary school should be devoted to basic reading skills. History, science, and the arts can wait.

For a long time I've thought math education has this problem. Math as a subject is abstract and lacks context. Learning subjects like physics or computer graphics or robotics requires learning math along the way to get something done, but they come with goals and results and context that can be far more motivating to the average person than just learning the mechanics of linear algebra or calculus in isolation.

ianbicking• 8 years ago

While a lot of people here are focusing on the testing, and it does seem to be an important negative feedback cycle, there's also a discussion on pedagogy that's worth having.

I've noticed what the article talks about when reading with my own daughter. She's a natural whole-word reader - meaning she might think through a few syllables, but ultimately comprehension is a gestalt event. This is where everyone usually arrives, and it's necessary because you can't really sound out words... and really, if you sound out "rug-bee" or "rug-bye" it doesn't matter that much unless you know what rugby is. (And haven't we all encountered avid readers who pronounce things wrong even though they fully comprehend the word?)

Carefully watching my daughter read like this, I also realize it only works because she knows a lot of words (and phrases, literary devices, plot details, etc).

Decoding words (ie phonics) is useful scaffolding, but it's only scaffolding. You also just need to know a ton of things.

And of course there's also the depressing findings on class and privilege, and the number, variety, and quality of words children hear. The differences are staggering.

projektir4• 8 years ago

Isn't reading the kind of thing that should be taught by parents before the kid even goes to school?

I have no idea how kids manage to learn how to read at all in schools, American or otherwise. Reading is... difficult. The school environment does not promote the study of difficult things well. If you haven't been prepared, you'll have trouble.

Sometimes I'm not sure what we're measuring, education quality or just how good someone's parents are. Pretty much everything I knew that helped me at school/college did not come from school/college.

learc832• 8 years ago

Isn't reading the kind of thing that should be taught by parents before the kid even goes to school?

No, most kids in the US start school at the age of 5. Consensus is building that forcing kids to learn to read before they are read is detrimental, and the vast majority of kids aren't ready to read before they are 5.

projektir4• 8 years ago

I'm not mentioning age anywhere in my post?

I don't recall starting school at 5, I think it was later than that, but it wasn't in the US. In the first grade already if I didn't know how to read prior, I'd be in huge trouble. Most students were actively struggling to read and continued to struggle for 2 more grades. If you are not ready to read at 5 before school, why would you be ready to read at 5 in school? Why would teaching someone to read 3 months prior would be so much more horrible than waiting for them to hit the school system and suffer in there instead? If that's the argument, school should just start later.

I came into the US school system late but people were seriously struggling with reading in 6th grade, as well. People for whom English was their native language. I am not really seeing that parental interference is not needed.

Consensus is building that forcing kids to learn to read before they are read(y)

This is a tautology. I'm not sure what is the magical age at which children are "ready" to read, but I am very sure that people should be able to comfortably read by grade 6, and I'm similarly very sure that the educational system alone won't accomplish that.

icc97• 8 years ago

A rather prescient quote from Alan Kay's Dynabook paper in 1972 [0]

For many years it has been a tradition to attempt to cure our society's ills through technology: "You have slums? Let's build low-cost housing!" "You can't afford that TV? We'll build a cheaper one and you can buy it on time, even though it will break before you've finished paying for it!" "Your kids aren't learning and education is too expensive? We'll build you a teaching machine which will guarantee your kids will pass tests!"

[0] https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html

Assumptions about how children learn to read have been disproven by research

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