If I wanted to destroy a culture, I'd give each child an iphone and an internet-ready computer, and put a TV in every home. A Carrington event today would lobotomize most of our population.
10
Hardly surprising. With all the gimcracks and techno-twaddle accessible, why would a child exercise its mind? And if you think this is worrisome, wait until the next Carrington Event, when the entire United States will be lobotomized as the internet dissolves.
7
The US has:
- done more studies on reading than other nations
- more solid, time-tested information on how to help kids read and comprehend
- more resources than nearly all other countries
- relatively well-paid teachers with excellent benefits
- 2/3 third and eight graders not meeting standards
Who is to blame?
- Parents for not reading to their kids
-Teachers for being unwilling/unable to teach reading
- Kids for not trying or simply struggling with diagnosed/undiagnosed learning problems, and for playing on games for hours each day instead of reading
- Teachers Union for promoting mediocrity and defending failure
- Politicians who demand standards then don’t fund schools adequately
- Culture for focusing on entertainment and violence rather than prioritizing learning and peace; marriage breakdown that causes unstable homes, which become dismal places to learn
- Writers, Editors and Publishers for offering our kids “junk food” reading
- School Boards/Administration for exceptionally poor leadership in overseeing and implementing reading programs, including the demise of teaching Grammar, Latin, and basic skills
- The Local Community for not standing up and demanding higher quality and voting for true child-education advocates.
Plenty of blame, each one ought to take responsibility. But no one will; just keep pointing fingers as our future generations become functional illiterates.
19
Teachers have to spend way too much time preparing children for tests and then administering those tests. We are forcing young children to spend countless hours taking excruciatingly long tests that appear designed to break their spirit and rob them of a love of learning. When did education become just about tests, tests and more tests? Assessment is important but it shouldn't be the main focus. The main focus should be learning. If we invested more time and energy to learning and less time to assessing, just maybe the kids would do better.
12
How about we fund education the way it should be funded and with teachers that are properly paid? How about we treat them like tech workers? Pay top dollar for top skills? These students are not stupid, they are pawns in the decades long republican effort to never spend a dime on someone else.
15
We have an illiterate president. Who can be surprised when the tone is set at the top? Additionally, language is changing in the internet age and I wonder if that is taken into account.
12
I find this article both sad and frightening.
I am a product of US lower middle class parents and the US public schools 65 years ago. Over 90% of my high school graduating class went on to college. I received an appointment to one of the US federal military academies. After graduation and military service, I entered seminary, graduated, and subsequently earned three more graduated degrees. I have served as military officer, pastor, missionary, and graduate school professor in my long career. I could have not had this career had I not received the education I received in public schools.
For the vast number of US school children who will never be able to read with understanding and to communicate verbally with clarity , this path -- and many others -- are closed.
I hope America will grasp the tragedy of this situation and correct it. Otherwise, your future is uncertain at best.
14
Remove all homework. Increase teacher salaries, no bonuses. Move to a 5 hour day. Make Spanish mandatory. Scores will go up.
6
I don’t see how failing schools is not a money-driven issue.
Pay teachers more. Many professionals like myself would be interested in teaching, but at the current salary levels it would essentially be charity work. We did well in school, did well on standardized tests, and now we have an opportunity to make far more money in industry than by reinvesting in students. It’s a brain drain.
104
The comments seem to be the same one sided solutions I’ve been hearing for years. What about the power of teachers unions to thwart any changes to the status quo. Methods of teaching have to change and teachers have to be evaluated on results. Our public education system is very socialistic and achievement is stifled because we don’t want to let Johnny to get to far ahead of the group.
4
Do these test results cover only public schools? In many communities where there are private school alternatives, parents who can afford them opt out of public education. Scores would naturally go down in systems where the “best and brightest” students with the most-involved parents are no longer part of the mix. Failure to serve all of the children in a community, from the least skilled to the most gifted, and to retain most of its families is one of the biggest shortcomings of public education today.
4
Too bad SO many elementary, middle and high schools across the country no longer employ professional School Library Media Specialists nor focus on their school libraries. I believe both are essential links to reading success!
9
Top-down policy is greatly to blame. Great teachers are often handed canned curriculum diminishing their passion, choice of texts and self-determination, demoralizing them and stripping them of delivering what they know is most engaging, matched to student interests/backgrounds, and planned and honed from the heart. It all goes back to self-determination theory and how to motivate and engage both students and teachers. Grassroots stakeholder engagement and decision-making is needed, and the punitive effects of inflexible Federal policy needs to be removed. Start matching students to books and projects that engage them and scores will improve rapidly.
We also need strong voices/ongoing conversation to give parents guidance on how to manage electronic devices that are undermining the mental and physical health of our children. Better management could help yield great gains, as there are amazingly effective apps and software to harness that children love. IXL, Starfall, BrainPop, Khan Academy, and thousands more.
DeVos is clueless on the realities and details of our schools and operates from a completely personal ideology and uninformed place. She is utterly unqualified as are the bulk of Trump appointees/monied cronies.
4
the poorly performing students do not read well because their PARENTS don't read well, and most likely can't. What behaviors do parents model?
identify parents who want to be part of the solution, partner with them, offer combined education activities while realizing some parents work and are unable
Parents can restrict game time and internet time. Teachers can only do so much utilize other education professionals , especially college students
I was trained in education, and, after many hours of just THEORY, I really learned by volunteering at junior high employing PRACTICE in classroom.
DeVos has never been in classroom or had children in public schools. Unless she has excellent, experienced advice , it's unlikely she sees solution
5
Hmmm.... The US spends $30 Billion per year just to operate an aircraft carrier, and we have 19 of them. Then there are submarines, missiles, trucks, tanks, etc., spread across 800 military bases in 70 countries.
Can we please have an honest discussion about spending priorities?
11
I've read most of the comments on this story. Interesting. Many of the comments seem to have been posted by persons who...wait for it... didn't read the article. In fact, most comments on most stories are being made by people who haven't bothered to look beyond the headline. Want your kids to be readers? It comes from the top down. Stop living your lives in 30 second sound bites or flashy headlines,turn off the opinion tv news, and actually bother to read for information. Your children, and your country, will be better for it.
10
@Kate H. AMEN! Finally, a comment from someone who understands! Thanks for your opinion!
1
A couple things parents may not be aware of when looking at reading test results.
1) Reading tests today are based off of how students perform in writing responses to text dependent questions. For example, at 5th grade students are expected to be able to read text that is opinion based, and determine the authors perspective and cite evidence from the text to back up their reasoning. Essentially, write the thesis that you did when you were in high school. If your a parent, ask your teach about it; it's called text dependent analysis or TDA.
2) When I was in elementary school in the early 90s, they would have been zero chance I could have done this. Heck, I don't think I wrote a thesis until I was in high school. This encapsulates the situation in America's schools. All thats happened, is the test creators have done is dropped the standards from Middle School to Elementary. If we gave the same test that was given to students in early 90's they would absolutely dominate it--- all multiple choice, no writing, basic comprehension questions. Its a great gig for the test creators. Every three years change the standards so schools HAVE no choice but to comply.
5
Once again, we're blaming schools. Do you realize that hardly anyone reads anymore when given free time to do it? Check out the airplane or the DMV the next time you go. Years ago, everyone had a book. Now, everyone is watching a movie or wasting time on social media. If you're 70 or over, you probably still have a book in your hand.
Having taught for 38 years, I can easily say it's almost impossible to get students to do homework which includes reading outside of the classroom, which is all we did as kids. So much has changed.
110
I just retired as an NJ principal. The Harvard literacy expert shows the way. All reading must drive students to more reading. Money to schools is not always the best way to drive teachers to teach that habit. The innate curiosity pf every new teacher must be encouraged by their mentors and veteran teachers must continuously rekindle their own curiosity. Teachers are like monks in the Dark Ages...keep the flame burning. Are we becomiing too bored, distracted and weary to do that anymore? It has to be every day all day. That's teaching. Grow up.
33
I would caution those readers that support vouchers to look at Betsy Devos' own state, Michigan, which have been around in MI since 1996. Our state has seen consistent decreases in school funding and vouchers take necessary resources from school districts, reducing the amount of money they can spend on the children. Further, even having vouchers for the past 23 years and a boom in charter schools, has not improved students scores in reading or math. Using this failed policy to further erode the public school system will be a long term disaster for generations to come.
4
Where is the data correlating test results to per-pupil spending? Urban New Jersey school districts have some of the highest spending ratios in the US. What are their results? And how much of spending increases are actually intended for more focused instruction rather than to shore up underfunded pension plans? In many districts, that is where increased funding ended up!
3
We should be outraged at these kinds of findings. How in the world can we expect to govern ourselves if we can’t collectively read or write? No doubt some pols are in on the fact that ignorant masses are easier to manipulate. We are led by someone who is functionally illiterate. Do we need more evidence that the US is becoming a nation of ignorami.
4
Sorry folks, until there is a respect for education at all levels, from parents up to our elected officials, there will be no change in this pattern. I grew up in a lower middle class blue collar family with a father that graduated 9th grade and a mother with barely a high school education. My father had a tremendous respect for the education system and what he was not able to do and made sure his children had access to the best education possible. Any time there was an issue at school we were physically punished at school, punished when we got home and then again when my dad got home from work. At no point did anyone ever ask my side of the story. My parents never sided with me against a teacher. If you weren't an IDIOT, you remembered. I went on to achieve two engineering degrees and have told my father since my mid 20's that he is the smartest man I know. RESPECT FOR EDUCATION has to be first and that is one thing we do not have in this country. This is why other nations send their children to our universities, because it is so easy to compete against U.S. students for the best degrees/jobs. We are becoming a nation of undisciplined players of video games. Sadly, the stereotype fits. Exceptions are out there, but not enough to advance the country and pull along the masses that read at a 3rd grade level and are not able think critically beyond "What's for supper?".
12
to analyze this challenge, subdivisions by state may not be the best way to do this. California has a lot of geographic and cultural regions. Nebraska has many fewer. It may be better to regroup the results by region, even though each state has single Education Secretary. And just like the Economics Nobel went to analysts of randomized trials, smaller trials of different interventions would give better correction to this serious problem than flag waving for vouchers, money, or whatever else your political imprints declare. It's serious enough to correct it properly, and optimal is not always popular.
1
It’s nothing 50 billion dollars invested in public schools won’t fix, and we all know where to find that kind of money: military spending and taxing the rich. As an added bonus the money would go into the pockets of the middle class all over the country.
Come on, people. It’s not that hard.
3
Teachers’ salaries have increased mightily over the generations, more money is not the answer. I was in Addis Ababa recently. The kids could read well and understand in two languages. Teacher is poor. Kids are poor.
2
My kids go to poor urban schools, so I am all for increased funding equity for schools. In this case however, I think the issue is way beyond funding. I have seen a stark and scary difference in the approach to reading curriculum between oldest and youngest kids. All the money in the world won't help if they continue with the recent changes - rarely reading an entire book, just short passages (that I often think the textbooks interpret incorrectly when you see the passage in its larger work), extreme emphasis on non-fiction, and "close reading" that is not only incredibly boring, it encourages kids to read things into the text that just aren't there. This approach does not give kids the skills to read in the larger world outside of the classroom. Plus it makes kids hate reading.
9
It gets worse: going by my experience, at an elite research institution that ostensibly recruits from top achievers, college students are very obviously increasingly unable to read. As they can’t read, they can’t write, and since reading and writing remain critical for acquiring and applying analytical skills, this translates into a dire future for the nation as a whole.
6
I can't contribute very much to the debate about how to how improve the reading abilities of our schoolchildren in the short run, but one cannot look upon our society and culture and fail to realize that an even more critical skills deficit in the citizenry is in reasoning and critical thinking. The most important goal of the educational system should be to show students how to acquire and utilize these skills. Critical thinking principles should be embedded in every subject in the curriculum, from kindergarten through high school and college. If we could accomplish this much, perhaps reading problems would take care of themselves.
2
“Low stakes testing” is a key phrase in this article.... as a retired educator with some students who’ve participated in this testing, the results are meaningless. I can say many teachers (and many more students) do not even take this assessment seriously at all. In fact, it’s often just viewed as yet another federal mandate to be followed when we are already squeezed to the brink. Very few kids even get tested! In a school with 600 eighth graders, fewer than 100 are even selected by the government to take the test, and on the day of the test, students can simply just refuse to take it! Many do. And really, why not? They never get their individual results and we, their own teachers, never know how our students or even how our school performed! The students know that their teachers and their parents will never be told their scores either. So why care? Though it’s supposed to be random, we educators always shake our heads when we see who is included in the sampling — and it’s rarely if ever, any of the serious students. So there are those who put their heads down after bubbling in anything mindlessly, finish in ten minutes— and go right to sleep. Truthfully, there are enough other important tests students take that give us reliable indicators of student progress, than this test that kids don’t even put their names on! An incredible waste of time and money!
3
In case people have not noticed, college students probably would barely making the mark. This is no exaggeration. it is beyond sad and scary. It is called illiteracy.
5
It's important to realize that our nation is diverse, and while the focus on early reading skills is critical, many children and adolescents missed the early reading focus on phonics, stamina, and fluency and need initial instruction as well as remediation. They may need this in high school. More flexible instruction and assessment is needed. Betsy de Vos is pushing a religious and capitalistic agenda that is all about adults making money while the taxpayers pay twice for a less effective school system. We don't need a school system that functions more poorly than our over-priced healthcare system. We need resources that better match the needs of the students in communities and schools.
3
I doubt that Betsy De Vos, or anyone for that matter, can name a country that leads in academic proficiency in reading, math, or any other subject, where elementary education is largely privatized as she would have it be in the U.S. De Vos is one among a supermajority of Republicans who are motivated by ideology rather than evidence.
6
Wow! Commenters throwing blame on DeVos, Trump, lack of funding, socio-economic status, electronic devices (well these definitely are a large part of the problem) etc.---did you not notice Asian students are doing fine? Those parents are doing something right. Let's study them.
6
It saddens me to say that with all of the startling news that bombards us daily, this piece of news frightens me to the core.
Fortunately, I was raised by parents who were voracious readers, and I got that gene.
Books are magic... They can take you anywhere you want to go; teach you anything you want to learn.
The fact that our children aren't reading does not bode well for our fragile Democracy. How did this happen?
62
FUND SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANS.
Notice where the accompanying photo was shot? This place is becoming rare—yet it can be the heart of a school’s culture of reading.
In the period of decline cited, US school districts have slashed librarian jobs and library budgets. Hardest hit are poor districts. Chicago teachers have included librarians in their demands. Chicago high school students held sit-ins to save their librarians’ jobs.
Catherine Snow’s prescription is MUCH easier to accomplish when you have a library teacher collaborating with other educators, to introduce classic and new literature and teach inquiry-based research. This must begin in preL
I was one of the 2019 Mass. school librarians of the year. We came from a variety of school districts, but we had a couple things in common: 1. we work tirelessly to empower literacy teachers and learners, and b. we have teaching credentials, book budgets, and full-time jobs that aren’t constantly under threat of elimination. Compared to many other school initiatives, we are a bargain.
5
I teach language arts at the high school level and my daily experience supports your conclusion that, yes, reading scores, attention spans, and comprehension skills are declining.
I can tell you the cause, at least in my upper middle class area: overuse of technology starting in kindergarten and literal cell phone addiction. Although I support the use of technology in the high school classroom, it should not be a mainstay of education in the primary grades. And I have students who have had their own cell phones since 2nd grade!
Face it. This is a generation of kids for whom technology is and has been the focus of their lives. It provides constant social access, umlimited games, and instant gratification. Who needs anything else?
Schools, parents, and society bought into this trend, and kids are now paying the price with lower reading scores, a lack of sustainable focus, and the expectation that their phone has the answer to all their problems.
This has not prepared them for the rigors of college and the workplace. As a teacher, I struggle with this every day, actively and creatively fighting the decline, but by the time they reach high school it's an uphill battle at best.
14
The problem has been noted in a lot of anglophone countries. It stems, in large part, from decades of educational fads and fantasies. Every year another wonderful program that would enable the effortless teaching of reading - even do away with the need for teachers. A student, entering first grade in the 1980s, could suffer from up to four different reading "methods" during their schooling. Many of those students, barely able to read themselves, then became teachers; working under a series of "miracle teaching methods". Unsurprisingly their students were even less capable than their predecessors. This has become an accelerating "death-spiral", with each cohort of students taught by less capable teachers.
The most worrying issue is the speed with which these educational delusions penetrated universities and teachers' colleges. Instead of picking up on the problems and ensuring that student teachers were fully literate and taught how to teach; universities simply churned out accolytes of the latest educational cult.
Everyone is seeking a solution to the problems of literacy but no one wants to fund the research needed to find them
4
Could this be a reflection of the demographic transition? Half the children born in the US are on Medicaid. In my children's school the majority speak limited English.
2
It's a disgrace that Betsy DeVos will not acknowledge this as her failure. She's been there for three years, what are her accomplishments?
4
One nation under one text, quite illiterate, with chargers and bandwidth for all...
7
Betsy DeVos has a one track answer for everything, one which pretends that funding is not an issue, when public schools in underfunded areas struggle to provide the proper facilities, and services to children from equally "underfunded" families. They struggle to attract the top rated new teachers, as well, and are likely to have more students with special needs.
Funding schools should be done via income taxes, not property taxes.
And "school" - preschool, providing not so much structured programs as exposure to reading and multiple experiences, should be available to all.
The ground that is lost in learning doesn;t begin in 4rth or 8th grade, but before formal education begins.
This doesn't mean providing cookie cutter programs and discouraging innovation. But that should be wrapped within the public systems, rather than going into private hands who need not serve the entire population.
3
Any parent who's been asked to purchase boxes of tissues, photo copying paper or toilet paper for their child's school at the start of the year knows that throwing more money at schools will definitely help. When our teachers are only able to survive by adding an evening and weekend shifts as Uber or Lyft drivers then yes, more money would help. When our teachers are struggling with overwhelming college debt that technically should have been forgiven, but is still working its way through collection agencies and decimating chances for a stable financial future, then yes again, more money please. And this doesn't begin to touch on the crumbling infrastructure of school buildings, lack of real and substantial professional development, disparities between schools in impoverished neighborhoods and those in wealthy ones, or the resources (band, arts, theater, sports) that children in wealthy districts have access to. Anyone with money (and anyone without) knows that money will always help.
16
This is disturbing. But can any adult who interacts with children honestly claim to be surprised? I find the fact that these results might be revelatory to anyone shocking. Think about the last written letter or card you received from any young person in this country...yep, most of us haven’t had that experience in a very long time. But even if you had, it would have been scarily disappointing. Seems young folks can’t even put nouns and verbs together to form modestly engaging sentences. The basic skills of reading and writing appear to be vanishing. I’m sure there’s enough blame to go around. But I’m inclined to start at home, with parents. No amount of educator engagement can replace the effect of motivated and engaged parents. Want to begin improving the apparent dismal and declining educational performance of America’s youth....look in the mirror.
5
Good read, but fell short of mentioning how families have become addicted to phones, children and sadly, parents too, value electronic devices with games, graphics more than books. I ride the train for my commute and I often see children with their parents, and while parents chat on the phone, or text, children do the same. Whatever happened to reading to your kids, or just in general, talking to your kids? Last week, while on a work trip between LA and SFO, same visual as my train commute.
I raised two children who are extremely articulate, they read actual books. I had reading rules, reading for 1hr per day, no you can't see the movie chronicles of Narnia until you read the book, and trips to the library even if it was late at night, were part of our routine, it was work, but that's responsible parenting. I didn't teach my kids their vocabulary, they got it from books. Long live reading, long live literature, long live books.
14
We have this in part to thank for the results of the Presidential election.
Ignorance helps to make people believe in lies.
1
I'm reading some of the NYT Picks comments and cannot disagree more. As a former 3rd grade teacher, this is a terrible mark and we should stop with the snarky remarks about DeVos, etc., and work together to solve this. One comment says our kids read a lot. That is patently not true. They read bites on their cell phones...they don't "READ". It's incredible to me that in 1920, kids could quit the 6th grade and get jobs that required good spelling....and they were successful at these jobs. Parents need to be scared and take responsibility....kids need to have required reading and book reports so they "comprehend". There is no excuse for these failing grades other than total lack of involvement and discipline. And the ridiculous excuses about cultural differences need to stop. I'm sick to death of people belittling blacks and other ethnic groups with this poor excuse. If immigrant poor Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Southern Italians could accomplish success through learning how to read English in the early 1900's, there is NO reason why others can't do it today. And hundreds of black freed slaves became civil service workers in the early 1900's.
10
As a parent of a middle schooler, I was shocked when I learned that schools have completely gotten rid of textbooks. Kids in elementary school were given directions to read anything for 20 minutes a night, but there wasn’t accountability.
All homework is also now given online with google classroom and as a parent this is a nightmare. Homework time traditionally was reading time—even if it was math, you were still reading. Kids now can play a game, chat with their friends and look like they are doing homework. Even if you have kids sit at the kitchen table and do their homework in front of you, you can never be sure what they are really doing when they can alt-tab.
The way our schools are set up now, it’s sort of like we’ve put all of these pieces of fudge between piles of vegetables on a plate together and we’re all sitting around scratching our heads wondering why the kids aren’t eating the yummy vegetables instead of the fudge.
Going all in on electronics in the classrooms is creating more problems than it is worth. It is happening way too early (my daughter got an email address in 3rd grade) and it is totally unnecessary because by the time these kids reach high school the technology will be different anyway and they’ll have to learn new applications. It’s better to wait. And if you want them to read, well then give them books!
18
@BT I could not agree more. Schools who do not return to analog textbooks, notebooks, pencils, and sheets of paper are only making the problem worse. Even the expensive private schools have fallen into the "getting rid of textbooks trap" and doing all on Google Docs. Ugh. Incredible stupidity and it is all so obvious.
47
Internet addiction is REAL. Kids have also much harder time controlling themselves than adults when it comes to video games.
There should be a prevention program for all sorts of addictions. Unfortunately parents don't know how to deal with it either, other than keep screaming at their kids which doesn't work in most cases.
There should be an option to hide the right slider with thumbnails and other similar features in YouTube, etc., which only increases binge viewing in my opinion, like flashing a carrot in front of your nose.
7
If only kids had watched and listened to ET when he built that phone out of a SpeakNSpell, an old victrola and a kite, this problem wouldn't be so bad.
Prt of the blame goes to parents, Apple and Samsung for addicting our kids to phones, texting and non-verbal communications.
3
DC has become a majority white upper middle class, rich white students who have advantages over children from poorer zip codes. Drill into the numbers white vs black students and a different result presents itself. Drill into the number of uncertified teachers teaching in poorer zip codes and the numbers also tell a story. I am disappointed that the NYT did not make reference to that issue. Tt was misleading in the same manner when Texas had a miracle a few years ago where they had cut the drop out rate. In reality they had removed children who failed to appear from the rolls. Experiment in poor zip codes of having uncertified teachers in front of second graders is not as efficient as the elite charter school CEO's promoted. I remember when Eva Moskowitz remarked that certification wasnt needed if you had passion for teaching. Only she and Facebook CEO can get away with making ridiculous statements. As long as a teacher who is uncertified has passion knowing how to teach doesnt matter. Facebook political ads are ok even if they are distorting facts and the Russians are putting money in his bank account
Betsy doesnt realize that the buck stops with her so she better come up with a plan that is based on education not made up ideas to promote vouchers. As an uncertified educator and just a political appointee nothing will change because she has no knowledge besides smiling at children how to do anything. How much proof do we need the number speak for themselves.
2
The Republicans have done a fine job wrecking America's public education system by bankrupting it, ignoring teachers' salaries and not repairing barely standing buildings.
They created the MAGA mob's children who are certain to carry on their ignorant parents' political beliefs.
Just look at the education quality charts from around the world. America doesn't even rank near the top any longer.
It's sinister to create an ignorant class of citizens but Republican politicians send their children to private schools, so they're unaffected by their parents' decisions to destroy public education.
9
It’s Democrats that send their kids to private schools also.
5
Re:
“Someone has got to hold states accountable,” said Jim Cowen, the executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success, a group that defends the roles of standards and testing in public schools.
If Cowen's opinion is included, why isn't Diane Ravitch's?
And I bet I know who he thinks ought to do just that...the same venture capital privatization cliques who have been responsible for imposing this seductive delusion that standards and data driven technological fixes is a sine qua non for improving performance among students in those
sectors of society that struggle against structural poverty,
awol, indifferent, or inept parenting, ravages of drug addiction, homelessness.
These are all children left to their own devices, who missed out on early interventions, since society is not interested in committing itself to nurturing them orinvesting in their future. It's always up to the parents, and if they royally screw up then it's not up to everyone else to help out.
And it's not just the urban poor, it's also the children of the struggling middle class, the working class in deindustrialized America, the children of depopulated rural America. They are all included in this giant heap of discarded young promise that this country doesn't want to be bothered about.
It is a collective tragedy in lost potential, a systemic failure
of imagination and empathy that justifies a conscious withholding of resources by far too many indifferent adults.
3
What can we tell about a speaker who says
"Think about the mom or dad who cannot read, and so does
not read to their children at bed time"?
