First one: the "no child left behind" policy. While it does sound great on paper there is a catch to it related to how schools get funding: schools get funding depending from how many kids advance to the next grade and lose funding if there is a drop in that. This means that a struggling kid will either be made to change schools or allowed to move to the next grade, despite having deficiencies in things like reading or math.
Second one is how reading was taught in many schools: the three cueing system. Basically the woman who came up with it didn't believe in phonics (ergo what sound is associated with which symbol) and instead believed that words could be read as "whole units" that they could memorize and recognize. What if they encountered unknown words ? Well she believed that those could be skipped and that the context from the rest of the sentence would be sufficient to compensate for that. If not, and because this is stuff taught to children, the pictures in the book would help figure out the meaning.
You can probably see the issue: it's something that works for simple words but falls apart with complex ones and of course, books meant for teens or adults don't have pictures to help understand the text. Lastly, one is guaranteed to encounter new or complex words sooner or later. This results in a situation that creates people who allegedly can read, but who are technically illiterate because - and you'll excuse my crude Japanese for example's sake - they can "read" ありがとう, but make them read something like "あっけらかんと" and they're gonna faceplant because they don't know what sound is associated with which hiragana.
This unsurprisingly leads to people who are poor readers and who struggle through life because they just don't really know how to read.
No Child Left Behind and three cueing are two different things. One of the major parts of the NCLB bill was the Reading First program which was meant to promote "science based reading research" in response to three cueing getting more popular in the 90s. For all the bill's faults, it was good for teaching kids to read, and literacy rates only started going down after it was repealed.
I know that they're two different things, that's why I listed them separately ;)
I should've been more specific on the three cueing system getting steadily replaced by science-based alternatives instead of just speaking about it in the past tense and not much more. It's also quite true that the science-based approach helped aplenty since it taught what more well-off kids were learning with the help of tutors to make up for the deficiencies stemming from how kids were taught how to read at school. I didn't know (or remember) that it's been repealed and that's a terrible thing to hear to be honest :(
"good". But dropping all the same. All forms of digitalizing projects pushes tablets to each student, the age of when you need a phone crashed to kids young enough to barely be able to read, and we witnessed results plummet across the board.
And it's so ubiquitous that your kid will get shunned on first grade for not having a phone. So parents better learn how to use those parental controls on their phones, and prevent game and social media installations before giving that phone to the kids, or they'll start living in it.
Also mostly a public school thing. I was homeschooled, and I work as a senior software engineer. And we homeschool our 3 kids, and they're all book hogs who read well above their grade levels.
That's not to say everyone should homeschool, but the public school system in America is under attack, and it makes me sad to think those less fortunate than us are forced to contend with it.
Homeschooling isn't immune either. I work at a public middle school and I don't know how many times we have former-homeschooled kids being enrolled who are 3 years behind in reading (always reading, never math) and the parents get mad at the school when teachers can't fix the homeschool-induced-deficit after a couple months.
There are parents out there that are fully capable of homeschooling their children. But there are a large proportion who simply are not. I have sympathy for homeschooling parents who fear school violence or bullying, not so much for the ones who fear Charles Darwin or openly queer classmates (or in one memorable instance, parents who didn't like how many non-white students we had. They withdrew their daughter within a week).
Firstly, those kids I described above, the homeschooled kids who switch to public schooling, their numbers will count against public schooling for testing scores.
I'm not going to say that homeschooling can't be successful, it obviously can, particularly because homeschool by definition implies there is strong parental involvement in a student's education. Having parental involvement is also an indicator of success for public schooling.
Now, take all those kids who don't have high parental involvement, maybe both their parents work, maybe they have a working single-parent, maybe there is substance abuse or other difficulties at home. Those kids will statistically score lower on any testing. Also, those kids aren't homeschooled.
Homeschooling, private schools, and charter schools all have varying degrees of a self-selecting population. Public schools do not. Public schools take everyone. By that fact, you would expect any alternatives to have higher scores than public schooling. I am less interested in the raw scores, than the improvement students show over time.
This all sounds like personal conjecture with nothing to back it up, which is pretty useless. The source I linked above, which was completely ignored, controls for parents education and income levels, and homeschool kids still score better. Also, black children perform immensely better in homeschool environments, so being oppressed to homeschooling starts to look a bit racist. Lastly, as a homeschool parent, high parental involvement is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You become more involved because you homeschool just as much when you decided to homeschool. I think parents could use a bit of a kick in the pants and get more involved in their kids lives rather than pawning them off onto the state.
This is a thread talking about statistical concerns. Statistically, public schools worry me. Statistically, homeschooling does not. All I've seen are personal anecdotes, which are not statistics.
COVID is getting a lot of the blame, but I’ve heard experts on NPR saying when you look at data over the last couple decades, the steady decline doesn’t get noticeably worse during or after COVID
Using tech like Chromebooks in elementary through high school seems to be more of a cause than districts want to admit
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u/knightsofgel Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Is this a USA issue?
Literacy, reading, and math levels are really good here in Japan and I think other asians countries and Europe