Perhaps the speaker does not have the background of
having read deeply himself/herself. Perhaps the speaker has
not had the training to deal with complex issues.
Perhaps the speaker has weak understanding of how to use
well chosen syntax to examine complex ideas in depth.
Perhaps the speaker's language level might be found
wanting if he/she took the test in question, particularly
in the area of academic texts.
@Yorick
That sentence is no longer considered ungrammatical or illogical, but is purely a matter of stylistics. And many people consider the phrase "him or her" to be too wordy or awkward, depending on the context.
As for the content, what I wonder is how societies managed to move from mass illiteracy to literacy in a single generation. One of my grandmothers did not read or write, but my father, her son, was a law student -- not in the United States, by the way.
2
How many schools still employ certified Reading/Literacy Consultants? I often hear schools have coaches to perform the role of the consultant, someone told me she didn’t even need to take classes to become a coach..simply pass a test. There has been a lot of research showing that schools that employ certified consultants do better in inservicing classroom teachers in the teaching of reading/literacy thus directly improving how students become successful. As a retired certified literacy consultant I have watched the elimination of this position probably due to higher salaries. Schools always cut what makes sense and then when test results fall they spend months delving into why the scores drop. All in all, buying lots of interesting books for kids to read and encouraging choice of reading material based on personal interests just might “hook” a student into become a lifelong lover of reading. Stop the canned, horrible programs, and trust your reading/literacy consultant to guide your school into using best practices according to research. This whole thing reminds me of the person doing the heart surgery who is somebody who works at the hospital and has a nice personality. Why not just make her the surgeon? We do it all the time in schools and expect great results.
1
If parents don't cook, kids won't cook. If parents don't go to church, kids won't go to church. If parents are not polite to each other, kids will not be polite to each other. If parents do not act compassionately toward the less fortunate, kids will not act compassionately toward the less fortunate. There is a pattern here. If parents don't read books, kids won't read books. And even if parents do read, it's going to take effort to get the kids into the joy of reading. But once it's there, they thrive in it.
8
If parents had the time to read to and with their children I expect they would. Too many parents have more than one job. That is what I consider obscene. In addition we cannot overlook the fact that students are too attached to their phones. I teach and it is a chore to get kids away from texting in class. Just imagine when there is no one to take the phone away.
2
@karen, facts are stubborn things. Actually, less than 5 percent of people have more than one job. That's not the reason their kids aren't reading. Reading is not important in their lives, and kids get the message.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/4-point-9-percent-of-workers-held-more-than-one-job-at-the-same-time-in-2017.htm?view_full
5
@Snowball Thank you. People use this as an excuse all the time.
3
The testing system is inherently flawed. Firstly, students knowing that the scores are not going to be calculated into their grades are not going to try their hardest. Many of my classmates simply went down the list in filling in any random letter to get test done.
Secondly, the article conveniently omits the amount of immigrant children many of them illegal whose parents cannot read into the data. To be a true representation the test should only include those who are proficient in English with a subcategory of second language learners.
At lastly, public education will never change unless there is a national uproar as those in control of the policy, i.e. the wealthy, do not send their kids to public schools.
Poor schools teach their students to be good workers. Well-off schools teach their students to be good managers,owners, etc I witness this on more than one occasion.
Funding public schools with property taxes does not work in this century. We need a national funding system and more importantly, a national curriculum similar to that used in England. The concept of school boards while democratic in nature allows the uneducated, uninformed, and those using it as a springboard to higher office a say in the education of your children.
5
You have your iPhone. Why would you need to read? Pitiful, yes, but look around ....
3
yes, indeed. I teach and fighting phones is something I have to do frequently. I have often said "if I had a nickel for everytime I took a phone away, I would be a wealthy woman."
2
We live in one of the top ten school districts in our state and yet not an single elementary school in it has a librarian. In our previous lower-ranked district, my son’s school had a full-time librarian in the building, and he often spent his recess going to the library instead of the playground. Now, he doesn’t have that option and can only go once every other week. I’m a librarian and we have literally hundreds of books at home, all of which he has access to, but what about the other kids at his school? A school librarian should not be the first staff cut when a budget is tight.
6
No surprise here. If the parents don’t read , why would the kids? I grew up in a house that emphasized one thing over everything else. Reading. There were books literally (pun intended) everywhere, including climbing the stairs. My parents read voraciously. My grandparents did too. It’s passed on. It’s passed down. Reading is the gateway habit to having an intellect that is nurtured and nourished. Reading is the gateway to an outer world as well as an inner life. Reading is a refuge from troubled times, a sanctuary from ignorance. Reading leads to a fully realized life. It’s that important, it’s that essential.
10
Could any of this have to do with the increase in trauma from school shooting drills? Or from an increase in family uncertainty due to massive inequality and insecure employment in our modern economy? Or could it be from an increase in playing games or watching shows that don’t require reading skills?
2
Trump is thrilled. This will grow his base.
4
Will we finally admit that cutting out everything but "reading" instruction and math has left a generation of students who know very little content? Can we admit that like literacy expert Tim Shanahan (of the National Reading panel) has constantly preached, current reading instruction trends that districts force, like the Daily 5, F&P leveled text reading and strict 90 minute literacy blocks, have no viable research that shows their effectiveness? Will we admit hat when we take decisions and autonomy from teachers we limit their effectiveness and increase their frustration sending highly qualified teachers away from the profession? Will we recognize that the increase of autism creates new demands for classroom teachers who have no support and no training? Then then there are invalid tests for ELL's making all the scores questionable. In addition we have put greater academic pressures on 5 and 6 year olds, most of whom are not developmentally ready, removing play and all of its social emotional teaching value. NONE OF THIS IS WORKING. No teacher like myself (kindergarten) is one bit surprised at the these results. Will this be the catalyst for the decision makers to start listening to us for a change? We have a new world and we need new ways but it has start by letting the boots on the ground folks lead the way.
4
As long as we have Fox News, why do folks need to be able to read and cipher?
3
Here we go again. First, show us the test that was used. Second, in Europe only college bound schools are included; in the U.S., we include all schools. I refuse to believe our students can’t read. The practice tests I’ve seen are incomprehensible.
1
@Sharon C. students can't read. They sleep in class. They are advanced to the next level even if they can't do math or read properly. We are "educating" a nation of idiots.
6
@India
You hit the nail on the head and described the real elephant in the room. As a college Professor I have seen scores plummet since the mid 2000's. Students are glued to screens and social media. They spend very little time reading and studying.
We dumb down the coursework to satisfy "student success" goals and transfer numbers because academia is now managed as a business.
A lot of money is spent on programs to identify and help students with learning problems. The truth is they were not taught how to read and study.
8
Isn't it obvious? Make children READ MORE and they will become better readers. Take away the ipads, the tablets, the computer-whatevers, and stick books in their hands. Have them prepare book reports. Have them read aloud in class. What have we devolved to?
7
The vast majority of today's children have a cell phone and at least access to a computer. They have been given screens as early as toddlers to entertain them and distract them. However, watching videos, playing video games and texting are poor preparation for reading which requires sustained attention and provides little, if any, distraction. Moreover, according to contemporary educational theory, school should be entertaining in order to attract children's interest. So, schools employ more and more technology in the classroom as if they were competing with the entertainment industry. Finally, these children seldom, if ever, see their parents reading a book for pleasure. Is it any wonder that they can't read and understand complex ideas?
10
My dad is in prison for robbing a bank, my mom is living on the streets because of drugs, I play on my iPad until my grandma brings me McDonalds when she comes home from work. This child’s routine is not an abnormal situation in our schools. Blaming teacher’s union, administrators, or politicians will not address the root cause of so many student’s failures. I will continue to volunteer in the school’s reading program and the battle scarred teachers will keep pushing because we still believe in these children. Too bad test scores don’t measure hope.
10
DeVos, destroying public education, is largely the one responsible for this decline
"She has championed programs that allow tax dollars to follow children to the schools of their choice, including private schools, religious schools and charter schools,"
2
DeVos is nuts blaming this on illiterate parents. Our parents didn’t sit and read to us, they just made the written word available. Education, and therefore, reading, resulted in the keys to the kingdom. We were blessed to live in a house crammed with our parents’ books; we ‘lived’ in a library. I read so much I had a personal librarian in third grade. Would that happen now? Nope...no money to even stock classrooms with books to take home, which we also had. How about we quit depriving our kids of the simple, not particularly expensive tools they need...books? Let’s give teachers a reason to stay in their professions, via respect and pay. And the lesson that if you don’t read, you fail at life. And yeah, trump is a failure. He “loves the poorly educated” for good reason, they are easy marks. “Keep America Great?” Not so much.
6
This is big data, and it shows the big trend is downward. That's bad news. However, behind each data point is an individual story, and assigning generalized causes and generalized solutions based on this study is not appropriate. Take it for what it is - a wake-up call to each district for self-examination.
3
There is a notion that school is where the learning begins and ends. There is a whole system involved that includes the child's family. We want these scores to grow, yet we have families where both parents work 2 or more jobs and struggle to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. This isn't the upper middle class family, this is a working class family. And work they do. We wonder why they can't come to parent teacher conferences, why kids come to school tired or hungry, why parents aren't there to police the homework process. Our "economy" has taken parents from the home for survival. These aren't families where Mom and Dad have good paying professional jobs, where they've hired a nanny or take enriching trips. We've lost sight of the role families play in education because our economy requires that both parents work to have a sufficient income. That's just plain wrong and we're seeing the impact of that today. No amount of testing, not amount of spending will replace the role of family.
5
This is interesting, however it's a lot of words for something that could easily be summarized with a graph.
The data exists, why not visualize it?
Maybe reading is overrated after all.
7
Teachers get a pay raise every year no matter what the test scores are. Why change?
7
@Rick
Where is that? If it were so, they wouldn't be out on strike in so many cities!
3
@Rick FALSE. There really is such a thing as FACTS. Teacher salaries been in decline over the years, http://neatoday.org/2019/04/29/national-average-teacher-salary/ —along with societal recognition of their value to our society.
11
@Rick - Not true at all, actually.
5
The decline in scores coincides with the entire time President Obama was in office. Billions were spent during his administration to study programs to improve education. His administration reported that none of the efforts had any significant effect in improving student performance. Now it appears there was an actual decline.
It is time that we stop thinking that there is any hope in finding an educational approach to improve student improvement. The best predictor of educational performance is a student's family background. Efforts should be focused on how improve family life even if the findings contradict the values of the day.
Having in tack families with the biological father of the children in the house should be studied. The use of day care to replace a parent in the home vs having a parent in the home is another topic that needs scrutiny. The impact of race and sex preferences on the academic performance of groups getting the preference also needs close examination.
The findings should be compared with the rate of change of academic performance as these factors became more prevalent over time. If there is a relationship with the increase in one parent homes, families that do not have the biological father in the home, the practice of giving racial or sex preferences to designated groups, or the expansion of day care the support for these family structures need to be eliminated.
7
The study showed that reading test scores improved for Asian students. Why? Because their parents are involved into their kids’ education. No money in the world will replace an involved parent (not the kind that frequently emails the teachers and blames them for everything, the kind that holds his/her children responsible for their own learning by supporting them and making sure they actually what they are expected to do). As a public school teacher, I am tired of being hold responsible for kids who show no effort to learn anything. Parents need to be hold responsible, our model of “public” education does not work. When parents are financially involved into education they become unrealistic and frankly disrespectful.
7
@Visitor
I don't think it's parental involvement as much as it is values. Many Asian students are from immigrant families and do not speak English in the home. Their strength is in their ability to tune out peer pressure.
Many Americans want their children to be "popular," which to be fair can have a bearing on earning power later in life. But it can also leave the child vulnerable to the judgment of other children, and that is hugely risky. If the child's friends don't read, the child probably won't, either.
This is not how Asian families function, and is less common in Europe than in the U.S., at least outside of the English-speaking countries.
1
Some thoughts from another educator, in reply to SeanCarm:
1. More money is no guarantee of better education. A good teacher does a better job teaching a large class than a bad teacher does teaching a small class. A teacher teaches no better whether at the same or a doubled salary.
2. Every problem with public education has been addressed except the two problems fundamental to education: properly comprehensive, structured, and sequenced curriculums; and subject-matter competent teachers, especially in elementary and middle-school grades.
3. Curriculum: experts in state departments of educations showed us very clearly what they cannot do when they created the Common Core curriculum. Curriculum requires a do-ever and, in my opinion, a return to curriculums before the Vietnam War.
4. K-8 teachers: everyone must admit, however ruefully, that one of the unintended consequences of women's lib was to leave mediocrities in these grades. Schools of education do not train them to mastery of the subjects which they teach; instead, they focus on methods, diversity, etc. The result is methodologically achieved and highly diversified educational failures for all kinds of students everywhere.
5. No improvement is possible until the focus be placed on the education which worked in the past, then for a few; the challenge is to make it work for all.
6. Just how racist is the multiplication table? How sexist is phonics? Are historical dates homophobic? Is the solar system elitist?
9
SeanCarn
"The single greatest issue with education in the U.S. that doesn't get nearly enough attention is that it is funded by property taxes. Better property = better schools. This fosters a system of education that actively restricts access to opportunity for the overwhelming majority of students."
I could not agree more - I posted this many times - but
NOT A SINGLE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE IS RUNNING ON THE ABOLISHMENT OF THE LOCAL PROPERTY TAX THAT MORE THAN IN ANY OTHER TAX FORSTER INEQUALITY
2
This article stinks. Really need the detail by state of what the changes were
1
To all the commenters bemoaning how kids today are glued to their devices: It troubles me more that the educational reformers of the moment can't think of anything more creative than putting newer and shinier devices into every classroom.
They will try anything---anything!---as long as it doesn't involve treating teachers like professionals and teaching like a learnable skill.
4
I bothered to click thru and read the report this article is based on
It is not very clear, but it looks like the Exam decline is a change in score from 226 to 225
which the authors claim is significant at P = <0.5
so, it is not really clear that we are seeing a decline in reading
That MA is one of the states that went down further suggests this is not a significant effect, as MA is one of the best states for education, as assessd by this sort of test
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/supportive_files/2019_infographic.pdf
4
Shrug. Seasoned teachers could have told you this was coming 15 years ago. Year after year, students are reading less, understanding less, and expected to do less.
For the most part, rich people's kids don't read as well as they used to, either. When you dumb down curriculums, you dumb down kids. But don't worry, they feel good about themselves, they're much more relaxed now that they don't have to read 20 pages a night of a challenging book, and they'll get into college anyway.
4
"Again, Mississippi led the pack." Does this mean, "When you are at the absolute bottom, there is no way but up?" or does it mean the rest of the nation is dummying down?
I just hope that kids start to read more and not just text messaging & sending selfies.
1
I live just about an equal distance from a local library, to the east, and a new casino to the west.
I still remember the night about seven years ago when the news reported that library hours would be cut again, and in the next breath reported on the debate about where to open the next casino.
4
This is why we need merit-based immigration policy, and why colleges and universities need to stop admitting underqualified students.
4
Sect'y DeVos, of all people, should know that reading is highly over-rated as she has observed with her "boss' in the WH. The self-anointed "Chosen One" not only doesn't read; he has ripped the most respected newspapers in the country from the hands of his staff. And, just look how far illiteracy got him, us not so much.
1
The article is subtitled: "The results of the test, which assesses a sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students, will inevitably prompt demands for policy change."
I see absolutely no indication that these test results will 'prompt demands for policy change' at least not from Trump's Department of Education. Recall his speech following the 2016 Republican Primary in Nevada: "We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated."
Trump LOVES the poorly educated, and they love him. I don't see any policy change in the works, but maybe a Presidential Medal of Freedom for Betsy DeVoss. China surges while the US dismantles public education.
2
There are many great comments here, including those regarding school libraries/librarians.
However, even if your child's school lacks a great library, with an enthusiastic and skilled librarian, there's an answer: go public! Public libraries are treasure troves, and the people in them can supply information, recommendations, and lists of great books for children from pre-K to college.
Remember the saying that, "Libraries will get you through a time of no money better than money will get you through a time of no libraries."
6
The dumbing down of America is well underway. Now half our kids will read, write, & think at the low barely literate level of Donald Trump.
4
This is a larger cultural issue. The current White House embodies the anti-intellectual tendency that thrives in our country.
Figuring things out as you go along and/or living by the seat of your pants can be a good thing sometimes. But, it's not in any way a long-term model for creating a country with a rejuvenating population of astute leaders, successful individuals, and wise citizens.
The internet isn't helping, of course, but our culture seems to promote the ideal that knowledge isn't necessary, just a commodity that we can access when needed.
We need to ring the alarm that this is truly hurting our country. It's not the test scores, but the culture of anti-knowledge we seem to be coasting on that's deep and troublesome.
138
@Owen - "The internet isn't helping,"
I so disagree. The internet is the library of Alexandria.
I have been learning recording engineering with a Grammy winning engineer in Los Angeles, studying horn arranging with a big band leader in Portland, studying harmonica with an old blues master in Georgia, and piano with the guy who plays at Disneyworld.
I have been studying geology with someone from Washington, chemistry from a couple of different universities, history with Dr. Bettany Hughes of Britain, Egyptology with the head of the Cairo Museum, and even a little math now and again.
I have been studying Mandarin, Hawaiian, Samoan, Hebrew, Greek, and soon, ASL online.
I learned how to build web-responsive websites online. And now people are starting to ask me to make them one.
And I learned all of this for free sitting at my desk in my p.j.s sipping breves and smoking homegrown.
The internet is what one makes of it and I see it as an incredible gift.
The internet gives me the New York Times where just yesterday I cleared up a long standing question in my writing. Is it "a hysterical" or "an hysterical"? I have been wrong for many years and thanks to an article, I now write English better. And I wasn't even sitting in a class.
My ancestors wrote with cuneiforms until some young kid started writing with an aleph-bet which we use today. Maybe my descendants will come up with something to replace it?
18
@tom harrison: The opportunity is there and some will take advantage of it. But that doesn't mean that, in the aggregate, that opportunity is being put to good use. For many, it's just a distraction, an attention-grabber, not a platform for learning.
19
@Owen
The issue is that knowledge(information) is a raw material, education provides the tools to turn knowledge into something useful: philosophy, a book, a product, a step to further knowledge. The internet does not provide any of the tools or insights that extend civilisation.
9
I am a teacher, though at the college level. This is a country that does not honor teachers or education; otherwise much more money would be put toward eduction as well as paying teachers as it they mattered. You don't need to give bonuses-you need to pay teachers and then support them; ditto for librarians. All schools should have the same standards, the same access. I would caution putting students in front of screens- that is one reason students don't achieve in reading; they don't read outside of class; and some don't read at all. And I agree that time testing is a waste of time-the entire education is about testing, not learning.
15
Schools and teachers can only do so much about this when they’re working within a culture that doesn’t value books or reading all that much. Sure, Oprah tries. But let’s face it, we are a culture that values sports and screens over the written word.
15
@Galfrido - I read a ton of material but none of it is literary. Almost everything I read is a textbook or a manual of some kind.
I have met people in their 20s who cannot read an analog clock face, only the numbers on their smart phone.
10
Most of the comments center around the need for a U-Turn in policy. And, as always, money.
Interesting that that bastion of weathly Progressivism, Mississippi, outperformed, eh?
2
Just want to see readers picks
1
I would like to know more about the test. Is it the same test every year? If not, that could affect the drop in scores. A few poorly worded questions or passages that students don’t have any background knowledge about can make a difference.
If it is the same test, was the population taking the test demographically the same as the year before? Were there more non-native English speakers taking the test? More students with disabilities?
Little changes can make a huge difference in student results.
1
I’m not all that impressed with the current curriculum. There’s a lot of emphasis, probably too much, on STEM. Reading instruction gets a lot of attention, but It looks like a tedious chore. Kids need to be read to, they need to read books they enjoy reading and they need to spend a lot of time reading actual books, not computer screens, to be good readers. My mother spent hours reading aloud to me when I was a preschooler. I saw my parents reading for fun. Books were scattered all over the house. I was not an early reader but I became a bookworm and read constantly. Both parents took the time to correct my spelling and grammatical errors when I wrote school papers. I became a writer. Every local spelling bee champion I have ever talked to also loves reading and has parents who followed a similar approach. Most of them are also talented academically in other ways.
6
"There’s a lot of emphasis, probably too much, on STEM." That's the least of our worries as far as reading skills!
There is no question that the over-use of technology in schools - and at home - is significantly to blame for this.
I have yet to see any substantial data that indicates the use of technology in schools has improved...anything.
The reduction in funding for libraries, parents themselves spending too much time on their smart phones, and the relentless pace of pop-culture, marketing, media, and advertising is robbing us of our creativity, curiosity, community, culture...and genuine connection to one another.
Technology is the tool...that has become our master. And we worship it to the detriment of our way of life, including the education of our children...who are missing out on the most fundamental tool of their future education...and the joy of reading itself.
Technology - used in balance and with responsibility - is a valuable, powerful tool - but only that...a tool.
13
My mother (a teacher), insisted all of her children have 1 hour of time in our room each night (Sun > Thurs) for homework. We avoided it - but grew bored, and we eventually did the work. I have 2 graduate degrees and have gone from a teacher’s salary to a “one-percenter”. I will retire at 55 - comfortably. That one hour a night gave my working mother a break, and had some impressive results on her children. Thanks mom. I miss you.
15
"no significant change for Asian students."
Asian students are motivated and they cope.
6
So these kids have something in common with the guy in the White House.
6
"Catherine Snow, a literacy expert at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said educators need to learn how to integrate foundational reading skills, such as knowledge of letter sounds and combinations, into lessons that will excite young children. "
They do ?!
How did my peers and I learn to read without those lessons that excite young children ? How did generations of children learn to read without "Cornerstones " that taught us how vocabulary and reading skills through shared experiences ?
Could it be that my peers and I, and generations of children benefited from our parents from our parents making eye contact with us, cooing at us when we were babies , speaking to US, pointing at the birds the sky, the trees, and teaching us :"Bird", "Tree", "Sky", "Sun", "Airplane", when they were pushing us in our strollers, instead of staring into little glowing screens, talking to anyone but their children, and taking photos of themselves with their backs to the sunset instead of saying :"That is the sunset ." ?!
Could it be that what children need is their parents' ATTENTION ?
18
The current “Conservative” political administration is likely responsible for the drop in school performance in the past 2 years. If Hillary had not been swindled out of the Presidency, the changes in student performance scores likely would likely have changed as much in the opposite direction, or at least have remained the same.
3
This is good news for the likes of Trump and other populists and bad news for a rational world where history and real evidence guide our decisions.
7
Whilst I understand that data from these types of surveys can be somewhat skewed, this still points towards a crisis in education in America. DeVos' assertion that children can "choose" their school is ridiculous; of course some can, but most can't. It is only recently that I have learnt that some US schools don't have a library. I was astounded and saddened.
Ms. Devos: think about child whose mum or dad cannot read, who does not get read to; and likely has no choice in the school they attend. Think of how choosing to not direct more funding to schools in their district portends to their future.
4
@Amy LS - I can't speak for the rest of the country but I do know that our city library has literally thousands of books and videos and tapes free online along with two other services that have films and documentaries. One of them has this amazing chemistry course that I have been taking. One does need a school library or even a local library to find things online. MIT offers lots and lots of college classes free online. No credit but if you want to study chemical engineering, know yourself out. They put up all of their tests and assignments, etc.
Check out our local library for a taste of what we can bring to the homes of elderly and disabled these days or even folks living out in the sticks.
https://www.spl.org/
Schools have given up the practice of reading aloud, memorizing spelling and vocabulary and learning phonics. When a rigorous curriculum isn’t offered, the result is predictable. The content isn’t essential. We learned to read with Dick and Jane. The others are.
6
I loved the Dick and Jane books. We focused on mastering reading;we weren’t filling our heads with distractions.
2
Wow, not a single mention of the fact that almost half of DC public school students attend charter schools. I'm a lifelong Democrat and a lifelong pro-education voter, and I wonder when finally the left will stop pandering to teachers' unions and realize that we need every possible solution on the table for our childrens' educations, including longer hours, more school days, and mentoring and coaching of children on homework, as part of the school day. Yes, it will cost more, but until we delineate what really needs to happen in education we will never be able to advocate for that shift in spending.
2
Whoa. What’s with all the union bashing in the comments? This is a phenomenon of the 21st century. Follow the money...the huge billion dollar industry of psycho metrics and their lobbyists take precious hours away from developing and implementing relevant curriculum. And unions are the devil?
7
Iphones make you stupid. Simple.
The math is down
The writing has gone.
The soothing movement of a pen has stressed them out.
Ask any teacher of experience.
They are getting dumber because they dont use or discipline their minds.
6
It’s Dr. Catherine Snow, not Ms. why is it so hard to give women the credit they deserve??
2
One really wonders how much electronics impact children’s ability to read, and maybe we can point to it being a distraction. I see so many young children, in my neighborhood, walking with phones in their hands on their way to school. It can be surmised that those kids are probably using their phones during instructional time at school. I personally know young children in my family whose parents use phones as a way to keep kids distracted, and I know for a fact that I’ve never seen those kids read a book. 2) how many of us are readers? My parents use to read to me when I was a child. How many parents are reading to their children anymore? 3) how many immigrant children,whose primary language isn’t English, is weighed in the results?
7
@E Robichaux - My neighbors got their little kid his own phone. He does get some game time. But his family also stuck him in front of English classes (they just moved from Africa), they included Russian classes, Spanish classes and some other language classes and they speak Amharic at home.
The kid seemed just a bit behind the others in the building with his English but what seemed like overnight, he started rattling off complete sentences with a Trevor Noah accent...and he speaks Amharic. He isn't 4 yet.
His entire family speaks high level English. And they all spend a lot of time with him. And he has no siblings.
Other kids in the building get shared attention with siblings and many have parents who can't speak a work of English. The families expect the schools to take care of that. I tried speaking with one of the kids who was the same age as the African child. He could kind of understand Spanish but half of the words he only understood in English. It was strange. He knows his numbers in English but not in Spanish. I asked him in Spanish to push number 4 when we were on the elevator. He went blank and then mom asked him again but she replaced quatro with four and he was okay.
What does a teacher do with 3 kids - one only heard English throughout life, 1 speaks something else at home, and the third gets half of each? And the parent of a 4th child is a crack head and doesn't even bother at all?
1
I am guessing big tech will get involved and sell a lot more electronic gadgets to schools.
That will get kids to read more books.
Regardless of what happens I predict that it will be very expensive, will result in no benefit to anyone, and will need to be replaced in a few years.
4
Tonight's WSJ online editorial on this topic says it all. See quotes below.
How does this supposed news article in the NYT miss the metrics on increased spending, and where the money goes (pensions and administrators) during this time of sharply declining student performance?
"The teachers unions’ answer to every education deficit is more spending. But between 2012 and 2017—the last year of available Census Bureau data—average per-pupil education spending increased by 15%. Spending has been growing at an even faster clip over the last couple of years as government revenue has recovered from the recession."
"States that are spending more haven’t shown improvement. In California annual K-12 spending has increased by more than half since 2013 to $102 billion. Yet student test scores have been flat since 2013. It’s a similar story in New York, Illinois and New Jersey where Democrats have raised taxes for schools."
"Much of the money has gone to fund teacher pensions and administrative positions that pad union rolls. Maybe parents should go on strike to demand more accountability from the union-run public school monopoly."
4
I own a tutoring center and work with struggling readers. The recent book, The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler gets to the heart of this matter by delving into the history of reading and more specifically, the "Reading Wars". By and large, we do not teach structured phonics nor do we teach content. Instead, we teach "tricks" for figuring out words and comprehension skills that make reading most unpleasant.
9
The half that voted for DJT?
4
I was thinking about Cats, the musical. It's T. S. Eliot. I just reread some of the lyrics. To my mind, they are far, far better than the lyrics of Hamilton, which is I think are very pedestrian. I never loved Cats, but I grew up knowing the songs and lyrics. If you reread them, you'll see how sophisticated and literary, they are. I feel the same, but less emphatically, about Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair.
4
Yes, Broadway lyrics have gone down the tube. Have you listened to the Beatles or Stones the lyrics lately - witty, ironic, use of word play, building a scene. Oh, I forgot - they’re English.
1
This is a statistical fluke. According to probability theory and mathematical statistics, we ALWAYS expect half the schools to decrease and half of them to increase simply due to randomness. It's a phenomenon called "regression to the mean." So this headline is literally not news at all.
1
@HW
Simply not true: the most recent test scores within each state are being compared to the prior test scores within the same state. They could all show an increase, or decline, or stay essentially the same.
If obesity rates, or vaccination rates, or college completion rates, or homicide rates in half the states go down significantly, is that merely "random?" There is no reason to think so.
When a decline (in any of the above) is noted over a relatively short time frame, the decline may not be the beginning of a trend or pattern. But that isn't saying the same thing: it also may not be a "fluke."
3
If the president fails at reading I guess this justifies the failure of our youth to be good at reading. How about paying teachers a living wage instead of appointing morons like Betsy DeVos to be education secretary?
10
Read to your kids.
Match senior citizens, often lonely, with schools in an effort to read.
5
Love this idea!!
2
Why do you think that every parent who works in tech refuses to let their children use iPhones, computer games or social media. It is simple. My friend used the television to learn English when immigrating from another country, but that was not the end game- she studied and read books and now teaches English at an Ivy League university.
Small attention spans reinforced by the internet and entertainment means you stifle retention and growth.
17
@Ruby T - A good deal of what I learned in life came from watching television - Jeopardy, Julia Child, Wild Kingdom, Jacques Cousteau, Dick Cavette, and of course Soul Train. As a child, I was exposed to Judy Garland and Liza with a Z, Barbra Streisand, and too many names to list. Old movies with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Glen Miller, Fran Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, and Gene Kelley.
There were symphonies with Leonard Bernstein, operas, jazz artists galore, country music festivals, gospel, soul, rock, and one of my childhood favorites - Tito Puente.
There is nothing wrong with television or phones unless your mom is hooked on soap operas and seeing how many likes she has. My mom would get excited that some economist who had written a book was going to be a guest on Dick Cavette's show. Which meant I could't watch Charro on Tom Snyder's show that night. Cucci cucci!
2
Forget policy change! Change the culture! Books, bookstores, literacy, writing, thinking (!) could be priorities. But we let the marketplace control our culture and our values. If something makes money, it's good. If something doesn't make money, it is useless. Our pathetic culture, our pathetic government ... but I'm pinning my hopes on the millennials-- they read ....
6
I teach in a community college. The problems are not simple and solutions will not be simple. The majority of the college students cannot write complete sentences, their written grammar is awful, and class participation does not exist. About 2/3 of my students work really hard to make good grades and have jobs to help their families. About 1/3 constantly read cell phones and disrupt the classes; no amount of care and outreach will motivate them. Something is deeply wrong and will require massive research with creative new approaches in the future.
10
If all the testing units (school districts, states, whatever) are all deploying exactly the same teaching efforts, and if the students are all on the same level (intelligence, fed, prepared), wouldn't one expect that about half would do better than last year, and half decline, just based on random variation?
1
Teachers see students less than 5 hours a week, less than 8 months out of the year. Teachers cannot "make" students do homework, study, read, be curious about the world. We can only fail them in our class, which they can then make up in a 3 week course that most school districts offer over Winter and Summer breaks.
This article mentions parents once--DeVos's condescending remark about illiterate parents. The article mentions social media zero times, yet most students spend about 3 - 7 hours A DAY on the internet, according to the Washington Post.
Non-union, tax-funded "private" schools that cherry-pick students, exploit teachers and consequently have very high turn-over and lack teachers with experience (yes, experience matters), pay low wages, often are run by corrupt administrations, these schools of "choice" are not the answer.
Parents and students themselves are so commonly left out of the education equation that it's almost as if some revolutionary discovery were made--like the earth is round and revolves around the sun--that it's become anathema, politically incorrect, to simply mention them and their role in education.
I venture to offer that what is so often NOT said may hold some of the major answers to this problem.
4
In North Carolina our legislature has cut school finding, including at our state universities for the last several years. They cut teaching assistants from primary grades, with a few exceptions. A third-grade teacher might have to share an assistant with 3 other teachers. They passed a Read to Achieve law which states that third graders who can't read at grade level have to repeat third grade. The teaching assistants were the ones who worked with failing students. Legislators then wonder why our reading scores went down.
7
Lets keep raising our public Union teacher salaries and benefits. We can be ver do enough for our teachers. Even though they’re widely reported as the best paid anywhere. And lets not fall into the trap of demanding gains in student performance when raising public Union teacher salaries. That’s not realistic. We can be certain our public school teachers are just doing the very best they can. As true “professionals”. Our teachers are doing the jobs they were hired to do. It’s always been that way. Results are entirely different story.
1
The problem is very simple:
Like most every skill, the best way to learn to read is "Practice, practice, practice". The more one reads, the faster one learns how to first expand vocabulary, then to begin focusing on phrases, rather than individual words in a text. This second skill is the foundation of speed-reading - which is what true literacy is.
And the most effective way to get children to engage in more reading is to instill in them the sense of discovery and accomplishment that reading brings to everyone. Kids must LIKE reading to become prolific readers.
But today we live in a "point and click" society. Images and "memes" are more vivid and accessible than unadorned text. So we let kids "explore" the world on their tablets and smartphones - where they rarely encounter text that's more complex than a Tweet.
And older kids know that the president is lauded by many for his "effective" use of Twitter. If the president can get by with his third-grade vocabulary, fractured syntax and frequent mis-spellings - why should any 10 or 15 year-old child strive for greater mastery of the language?
So parents, read to your kids every day when they're young (from toddlerhood through elementary school). Teach them that books are fun. Teach them that books are filled with amazing stories. Teach them that books can take them to fascinating places that feed their imaginations far beyond the sterile, pre-programmed video images on their phones.
Teach them that "Reading is Life".
7
You can move the goal post or blame the other party, still doesn’t change the fact that the masses are huddling around their phones more than ever, mindlessly consuming an endless stream of “content”. Sorry, the kids will just keep getting dumber.
9
@Wayne Z: agree with you and everyone pointing to devices that don’t require reading as a huge problem. But as an older person, I noticed working with college grads from ‘good’ schools that many couldn’t write a coherent, grammatically correct sentence. This was years before the internet was even a thing, never mind mind the current phone addiction issue. Have no idea what happened, but we’ve been accepting the dumbing down of our kids for a very long time. We’re paying for now. Sorry to admit it, but doubt we’ll catch up with other countries.
I’m extremely disappointed that the authors of this article failed to discuss the “reading wars” and the turn by public education to “whole language” or “balanced literacy” in an effort to focus on comprehension. As a result, our schools have abandoned “structured literacy” which focuses on phonics and explicit reading instruction. Studies have shown that structured literacy is significantly more effective. For more information on this, see recent articles by Emily Hanford, particularly “Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way” published by the NYT on October 26, 2018.
5
Both my sons had to navigate this ridiculous testing. My oldest a PhD from an Ivy, working for a big tech firm. My youngest a Military Officer. This is awful to put kids through, but worse for parents. Best advice, read lots of books with your kids when they are little,continue to support reading through elementary and HS,get them a library card. Support your public schools and teachers.
10
In a recent study by the University of California Irvine, published earlier this rear in the journal Scientific Studies of Reading, the middle half of 7th and 8th graders who used Visual Syntactic Formatting increased their scores on the Smarter Balanced Advanced Consortium test for Reading and Writing. Their year-to-year literacy growth was double that of randomized controls. Visual Syntactic TeXt Formatting is easy to implement, and was integrated with the online texts used in the textbooks the district had adopted for English Language Arts. The right technology makes a difference. Visual Syntactic TeXt Formatting should be implemented across the country.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10888438.2018.1561700?journalCode=hssr20
And went up in the other half? To be expected.
Kids aren’t dumb. These tests are meaningless to them and they have little if any incentive to perform well on them. In addition to that these tests don’t measure a child’s growth from year to year. They only compare one class to the next class, and there is no continual measurement.
3
The President leads the way with his devolving second-grade vocabulary. Another category of failure from our bottom-of-the-barrel leadership.
6
So can we finally jettison Common Core?
3
Reading is not cool, c'mon America. Those kids don't want to be nerds, walking around with a book or Kindle instead of sending Instagrams of themselves even when they are on the toilet seat. That generation clearly reflects the values of the population, just look at the toad in the white house! A "wake up call", too late for that. The house is burning down unless you have dual citizenship somewhere.
4
Completely unacceptable and (sad!) Who will Trump blame for this?
This is really bad news for the future of our children and our country. Sadly, it won't be a top news headline on any national news broadcasts, will it?
1
Like the rest of the US, in decline.
4
Socialized education is failing our youth, now lets socialize medicine and fail everybody!!!
2
@D
Is Medicare failing our seniors?
And how did any society move from nonliterate to literate, sometimes in a single generation?
3
I hate to bring the name of Donald Trump into this conversation, but I wonder how the so-called adults who take his lies at face value would fare on one of these tests. Not very well, I imagine.
1
If these kids cannot score high in reading, it is because of a teaching and school administration failure. If these children cannot read well, they become useless because they cannot learn or work when old enough. Pathetic news.
4
Falling to the lowest common denominator. We slash expectations. We eliminate gifted programs. We ask for mediocrity.
5
So much for educating our children for the jobs of the 21st century, which is all I heard during the Bush era. Instead, what they've done is take money out of education instead of funding it. Bush comes up with the idea, that lowering test scores, doesn't help, and is simply ridiculous. Sure your graduation rates go up because kids don't have to make a real effort to achieve, but more than that, all you do is send people out in the world that can barely read, and what they do read, they struggle to comprehend, forget math, science, and civics,
Maybe this is what Bush was thinking when he came up with the "No Child Left Behind" idea. Trump put it best when he said, that he likes uneducated people, and people that have a substandard education lack the ability to think critically. If you have an educated population it's harder for politicians like Trump, or fake news organizations like Fox News to get them to buy the lies your selling.
Not to mention you won't have workforce that is prepared to enter a job market that is far different from the era when a worker with just a high school diploma to get a good paying job that they would stay at for 50 years, and receive a decent pension, medical care. We as a nation simply won't be able to compete on the world stage, and it's really that simple.
1
Why not listen to what thoughtful, experienced, successful teachers can tell us? I find it infuriating that teachers' expertise is ignored. Instead, we hear the union, the administration, publishers, professors, politicians, Betsy DeVos.
For 23 years I was given 31 students, often in a combination kindergarten/first grade. No assistant. No supplies. Ineffective textbooks.
One third of the class spoke 30 different languages over a 10 year period. The KKK and Aryan Brotherhood made threats. The trauma of shootings and stabbings of student's family members reverberated through the entire class. Drugs. A few very severely emotionally disturbed children who were never given help.
And yet, by sheer will, determination, and innovation I made sure everyone learned their phonics and a basic vocabulary in kindergarten. Every child learned to love books -- I bought 1,000 with my own money for my class "library." Every child learned mathematics with hands-on materials I made or bought myself. Every child learned to dictate or write their own short stories and read them to each other.
I recruited parents to come in for 2 hours once a week to help, even if they did not speak English.
I made videos so other teachers, who can rarely get into someone else's room to observe, would know how it worked.
How much less stress there would have been for all had there been support: 20 students and an aide. Good materials provided. Help for traumatized students. A good school library.
6
From what I have seen over the past few years in the public schools my children attend, the English curriculum is based on intensive deconstruction of words, sentences and paragraphs.
Perhaps we should just let kids read and enjoy the story and/or facts they are learning. They might just absorb language skills by osmosis. I recall sentence diagramming in eighth grade - an absolute waste of time.
1
Let’s be honest,unfortunately we have a materialistic culture only interested in acquiring wealth.Our universities down to our pre-k are about making money or budgets that have teachers buying everything from pencils to toilet paper.Its beyond obvious that we are not interested in a academic oriented society.So let’s import Chinese,Indians and Iranians for these are the majority of people in our PhD programs.Lets keep our kids busy with Transformer movies,snap chat and all Other anti intellectual activities.We have nobody to blame but ourselves,let’s take some responsibility and stop blaming teachers and schools.It is our responsibility to breathe the fire of critical thinking into our children not the schools!Then and only then they will want to learn.The acquisition of knowledge should not be a chore!
3
It seems to me that the more money we put into education the less we get out of it. Someone should be held accountable here in New York you can not even dare attempt to hold the Teachers union even remotely accountable for the score the children receive. Look at Chicago the teachers who constantly claim it’s all about the children have left their underperforming students in a lurch for 10 days.
Perhaps another reason is that politicians are using schools as social experiments stop teaching political correctness and social justice and just teach the basics
1
The unions do not write the curriculum. Bloomberg bought the junk Everyday Math books from his friend, Diana Lamb, and the vile Pearson Publishing is raking in the dough on the incomprehensible tests.
4
Parents who give their toddlers a cell phone or tablet to electronically babysit the child with video games do nothing to promote literacy.
5
Average class size in the public schools has declined substantially since 1970 (22.3 in 1970 versus 16.0 in 2015).
Average teacher salaries for their 9 month workyears is substantially higher than average salaries for 12 month workyears in about 20 states (about 25%-35% higher is NY, NJ, CT, MA, PA, CA, OR)
Clearly the teachers union propaganda is utterly false that education would finally be good if teachers were just paid even more and had even lighter workloads of smaller classes.
5
Why is Betsy DeVoss able to turn this into a wedge issue? She’s been the head of the department of education for the last three years, this happened on her watch, yet she’s able to trot out the same non-solutions like school of choice without any refutation? As a proud son of the great state of Michigan I remember the steady decline that Michigan has had in the educational state rankings since Betty and her husband started bribing pleasant peninsula G.O.P. officials with campaign contributions to promote their own ideas about how schools should be run. The results have been a corrupt Detroit public school system that still somehow manages to outperform nearby charter schools, and other cases charters performing at just about the same level as or worse than public schools. Talk about waste of money Betsy...well you’re finger prints are all over Ben Franklin’s face on this one.
5
@Fred
"This happened on her watch..."
Nope.
This negative trend is obvious starting with 2011 and coincident with "Race to the Top".
1
Autocrats and others motivated by financial self-interest must be thrilled with this development. All the easier now to confuse and manipulate the populace. DJT "loves the poorly educated." Of course he does.
1
Let's assume that in a decade or two, progressives dominate American politics nearly across the board (whether or not this is likely). If they can't find a way to bring black and Latino scores up to those of whites or Asians, will they grasp that the underlying inequities took centuries to build and will take a long time to break? Or will they do what we've seen lately: claim that only those luxuriating in their own privilege would demand patience?
Will there ever be a time when progressives chastise individuals, even if those individuals bear the weight of historical, ongoing oppression on their shoulders? Is it not the case that victims, too, need to be held responsible? Familial structure and culture is so important to education. Pandering is part of politicians' jobs; but must the media forever tell people that, if they fail, it isn't their fault but society's? The likely result of this will not be determination and initiative but apathy.
If reading continues its descent, especially among blacks, who's to say progressives won't claim that reading is white supremacy and demand that it be scratched from the curriculum? That sounds outrageous, but can we put it past them? "Fixing our schools" is harder than people imagine. Anyone claiming to have a sure-fire answer, doesn't. Public policy needs improving, but education is often about culture, and changing that is up to us.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/
1
The current education “teach to the test” requirements neglect real literacy skills of reading long passages and writing more than a paragraph at a time. Students come to college unprepared to write longer than a paragraph or two. And this is where class size can really matter; think about the time it takes to read snd grade 35 real essays.
2
This is not surprising since reading scores for US Presidents have also declined over this period.
3
A reliable source https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf indicates that per pupil costs/expenditures have increased at a 45 degree angle since the 1970s, average reading, writing and arithmetic scores have been stable; and the achievement gap obtains at all income levels. See https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/why-ses-does-not-explain.pdf
And average performance on SAT Critical Reading hasn't changed materially in recent decades—
true as well for average scores of groups classified by race/ethnicity – except for Asian-Americans,.
Table 1. SAT Critical Reading average selected years
1987 '97 2001 '06 '11 '15 '16
507 505 506 503 497 495 494 All students
524 526 529 527 528 529 528 White
479 496 501 510 517 525 529 Asian
...................................... 436 Hispanic
457 451 451 454 451 448 Mex-Am
436 454 457 459 452 448 Puerto R
464 466 460 458 451 449 Oth Hisp
471 475 481 487 484 481 447 Amer Ind
428 434 433 434 428 431 430 Black
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.(2012).
If SAT averages haven't changed materially for almost 30 years, despite the effort, time and money expended to improve educational programs for all students, it seems reasonable to assume that we shouldn't expect any meaningful change in average level of performance in this critically important ability in the foreseeable future.
3
The kids all have i-pads instead of books. No wonder!
3
Sorry. Blame the parents. Teachers pass kids on to the next grade because they can’t wait to get them out of their classroom. Disruptive. Rude. Dismissive of requirements. Monday mornings exhausted from a weekend of travel tournaments. No one reads to their children anymore. Parental example: they are never off the phone. These kids can’t construct a sentence. Their handwriting is illegible and frankly most of them simply do not care. Been teaching for almost 20 years. Sorry blame the parents
4
If you want your child to get a good education, you only have 3 choices in America:
1. Go private, or
2. Move to a suburban school district that has good schools, or
3. Get your child into "gifted and talented" classes.
There are no other alternatives.
Any questions, my fellow NYT readers?
5
@Kenneth Johnson, homeschool, or come together with five or six other parents to hire a part-time home tutor. That tutor will get done in three hours a day with six kids what it takes a regular classroom teacher two days. The cost will be a fraction of private school. Then let the kids play outside and go to the library.
3
@Snowball So wish I had done that.
1
Maybe all those "woke" books that are being published and pushed now for children and teens are actually having the opposite effect of inspiring kids to read less, not more.
3
The cause of the decline in quality education at the K-12 level and college: parents and administrators. They terminate teachers and professors that challenge the students and are viewed as abusers. Learning is hard work. But guess what? Students do love to learn. They feel a great sense of self worth when they do. The few students that complain when they are expected to learn ruin it for everyone when their parents harass teachers. Administrators are afraid to lose their jobs if they support teachers who really care about education and are competent. College administrators view students as customers and they don't want their prestigious and highly paid useless positions be taken from them. K-12 and college administrators don't want to hear about problems. And the main problem in schools and colleges is lack of discipline, not technology. However, technology is imposed on teachers and professors because it is a way to keep trouble students quiet. Administrators also help technology corporations sell products and avoid costly lawsuits from parents. We live now in a society that values monetary gain instead of integrity and courage and the development of human intelligence and creativity.
1
No surprises here. Every time there is a budget shortfall in any state or city, the first thing to be cut is education. Teachers leave the profession at alarmingly high rates. With lack of job security and low pay, who came blame them?
It is also no surprise that there has been some improvement in math scores. The rage for ever more STEM education is probably fueling that.
There is no point in emphasizing STEM if kids can't read and write. The two should go together if we want a well-rounded educated person.
1
Perhaps what we are finally seeing is the inevitable result of the constant attacks on professional educators and the teaching profession. The teaching profession in our country is so decimated that 50% of new teachers to the profession are coming from foreign countries. Wonder what our American History test results will look like in a few years?
In the New England town where we live, very diverse and mostly working and middle class, the parents of middle school students protested and signed petitions successfully ending required summer reading programs. There is the answer!
7
This is what the Republican Party is pursuing: raw uneducated voters. Consequently we have a head of the department of education that has never taught. Who reads War And Peace, The Sun Also Rises, The Reivers, Shakespeare's plays, etc. etc. etc.? Certainly not our children. Our movies have become comic books put on the screen because Siddhartha and The Magic Mountain simply have "too many words". I read hundreds of comic books but none lately. My son did give me one on Bertrand Russell that was about 70% accurate in what it presented, and presented about 5% of Russell's biography. I do, however, recommend Russell's three volume autobiography.
Very excited that NY may pass a bill for universal dyslexia screening in Pre-K! Nearly all students can learn to read fluently, but for students with dyslexia, they will need structured literacy (intensive step-by-step phonics) to get there.
Wealthy families of kids with dyslexia just get private tutors to do this work, but many public schools don’t offer the level of intensive and long-running intervention these students need. (It happens in some places but not all—I know because I have middle school students who need this help who have never before received any intervention teaching around it.) Successful adults from wealthy backgrounds often share with me (because I’m a reading specialist) that they have dyslexia and only learned to read because of 2-4 years of private tutoring. They usually remember being told they were dumb and lazy, too. These people have included my husband’s boss at a consulting firm, a casting director I know from the dog park, the best social studies teacher in my school, so many others. Ssuccessful people from all walks of life!
Children learn to read just fine when we teach in the way that works for them. We need to make this kind of help available for all students who need it, regardless of background, through public and charter schools.
If children are raised in an era in which the country's president (judging, at least in part, from his tweets) comes across as barely literate, and is disinclined to read even crucial information about policy, etc., in the country he purportedly "leads," can this really come as a surprise?
I've read comments here from parents who are (justifiably) proud that their children read books (of all things!), but there's no denying that the English language is devolving into social media-friendly "lol's, etc. Even the few remaining traditional news outlets--including, I'm sorry to say, the Times--are rife with unchecked grammatical errors.
Perhaps in the long run it won't matter, as all things must pass (including, perhaps, American democracy). But in my mind it points to a disintegration of our society as a whole. And yes--I blame much of it on social media, which was a nice idea at first but is now disastrous on so many levels.
End rant (for now!).
1
“Over the past decade, there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance, and the lowest performing students are doing worse,”
That is very bad news for a lot of young people in a world that will be increasingly demanding and competitive.
I noted that only Asians students did not have lowered performances. Is there something to be learned from them (their home environments, possibly) by the other groups?
More money is not the answer to all problems, sometimes a little more effort is needed to really understand a problem so as to find possible solutions.
3
May I suggest that parents are mostly to blame? Demand that your kids read. Read to them from birth. Don't hand them a phone so you can shop. I can't count the number of times I have seen toddlers staring at a screen instead of learning about the world around them from adults.
I see the results in my classroom every day: inability to focus on long-term tasks, inability to interact socially, kindergarten-level vocabulary in grade 8, and inability to express oneself via the spoken or written word. I have no idea how these students will function in a demanding workplace where they can't just Google how to solve a real problem.
We have the idiocracy many of us feared.
2
Common Core standards were a public policy disaster.
The research is clear, teachers who differentiate instruction, that is teach to each student at their level as much as possible, have greater academic gains than teachers who teach at a single level.
Common Core dislocated millions of classrooms as district totalitarians demanded that each teacher "teach to the standards".
Minorities, which had been trending up, suffered most severely from this dislocation. The ethnic achievement gap is now at an all-time high.
The Common Core standards also had the effect of throwing classrooms into chaos as teachers' natural rhythm was thrown off by being forced to dramatically change.
These assaults on schools by education culture are just a natural as crude concepts gather steam and then are blasted at the system with big chunks of money.
2
I wonder if anybody has thought to cross-reference this with changes in average income level. Are cities importing professionals seeing stable or rising test scores while those in cities losing professionals seeing diminishing test scores? Something to investigate.
Some thoughts as a statistician. If the talent and makeup of students and the effort of teachers stays exactly the same, we will see 50% of states rise and 50% fall. In a time of demographic change (fewer white people who speak English at home), this results suggests that education is becoming more effective. The headline was worded in such a way that I can’t even quite grasp the negative implication they were apparently striving for.
Here’s a policy change; let’s take our kids’s phone away and read them a real book before bedtime.
THEN we can put basic hardcover reading back into our public schools and some basic civics while we’re at it.
1
Many years ago it was said that Time magazine was for those who can’t think and Life magazine was for those can’t read. Today, with pundits telling everyone what to think and information streamed in a couple of hundred characters, is it any wonder that long format reading (and with it context and logical thought) are disappearing.
Given the scale of the change, is it possible that there is something about the test that changed?
"Someone has got to hold states accountable,” said Jim Cowen, the executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success,"
I have a suggestion. Let the citizens of the states hold their own states' legislature and executive accountable. That's how it's supposed to work. The federal government has no constitutional power to compel states to properly educate their children.
Students will not learn to read as long as they are literally never without a cell phone in their hands. Inordinate screen time is a national emergency.
2
This is easy enough to fix.
1. Ban all computers, ipads, and cell phones in schools k-12.
2. Teach old school phonics, spelling, and handwriting, from early elementary.
3. Have students do traditional book reports, summarizing plots, rather than arcane literary analysis.
4. Have a traditional "English" class that focuses on the skills of reading, spelling, writing, as well as a "fun reading" class where each student gets to read whatever they want and talk about it to the group.
4
This is dismaying- but not surprising. Apparently "Reading" is not all-that Fundamental (RIF). The blame (for the dismal scores) can be shared by almost everyone and everything involved with students: Parents, educators, class sizes; society valuing visuals more than text...
Having spent two decades working with children in school settings; impoverished and wealthy, the heart break of working with otherwise intelligent students- who cannot read, is almost unbearable. Lack of focus on fundamentals like phonics, syllables and meaning- is devastating. I've tutored reading in classes for English Language Learners-filled with native speakers who simply didn't know how to read:
By grade four, children without the basic tools to read and comprehend- seldom catch up. By grade eight, the prospects are catastrophic for those entering high school.
Quite simply, you can learn what you don't understand; you can't understand what you can't read. Forget about teaching every 10 year old how to Code. Teach them how to read (and write) first.
3
Kids who read a lot, read better, just like anything else. What is not like everything else, is that those who read well have at least a chance of learning to think well. Otherwise, one would have to be off-the charts clever to be both functionally illiterate and broadly knowledgeable. I maxed out the standardized reading test in grade school after devouring most of the books in my parents home, so teacher gave me selected contrasting essays from The Federalist Papers for a book report. Today, that would probably be called child abuse, but back then it sent me to the library for the Britannica and a good dictionary. The report was undoubtedly abysmal by even lax middle school standards, but I was proud of it. More importantly, the assignment got me hooked on fine style prose. Whatever ability I have to read something and cut though its hogwash I attribute to long practice of reading lucid idea-laden prose. Just have kids read more, read better stuff if they stomach it, and the rest will follow for a large portion of them.
2
The kid in the picture is reading about baseball. I grew up in Boston avidly following the Red Sox, but I read other stuff. I read all the Dr. Who novels,w hen I was ten. When I was 11, I tried Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky. I didn't understand it, but I knew it was there. I don't think reading a book about baseball players really counts as reading. When I was a kid, we all read The Chronicles or Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, The Dark is Rising, and such books.
Honest question: Do non-white kids read fantasy? Almost all the kids I knew growing up (most Jewish), devoured CS Lewis, Dr. Who, and The Hobbit. We all played D& D and loved stuff about talking animals, dragons, swords, and quests. We didn't even see ourselves as nerds. We all watched and played sports too. My mom took me at see cats at age 9. All alone in the moonlight.
Every kids I knew had read The Lion, the Witch, and The wardrobe. Years later, when I was in English PhD program, we read The Discarded Image by Lewis. It was cool to realize that I had read C S Lewis at age ten and again at age 28.
1
The vast majority of students read about as well as their parents read, and inherit a similar interest in reading. We have a cultural problem. To the extent that school matters, siphoning money away from public schools to fund choice only hurts. Not to mention, No Child Left Behind was a mindless law that showed no understanding of children. These are the results one would expect!
I suspect the best readers are those who were read to (at home) and whose parents valuing reading and books. The worst readers are those who were never read to and whose parents don't read. It has to start there. It has to start in the home. Throwing money at schools to fix something that is supposed to happen at home isn't going to work.
3
I don't think there is a solution.
Whatever the issue, and whatever anyone may suggest, and no matter how thoughtful, well-supported, and well-argued their position, someone else will strenuously object.
And everyone will suspect that all sides are in it for the money.
1
Students suffer from testing fatigue and there isn't much - if any - incentive for kids to do well on the exams. The numbers don't mean much at all.
1
More thoughts from an educator:
The article does not say whether this was the same test that was used previously. When we compare old scores to new ones, are we really comparing apples to apples? Did the old test and new one measure the same aspects of reading? Did the State standards for reading achievement go up or change in some way between the testing episodes in question? I know in my state, the tests and standards have changed 2-3 times in the past 20 years. Often becoming more stringent. Many adults can't pass some of the new tests.
1
When was cursive dropped from educational programs? Any correlation there with dropping reading scores?
When learning how to write cursive, one automatically reads at the same time.
Instead, we have introduced computers and tablets, smartphones became ubiquitous, and kids are spending way more time staring at screens watching videos or game-related animation, all time that they would previously spend reading.
Getting rid of cursive was the biggest uncontrolled experiment that may very negatively influence our civilization that was founded for several hundred years on the need for everyone needing to write cursive.
Guess we will find out where this is taking us.
5
As a speech-language pathologist who has worked in both oral and literate language development and disorders for 40+ years, may I also add that whole language reading programs, e.g., Fountas & Pinnell and Lucy Calkins, and the corporatization of education by publishing companies, has caused significant damage to educational practice and teacher-training. The poor knowledge base that most teachers now have in the primary language of instruction, English, the weak identification and treatment of children's language-learning deficits and the 'dysteachia' causing a significant subgroup of children to fail to learn to read who are not learning disabled, is a crisis in America.
Until be heed the evidence-based research that has proven how we learn to read and why we do not learn to read, in effect, we are practicing science denial. Whole language approaches were sold as appealing programs even though we now have nearly two generations of students disabled by them. Coupled with an over-reliance on technology in the classroom, we can expect scores to continue to fall. We need to follow the grassroots of parents and teachers who are driving effective educational change in states throughout the country.
5
I think we have to acknowledge that many years ago, teaching and nursing were the only professions open to women, with rare exceptions. Gradually that has changed. Now women can pretty much choose anything they are interested in and capable of doing. Gonna have to raise those taxes, and improve teacher ed, too.
1
Parents have to instill in their children a love of reading as soon as they can sit and hold a book in their hands. Children learn from examples. If they see their parents reading, they will read also. Parents should limit the amount of TV time their children use. They should monitor the time their children spend on their computers for educational purposes rather than games and social media. It is not rocket science. It is called intelligent and loving parenting.
5
Everyone here commenting seems to have a specific and technical reason for the test results, - as in nothing has changed, - computer reading and learning is as good as book reading and learning. I observe kids today that work on my farm who don't have the old-fashioned experience in life which begets curiosity and wisdom. Many of the young people who have worked for me over the last 50 years have come back later and thanked me for the school of hard knocks, pinched fingers and sore backs and then followed the simple discipline of good attendance at school and thorough preparation which has provided them with great careers.
2
As we become more diverse, average reading scores will inevitably go down, simply because we have totally failed to close the achievement gap between white kids and their African American and Hispanic counterparts. Virtually no progress in four year high school graduation rates, and steadily worsening score in global comparisons. Until we fix that the quality of our workforce will continue to decline. We will be ever more dependent on better educated immigrants.
Best I can tell no one has a proven solution for this national problem. There have been a few successes but we have been unable to scale those ideas. Charter schools have broadly been a failure. People like Bill Gates have thrown tens of millions at the problem without success. Head Start and pre-K make little difference.
We need to stop being surprised each year that the results decline, that our kids become less globally competitive. It is the inevitable consequence of our demographics and our inability to solve this problem.
Need a breakthrough, a miracle. As the documentary says Superman is not coming.
10
@John Mortonw , learning (and the desire to learn) starts at home, at a young age. Not that the education system doesn't need some kind of major overhaul, but perhaps the "miracle" can start with parents actively encouraging their children to read, write (even just journals), explore the arts, etc.
I'm 57, and as I look back over my life I see that most of what I consider my most important and memorable learning occurred during non-school hours, when I read (voraciously), tried to make drawings of Rembrandt paintings from a book I had around in 6th grade, listened to music often suggested by friends, and just generally explored the world on my own.
And I will always be grateful to my late mother for suggesting I read Kerouac!
9
Reading is crucial to success, we all know that. One culprit not mentioned is Amazon. Amazon competes with bookstores, which we need many more of. Of course we have libraries, as of now; God help us if they disappear. Parents must accept the responsibility of reading books themselves-real books-not on a device, reading books to young children, and taking kids to the library and to bookstores. No digital experience matches a real book, and 6 months of age is not too young to start.
5
I just re-read Fahrenheit 451 on my Kindle and enjoyed the irony of it. The story is the same in digital or print. Get over your digital reading hangups, it is the way of the future.
1
@William Becker
Those of us who read paper books and write fast -- which often means in cursive -- make tons of notes in the margin.
This practice often deepens understanding and makes reading more fun. This is how a book becomes my book.
1
My school district has no professional librarians. The last one retired three years ago and what not replaced. Two schools do not even have a library paraprofessional. I ran reports in our library software last year. Students in our high school checked out only 206 books. That's about one book for every three students.
It isn't just students who aren't reading. I see as many adults doing their primary reading on their phones or with app as I do children. There is some truth to the responses that learning the tests are as big an issue as learning literacy skills. However, students are not digging deeply into literature and often lack the skills to determine the context of what they are reading.
Meanwhile, despite rising graduation rates, colleges and businesses are alarmed at the lack of new students / worker preparation.
2
I think children need to learn to love to read before they are given access to TV and computers. I feel sure there is a learning from reading for enjoyment that is deeper and richer than watching TV or playing video games. This is a family issue. Books must be integral to home life and conversations, a source of pleasure and excitement and interest. Schools can make little headway if families do not value reading.
20
@Mary
I remember how my parents used to talk about which was better, the book or the movie. My mom used to say the book was nearly always better, and was so impressed few times when the movie turned out better.
@Mary
I remember how my parents used to talk about which was better, the book or the movie. My mom used to say the book was nearly always better, and was so impressed the few times the movie turned out better.
I think kids read more then adults realize. Ask a kid about say Minecraft and listen to them talk. A lot of them will talk about strategies and plans and all sorts of complex ideas. Some of that is YouTube. A lot of it is reading guides and books and strategy magazines.
Ask a teenager about Overwatch Lore. That's all reading. It's not High Brow Literature. But kids will be alright.
2
@Eli
More then adults? Or more than adults?
(And which adults?)
These fourth and eighth graders have a president who struggles with English. Great example for them.
32
It's going to be hard to pull data out of this one, I think. Who goes to charter schools? If a student, say, has to be academically gifted to get into one, the charter school's performance would be higher regardless.
It pains me to say, but maybe DeVoss is right. Or maybe she's not seeing the whole picture.
I still think it makes the best sense to look at the world's #1 performing schools (Finland, I think it is) and just do what they do. That would be the easy route.
3
@Andrew
Finland is highly rated. However there are things to know about them that differentiate them for the US.
Finland has a very homogenous population and a tradition of parents being very involved, willing to pay much higher taxes for education and other government services. All citizens are supportive of schools for the good of the general economy (businesses need well educated and skilled workers) and so for the future of the nation.
9
Teachers in Finland are very highly laid and respected as well.
@Si Seulement Voltaire
"Homogeneity" isn't an advantage, unless what you mean is wide agreement about the value of literacy, and the need to recruit the most academically accomplished students to become teachers.
Another goal of the Trump Administration has been reached.
20
If I remember correctly, there is a direct correlation between the verbal skills of classroom teachers and the performance of their students. With teacher salaries declining in real dollars and class sizes increasing, could it be that teaching is not attracting high performaning college students, especially in those districts with high levels of poverty and unemployment? Why not call Decks on her claim that throwing money at the problem won't solve it. Didn't throwing at her own life improve its quality? So let's throw some serious money at raising teacher salaries and raising communities out of poverty with better paying jobs. Let's just see what happens!
d
11
26 years teaching public high school-- I see that kids are highly distracted by the digital technology they carry with them AND that which is provided. many kids think googling a topic is work...their "phone" has become an extension of their being-and it is sapping the life out of them, as they struggle to interact face to face with each other and teachers. It doesn't help that parents constantly text and call their children during class -?- And instant electronic notices of grade updates can cause a variety of reactions in the classroom in real-time. Any questions? Ask your child~
26
Agreed. The data correlates with the advent of constant and ubiquitous use of technology. They (we, all of us) have become acclimated to reading shorter works and their (our) need for instant information that is short (and not necessarily correct), has taken the place of reading for pleasure and gathering information from various, worthwhile sources. A Youtube video is deemed worthy simply by the number of likes it gets. Yes, I have students who still love to read but they are very often females. Very difficult to get a young male to read.
8
I would argue that any reading tests need to test digital reading skills like browsing, scanning and so forth.
Families need to be involved, from the beginning. Parental involvement in education is the best way for success. And what are the children reading? I preferred reading Kurt Vonnegut in high school, rather than Shakespeare. Get kids to read anything of interest to them.
11
2009 was when the trend started turning down. That was the year that No Child Left Behind, which placed a huge emphasis on basic reading and writing, was watered down at the behest or the teachers unions that had backed Obama. Education funding wasn’t cut until 2011 due to the much needed stimulus package. Note that all of the negative reactions to this common sense post will be from those politicized by teachers unions.
3
What is even more scary about this continued decline in American education, is that fact that will only get worse. An interest in learning and pursuit of knowledge is essential to basic education. As AI and other "smart" tools become main streamed into American life so also will the need for actual knowledge decline. Why do I need to know the meaning of a word or phrase, when I can Google it? Why should I do homework or write a term paper, when Alexa can provide all the information I need? Then there are the many unqualified teachers and their collaborating Unions inflating grades and test scores, to ensure job security.
There is a major crisis in American basic education systems. The decline may be irreversible and we must all be concerned.
4
Having had direct exposure to phonics-based reading instruction, and also several years as a college level visiting lecturer in writing, I feel qualified to state the the young in this country don’t read or write anywhere near to the level needed for basic literacy. One reflection of this, as any HR professional can tell you, is the shockingly low level of spelling prowess.
So, what are they doing in lieu of reading, writing and arithmetic?
Talking and texting on their phones and watching or playing video games or posting on Instagram.
Many college students I taught did not know how to write their own names in script. Penmanship is no longer widely taught.
All of these indicators, taken together, paint a portrait of a society that is severely under-educated, at just the time when a democracy needs informed voters as never before.
The culprits in this issue are state legislatures that in many states have cut public school funding to shockingly low levels, while boosting spending on charter and private schools. Lawmakers, notably in red states, have all but abandoned public school education. Last I recall, that probably their most important responsibility, after good roads.
How did this nation, or a sizable chunk of it, go so far off the rails?
15
Students rely on spell check. I can’t believe the low level of literacy I see every day in my very high achieving high school.
1
Our lack of serious investment in public education is on display for the world to see; our children’s skills are declining, our teachers are not paid what they’re worth, our classes are overcrowded, and in all but the highest-taxed areas public schools are so resource-poor we may as well be a developing nation. We are creating yet another generation of students who lack the critical-thinking skills to identify propaganda—and look where that ended in 2016. As a nation, our lack of will to maintain quality pubic education for all children is mind-boggling. Are we TRYING to create a permanent underclass?
7
@PG absolutely. There are huge industries and government funding dedicated to the creation of an underclass. Generally, the less government funding people get in the USA, the higher their test scores and the longer their lifespan. I know dozens of people who arrived in the country with nothing and are millionaires now. These people got up early each day and avoided being trapped by the poverty mentality, which is a cancer. The people I mention are of all races and all genders.
1
@PG absolutely. There are huge industries and government funding dedicated to the creation of an underclass. Generally, the less government funding people get in the USA, the higher their test scores and the longer their lifespan. I know dozens of people who arrived in the country with nothing and are millionaires now. These people got up early each day and avoided being trapped by the poverty mentality, which is a cancer. The people I mention are of all races and all genders.
@rjs7777
I don't believe you know "dozens of [such] people."
As for "government funding," universal health care in the developed world has done more than any other initiative, public or private, to increase life expectancy. You also see a marked increase here, once people qualify for Medicare. Programs that exist for all work very well.
1
Well, many states have been defunding public education for decades...what do you expect? Where are early childhood, after school and summer programs? What happened to RIF? We've got 8 and 9 year old's talking state exams that last as long as college boards...go figure. And just maybe some legislators need to understand that testing is not teaching.
7
I'll say this in less than 280 characters:
This isn't about Common Core, Betsy DeVos, or Trump. The culprit is texting and Twitter - oh, and not to mention emojis.
IMHO (sorry, but you see my point), If you think these haven't taken a huge toll in reading proficiency you're kidding yourself.
10
These statistics come from the Donnie Bone-Spurs administration? And we're supposed to trust them?
4
People read if what they read is interesting. I believe reading and writing has been harmed by strait-jacket curricula that force children to read arbitrary passages of no interest to the child and then answer questions about them. Likewise, much writing has been forced into artificial structural patterns that do not allow children to follow their own thoughts as they write. Reading and writing become lifeless burdens, and kids run away from them. (Note my Oxford comma.)
3
@Ro Mason
I'm grateful I was forced to read arbitrary passages of no interest to me as a child. It stretched my mind and helped me become a better thinker. I'm also grateful I was assigned summer reading lists (even though I remember having a meltdown the summer before 9th grade trying to comprehend and get through "Jane Eyre"). Amazing how those summer books opened up so many worlds outside of my own little world -- a world where there we no books in our house and our family never took vacations or even trips to the library. For me, reading never became a "lifeless burden." Rather, I simply understood that, as with all things in life, sometimes you have to do things you're not keen on (e.g. go to school) and sometimes you can do what you want (e.g. read Nancy Drew).
7
It’s called “Trickle Down Education “. When the president (not capitalized) refuses to read and is not interested in learning, knowledge or education (unless it involves name-dropping a school his dad bought him in to) and speaks like a Bowery Boy, the world will follow. Eight years ago, I told my wife that the iPad, iPhone and their ilk would be remembered as either the greatest or the worst gift to education. I’m afraid it’s the latter....
9
No surprise to me. Parents and Public schools are to blame. You must read for pleasure to develop strong reading comprehension skills. That is the job of a parent to instill a love of reading. I would recommend “How to Raise a Reader”.
The public schools do not require enough books to be read per year. I recall my shock when our local middle school required about 6 books to be read all year in English class. The author of “Readicide” described this public school problem: Spending 6-8 weeks on Romeo and Juliet with a 100 page teacher guide as a recipe for killing a love of reading in a student. I agree.
Why can I be so opinionated? I tutor high school juniors for the SAT and ACT and see first hand the decline of superb reading skills among the students over the last 15 years.
If you aren’t an experienced strong reader, you’ll never be a great writer.
6
In 8th grade (private), we read Wuthering heights, Romeo and Juliet, and Trinity by Leon Uris. In 9th grade, we read The Nick Adams Stories, The Great Gatsby, and 1984. Does that seem advanced, by current standards?
To my mind, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a badly written novel. It might be an important novel to read, but it is not an example of good writing or good grammar.
10
Easy to know why. Kids are only being taught to become social justice warriors.
8
Timed tests are set up to produce a bell curve, not to see how someone would do with a problem in the real world where rushing is not the goal. Yes, I know about factor analysis, weighting, distractors and so forth. But none of that assumes a timed tests measures anything but how fast you can race through a reading assignment.
3
Firstly, even though a national decline in eighth-grade average reading score is clearly not desirable, having no other statistics presented to characterize the decline is misleading and inconclusive. The average does not tell you how the scores were distributed by geography, economics, and perhaps most importantly, money allocated per student. It doesn't tell you whether California is doing better than Alabama, or whether Miami is doing better than Jacksonville. There could be a small number of schools responsible for very large declines, or broad declines across a much larger group. What we do know is that after the economic collapse of 2008, many state governments fell under republican control, and almost across the board, budgets for education were cut. Florida, my home state, had this exact situation occur. According to the Florida 2007-2008 budget, per-pupil spending for public schools averaged to $7,126.00. When Rick Scott was elected, the per-pupil average spending was reduced every year until the low point of $6,217.00 in the 2011-2012 years. almost a 20% decline. Those students beginning public school in that year would now be in 8th grade. Funding was increased very slowly from 2012 onward until finally returning to the 2007-2008 levels in 2016 - 2017 budget. What we already know is that refusing to fund public schools adequately never produces better education.
8
By and large, my grade nine students - who were so recently grade eight students - do not read. They watch celebrity YouTubers and spend endless hours Snapchatting. Even the brightest, most skilled thinkers and writers read very little. I did an informal hands-up survey to ask my students who reads outside of school time; an average of four students per class put up their hands. That is four out of twenty seven or twenty eight learners. I have seen the interest in reading decline markedly in the past several years. All the while, we are fighting the addictive, seductive siren call of the devices in their pockets. Although their phones get dropped in a basket at the door as my students enter, the rush to collect them at the end of class to catch up on social media is indicative of what is really important to them.
20
Oh, is Kansas spending more money on education now then in 2009? Maybe a state by state chart showing spending from 2009 to latest year available would demonstrate if we're just throwing money at schools and education.
Money does play a part. Teacher salary,student to teacher ratio,faculty turnover, facility and technology updates are all a part of the problem and solution.
And a Manhattan Project on curriculum. What really works. Kids can and are able to learn. Presenting them with the tools is a societal requirement.
4
I have taught for many years. I enjoy reading cognitive science and neuroscience books. In recent years, we are forced to teach in methods that directly go against what the science shows is how our brains learn well. The failing methods are all done to match the tests, which we do almost endlessly now throughout the year. Other highly successful countries, such as our neighbor to the north Canada, look at the science and design education based on that. Most of what we are told to do has never been supported by evidence. Many people in cognitive science and some universities such as Stanford have been warning of our methods for years.
17
@Tim I agree! Here's an example: the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) prescribe inquiry-learning. Yet an impressive body of research shows grave weaknesses in the inquiry approach and also shows why, in light of new understandings of how the brain works, it cannot work (http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/vtt/Constructivism_Kirschner_Sweller_Clark_EP_06.pdf). This is a scandal, especially since NGSS is being implemented in virtually every school in the country right now. Sadly many so-called education experts are woefully ignorant of the relevant scholarship.
So has anyone looked into the test itself? I have been a voracious reader since I was very young. I read all the time. When I took my basic skills test to secure my teaching license, I struggled with the Math portion (not at all my content area), guessing on most of the algebra and geometry sections. I was certain I would fail.
When I got my scores back, I had passed Math with a minimum score (by guessing), but also got a minimum score on Reading!The essay I wrote did not pass, and I had to pay the money to take the writing portion a second time. It made no sense at all.
Maybe it’s the tests?
Accountability for the testing industry!
4
Question the validity of all standardized testing and certainly those demanded by politicians.
This is a strictly politically motivated bubble testing with questionable results that are meaningless.
Despite all of the Draconian measures of the past 35 years to attack "government schools" both by defunding them, demanding bubble tests and deprofessionalizing teachers public schools have survived and so have teachers' unions. This enrages the RIGHT, Betsy DeVos et. al.
These tests measure the inconsequential and reveal how we now have politicians dictating what goes on in the classroom.
Enough.
I'm with the unions and Bernie: traditional, community based public schools, well funded and staffed by professionals.
Forget the bubble tests. Diagnositic tests are great for the determining disabilities but standardized tests MEAN nothing and do not measure true learning at all.
It's a political football nothing more.
6
Kids not reading like they use to- must be schools' fault. It is always easiest to blame what's closest to the concern. My teacher colleagues talk about kids coming into kindergarten truly great at swiping screens and not knowing how to turn a page. Some of them talk about the future post-literate society and what that might mean for their teaching. A college leader at a local university encourages all written materials for students to be set out in short digestible chunks- like the kind of texts students read all day long on their phones. Libraries have become defacto shelters for the homeless. And the problem with reading scores is that schools are doing a poor job? What's proximal is not necessarily the cause.
4
I may have a different perspective on this.
In the past I have written technical documentation, with documents usually running 60 to 100 8.5x11 pages. I wanted to ensure that those documents were as effective as possible so I did research before starting. The recommendations from American publications at the time were that documents should be written to a grade 6 to 8 reading level - and this was for readers with a college or university background.
What this meant was: short sentences, short paragraphs and do not use long or specialized words if at all possible. It was hard work writing technical documents to meet those requirements.
At that time things were about the same here in Canada in terms of reading capabilities. I do not know if things are better or worse now. When I went to high school in Ontario in the 1960's we spent a couple of years doing exercises and tests to improve reading skills. Somehow I suspect that is no longer the case.
2
L.A. Unified has over +835,000 students {K-12} enrolled and an annual operating budget of $23.5 billion- that's over 10% of California's state budget. 65% Latino students and English is their second language. LA Unified has some of the lowest test scores and highest truancy rate in the nation. The district looses $10 million dollars a day because of unexcused absences. The teachers are underpaid, class sizes are too large- the buildings are old, not enough counselors and nurses, usually 1 janitor per school... Security is non-existent..
And what do the liberals want to do? Add thousands more undocumented and asylum seeker children to a system that can barely function as is...
Enough is enough!
12
We “liberals” also want funding for basic social services in these exact communities to stop toxic stress on children that result in physical damage to the prefrontal cortex. If this were in place, the school systems could handle immigrant children just as it did when my grandparents immigrated here.
It’s not the immigrants, it’s disproportionate funding in this country. American communities that have been neglected for decades. Children from these communities are born into a disadvantage. It’s heartbreaking to see the effects on a daily basis in classrooms across this country. We could and should be so much better than this.
8
Turn off the screens and read a GD book..
Most Americans no longer read and the Novel itself has been abandoned by most Men readers..
No wonder the U.S. has slipped down in education..
The flyover States especially are poorly educated and don’t support Libraries..
7
Another sign that America is going down the tubes....
4
Whatever happened to Teach for America?
Teach for America still exists, placing young people with great intentions but minimal pedagogical training or cultural understanding of their students into classrooms to teach students with significant developmental gaps in literacy, numeracy, and social emotional learning. It’s a recipe for disaster and high burnout rates. This program fills the gaps of school systems that are not able to hire and retain teachers in part due to abominably low salaries.
15
OK...what is the red state/blue state breakdown comparison? America needs to know.
6
@Diogenes Look at the report card - it's all there. And blue states do little to no better than red. The scores are abysmal all around. www.nationsreportcard.gov
5
The GOP knows that in order to stay in power they need voters who are stupid and uninformed. That's why every Republican controlled legislature slashes public education funding every chance they get. That's why they kill school lunch programs every chance they get. And it's why they only support overpriced elitist schools that will inevitably raise the next generation of privileged, self-absorbed, consequence free, whining, arrogant snobs like Brett Kavanaugh.
The GOP knows that if the citizens of this country were well educated, they would never win another election - period. And that's why they do everything in their power to make sure that people cannot get the kind of education that would relegate Republicans to the dustbin of history.
When it comes to brains, the GOP considers Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter to be brilliant, and Donald Trump a "genius". What more needs to be said.
22
Who needs to read anyway when there’s a podcast or You Tube video with sound for everything? If not Siri will read it for you. It’s like reading that check writing is down, duh.
3
All this education stuff is overrated...
I doubt Trump reads at the 5th grade level and he's a billionaire and President of the United State.
You don't need an education... You just need your parents to leave you $200 million and you are all set.
Devos is also a billionaire... How did she get to be a billionaire? Her daddy was a billionaire...
Like I said, you don't need an education, you just need uber wealthy parents.
But, strangely, the Republicans have no plan for giving us all billionaire parents?
But they are very good at cutting taxes for the uber wealthy. :)
18
Tell us the states that had declines please, is it any wondering with DeVos in charge, dumbing down America
7
Its ALL about socio economics. POVERTY!!!
Add for profit , unregulated religious and charter schools.
The coup de grace, Betsey DeVos ,( complements of the Republican trump sycophants ), our children and our nation are doomed.
11
@PJ Poverty is a major factor, but effective, evidence-based instruction is a leveler. Unfortunately not enough schools are using science-aligned teaching approaches. Text book companies put out curricula with all the right buzzwords, but lacking a grounding in how the brain actually learns. Wealthier families have the resources to pay for tutoring or other outside help. Poorer families have to rely on the schools, and the schools are letting students down by investing in ineffective curricula and teaching methods. It's sad.
1
Even the president doesn’t read. Why should I?
4
Byproduct of Humanities Professor constantly, hatefully discouraging students reading anything written by "cis gendered dead white males".
3
Yes...all of those humanities college professors teaching those fourth and eighth graders...
1
@Kate Drinian
Absolutely: grammar school “teachers” indoctrinated by “woke” education Professors congenitally biased against straight white male literary giants—especially Hemingway.
1
Congratulations Mrs DeVos, your "Keep America Stupid" campaign is working..that should provide a wealth of people you can misinform and scare in voting for conservative candidates
7
Republican policy: keep them poor, keep them dumb, keep them sick, keep them harried, keep them watching Fox News, so they’ll keep voting Republican.
14
Idiocracy is not far away. The trump adorers are living in it right now.
16
Well, with the college entry 'bribery' scandal still in the news, one would think that parents know that education--see reading-- is not an option. I don't even remember how I learned to read---I'm terrible at phonics---but Thank You to my jr high school librarian who gave Mrs. Mike to the wandering child during study hall hour. I rocketed off and never looked back.
Oh, and what I looked up on the internet is that IQs have fallen across the globe.
1
It's not clear how to interpret this article and sharp journalism could help a lot more. How should a reader interpret, say, a 3 point drop? How confident can we be that the tests across years are equivalent measurements? Without these assessments, the reader (and therefore the nation, given the prominence of NYT) is lost.
5
DeVos statement attempts to transfer blame to parents, most of which are struggling to hang on. Everyday people need to work multiple jobs in this so-called "ownership society", leaving little time for their kids and reading. Isn't Republican capitalism wonderful?
DeVos needs to crack open her own report card and realize that this failure is her own.
7
Shocking news! Do kids even read today? Anything at all? We had a summer reading list when I was in school - book reports, tested on the books to make sure we read them. Do kids today even know who Charles Dickens is? I doubt it. If you can get the heads out of the phones and require kids to start reading real books then maybe they will learn to read. And then when you throw a few million illegal immigrants into the mix you dumb down education at every level. This is what we have today. Kids can't read because they don't want to and no one is making them learn. Money won't fix this.
3
Great job, DeVos! If enough Americans become as ignorant as you and your boss, you'll be able to rip off the country as much as you and your cabal want. I would bet the sane result are happening in STEM areas too.
It's all about CRITICAL THINKING. Those who do not/cannot read are doomed to failure because they have limited exposure to language and thoughts, Look at Trump for example - he's an ignoramus, as are his children.
OUR public schools are charged with educating our children; they are not doing a satisfactory job. YOU are not helping at all and need to quit. Private schools are not the answer, except to breed a two-class society that like of the 15th Century. THAT is not what this country stands for.
8
I can assure you that if reading tests included content on Kim Kardashian or LeBron James, you would see that kids read just fine.
5
“We can neither excuse them away, nor simply throw more money at the problem,” she said.
Predictably, Betsy DeVos is advocating taking more funds away from historically underprivileged American students, just as she has with her heinous student loans program. She should resign and renounce the white nationalist policy she is subtly but surely injecting into American public education.
5
We need to stop taking money away from public schools and giving them to private or charter schools. If you want to go to Brebuf or Central Catholic or whatever - you can pay for it or you can go to your local public school! This is also causing SEGREGATION. If you don't go to school with everyone, you will continue to think these people are different from you.
DeVos needs to go as well. And Pence. He destroyed the public schools in Indiana.
5
Your kids are not representative of the nation. You just fell victim to the fallacy of a non-representative sample, a common logical mistake. But a mistake nonetheless, like the appointment of Betsy DeVos, almost the least qualified person one could imagine for the job.
3
Why do we never ever hear about scores of parochial. Or private schools, or home schooled? Can anyone answer that.
4
Encouraging news for growing the GOP base!
4
Well it seems at least the Asians are not falling behind. Take it from this Asian American parent. Common core is not how you teach small kids. It's like teaching someone music by having them play and interpret Bach before they even learned their scales. No one learns to be a master musician without rote playing. No one masters math and English without a modicum of rote learning.
The secret at least from this Asian parent is rote learning works, you need a foundation before you can move away from rote learning.
Math, reading and writing just like music one can't become great at it if you don't have the muscle memory. I just never get the war on rote learning. It is necessary, it is foundational. We Asian Americans are spending massive amount just to send our kids to tutors just so they can get some rote learning in to supplement Common Core.
14
I agree that the vilification of rote learning has hurt education. I think too much emphasis used to be placed on rote learning at the expense of making learning a joy, but the pendulum has gone much too far the other way. The “advanced” kids— those is gifted programs and on the AP and Honors class track — can’t do quick multiplication because they didn’t spend enough time on multiplication tables, and they don’t know grammar because heaven forbid they suffer from a few lessons in diagraming sentences.
1
No mention of the increased use of screens and “video” story telling over reading. No wonder kids are struggling with literacy....
3
Great news for Betsy DeVos who no doubt is already planning how to scam millions of Americans with for-profit schools and no relief for student debt.
And even better news for Donald Trump who "loves the poorly educated".
That's called "winning!"
4
This article provides the very reason why the HB1 visa for foreign workers should never be abolished.
Travel to China , Japan or South Korea and you’ll be amazed at the the academic brilliance of some of their secondary school students .
Until Americans start taking education seriously and stop using this important human right as political football nothing will change.
This article should be a wake up call to every parent in this country.
It’s time to seriously think out the proverbial box . Perhaps a return to basics and learning the 3 Rs . Teaching history and geography as separate subjects as well as innovative ways to learn a foreign language.
High School should be a place of learning not a fashion house or dating game with sports thrown in for the xtra measure.
Americans should also wonder why it is, many around the world continue to think that most Americans are ‘dumb and stupid.’
4
Replicating various Asian studing methods; involved two parent intact nuclear families; negligible violent crime rates equalling continuing academic success.
4
Betsy DeVos says we can't "simply throw money at the problem." I agree. We should be throwing money at the TEACHERS.
4
Just another step in making America Great Again.
3
With people like Andy Tuck, Chair of the Florida Board of Education and a staunch evolution denier, helping shape our states' curricula and our children's minds is it any wonder that progress is slow, stalled, or reversed?
8
This is the stark outcome of the relentless assault on public schools by the charlatan privatizers. It is time to fully fund public education again and restore this important pillar of democracy.
8
Reading scores will continue to tank as long as teaching continues to be de-professionalized. You reap what you sow.
5
We have a commander in chief who proudly boasts of not reading- "I have people who that for me." So apparently the trickle down in now in place and when 'Merica is great again one won't need to read because we'll outsource it. (And not pay a living wage but that's a math issue, isn't it?)
6
Betsy DeVos is not a good advocate. The President is a bad role model. 140/280 characters is a very low common denominator. Millions of video clips to watch. And kids are hungry and at risk.
Wonder why reading scores are faltering.
2
The point this report card makes clear to me is we need a new Education Secretary, preferably one that can read their own report card. The report card clearly demonstrates test scores going up across the board until Ms. DeVos is appointed to her cabinet post.
Only in the Trump administration could someone be appointed to lead an organization, publish a report demonstrating their policies aren't working and spin that to the press to encourage more investment in their failed policies.
Shame on the NYTimes for not analyzing the report card themselves, though I do appreciate that they actually reference it. This headline should read, "Betsy DeVos gives herself an F and a pat on the back."
5
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/
While reading the comments, I notice much blame for charter schools, but if you look at the report card you will see that charters are included in the results, as are other nonpublic schools. It's a fascinating and alarming perusal on which I wasted too much time today. All sub-groups of children have shown declines, except for Asians, and the much touted success of white students isn't all it's cracked up to be - they're also failing to test proficient in large numbers. The most alarming thing to me is nearly 1/3 of all students are scoring below basic, which I learned from my time in the classroom means barely literate.
Money may play a role here, but this is more than a money problem.
6
Proof positive that our worst nightmares are coming true.
1
With a nearly illiterate President in the White House, who tweets his ineptitude daily why should kids bother to learn to read rather than follow Trump's lead? He is supposedly a "stable genius" after all--who can barely read and write coherent sentences. His supporters obviously don't believe in reading either-- because a quick glance at the Constitution would reveal the obvious reasons for these impeachment hearings that he and they believe is a "witch hunt".
3
Betsy claims “we shouldn’t throw money at the problem”? Is she serious?
Okay, Bets, we’ll pray away this issue.
Put more money in the schools! What else is going to work?
4
I’m modeling the President*, and he doesn’t like reading.
Perhaps our youth are inspired by the President and seek to emulate him.
Who reads when you can use your phones? Our students even before the electronic revolution were on their way to ignorance and bliss.
I tried to get through the article but I got confused. Something about how the need for more tests?
1
As a reading specialist, I have first-hand experience with this topic. I notice several factors that can explain this decline:
** The proliferation of graphic novels. Students "think" they're reading, but they are being misled. Most students miss opportunities to envision, infer, and use of language beyond a basic conversional level. It's fine to occasionally choose a graphic novel, but not exclusively. The growth of graphic novels portends what can happen to reading skills, as indicated by this study.
** Weak language environments at home. No one has time to sit around the table discussing in-depth concepts anymore, or get involved in the student's schoolwork when there are so many more tugs for time. Both parents are working and their children spend too much time on their phone or battling on videos.
** Curriculums expect too much and teachers are stressed. We need to go back to the basics again, starting with phonics and grammar, and build from there.
** Teacher training: it shouldn't be about popularity or fulfilling a quota or even tenure to decide who gets hired or stays in the classroom. If the teacher is making a difference with EACH AND EVERY child, then great. Are teachers willing to spend more time if a child needs help (even the quiet ones)? Clearly, this study shows that too many students need support and are not getting it.
9
Could academic literacy in primary and secondary education have anything to do with the fact that the child poverty rate in the US is the highest in the industrialized world? Naaah....
4
Should we be surprised?
We have a President who does not read his intelligence briefings, except and unless the information is reduced to bullet points on notecards.
We have a President incapable of reading a speech, who instead, goes on emotional stream of consciousness rants that are completely unconnected to currents events except for the committee inside his head needing praise.
7
In 2017, New York State Board of Regents eliminated the requirement that would-be teachers pass the Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST). (In 2014, the last year that results were toted up and published, it was found that 64% of white candidates passed the test on first try, while 46% of Hispanic and 41% of Black candidates did.) The then Dean of Hunter College School of Education said that eliminating the ALST was appropriate because, "We already know that our licensure candidates have a bachelor's degree which, in my mind, means that they have basic literacy and communications skills." I never got to ask him, "If they already have the skills, how is it that they can't pass a simple literacy test?" (I took that test and aced it, by the way.)
If no one cares that teachers aren't solidly literate, why would anyone fuss about the students' scores?
8
Uhhhhh. “Simply throwing more money at the problem” is exactly the solution. More money = smaller classes, more individual help, access to books, better libraries staffed with librarians, etc, etc, etc.
5
I don’t think that we as a nation actually want to solve this problem. Good education teaches people how to think, and people who can think question Republican lies and religious dogma. They question paying $70K+ for a year for a private college and $30K+ for a public university with administrative bloat, that requires 5 years to finish because of overcrowding. That kind of thing.
Beyond that, it’s a complicated problem, and we’re not exactly known for thinking about subtleties in this country.
3
The world's democratic industrial nations the US is the only one without a national education policy. Leaving education up to local school districts is persistent inanity.
3
Hopefully it will lead to teaching, rather than teaching testing. The Republicans own this mess.
2
If Washington is the exception and doing better then look at what is or isn't happening there.
I wouldn't read too much into it. I know of millionaires who were not that good at reading and writing and have made lots of contributions to society and it hasn't held them back in life; and they left school at 15 years old. Some kids prefer reading comics to books! And are not academically inclined. Rather be outside searching for scrap metal at the dump they can sell for pocket money! lol! (That was before computers were invented.)
Also, when you get new immigrants into your nation and both parents don't speak English in the home, that affects a childs learning, and probably holds back he rest of the class while they're struggling at school.
Social media probably is a major distraction for kids these days, something us oldies didn't have to contend with growing up. More time on social media = less time reading or learning life skills.
Some USA libraries have homework help online - maybe that's what's happening in Washington. Or there are more parents in Washington that speak English in the home. Lots of kids read e-books today. Also, I grew up with British English and now I'm on the internet and have Microsoft my English is set at American English and my spelling has got worse.
1
Kids with intelligent and caring and economically viable parents have the whole world of possibilities at their feet in a dynamic and challenging world.
The other half will drown in a dystopia of hopelessness and self inflicted wounds -NO chance at fulfillment and happiness.
We can either apply the kind of resources available to better off helicoptor parents -deal with poverty - OR continue our slide into a nation starkly divided between mental haves and have nots:
With all that portendsfor us ALL!
1
How many points OUT OF HOW MANY? Did lowest decile lose one point out of five or five hundred or what?
Asking for a friend
For some reason, I don’t have a lot of confidence into Betsy DeVos. How will Republicans win elections in the future if the reading scores go up?
Stop foisting scripted cookie cutter lessons on teachers and let them teach! Teachers have been stripped of their power to execute professional judgement. Classroom teachers have been telling us our nation’s educational reform efforts have been moving schools in the wrong direction. No one has been listening.
It’s not that complicated. Research tells us the biggest factor in student success is having a qualified teacher in the classroom. Why tie their hands behind their backs? In truth it’s worse than that. We tie teachers’ hands behind their backs, and then belittle their efforts. Even great teachers find it difficult to create magic out of bad scripts!
When us parents were screaming bloody murder about Common Core, this is what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said To address our concerns:
“ It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from sort of white suburban moms who, all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, their schools aren't quite as good as they thought they were. And that's pretty scary.”
It turns out after all that we were right and Mr Duncan wasn’t as brilliant as he thought he was.
2
Awesome! Let’s do the logical thing and cut public school funding. That’ll incentivize improvement! Right?
Right?
2
[ In a statement, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who is championing a $5 billion school choice program, said that the results “must be America’s wake-up call.”]
Secretary DeVos is correct. Americans must recognize that siphoning off the top students from the public sector into the private sector causes the remaining students to appear worse.
1
“We can neither excuse them away, nor simply throw more money at the problem,” (Betsy Devos) said.
What she means is putting more money into America's public schools, our tax public funds supporting public education for the public good.
No, Betsy Devos would be happy to throw money at private charter or religious schools. You know, public funds going into private profits or church coffers. She has been doing her best to destroy public schools since she became Secretary of Education in the Trump regime.
The anti government billionaire cabal. They hate big government, but they love a big government contract!
5
Ignorance is not bliss. It's ignorance. Reading ability is the ONLY avenue out of ignorance. Our founders and their best students of history understood this. We must, too.
5
The loss of school libraries and Certificated School Librarians is a huge factor in the decline. Fund school libraries and qualified library staff for a start. Also, this was bound to happen and will continue to get worse when kids spend most of their spare time surfing YouTube and watching useless content.
2
Why did we not care to limit availability of technology to kids under the age of 18? Or disallow it? It's not too late.
Why is it always described as "throwing money"? That's an intentionally misleading phrase having no actual precedence. It's simply another way to justify parsimony.
You want better curriculum? It costs money. You want more teachers? That costs money. You want schools to provide more services for students and families? You get the idea.
Teachers are already doing vastly more in their days than they did just a decade ago because our understanding of what children really need keeps growing, and teachers have taken on more quasi-parental responsibilities. We feed them, heal their wounds, protect them from danger, bolster their emotional well-being. Oh, yes and we prepare their minds for academic demands and challenge their desire for immediate gratification. Among all this, it's no wonder the NAEP is often dismissed as another buzzing fly of distant, irrelevant demands made by faceless bureaucrats. You want high reading scores or low suicide rates? Doing both takes more work than society seems to be willing to offer.
2
I agree that the charter system should be “slowed.” I wish the whole mess could be abolished. I know of charters that are run as religious schools — established by evangelicals and run by them. Operating with misappropriated public money. (And I know of one ostensibly religious charter school leader who embezzled those funds, and was caught.)
I think the reasons reading skills are declining are complex enough that throwing money at the low performing schools won’t fix it. I know from volunteering as a tutor that most parents are not reading to or with their young children at home (nor are they required to participate in their kids’ tutoring programs). If they do read bedtime stories to their little ones, once the children enter school they leave this teaching to the teachers. Parents are not buying books or periodicals, or borrowing books from the library. In many homes, there is no reading material lying around! I developed my love of reading by sitting with my parents and asking them to help me understand the words in their books. I studied magazines and newspapers found in my home. I pulled books from the shelves. We had encyclopedias, and an enormous dictionary. I was taken to the library. Now that children have cell phones and tablets, they often read no more than a couple sentences at a stretch (Harry Potter books notwithstanding). This destroys reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is a skill based in patience. Our “now” culture does not foster patience.
2
This outcome isn't exactly a surprise. It's exactly the result which the tests were intended to generate.
The "for-profit" education industry has been trying to undermine the public education system for decades. The current Secretary of Education is nothing but a mouthpiece for that industry. It's like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop, and then wondering why the hens are disappearing.
3
Maybe the parents should be more involved in their kids.
Instead of giving them a cell phone, give them a book.
Also, more money is spent on ESL for people in our country without permission and remedial classes for them, as well as other foreigners, than is spent on our kids.
Just an observation.
3
Do you ever wonder whether rich people like Betsy DeVos follow their own advice and don't just "throw money" at their own children's education? Well, don't think too long about it. You can be absolutely sure that wealthy parents do indeed spend more, much more, on their own children's educations. They don't apply the same standard to others, though. For poorer children, the answer has to be cheap or it'll never please DeVos or others of her wealthy class.
2
I knew my zoned public school was a loss when the local men's club made a big to-do of their new annual tradition: donating a dictionary to each third grader. What kind of 'school' refuses to provide dictionaries for student use? Not even one per classroom. 1984 is here.
When I taught as an adjunct at a large university in the journalism school none of my 300+ students ever read by their own admition (even those in the journalism school). After reading their terrible papers it was apparent none ever read much of anything. I cannot image how much worse this has gotten since then (15 years ago). It's so sad. Kids don't read anything. How do you expect them to be decent writers? We don't teach the basics anymore - reading, writing and math. America is far behind the rest of the world in education and fall further behind. Until we start to value education like they do in other parts of the world we will continue to decline.
of course the change should be severe restriction of everything but books.
1. We need national standards for K-12 education, rather than a patchwork quilt of craziness. A high school diploma from North Carolina should represent the same level of achievement and exposure to topics as one from North Dakota.
2. We need to pay classroom teachers, and respect them for the dedicated professionals they are, and the value to our society they bring every day.
3. We need, most importantly, to consider public education a matter of national security. Every child in America deserves the opportunity for a free, world-class, public education, starting in pre-K, and going through 2 years of community college.
4. To those who say we can't afford it, I say rubbish. The Trump tax cuts will add over $3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years. Imagine what spending that $3 trillion would do for public education.
2
Pay teachers what they deserve; make school harder, not easier so that nobody fails standardized tests; stop jumping from one fad to the next; stop believing devices will do the magic trick of teaching and believe in your students! Expect the most from them, fund the education system and never give up!
While our education keeps declining, other countries are working themselves off to make their students competitive. If we don't wake up soon, we will have witnessed the decline of America as the most powerful nation in the world. You can't be powerful in you can't read or be an informed thinker.
No one at the Federal level is talking about the obvious solution: Look at the education models of countries who do far, far better than us (while spending less per student!) and emulate them.
Republicans won't do this because it doesn't funnel taxpayer dollars to billionaires. Democrats won't do this because teacher's unions hate the idea of any change at all, no matter how poorly the current system performs.
1
Stop blaming educators for this decline. Reading as an occupation has become extremely unpopular and not just among little people. To conquer boredom many years ago, reading became my ‘escape.’ I loved reading and still do. My husband is an avid reader but even our own children do not read to the extent I did as a young person. There are so many children growing up in homes without books. Many children struggle with sustaining attention and lack imagination and creativity. Exposing very young children to screens has been proven to negatively affect their creativity, play skills and imagination. Who wants to read if YouTube and Netflix are just a click away and no need to imagine anything yourself.
The President credits himself with all good economic news. Secretary DeVos's comments suggest that she thinks this "devastating" news has nothing to do with her -- almost as though the results were from another country! How would she respond to a question about her role in this? Would she blame the usual punching bag: Congress? HER political party controlled Congress from the start of Trump's term through the end of 2018. The fact is that this report card is also HER report card, and she's failing. Badly.
A decade ago, when I was in academia, a literacy professor at a major university told me that the trend towards using tablets and digital devices in the classroom was killing literacy and went against all the research. But no one cared, because it was the "new shiny" and there was enormous amounts of money behind it.
Studies show that children, and people in general, retain more from paper books and learn best with paper and pencil, (my personal guess is because it is more engages more of the five senses, and requires more complex cognitive process than consuming digital media, which is passive.)
Combine the overuse of tablets in elementary schools with the overuse of tech at home, and it should not be surprising that literacy is declining.
I have three children, two of them in grade school, and they are absolutely forbidden from using any kind of digital device at home, for any purpose, and always have been.
Not even "educational" games or those sanctioned by their teachers.
Not even when we travel - they bring some books, or a pad of sketch paper and pencil, on the airplane or in the car. Or they stare out the window and daydream.
Not even when they are bored - learning to entertain yourself is vital to developing an internal locus of control.
Not even to pacify them when they fight - fighting with your sibling is how you learn to work things out on your own and self-regulate your own anger.
Parents, turn off the devices.
Schools, resist the "shiny."
6
If you want kids to read, make it fun and give them stories that are relevant to their lives. If you want kids to learn, make school fun rather than a daily jail sentence to be survived. If you want kids to blossom into their abilities, try praise instead of constant negative nagging with grades that pester them with how much more they have to do to please authority. If you want kids to learn to love learning, show them how everything, especially the things in their own lives can teach them something new, often about themselves. Instead we load kids down with so much homework, so much sheer drudgery, that one study found 7,000 kids a year are actually injured by the weight of their backpacks, 19 percent of students missed school or sports activities because of backpack injury and 50 percent of high school adolescents complain of back pain from their daily load of books. So much for fun, the joy of learning and the inherent pleasures of reading.
1
Standardized tests essentially tell us what a student's zip code and socioeconomic status is. The "Nation's Report Card" is telling us there are more places of poverty and that children are suffering that poverty at greater rates. That scores leveled off and declined around 2009 follows our "Great Recession" trajectory.
If we want to change outcomes for children, we need to address our horrible, inexcusable gap between the one percenters and the rest of the country. Too many children are living in poverty or near poverty. Their nutrition is compromised, their exposure to educational experiences within their homes and communities is limited at best, and now they have to endure an Education Secretary who will take precious resources away from their schools.
It's time to make our children a priority by updating the minimum wage, fully funding IDEA, providing more funding for public schools, and developing accountability measures that follow the curriculum, while still retaining local control of schools.
Then there are the issues of access to decent, affordable, stable housing, reliable, sustainable, affordable transportation, and wholesome food. There's a lot of work to do. It will require an investment similar to the Marshall Plan, except this time we need to save this country.
1
The Common Core Standards were launched in 2009. Why didn't the reporters report this interesting fact. Perhaps the Common Core standards and their assessments along with so-called data driven education decision making (standardized test data) need to take some of the blame. These schemes took teachers and principals' attention away from looking at the classroom data in front of them to inform their decision making. This is more evidence that the Obama corporate education approach failed. Now, let's see if any of the foundations and corporatists admit to this. Or did they get what they wanted out of it: profits!
I'm a reading specialist with 30 years experience, mainly in Title I schools which serve the poor. The only students who gain from school choice are students who come from well-off homes. They get to go to even better schools than in their neighborhoods with "choice". Poor students' families are unable to transport their students to "better" schools. These "better" schools simply have a higher socio-economic base, further insuring higher achievement. School choice is actually a bussing program that the government does not fund so only the well-off can afford it.
3
How many decades did it take for folks to figure out that Philip Morris was pushing an addictive substance ? How much longer idid it take for people to put 2+2 together on Purdue Pharma, even in our "enlightened" information era?
Well you enjoyed passing the phone to your toddler when they made a peep in the grocery store line, rather than comfort them with your arms or voice; you fell for "educational" automated toys and "skill building" online games,then you enrolled them in a school where the teacher doesn't read because the SmartBoard which the students have already stared at for 4 hours in between looking up from the ChromeBooks , can do that for him/her.
Books? Yeah, as if. Try that suggestion on admin only if you can wear the dinosaur label proudly which I do ( but will never see a promotion or pay increase because of that. )
As a reading teacher for the past ten years, every year I see kindergarten attention spans decrease by 5-7 minutes of sustained story attention.
Enjoyed introducing technology saturation to small, developing eyes and brains to foster technology addictions nice and early ( they need to make a living, too ) and now bark about the literacy scores ? How apt.
2
Bring in the science of reading - Check out "The Logic of English" and the "Reading league" - the current "whole language" approach works for many but will fail in a large fraction of students. My child was falling further behind until we gave her leasons in phonemic awareness. By that time she had been told to make use of pictures and guess words from context - all of which she now has to unlearn - this was at a private school too. Don't blame the teachers either - it is what they were told to do.
1
This raises the question of what Mississippi is doing right. I think it may be something like what you're describing here.
Reading can be essentially "free" due to libraries. Not much profit to be made there. Huge profits to be made addicting children to fiddling on electronic screens.
1
Schools must compete for the attention of their students, both in class and out of class, with video games and social media as well as older temptations. Video games and social media are driven to compete for student attention by their need to survive by turning a profit. They have an advantage in that their primary goal is to win student attention and time, while schools have teaching as their goal and getting student attention is only a means.
It is not surprising that video games and social media are winning the competition. Schools must learn to compete without becoming vehicles for entertainment like their competition; they will fail if they gain the attention of students without teaching the students anything the students would not learn from video games and social media.
Students learn from video games and social media the importance and pleasure of winning and avoiding losing. They learn how to understand the rules, follow them, and ultimately manipulate them for their own advantage by finding ways to break or avoid them. They then carry over what they have learned, and use it in the school environment; this prepares them to compete in the real world.
They also often discover how much fun it is for winners in the pecking order to cement, advertise, and advance their place in the order by tormenting losers. For a few, studying and learning provide an escape from this world of winners and losers to a different world, a world of understanding.
The school "reform" advocates are trying to kill public education and funnel money to charter and religious schools run by their cronies.
Ironically, the schools where the 1% send their children--children who are not necessarily smarter than the average child and may be a great deal less motivated or well-behaved--have all the features that "reformers" hold to be unnecessary: elegant buildings, a maximum of 15 students per class, teachers who are specialists in their subjects and are given a great deal of freedom in how to teach, well-stocked libraries and laboratories, courses in the arts and foreign languages, as well as the other humanities that are deemed "useless" for the peasants. No high-stakes testing. No threat that the school will close if the students don't improve continuously from year to year. No legislators or business executives--none of whom have been in a public school classroom since their own high school graduation and none of whom would last an hour in a room full of seventh graders--telling teachers what miracles they ought to accomplish with no resources.
The cost at these private schools? About $25,000 per year for *elementary school* in the Minneapolis area. Probably more in other cities. And that's without enrolling homeless students, students with disabilities, or students who are two weeks out of a refugee camp.
4
Two points stood out for me:
"but those improvements began to level out around 2009. There is no consensus among experts as to why."
Asian students had no decline in math or English in 4th or 8th grades.
It appears that: "Throw money at the problem" did all the closing of the achievement gap that it possibly could do. What was left of achievement gap is the elephant in the room.
The consistency of the Asian achievement advancement comes from: the culture in which theses children live. Not all Asian children have a "Tiger Mom" but almost all of the Asian children have a cultural milieu that values education above baubles, trinkets and Jordan Air shoes. Parents forego items in favor for expanding their child's opportunities even when it means doing without, or at least, doing with less.
Parents, making choices for the benefit of their children's education is the elephant in the room as opposed to any material item. This means for parents, spending the time with the child and their educational experiences, each and every day is most relevant to their child's success. It takes more than wishing for a favorable outcome. It means the parent is sacrificing their own time for someone else.
It doesn't help of course if the cultural milieu in schools is peers visibly denigrating/bullying those kids who are striving to succeed academically.
2
Not being able to read is just another symptom, along with not being able to concentrate, think or speak in words, phrases, or sentences (as opposed to whatever "LOL" and "IMHO" and other text shortcuts are called), and not having any cognizance of or being able to relate in almost anyway with the real world, past or present.
There are certainly many examples of students and young adults today who are extremely articulate, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and having a much wider range of knowledge, experience, and understanding than my generation ever had in high school and college.
But it is becoming increasingly undeniable (and being observed and confirmed by many objective educators today) that the masses of students are failing miserably in the most fundamental skills and critical thinking. It is not that the average high school student just reads at the third or fourth grade level, but that their common knowledge and thinking is far below even that grade level from eras past. This was the first generation that started earlier to use cell phones (early grade school). The new generation is starting preschool and by the time they grow up, the Matrix will be in full control.
Potentially interesting story that buries all the evidence that contradicts the headline at the bottom.
It also ignores the growing questioning of standardized testing as a useful guide. Do these scores even matter, and if so how much do they matter? Even if the reporter did not have the time to look for any answers, she did have the time to raise the questions.
1
Maybe get the tablets out of the classrooms, and hand the kids some books? Actual books.
My kid has tablets shoved in her face all day, in a wealthy, progressive school district. Imagine what happens to less privileged kids.
2
Everyone is on their phones. We all don’t read as much as we used to. The phone has destroyed concentration and the ability to read and observe slowly and comprehensively.
We created this world for the kids. How do we keep them from being addicted to their phones. From what I see, day after day, is that kids and teens are addicted to phones. It makes it very hard to teach. Attention spans are not what they once were.
Perhaps the smart phone is not very smart at all.
1
Perhaps, but their Fortnight ratings are at an all-time high -- and what is a more important skill these days?
The article doesn't indicate what, if any, theories for the reading decline are prevalent. i wonder whether the great proliferation of "graphic novels" for young people has had a negative impact on reading scores.
1
This is not surprising, given all the digital distractions (Tik Tok!) out there, one would assume kids are reading less than in previous generations, which will harm their life long ability to understand and convey complex information. Not a good portent for humanity.
Being on your phone all of the time doesn’t necessarily mean you’re rotting your brain on YouTube or Instagram. I’ve become addicted to the news and podcasts, whose book recommendations have increased my book reading exponentially (kindle app also on phone). My parents pushed reading at home a lot when I was growing up, but I never enjoyed it. In my case, constant access to high quality content on topics I’m curious about led me to read more. I can’t wait for my son to be old enough for me to share pods and great investigative journalism pieces with him, so we can debate issues of the day at the dinner table. Just trying to cast a bit of light in reactions I otherwise completely agree with!
Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons have no need to think - and therefore no need to read. They have their screens to keep their minds occupied.
We are in Huxley's 'Brave New World' (with a good dose of '1984' as well) where people are kept in their place and conditioned to enjoy it.
Soon all books will be online - making it far easier for the memory hole to operate. We've already started censoring 'fake news' - interesting how that phrase started with another DC scandal - while the 'official' news is numbingly consistent.
TPTB do not want independent thinking, questioning voters. They do not want critical thinkers aware of history.
If we had a truly educated and informed electorate the last 50 years would have been very different.
1
Some thoughts from an educator:
1. Using this test as a metric for national achievement is a bad idea. As someone who frequently administers tests like this to high school students, the problem I most often see is not in their ability, but in their ability to work through something they have never seen before in a set period of time. Granted, that's a skill, but it's entirely possible that their comprehension is perfectly fine.
2. Betsy DeVos using this as evidence of need for school choice is borderline immoral. Students shouldn't have to decide between a good school and a bad school. All schools should be good schools, and we should invest heavily in making that a reality.
3. The single greatest issue with education in the U.S. that doesn't get nearly enough attention is that it is funded by property taxes. Better property = better schools. This fosters a system of education that actively restricts access to opportunity for the overwhelming majority of students.
4. The only way any of this gets better is if you put more money into it. Students in a class of 15 versus a class of 30 will do better. Students that are well fed during the day will do better. Teachers with fewer students will have more opportunities to offer meaningful instruction and feedback. It's a much simpler problem than anyone wants to admit, which is kind of disgraceful.
428
@SeanCarm - Betsy DeVos using this as evidence for need of school choice is not borderline immoral. It is blatantly immoral as is Ms. DeVos's contempt of a court order banning the enforcement of student loans for for profit fraudulent "colleges".
44
@SeanCarm While I don’t disagree with what your saying I think the skill of being able to comprehend something unfamiliar in a certain amount of time is way to important to just gloss over like that. A lot of the professional world is deadline based and requires problem solving skills very familiar to what you described. If students are struggling with that isn’t that just as bad as comprehension struggles?
13
@SeanCarm
John Hattie’s research does not agree with you. He says that smaller class sizes is something teachers ask for all the time but when you look at that variable among all others, it provides a small improvement in student outcome. The most important variable, Hattie says, is teacher collective efficacy: teachers belief that they have the ability to teach children they believe can learn. It’s with the teachers. Apparently when they teach children more like themselves, they have a greater belief that those children can learn, and they are willing to try different approaches until that student does learn. It’s with the teachers.
12
The single biggest indicator of academic success is parental involvement. If we want to see improved academic success, then we need to promote functional healthy families. That's the only real long-term solution.
You can't blame these kids for failing academically when going to school is for escape rather than for education.
2
Our education system is completely decentralized, with each state, city and town making up there own curriculum, teach methods and standards. With so much diversity in approach, you would think we could identify the best practices and then deploy them nationally. We are behind other countries in education, many of which are poorer and have lesser budgets. This is not a money problem; it is a management problem.
It might be helpful to consider that the de-coding skills to achieve 'functional literacy' is around the average reader of 9 yrs old. functional literacy is capable of de coding tabloid newspapers etc. However while one can decode the words at this level if the vocabulary is limited it limits the ability to take meaning from text which will be required to obtain higher scores in reading. So language enrichment may help more once someone has reached a reading age of 9yrs.
1
I wish there were an index of literacy programs that schools use so we could track what works (well, there is the what works database already, but we don't know which schools use evidence based literacy programs. We should also track where parents outsource their kids education with tutors. Struggling readers - dyslexic and others - fill our prisons, and never have a chance to be full citizens. Let's end the dyslexia to prison pipeline and make sure everyone has a pathway to literacy, further education, employment and economic self-sufficiency and civic engagement.
Improvements began to level out around 2009? That timing correlates with the growth of smart phone sales, and the evolution of social media. Reading comprehension takes time and patience. We’re raising a generation of children who have neither.
3
I am a former HS teacher and we all, as parents, look at the report card results and try to determine how our children can do better. That's a beginning, but there is also a beginning that must precede that and that is the parents' day to day involvement in their children's education. Many parents send their children to school each September, but have not prepared themselves for participation in their children's education. Do they ask for graded quizzes and tests on a weekly basis? This is quite rare. Do parents ask about homework assignments and review them randomly every few days? Once again, quite rare. These parental school follow-up activities can take less than 5 minutes per stem subject and it's about the same for English. Once again, it can be from than 1-3 nights per week, depending on the child's performance. Such involvement encourages the child, ensures that the child is doing what they should be doing and there's no surprises at report card time. This, more than anything happening in the classroom, is what can guarantee a child's success in school.
3
I would like to see a national survey of parents designed to see how much parents in the same grades as these students are involved in the educational development of their children, including home work, reading, internet supervision and after school educational development.
I suspect there may be a correlation between declining scores and declining parental involvement, but would need survey results to be informed on the subject.
4
@therev56
Just ask the kids' teachers. They know which parents are/are not doing their jobs.
I wonder what affect objectors had in the final tally. What I mean is that many wealthier families know that they can opt out of many of these exams- and if they typically can’t then they can force it if need be. Poorer, and therefore poor performer, people often don’t know they may be able to opt out- or they can’t because they don’t have the political or social muscle. So I wonder what affect this ‘opting out’ by wealthier, and therefore better performing, students has on the results.
1
This is yet another argument for President Elizabeth Warren. As a former teacher, she understands what it is to be in the classroom, and I am sure she will intelligently assess the situation and find smart, sensible solutions.
5
These tests do not tell us what they claim to tell us.
Measuring reading skill is extremely difficult.
Making tests our main goal only results in teaching to the test, test scores rising, and then test companies coming up with a different test, because too many successful scores makes a test meaningless.
What the exams do is make money for the people who create tests, and the curriculum writers designed to teach to the test, and give politicians numbers to proclaim that our schools are "failing,' when parents and teachers may see things quite differently.
Ask a teacher how our obsession with test-taking, and test scores, has impacted the students. Please ask a teacher.
I've been teaching for 15 years.
8
As a writer of kid lit for 20 years who has visited over 2000 schools across the country, I can report from the field that kids are still interested in books, but they're far more excited about Fortnite, Minecraft, and YouTube. These things build a wall around books that can be hard to climb over. Recently I've been touring with a book that's also a video game, because whether we like it or not, we're going to have to learn how to meet a lot of young readers halfway. Not surprisingly, no traditional publisher will publish this project, even if I've published many books with them before. It's just not in their DNA to think beyond the page. We're going to need a new kind of publisher to reach a lot of these kids, one that understands that blending in isn't all bad. Sometimes it's exactly what a kid needs to start loving books.
19
This might actually be a really good idea... likely story telling will eventually leave the page completely and make its way into visual media wholesale, but this half-way measure might just be what’s needed to ensure that kids still read complex blocks of text, rather than just reading or hearing dialogue.
I live in a suburban district with a 95% high school graduation rate and many, many parents opt their children out of all of these types of tests. The fact that fewer kids are taking these tests makes the results questionable.
11
With so many college graduates underemployed, wouldn’t it be great if a program was created that hired these pool of young people across the nation and offered them a modest living wage with the promise to forgive student loans after, say, five years of service. Across the country, math and reading score would surge benefiting the country’s future. The wealthy only tax cuts could have been used for this purpose. At least in this case, we would see a return on investment.
8
Let’s do a small case study on one state with the largest decline-Indiana. The state legislature passed huge reform bills in 2011 that drastically shifted how money could be accessed by districts. (After the Tea Party republican wave was elected in 2010.) Vouchers shifted money away from public schools to private. Public schools had money shifted away from them based on performance in the school funding formula changes that had no public input in committee that year before it passed. Charters had less stringent performance requirements and oversight. Almost immediately, schools with wide income disparities and who had lost tax base after the Great Recession had drastic changes in their ability to support their students. Compare Anderson, IN, to municipalities that could pass extra referendums, like Carmel—the disparities just keep growing. So while we can scream about screen time, the groundwork for this data stems from loss of financial supports for districts to close gaps at school. This also is confirmed when you compare PISA scores of countries like Germany, who increased supports for parents and families in the past two decades, and subsequently have raised performance.
19
@Kelly It is unclear what you are referring to when you say Indiana had the largest decline. However, in regard to reading, the state with the largest decline for 4th Graders was New Jersey (-6) and for 8th Graders it was New Hampshire (-7).
For math, the state with the largest decline for 4th Graders was W. Virginia (-5) and for 8th Graders it was again New Hamp. at -6.
I respectfully submit that your argument would be more persuasive if it correctly reflected the results in the report.
1
@Gregg Duval - I blieve this is what Kelly was referring to: This year, 31 states noted a drop of two to seven points in their average eighth-grade reading score — which the federal government deemed significant — compared with their performances in 2017. Indiana, New Hampshire and Virginia were the states with the largest declines among eighth graders. So yeah, it does correctly reflect the results of the report.
1
I am a retired teach and ended my career as a NEAP assessor from 2011-2017. In almost every school my team and I visited this assessment was not taken seriously by the school staff. We were generally considered an inconvenience, the staff knew that individual scores would never be shared with schools or students, and the standardized test burnout was palpable. If the NAEP assessments, given to 4th, 8th, and 12th graders every two years, and were the only time standardized test were given, I suggest the results would be quite different. There’s simply no need to assess students every single year.
8
I wish I could post this comment on billboards across the country.
Public schools, another piece of infrastructure that could benefit from some financial attention rather than border walls and corporate tax cuts.
34
@DLO
But the upshot of these studies is that school funding doesn't make any sort of difference. As far as I understand, schools in NYC are funded very well.
2
Two significant changes in education include “Common Core” curriculum and the increasing use of technology by students through the school day. I’m a substitute teacher and one of the main principles in common core is that the students learn on their own, or in groups, during class. This results in issues of classroom management, competency and the ability to work independently. I’m not surprised by these test results and the trends in reading.
13
@J.J. You mean you as a teacher don't learn more from your students than they learn from you? That's the sort of comment that's common today, absurd today too.
@J.J. Common Core is a set of learning standards. It does not dictate how teachers teach. So what you're seeing is not the fault of Common Care. The problem is the curriculum, or how the curriculum is being taught.
Student-centered, collaborative learning has its place, but pedagogy now often emphasizes inquiry-based, constructivist learning even for foundational skills. Most kids need some direct instruction in basic concepts and skills and guided practice before they can profit from independent or group work with little teacher input. Most teachers aren't well-trained in leading project-based learning, and classroom management issues can be the result. (Many teachers have to wing it when it comes to classroom management as well!)
From the early 1990s until about 4 or 5 years ago, the number of charter schools grew by more than 10% every year. Despite that "there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance, and the lowest performing students are doing worse." I'm curious why DeVos thinks the lack of any correlation between the growth of the charter movement and the lack of academic success on these tests proves her case.
25
@MJB Because if wishes were fishes, Devos would have a sushi banquet.
This administration as a whole will say that ANY outcome of ANYTHING points to their success and the opposition's failure. Pervasive gaslighting is the final and only strategy left to this administrations and its enablers.
We can talk about education policy, teachers and "the system" all day, but lets not discount that most parents work and commute incredibly long hours, which means they don't have quality time at home.
If we modified our normal work week to 32 hours, or a 6 hour work day, like in some European and Scandinavian countries, our quality of life would go up in ALL areas -- health, education, general well-being -- for parents and for children. Of course, in those places people also exercise, spend time outside and share long meals together with genuine conversation.
37
That is an interesting proposal, but wouldn't a 32 hour work week result in parents needing another job to earn the same amount of income? I can't imagine that US businesses and corporations would continue to provide the same income and benefits for a reduced work week, because that would be deemed socialism, or communism, or some other infringement on capitalism.
1
@Dee Many poorer people will just get a second job, as many do today. If you are well off in a good job, your kids already likely read and write better than most. When some kids are just not talked to, read to, taken to libraries and museums and local attractions, they simply will suffer no matter schools try to do.
Most education for most people does not take place inside a school.
As I read this article, one thought comes to mind. Testing in NY state bounced around year to year. The day of the big test we reading teachers opened the packets to determine how bad the tests would be. It seemed each year the selections were more difficult as assessed by readability calculations. The questions were more obscure. At times a group of highly educated reading teachers could not determine the correct answer. Our students who used the library frequently, read, read, read and write insightful about their books were very discouraged by the end of test days. Yes. Multiple days of torture. So I ask, has anyone studied the tests to see if the materials are appropriate to grade level or a little above or below? Are the questions answerable? Who scores the tests? Based on what criterion?
34
What we need is evidence-based teaching. At every level, from curriculum design down to the most basic studying techniques, our schools do not use the methods which have actually been demonstrated to work.
We don't challenge students, let alone encourage them to challenge themselves, we emphasize "process" over real knowledge, and we have teachers stretched thin teaching multiple subjects they know little to nothing about.
"Throwing money at the problem" might help--but only if we throw it at real, evidence-based methods.
16
@Polly I'm sorry but this just isn't true. As a teacher, I can tell you that most of what schools do in the time that is not directly focused on instruction is research. Schools are always looking for ways to improve because improvement means better funding for the school. If the school is public, funding is directly tied to performance. Private schools try to maintain viability because they get results. That's how they convince parents to spend money and send their kids there. The notion that "we don't challenge students" is also completely false. I will grant that there are some students that are more engaged that others, but most students are just trying to survive the school day because it is so rigorous and stressful. I certainly appreciate the notion that we need to do better and we need to invest, but the reality is that what would help the most is just more resources, pure and simple.
7
@SeanCarm
We spend more per student than all but a handful of countries, including the countries that rank highest for education. We spend 35% more than the average OECD country. We spend more than Finland, Japan, Netherlands, Denmark, South Korea, and Belgium. We already spend more money on education than just about everyone. And if it were yielding results, I would be perfectly fine with that. If it yielded results, I'd be fine with spending more. Education is incredibly important. But it isn't working. Despite the money spent, US students are years behind the top countries in math, science, and reading. Years.
So outside of personal anecdotes, what evidence suggests that, without changing our approach, more money will achieve anything?
7
@Polly I would consider a study like this one from 2015 about smaller classes.
https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research/featured/the-class-size-debate-what-the-evidence-means-for-education-policy
It's been proven that smaller class sizes have a positive impact on learning. The only way to get smaller class sizes is to hire more people to support the students we have (spending money). The same is true for all supports that we offer students.
Your point about the spending already being there is well taken, but the reality is that it isn't enough. That kind of information also doesn't account for spending per student by community. For example, there are schools in Chicago spending almost $25,000 per pupil, while other schools in the same network only spend $4,000. That is an issue largely generated from the fact that we fund schools with property taxes. A wealthy community can remodel the school pool (something that just happened in my area) while another school struggles with teachers stretched thin with more students than they can handle. Also, that remodeling of the pool counts toward the spending figures you mentioned. You simply can't think about school spending as a nationwide per pupil issue because it isn't.
1
I have been an educator at the higher education level for more than thirty years.
My experience is that incoming students are increasingly ill-prepared (academically and otherwise) for college. Certainly, there is lots of blame to go around. But as a society we often depict education with a negative connotation ("Those who can do; those can't teach"). And we treat teachers and adjunct college instructors extremely poorly, offering scant support or incentive to enter the profession.
How about starting by paying teachers and instructors a living wage? The situation is dire and getting worse. What are you doing to help, Betsy DeVos?
69
Agreed. I am a used up adjunct. The education system in America is class divided. It is. When will we confront this?
3
most of the people who say you can't throw money at education to solve the problem send their children to private school and live in high property tax districts where the schools are well funded -- what they mean is don't spend money to educate other people's children.
86
@No name
Your statement is patently false. They may very well send their children to private school if they choose and can afford it but they still pay property taxes which are used in part to fund schools in their districts, whether they have children in those schools, or children at all.
I don't know what state you live in but not sure it is in the United States.
1
@No name
You nailed it. DeVos purchased her position in Trump's cabinet; she was not forced to compete for the position on the basis of her experience (or lack thereof) and educational attainment. In GOP world, when you're filthy rich, it's ok for you to buy positions
for which you are eminently unqualified. And unfortunately for most of the nation's children,
DeVos personifies the GOP's disdain for public education. After all, when public education thrives, the masses are empowered, an outcome not favored by a coterie of oligarch wannabes.
2
Why is there no mention in this article of “The Reading Wars” and the fact that students are being taught NOT to read and instead to guess the words based on the picture in the book and to memorize high frequency words? This is not reading. Schools need to return to teaching students phonics. It’s the only teaching method that reaches all students. Instead of standing around scratching their heads in confusion as to why these scores are low, education policy makers need to look at the methodologies used and their effectiveness (or lack thereof).
44
@Siobhan O’Reilly : I agree, but with one caveat. When I tutored street youth many years ago, they all knew how to sound out words. They were aces in that respect. But they had trouble with their GEDs because they couldn't necessarily understand what they read or make inferences from the content. That was what I had to coach them in.
For example, if they were given a paragraph like the one above, they were unable to answer the questions, "What were the street youth good at? Why did they have trouble with their GEDs?"
I'm not sure what was missing in their schooling. Perhaps they received too much instruction in the mechanics of reading in order to pass the standardized tests and not enough in learning to read for information and pleasure.
@Siobhan O’Reilly
RE phonics: English is not really a phonetic language, compared with Spanish or Czech, for example. You can not teach English phonics as if that is *the* answer. Beginning words such as "one," "two," "eight," "come," or "who" will utterly defeat a child who is being taught to "sound it out."
What is your method for dealing with this problem?
It is possible to teach phonics to 5 and 6 year olds and not set them up to feel "stupid" when it doesn't work. I have yet to see any published text as effective as the method I developed myself.
So few people look at things from the child's point of view!
1
@Pdxtran
An extreme example: Czech is an almost completely phonetic language. If you do not actually speak the language, you can master all the sounds of the letters and thus read aloud whole paragraphs and not have a clue about the meaning!!
English speakers can seem to be doing exactly this when they are only taught phonics and word recognition.
In your example, would these students understand the paragraph if it was read to them? Would they know the meanings of the words? E.g. Could they explain what an inference was? Would they have the background concepts re what was being discussed? Would they have the ability to explain to you why they did not understand something?
Time to get back to basics. Schools are for students and teachers, not all of the administrators, diversity coordinators, etc. Students should be learning subject matter and how to learn. Teachers are there to teach, not provide social work, policing, propaganda, etc. We should discard all of the nonsense and stick to basics. We know what works. We know what to do. We just have to do it.
12
1. In the lower grades, hire and reward teachers who have good grasp of their subjects, who love to teach, and who can serve as role models, rather than people who have merely waded through the moronic programs in schools of education.
2. Teach subjects not as a continuation of pre-school Sesame Street, but with emphasis that this is serious business.
3. Set reasonable standards and expectation; grade firmly but fairly.
4. Some students will fail. This will serve as an incentive. To reward poor results is to discourage motivated, serious students.
5. A policy of repeating grades will motivate both students and parents.
6. Communicate to parents what you are doing.
11
Demand for a policy change?
Like abolishing "No Child Left to Grind"?
And wasn't Bill Gates and all his loot supposed to save our education system by now?
6
Keep ‘me ignorant and frightened, promise you’ll keep them safe, and they’ll follow you anywhere. The Republican Party abhors an informed electorate.
28
@Tom Petrie That’s an ignorant statement. That’s a bigoted statement.
Why?
Because it is just not true.
1
Reading? What's that? Is it on YouTube yet?
12
Exactly. Reading requires focus and intent. Why work at it when I can sit passively and let YouTube, TikTok and Instagram content come to me?
"Work as hard as you can on your writing skills." This is the advice I have always given young people who want to work in technology. I worked for 34 years in computer software, and I my job always required me to write more English text than computer code.
10
Betsy DeVos is all about not throwing money at the problem. Well, except for the for-profit charter school operators - and almost all of them are.
For how that works, read Peter Greene's article in Forbes from last year, "How to Profit From Your Nonprofit Charter School." There's money to be made on real estate deals and management consulting and curriculum/software.
Our local charter school board here in our county, which is supposed to operate under the same open meetings laws as every other governing board in NC, recently announced a nearly $15 million new construction plan. They put forward schematic renderings and cost estimates and so forth, with nary a word prior to the announcement about contracting with design firms to prepare those schematic plans, nor a word on the cost of those plans. It turns out that one of the board members also owns a parcel of land that shows up in those plans.
So DeVos and the rest of the "school choice" segregationists are really about catching the money thrown.
16
It's the high stakes state tests themselves that are probably the biggest factor in these declines. ESSA requires a relatively small number of assessments, and states are allowed to apply for "flexiblity waivers" to use authentic, research-based assessments like portfolios, or to use nationally-proven exams. Most don't even apply for the waviers, preferring to give huge testing contracts to whoever has the best lobbyist, and testing more and more locally (beyond requirements of federal law) in hopes of diagnosing the problems leading to low NAEP scores (or somehow improving scores on that test through "practice" using completely different tests). This in turn leads to even more testing, as local districts use benchmark tests (usually created by outside contractors) to prepare for the state tests.
When does anyone actually get to teach?
In the end, high-stakes tests tell us what we want to hear, because they were designed to do so, going all the way back to post-war intelligence testing: They tell us that those demographics preordained to inherit our false meritocracy will continue to do so, while everyone else will be left behind. If we wanted to avert these trends, we would use measures that matter: long-term job attainment, college graduation, life expectancy. It's very possible that the very schools we label as failing are correlated with these more important indicators, or would be, if they didn't spend all of their time and resources teaching to these tests.
3
I work in higher education and I have worked at prestigious four years and right now I am working at a Community College. One thing I have notice is that students don't read for enjoyment anymore. Their parents don't read, even college educated ones. We need to realize that being able to read is a gift that should not be taken for granted.
31
@MH They don't like to read because they spend their entire lives reading "passages" so they can practice skills for cold reads on standardized tests. I am not allowed to teach whole texts. The only class I am teaching an entire novel in is a credit recovery class. None of those juniors have ever read an entire book in class.
4
The problem is cultural: we don't take education seriously. Schools are places for having fun, in high school the football team and prom are more important than studying. Families and schools share low expectations.
Once a child is past kindergarten, school ought to be work. After school, children should be home with their families, playing and reading.
9
School work should be enjoyed
I worked in a middle school program in New York City. Because all the testing emphasis was on math and reading, those classes were taught for double time, and subjects like science, social science, and the arts all suffered.
The consequence for poor testing were serious, the school would be closed, and all the students switched to other schools. You could call it beating the system, or surviving, but principals wanted to manage their schools to stay intact.
They could not lose midrange passing student to failing. So there was no emphasis on the children who were failing, they were put together and not expected to succeed. I had a classroom mostly of children who were disruptive, and they were put together so they would not drag other children down.
There was also not a great effort for the top scoring children. They were not in danger of failing, so no problem.
The schools have no control of cell phone use, gaming, or the dysfunctional households many of these children live in. They need to do the best job they can while the children are in school and the teachers I worked with tried very hard
It's the system that is dysfunctional. We can't move children from failing to succeeding when the system has given incentives to have them keep failing.
11
So scores have dropped since Common Core was implemented?
6
@Jennifer That correlation would be complex to assess, because not all states adopted the standards, or kept them. In my state (SC), for example, we adopted briefly, then dropped the Common Core standards. In that time, our NAEP scores have fallen precipitously. However, I doubt adopting (or dropping) the standards had anything to do with the drop (and personally, as an English teacher, I really liked the standards for their focus on specific, authentic reading and writing skills). I would guess our multi-decade decline in education spending and the fact that we are in a teacher retention and recruitment free-fall has a lot more to do with the losses on NAEP.
7
@Jennifer I think the more interesting question is to map the implementation of Common Core against the states' test scores. Because while a number of states implemented Common Core, a great many more rejected the national standards.
Common Core drew the ire of conservatives because it sounds like common good, commonwealth, Communist, and common sense.
7
Lower reading scores are actually the policy that “educators” in America pursue. Poorly educated citizens can be counted on to vote against their interests, to believe that the climate crisis is a lie, to think that health insurance and medical care should cost loads of money, and to fall for continuous lying.
Demands for policy change fall on the deaf ears of those in charge, because the current policy, (and the “low information voters” that it creates), is precisely what they want.
You can fill in who they is.
13
@Michael c:
I think you're wrong. The current education reformers are sincere in trying to fix education; they're just misguided.
Librarians—school teacher librarians are one part of the answer. The loss of school libraries that are staffed with a professional certificated teacher librarian has been profound. They make a huge difference in guiding student reading. Read “School Libraries Work!” for a compilation of numerous studies that have documented the positive impact of a teacher librarian on student learning.
261
@Jeani
I was appalled to see my hometown suburban neighborhood library disappear about ten years ago. My school library (and its librarian) was also a great resource for me as a child, but my weekend visits to the public library was a treasure trove I’ll never forget.
19
@Jeani not at all. Students never read in the library, unless a scarce few who bring their own favorite novels anyway. Kids spend wasted time surfing the net on computers and there's no way to prevent it. 30 years retired teacher
4
Exactly! I still fondly remember my school librarian. She actually taught us to enjoy reading. Simple English lessons don’t do it. A child needs to learn that he is free to choose a book he wants and that it isn’t scary at all.
9
Stop giving children smartphones and tablets! This is not a puzzle. More screens means more of the type of stimulus that shortens attention span. There is too much technology available to the young developing mind without proper guidelines. Light from screens affects the brain in ways serious and significant. Science not adults talking about policy is what’s needed.
8
@Mike
I hate phone culture and barely even look at mine. My kids do not have phones either. BUT, the truth is that my kids and now my 5 year old niece learned to read earlier than kids did in my generation thanks to their dad's phones. We loaded up learning apps and through playing games, they learned their letters, numbers, basic math and sight words at 2. Technology is not the enemy. Lax parenting is.
6
That might be true but at what cost?
1
2 years old?
1
Maybe when your parents have to work three jobs just to keep a roof over the family it’s hard to support the kitchen table activities that help kids get ahead. Add to that a lack of quality after school programming. No surprise here.
11
@Katherine Delaney
Say it, sister. I'm an attorney and my husband an engineer and we can barely make ends meet. I have no idea how most families are making it. I get home at 7:30. I'd love to spend time with my kids helping with homework, but it's mostly impossible. Thank God they've been responsible until now.
7
@jasmin an attorney and an engineer and you barely make ends meet? How is that possible?
1
The pendulum will swing back from the focus on STEM to recognizing that the Humanities are important too.
6
Many parents are addicted to their devices and don’t want to feel guilty about not spending time with their children. The overwhelming response is to buy the child a device so they are “busy” and not a distraction or a “pain”. The addiction then is transmitted to the children with these outcomes. These devises should have warning labels like cigarettes.
7
How about a map? Show which states are scoring lower than before. Show the levels and the changes.
Then give some context about what policies have been pushed in which states. And what policies are being proposed.
Having DeVos use this as evidence that we need to adopt her preferred policies needs serious questioning. How have states that adopted her preferred policies performed on these tests? Is Michigan leading the nation?
9
@By
You're right. We need a lot more information than this article provides--state by state and maybe district by district--before we conclude that it's money or policies or charter schools or family environment or ???? that determined these results. In fact, we don't really know mu about these results--this is too superficial. At the least, why aren't there links to the immediate raw data so readers can analyze this for themselves?
Students are coming to school, many of them, two or three years behind in readiness. Yet, we continue to insist that somehow we can close that gap by providing those students with 180 days of school and 6 hours of instruction per day, with inadequate professional development, inadequate supervision, inadequate curriculum and inadequate preparation time.
We know how to address this problem. Schools like Brooke East Boston, have shown that significantly more money spent appropriately on robust excellent teaching with more learning time during the day and the year. Its not the charter character of this school, or others like it. Other than exceptional students, its foolish to expect students to do two or three more years of learning in the exact same amount of time as their advantaged peers.
8
Another of the chronic failures of our educational establishment. If only education policy were not in the hands of a self-interested and self-protecting bureaucracy stretching across state departments of education, teacher credentialing cartels at universities, and their union cronies who buy political cover. But it’s all about the children, you understand.
2
@HMI it’s the chronic failure of Republicans at the federal and state levels. They’ve been at this for a generation and are starting to reap the fruits of their undemocratic labors...
1
@MB
This is just plain incorrect. Overall U.S. expenditures for primary and secondary education have done little but rise since WW II. Recent trends have been for sharp rises and small falls in federal spending, those falls still above a hugely pumped up baseline. The people to blame for the demonstrable failure of educators to educate are the so-called Progressives, who have and have had full control of the Education Establishment and who have taken this largesse and wasted it.
Isn’t this just what trump wants? Isn’t this part of de vos’s plan?
Kids who can’t comprehend will become the less educated voters that put trump in office.
It’s disgraceful behavior and will turn the USA into a third world country. We’ll be the ones looking for aid, but don’t expect anybody to help us out. We won’t have any friends.
We owe our children a good education as the primary tool to enable them to attain the American dream, whatever that is today. Letting our children down is criminal behavior in my book.
6
HEADLINE:
"Reading Scores on National Exam Decline in Half the States"
SUB-HEAD:
"They 'Fell Off A Cliff,' White House 44 to White House 45"
3
Success!!!
Betsy DeVos has done the the country what she did to Michigan.
Can't wait for her response...more privatization and the use of her "brain wave" technology.
12
“We can neither excuse them away nor simply throw more money at the problem,” she (Devos) said.
Why NOT throw more money at the problem - real money? Most schools are in survival mode these days. They need more supplies, more resources, and the ability to allow teachers to teach, without teachers spending their own money on those things. We need a complete reform of the current day schools to allow them to flourish without the constant short-funding.
396
@JEdwards
Because we already spend more on education than any other country. Throwing money at this problem is a proven failure. The worst results are mostly in very well funded urban districts that spend more per pupil than almost any other.
13
@JEdwards
The data is readily available and plentiful ... and more than a bit sad.
The US spends more per pupil than the vast majority of OECD countries and lags them by a significant margin.
Within the US, places like NY spend more than most other states and - guess what - still lag them by significant margins.
11
@Jonathan Katz It isn't true that the US spends more on education than any other country. And many of the countries that spend less on education spend much more on other social programs that have the effect of improving school readiness.
75
The scores are going down because the states are giving less money to public schools. The charter and private schools are taking the better students and rejecting the students with special needs, behavior problems and ESL students. Meanwhile the states are giving less money to the poorest children. Research shows that children benefit from free preschool and full day kindergarten but states are cutting back on that too. The class sizes are too big and less qualified students are making becoming teachers. The colleges are not investigating in their education programs. Until this country decides to provide quality education for all students, we will continue to see this trend.
3
I wish I knew more about today's tests and how they compare to those administered to past generations. Just from what I see my kids studying, I can tell you that students today are expected to know much more than in my generation (1980s). I think at the end of the day, the higher standards are a good thing, but we need to compare apples to apples.
2
It is saddening to read this article but not surprising. I grew up in the Bronx- my entire educational experience was via the NYC public school system.
I have two young daughters. I was entirely for the public school system given my own experience - until I dealt with the non-NYC public school system in a suburban area in CT. My two daughters are now in private school, and they will stay there as long as I am able to provide this.
Education does start in the home. I’m not surprised that there was no decrease in the scores within the Asian student population. Asians emphasize education. I feel too many Americans view their child’s education as what is done only during school hours.
Standardized testing and it’s own agenda, bureaucracy of the public education system, failure to emphasize the importance of an education at home, and the ever increasing infiltration of technology with its destruction of reading/imaginative play/etc.-are all contributors. While I love good teachers- I have seen a fair number of them in my lifetime exit classroom teaching to go into school system jobs where they had more administrative duties instead on teaching. This is also not ideal. We need experienced people in our classrooms.
We cannot fix/address all issues. However, we can ensure a good solid education with thoughtful leaders which seem to be a rare breed.
It would be interesting to delve into why cities do not seem to be correlating with the non-urban drop in scores
5
We hold the blame in our very hands; electronic devices.
Perhaps it is time to recognize that smartphones, video games, the internet, texting---all have wrought a profoundly negative net effect on society. And I don't know that we can strike a balance of good use/bad use here. Like a narcotic addiction or alcoholism, perhaps we need to eliminate our devices from all but the most fundamental, pertinent uses.
I know. I know. Impossible, right? All I can say is, there was a world before all of this decline. A world pre-smartphone, pre-computer gaming. For the vast majority of us, that world existed comfortably in our own lifetimes.
We can survive without them. We cannot, though, survive with them---not in any meaningful way. Certainly not in a way that would prove healthy against a China, for example, where reading and math skills are leagues ahead of our own.
Do we have the courage?
7
So again let’s all blame electronic devices... Sure. My two cents:
1) could you prove they harm ? Would be hard, because there is absolutely no scientific consensus right now.
2) also we can deduce from your insight and the paper that Asian kids spend much less time on electronic devices than other kids .. ? Would you mind to fact-support it ?
What if, not saying I support these hypothesis, screen time is actually increasing inequality, because you can do so many things on a screen, and the quality of the time mostly depends on nudges from your parents ? What if reading wikipedia and playing strategic video games is actually good for the IQ ? What if it actually depends on age : a <3 yo brain is much different than a >12 yo ? What if it is related to other environmental factor ? What if it is due to composition effects (illustrative - not real - example : poor people have better healthcare than in 1990, and so have more children, but too bad their children perform worse because their education quality is unfortunately lower) ?
Imho, if there were an easy answer, scientists would have already delivered it. So please let’s stop demonize everything just because it feels good.
2
I think a lot of the decline is also due to the adult influence on those students who experience the biggest decline. That the adults, other than the teachers, are not setting good examples. They don't read, they don't push their children to read.
lets face it, parents are role models for setting good examples for many behaviors, and one of them is setting good intellectual example. If parents are intellectually lazy, it's a good bet their kids will be too. Far too many adults don't read enough subjects that challenge them intellectually, opting for confirmation bias or the familiar.
DeVos has no answers, unless it's selling out the public education system in favor of the for profit sector. SOP for Trump appointments.
6
It just goes to show that as the age of smartphone access declines so do reading levels. Reading is now seen as a function needed for Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram nothing more. Part of the process of dumbing down civilization to support the digital world.
School of Choice or voucher programs server to support Christian schools that could not exist without the aid. They do not fix the root problem... parent involvement in the teaching process and a digital world that increasingly does not require spelling or reading skills.
1
Hey NY Times Readers.
The biggest problem is not the education budget or better schools. The biggest problem is cell phone usage, video games, and computers. Kids today never look up anything in an encyclopedia or read a news paper. If they can not see a picture or watch a video, they are lost. Even adults are loosing it. How many would be lost without google maps. People can not even read a map anymore.
Our society has been dumbed down by the likes of Facebook and Google. Without reading and investigative skills, we are allowing others to control our minds, based on the information they provide us.
Wonder why your kid can not put down his or her cellphone. They have been programmed as we as parents, who supply children with the electronic items, as a babysitting tool. It is easier than being a parent and the results are beginning to surface. Just wait another 20 years. Our society is regressing in front of our eyes, and nobody can see it, even in plain sight.
Remember, the cultures that advanced the most are the ones who have been reading and writing the longest, not texting
Wake up America we are Our Country and Our Civilization...
12
@Another Perspective
This is just patently false. My kids are currently in elementary and middle school and all of them read. A lot. They all carry their big fat books around with them They also all look things up - not in a useless, outdated encyclopedia, but on the internet. It's great for that, didn't you know? They read news articles on a website called Newsela, which is a fantastic tool that customizes adult articles to different reading levels so that fourth graders can read the NYTimes and The Atlantic. And they all learned to read traditional maps in school. It's part of standardized testing too.
Every generation freaks out that the world is ending with the new one. What's wrong is not that the internet exists. What's wrong is that inequality exists and that's why some kids are not doing as well as others.
248
@Another Perspective
Nope, nope, nope.
You're confusing the progress of technology with loss of intelligence. This isn't saying that students are less intelligent (they aren't, intelligence pretty consistently going up each generation) it's saying that they aren't reading as well.
I'm an English teacher in California - here's what's more likely happening, though further research is needed to really understand the issue: literacy is changing.
It used to be that reading books was the only way we proved our ability to read. And reading is pretty much a specialized skill - if you improve your reading ability in general you tend to do alright whether you're reading a science textbook or a novel. The issue today is that reading is no longer a specialized skill but a generalized one.
Reading a novel is different from reading an infographic which is different from reading text messages and social media posts which are all different from understanding a YouTube video or a WikiHow manual. Reading has become much more fluid and content has become far simpler (which is what languages do over time - they get simpler). If anything - I'd argue that the test that we're using to measure literacy is the problem and not literacy itself. And many of my peers continue to debate the efficacy of a test given once vs. comparing the rate of growth in a year.
All this new information shows us is that students are different than they were a decade ago. Not worse.
9
@figleaf
How does one define inequality, though? Not always by race, according to this article, since all racial groups have fallen backwards in reading, with the exception of Asians. People do read far less than they used to. On my commute to work all the college students around me are watching youtube videos on their phones, not reading the newspaper or a paperback. Leisure reading used to be more of a default than it is now.
As an aside, many of my English majors attempt to read 18th-century epic poetry on their phones and are surprised when they can't follow the plot. I teach at an R1 university.
This seems to be what Republicans want, to dumb down America, leave out the liberal arts and critical thinking from educational programs, and vote Republican. But if you praise Jesus you'll go to heaven, and that's all that really matters.
6
Guess 3 yrs of DeVos and her privatize, voucher, charter, choice cult are not working out so well.
7
We are dumb enough, do we want this getting worse?
3
The first thing we need to do: Get rid of DeVos.
21
@Citizen of the Earth
And since the majority of school children across much of the USA are not White, how about appointing a person of color or break the Education Cabinet in two and appoint two heads for these departments. The education system is too big and has too many parts making demands including technology, which was not always part of the educational system. Education is too important to fail. This DeVos is too far removed and looks like she should be spending her days shopping and lunching since she does not seem to know what she is doing at all. We also need a return to letting the best teachers teach, not check boxes of items covered. We need time and room for creativity and music and art in earnest.
1
Do parents feel that their children are reading less than previous generations? It is not the case in my house, and I don't think it's true for any of my friends' children either (other than those with diagnosed learning disabilities).
I think what is happening is that the educated middle class kids and higher are doing well, probably better than ever, while the rest of the students are falling farther behind. None of this should be surprising, as the polarization of our country in so many ways is more evident every day.
4
When we will learn to stop thinking of academic performance as strictly the product of schooling and admit that current "experts" can't come to a consensus because the situation is more complicated than the methods they use to assess it? Policy change has to happen in many more areas than the Dept of Education, which can do little to address the problems of income inequality, childhood trauma, poverty, homelessness, and hunger, the digital divide, lack of affordable health care, mass incarceration, addiction, and mental illness, all of which are GROWING problems in the United States, and all of which impact children's cognitive development and academic performance.
Whatever solutions may prove to achieve success, I'm quite sure that they will be in spite of Secretary DeVos's efforts to privatize education, (thus limiting quality education to those who can afford it), and not because of them.
3
We already knew GenZ reading skills were declining due to the readily available video content, but this article doesn’t mention that their multitasking and decision making speeds have gone up.
Maybe changing the content & teaching methods would bring scores back up vs trying to do the same thing I did 15 years ago.
IT is changing the entire world.
4
The public high school where I teach English is in the throes of a trend of letting students choose their own books, rather than reading assigned texts. There is institutional pressure to let student engagement drive text choices. Students are still reading--but are selecting texts that interest them.
I believe in questioning the canon, in using literature to engage students to expand their perspectives, and incorporating contemporary voices into the discourse of the classroom. I also believe that, as an adult who has spent her life reading and thinking about literature, I am qualified to select texts that will foster critical thinking skills for my students. Quantity of time spent reading becomes less valuable if the texts students read are only what interests them, rather than challenging them.
In no other discipline are students asked if they "liked" the curriculum. Nobody asks a math student if they "liked" that quadratic equation, or a history student if they "liked" the Enlightenment. There is nothing wrong with teaching kids that there are different kinds of reading: we read literature for one reason; we read "beach reads" for another; we read cookbooks for still another. The canon isn't the end-all-be-all, but it's got value, and to dismiss it as "irrelevant" is not helping our students.
62
I agree completely. I teach in a middle school where the focus is eyes on the page not analysis of literature. Students choose there own reading and teacher directed examination of the text is forsaken for high interest reads. Whole class reading has been abandoned for student driven lit circles. Why do we expect this to work. Sometimes a teacher actually has insights and information that could enhance student reading. In this case I actually do fault the current teaching methodology. How many kids will lose out on the experience of studying important texts before someone realizes that what we are doing isn’t working?
3
The nation is failing its students and young people on all fronts, from pre-K -16 public education, to quality health care, to protecting the environment.
Apparently the people in DC do not think young people are worth investing in, nor do they care much about our collective future.
DeVos is right. We are in a crisis. But it's a crisis of leadership.
We need leaders who care about our young people, their families, and their futures, not people like DeVos, who look at them and wonder how she and her friends can make more money off of them.
8
Of course teachers and schools will be blamed for these declining scores.
What are we up against? Kids who spend all of their free time playing video games, using nonstop social media on their phones, watching movies and YouTube at all hours. An entire generation has learned to use tech for entertainment BEFORE they learned how to read. There is very little chance that they will ever value reading beyond Google searches.
302
@SCZ
If you’re looking to blame then head on over to the systematic defunding of our public schools, state colleges, and anything else that government should be doing. The scores used to be higher because public money was spent on education. It’s been down hill since the Reagan years and the campaign to convince the public that government was the problem and shouldn’t do anything but lower taxes (mostly for the wealthy) and make everything easier for corporations.
26
@DBL
Sorry. Schools could do better but I don't think the primary blame lies there.
Reading starts at home with parents reading to a child. Too few children get much of that experience these days. Parents are at work. Nannies.... many barely speak English. Daycare has inherent limits. Reading to a group is not the same as reading individual.
Early experiences with reading is a large part of the problem but something else is at work.
I believe the way reading was taught changed in the 1960's. I see a huge difference in my generation's reading habits compared to those a few years younger.
Our house if filled with books. We read incessantly. Yet those only a few years younger have nothing written in their houses. We read for enjoyment; younger relatives do not. Even my wife's book club is overwhelmingly her age or older.
We used to have summer reading lists that covered a range of 'classic books' - fiction and non-fiction. No longer. It seems if they are not read in school today, they remain unread.
The WAY reading occurs in school deserves some attention. Some teachers focus on the number of books a child reads. One 4th grade teacher actually discouraged kids from reading 'hard' books and focused on 'easy' reading. Another teacher - whose students read fewer books - encouraged her students to take on more difficult reading.
Thankfully our children have picked up our habits. Books remain important parts of their lives.
14
Absolutely not true. You want kids to like reading - introduce them to a good book, at their reading level, on a subject they like. See the problem isn't their phones. The problem is during the Great Recession school libraries were let go, as were the librarians. Now you have no library time and no one to point out the books that might start a child reading for a lifetime. And yes, I am a librarian.
17
It would be instructive to correlate reading scores with home library size. When a teenager I read Ian Fleming verociously. In college I had to read incessantly. Kids today do not read, parents do not encourage reading. At a young age kids, today, are given their very own digital nanny that entertains them rather than a good book. This issue has zero to do with Common Core or other perceived boogeymen. Its the parents.
3
@Walt I'm in a pretty large parenting group and the consensus in the group is that kids are read to and many people limit their screen time. I only use tablets if I absolutely need my kids to not be crazy such as a trip to the ER last weekend.
Maybe if we stopped testing kids all the time, stopped making them only read paragraphs of boring material for the express purpose of testing them, and allowed teachers to teach whole novels, interesting short stories, and get back to what they do best (TEACHING), then perhaps we could get those scores up and have kids love reading again!
Madness, I know. But then again, what do I know? I only have two M.Eds, am a doctoral student in the teaching of English literature, and have been teaching for 13 years. Surely the testing companies, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the corporate conglomerates know more than I do...
21
Agreed, the situation has changed, but no one is changing the strategy to attack the problem. They just assume they can throw more tests, and more boring content at them and punish them for not excelling.
What’s the definition of insanity again? ;)
1
@Heather
But if they ask the people who know, they might have to listen.
Keep fighting the good fight.
2
Throwing money at the problem, in the form of private schools and tutors, seems to work for the rich. I'm not certain why it wouldn't work for the rest of us.
9
All of Trump’s base know reading might cause brain activity which leads to becoming more like Obama.
The horror of reading - that’s why they have rallies where they can all think together.
MAGANR.
3
There was no change in the scores of Asian students. This tells you all you need to know about the causes of the decline and the ways to reverse it. In Asian families, parents read to their children. Asian families have books at home. Asian parents are educated themselves and respect education in others. No money thrown at underperforming students and schools will improve them unless the cultural dynamics changes in their communities. When my kids were small and we were poor, I told them: “I don’t always have money for toys but I always have money to buy you books”. Both my sons are successful; both are avid readers. This is the only way to improve reading scores. Everything else is a waste of the taxpayer’s money.
16
Starts at home.
Mine were encouraged to read from little.
But that was the exception among their friends, most of them did not read.
Tablet have replaced parents, with kids being given a video game to make them quiet so mommy can have some Instagram time
How about YOU put down the phone and sit down to read with your kid?
8
We are witnessing the end of everything. OMG!
2
Let me guess, Blue-Light-Special, Pyramid-Scheme Devos' solution to this mild crisis is Private Vouchers to schools under contract to a business she or Duh-Nald owns?
8
When you live in a stupid culture like we Americans do, what do you expect? Young people don't read because corporate culture promotes spending one's time surfing the internet, playing idiotic video games, watching embarrassingly juvenile movies, and wasting a good portion of one's day on Facebook. Schools are not to blame. The silly American culture is the culprit. When it emphasizes silly entertainment over self-improvement and the pleasures of using one's mind, you get what we have.
9
Good job, Betsy.
1
For the actual report go to: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
3
How do we know that this year's test is comparable in difficulty to last year's test? Although scores in Massachusetts declined, the relative difference between Massachusetts and the rest of the nation remained about the same.
Kudos to the Washington DC for their improvement. Any speculations as to why?
There are likely several factors at work here. The emergence of the iPhone generation raised by cellphones (today's eighth graders were one when they came on the market in 2007) coincides with this and other negative statistics concerning youth learning and happiness. This is no coincidence, in my view. They have drastically cut reading time. Another factor is that standardized tests are a political football, subject to manipulation in the structure, level assessment, and interpretation. No one gets to study the material before or after and the material does not align with what students are learning in school. Then the pass and proficiency rates are determined not by the nature of student performance but by political-economic decisions concerning what will allow the tests to be impactful without being abolished as too difficult. Much of the testing movement requires that the results be deemed poor so that it can provide an impetus to move students out of the public schools and into for profit charters and private schools, many of them religious, as Secretary DeVos unsurprisingly has done here.
4
Are we surprised that three years into the Betsy DeVos era we are seeing declines in test scores? Everyone knew she lacked anything resembling adequate qualifications for her positions, an we now have the data to prove it.
I've worked in public education for more than twenty years, and the problem now is the same as always: the people who set educational policy in this country are not educators, and they do not understand how children learn. Instead, education is used a political football, intended to set one squad against another. It's as if we look at all of the available research to find out what works, and then we do the exact opposite. Except that I don't even think we're really looking at the research.
8
Ironically, as I was reading this article I was admonishing my 10-year-old son for reading at the breakfast table where he was quite unable to eat his breakfast, read his book, and cover his sneeze all at the same time.
How did we get to this sorry state of affairs, you ask? Well, my wife and I both read to him from birth (before in fact), we have books around the house and we believe that education is very important. However, I think that perhaps the most impactful policies revolve around devices.
1) No devices in the bedroom, ever.
2) No video gaming other than earned minutes (through chores, music practice, positive behavior, etc.) which will add up to a maximum of two hours a week.
3) We have no cable TV, though with high speed internet we do have some access to media via Amazon and Netflix.
4) No phone until HS.
Is this a recipe for success? No, just a method that we have employed a couple of times that works for us.
A perspective on the money for teachers question. This year, for the first time, my wife's base salary (she is a HS teacher who has been in education for 25 years) exceeded my starting salary as a software engineer in 1984. Given the importance of eduction on producing a population who can continue and expand our democracy I would hope that we can do better.
25
@Fmblog
It's really not that deep. My kids read obsessively too because my husband and I really like to read. But they play video games as well. I don't have hard rules, just yell "get off the xbox!' when they don't manage to cut themselves off.
What kid watches TV these days?
1
People are missing the obvious: Reading instruction has changed for the worse. Most schools expect kids to become proficient readers through a discredited method called "whole language," which fails to give kids the tools necessary to understand the phonics of the English language. Back in the day (I was in elementary school in the late 60s-early 70s), schools used phonics-based instruction. It works. "Whole Language," a fad created in schools of education around the country, fails many students, but particularly students with learning disabilities (many proponents of Whole Language even deny that dyslexia exists). Not only are kids not learning how to read, but teachers are not being taught the methods that help struggling readers.
Use of structured literacy with a systematic method of phonics instruction works for all readers, not just kids who struggle the most (like kids with dyslexia). Time to bring back what actually works to our public schools.
19
@Lee arlva: I'm a special education teacher in Missouri. We teach a phonics-based program for students with reading disabilities. I believe the shift in the last few years has been away from whole language towards balanced literacy.
4
@Anna Grace "Balanced literacy" is just the latest iteration of "whole language" to make it more seemingly more in line with research. Balanced literacy works no better than whole language, unfortunately, for students with disabilities. All students should be receiving intensive evidence-based phonics-based reading instruction.
1
Is it simply coincidence that the 17 states losing ground, bringing national scores down, are Trumpian states?
What are the rates of homeschooling in those states? What is the relative poverty level? What are the under-employment rates? Are those the states who had refused Medicaid expansion?
My hunch is that the social-economic factors in my questions belies the reduction in scores. NOT a vote for a know-nothing corrupt Educator-in-Chief. A turn away from having educated parents who read with and nurture their kids because they themselves have jobs, educations and health insurance.
It may be “elitist” to connect these dots but it seems to be related.
3
So what?
Among the 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 was 58% of the white voting majority including 62% of white men and 54% of the white women.
While Trump's partisan political base relies on the Trump Ministry of Propaganda aka Fox News and the Trump Minister of Propaganda aka Sean Hannity for it's ' facts' and ' information'.
Hannity is a high school graduate entertainer by nature and nurture.
3
"Throw more money at the problem" I don't take anyone seriously who uses this phrasing. The implication being there is no thought process behind the funding, just blindly throwing around money. You have to invest in what works. Figure that out and fund appropriately.
Using the phrase "throwing money at" is intellectually lazy.
7
And people wonder how Trump got elected...A properly educated citizenry would not fall for his Big Lies.
5
Let’s give these tests to Trump, DeVos and the Republicans. If they can’t do better than our 4th and 8th graders then they shouldn’t be in government.
9
Trump presidenting speech double plus ungood. Makes double plus ungood scores little ones having.
*The sad thing is, a substantial number of people probably won’t understand the above reference due to their lack of English literacy and a lack of knowledge of literature as a critique of world history.
I hope most Times readers get it, at least.
1
Asian - Americans at the academic top again. Why? Instead of the usual hand wringing and the rush to pump more money into a failing system, why not analyze the reason for the Asian - American consistent success?
2
Just through more money at it and continue to pay education grads - some of the dumbest college graduates there are - more money, I am sure it will fix it.
1
@Complete The irony of this comment is delicious.
2
This country is at a crossroads, do we choose a dumbed down president who pretends he knows all or someone who actually cares about education.
1
Social media - the new opiate of the masses?
5
Thank God we have television.
Here's a link with the scores for each state.
Very interesting.
Kansas and Indiana among the lowest scores.
https://hechingerreport.org/u-s-education-achievement-slides-backwards/
1
Kids with an intellectual/curious bend are branded as ‘nerds’ and ‘losers’. Perhaps it’s time for us to review how the American, anti-intellectual culture is driving poor academic outcomes.
9
Start by firing Betsy De Vos! The fish stinks from the head down, according to a prominent former Trump administration official. And, while you’re at it..........
5
It's part of Betsy DeVoss's overall plan in line with Trump policies and goals.
MADA
MakeAmericaDumberAgain
3
No no no… This is just the way Republicans like their constituents. Malleable, low information, gullible.
1
Parents who don't read beget children who can't read.
7
Poor education seems to effect the entire country....watching Donald Trump laboriously attempt to read his prepared statement from the TelePrompTer announcing the death of Baser el Baghdadi was pitiful. Difficulty learning to read seems to encompass all levels of America.
1
Pretty simple explanation. We are seeing a steady dumbing down of the general populous. How many parents read much beyond their computer screens? How many read books or even in-depth periodicals? What do we expect from them as role models for their kids? As tiresome as it sounds, when I was a kid, we watched no more than one hour of TV, there were no personal computers or smart phones, and my parents had a houseful of weekly periodicals, and took us to the library every week. Society has changed; the only hope if to educate kids to that new normal. At least make them computer literate and able to distinguish fact from fiction on the Internet.
371
@Esteban S. Just FYI: populous refers to the number of people (New York City is very populous, with over 2 million people living there.), and populace refers to the people at large, such as what you are referring to.
And I am in complete agreement with your comment. :)
14
@Esteban S. "As tiresome as it sounds, when I was a kid, we watched no more than one hour of TV, there were no personal computers or smart phones, and my parents had a houseful of weekly periodicals, and took us to the library every week."
Did you also walk to school 10 miles in the snow barefoot uphill both ways?
13
@Esteban S. - Mother of three young children here. I can guarantee you that most households I know, including mine, still place a major emphasis on reading, and still go to the library regularly. I think this is more of an issue of funding for lower income educational programs, rather than a lack of parent involvement.
8
Among highly educated families, the "Opt Out" movement has taken a strong hold. Therefore, results cannot be trusted. It's time to move away from inundating students with standardized tests. They should be designed to inform instruction, and little more. Put all those resources back into schools already!
2
@Lara Jones,
Highly educated = elitism. Thank you.
1
I hypothesize this decline is due, at least in part, to the Common Core’s emphasis on using complex texts across the curriculum. These ratcheted up the recommended average text complexity demands at each grade level about one academic year, which is a huge jump in text complexity for struggling readers. Although teachers in most districts do have some discretion over the texts used for instruction, during large chunks of their days, students who experience reading difficulty are working with texts they experience as frustrational. One-to-one, that might be arguably acceptable, depending on teacher prowess. But grappling with texts that are way too difficult leads to exhaustion, frustration, and limited learning.
5
Maybe the eighth grade reading declines mirror what you might see if you tested their parents. Scores leveled off in 2009 and then declined? The time line matches, more or less, when I and others I know, started spending more time reading (skimming headlines) things online and less time delving into books and longer essays.
8
Reading is not a dog and pony show gimmick. It is a life long activity and MUST be taught as a pleasure, whatever that pleasure may be. Testing is a dead end, just a feel good or feel bad diagnosis. Future success starts at the beginning, not in eight grade.
9
I hope a true education expert can guide any policy decisions, not Betsy DeVos.
7
It's time to gin up the assessment crisis machine! "Ms. DeVos said the 2019 scores reflected a 'student achievement crisis.'" Surely this calls for schools to spend big bucks on new tests, new curricula, new books, new buzzword training, new technology...
And yet, the same data show improvement from 1990 to 2009, which was several "revolutions" ago.
The crises are manufactured to sell whatever those in power are selling.
What really matters is quality teachers (not being jerked around by administrative micromanagement) and family support (looks like Asians were the only group not to retreat in reading).
10
"The results of the test, which assesses a sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students, will inevitably prompt demands for policy change." Policy change? How is the USG going to enforce such a policy? How is it going to make children read? What a joke!
2
This is the most basic, nation-wide measure of schooling, and illustrates the large-scale failure of the schooling systems. Yet the NYT pumps out stories about the 'crisis' of integration or bullying or the topic du jour. The proliferation of human interest stories comes at the expense stories grounded in data like this one. I suppose the single death (of a childhood education) is a tragedy and millions just a statistic.
3
@Andy Deckman So...you don't think school climate has an effect on learning? My 7th grade daughter, her cohort and peers across the country have witnessed a dramatic increase in bullying, increases in standardized testing (which distracts from learning in the classroom and increases stress), increases in populations needing ESL training, psychological/health issues that aren't being served because of a lack of counselors and psychologists, bad food, increases in class size and decreases in individual attention, crumbling infrastructure, highly stressful "lockdown" drills in response to school shootings...
Not to mention the ongoing exodus of teachers due of to low pay and minimized social status. In my old high school (in an affluent area fed by property taxes and a fundraising apparatus that sources wealthy alums), teachers are paid in the six figures and treated like university professors. A member of my family who is a retired teacher in a semi-rural district ended a 40-year career at $56,000/year and had to take up part-time jobs after retirement.
Because of pressure from the Right and for-profit education -- which is salivating waiting for their shot at this massive market -- schools are a battlefield, with public education fighting for survival while trying to serve their students and communities. Kids are right in the middle, and the least safe place in any battlefield is the middle. Tell me, @Andy Deckman, would you be able to excel in such an environment?
2
Is there a relationship between declining scores in reading and math and and increasing rates of poverty? Do scores correlate with decreased revenue by local school districts? What is the relationship between scores and increasing rates of mild developmental delay within the population, an issue almost completely ignored by the media? What is the relationship between media use and test scores? (After all, kids can read or do math if they are parked in front of the TV watching Kim and Kayne,).
6
how many of the people who say you can't solve the problem by throwing more money at it send their children to the best and most expensive schools in the land
24
@cjc Most of the good private schools have academic standards much higher than public schools. The main thing that money buys your kid is entrance into a community of people who value education, unlike most inner-city public schools. That means high standards, high expectations, and no tolerance for bullying or disruption in the classroom.
2
I just want to point out that private schools aren’t necessarily better, they’re just devoid of misbehaving riffraff. The requirements to become a public school teacher are astronomical. I’ve worked at a private school and the teachers...? Many were unqualified and actually shady (not all, but some). There are no standards. And people pay out the nose for that!
1
Half of US States are struggling with Republican infestations, whose leader boldly declared himself "not a reader." Books contain facts. It's not really a surprise that reading scores are declining.
10
Ah yes, now we'll hear another round of teacher bashing from parents and politicians. It's the unions fault or it's the teachers fault. How about this: it's our fault because we don't want to pay for high quality universal child care while parents work. We let poor children grow up in word deserts. We tell poor mothers that they have to work to earn their welfare and then we blame them when they haven't got the energy to spend quality time with their children because they were working. One more thing: our daily lives are so filled with noise that there's almost no quiet space or time to sit down and read a book for the sheer pleasure of reading.
The importance of reading becomes obvious long before high school. The first few years of schooling consist of learning the basics that are the foundation for the rest of our schooling and our lives. With the exception of developmentally disabled children, or those who are dyslexic, most children should leave first grade able to read simple books on their own. By the time they enter fourth grade they should be able, with minimal help, to read for information. And no one, teacher or parent, should tell a child that a book they want to read is too hard for them or way above their grade level.
We know what to do. We have to make up our minds that we'll invest the money, the time, and recruit the best to turn young readers into proficient readers.
10/30/2019 11:27am first submit
17
@hen3ry - Not to mention, teachers in high-poverty schools are dealing with hunger, housing instability, etc, in their students. Yet, we blame the teachers and not society as a whole.
4
@hen3ry
"And no one, teacher or parent, should tell a child that a book they want to read is too hard for them or way above their grade level. "
Can you come talk to my 7th grader's Reading teacher? My daughter LOVES reading. It's really her passion. She always gets great grades. Weirdo teacher asks what's she's reading and then says things like, "That's really a high school book." Really? My daughter read a bunch of classics recently - 1984, Brave New World, Pride and Prejudice - and got pushback from this teacher on every one. I don't get it.
3
@jasmin I never showed any teachers or librarians what I was reading when I was in school. I sensed that they would disapprove. I was 14 when I read "Le Morte D'Arthur" by Sir Thomas Malory. It was written in old English. I spent an entire summer with the book seesawing between the stories and its glossary and a dictionary. No one told me it was too difficult to understand. No one made fun of me. I came away with a good understanding of the Round Table, the legend of King Arthur, and a much improved vocabulary.
2
Nobody has spoken about the decline of teaching exacerbated by the Teachers Unions where most of the emphasis is on better benefits and salaries. less and less accountability and compensation not linked to student achievement. illiterates teaching illiterates. great example the Chicago teachers union. Corrupt to the brim.
4
@Dave - All the teachers I have met recently (and I have a kid in school and am guessing you haven't had a kid in school in decades) have been incredibly motivated teachers who want to do their best by their students. By no means are they "illiterates." Okay, Boomer!
2
@Dave So let me get this straight. You're pinning declining math and reading scores on the teachers unions? Spoken by someone who clearly has neither spent any time in a classroom other than the time as a student and who has no real idea what teacher's unions do. As a teacher and a union leader I can tell you that the average teacher spends about 5 minutes per week thinking about their union. It's just not top of mind. Any teacher worth his or her salt is always putting their students first. But with that said, I don't think it's fair to denigrate a union that is aimed at making the financial lives of their members more fair.
As for accountability, as these reports clearly show, there has to be more equitable accountability - including accountability at home and by the government agencies that can make the home lives of many of these students more tolerable. You start to fix the system when you fix the communities these students live in.
As for your "illiterates teaching illiterates" - I think that pretty much sums up YOUR attitude toward education anyway. Teachers are not illiterate and every student CAN learn - they aren't inherently illiterate either. I can't say the same for every NY Times reader, however.
3
@gerard.campione
I appreciate your comments, I really do. Yes the Public unions in this country have gotten out of hand. I come from a family of teachers at all educational levels going back to the 1920's. A consistent complaint from them has been the decline of education overall and the constant lowering of the bar. I will agree that better compensation would lead to better quality teachers in the First to 12th grades.
1
The state of Indiana, where Mike Pence was a Gov, had a big decline in reading skills. How did Mike change the $funding for education when he was Gov? What’s the average class size in Carmel, IN versus a school on the south side of Indy?
7
Here we go again. The decline continues. All of the single-theme magic bullets have failed. All of the quick fixes done nothing. There is no magic bullet. There is no quick fix.
The problem of fixing education is approximately as complicated as the problem of fixing our unfair society. The same dynamics generally apply. For example, in education as in society at large, the rich grow ever richer while the rest of us must struggle merely to survive.
The decline is real. The utter inefficacy of all those quick fixes and magic bullets is real. We know. I was part of a team that ran a many-year public school STEM program. The best teachers in the district were part of the team.
Academic success is a wickedly complicated problem which depends on home, community (real and online), school and employer. The problem includes any number of feedback loops.
Every student is unique. Even for the same teacher and school, no two classes are ever statistically the same. Erratic, misguided, and counterproductive school policies (and all of those quick fixes and magic bullets) exacerbate the problems and undermine even the very best teachers.
As for our own program, we believe it was successful. It became better as our model (and our understanding) grew more complicated, subtle, multi-faceted. A consensus of the most relevant parties--parents, teachers, students, communities--agreed.
10
Did students at religious and charter schools take this same national exam? If so, what were the results? If not, then how does anybody know whether or not students at religious and charter schools fare any better than those at public schools?
Has NOBODY, after all these years, done a study comparing education outcomes of similar students (same race, socioeconomic conditions, education attained by parents, etc.) at charter/religious schools and public schools?
These seem like obvious questions. Why doesn't the NYTimes explain any of this?
10
Public schools take all students. Private, charter and religious schools pick their students. Making a straight comparison without accounting for this is never going to be valid.
4
@RK
My kids and my niece attend 2 different Catholic schools in north Jersey. We do not take the PARCC exam, which is what public schools administer. Not sure if that's the case everywhere. Pretty sure the PARCC is more rigorous than what our kids take, where every child is deemed above grade level.
1
Simply a continuation of the Republican agenda since Tea Party ascendancy: find excuses to defund lower income educational opportunities, which translate to a demographic that is working class, not-all-white. Keep the masses ignorant, but provide funding for "charter" schools, which can ignore Federal civil rights standards and shut out people of color and the poor.
To me there is a social responsibility (and a huge nationwide economic benefit) to providing good educations, healthcare, and food and housing to as many as possible. It is simply good sense, too, to invest in our human infrastructure and would pay huge dividends.
We used to be able to take such things for granted, I thought.
346
@Mark
The more-funding-more-failure cycle is clear. Look at those districts with the highest per pupil spending. Devos et al are seeking to break that cycle.
2
@Mark Say what? This is an incredibly complex issue that goes back decades. There is no perfect solution, but charter schools in many places have shown clear value, both educationally and economically. It is bizarre how the teachers unions are so against them, when the status quo is an ongoing disaster.
Identify the school policies that are generating strong results and start rolling them out beyond those school districts. Some will fizzle, but many will help. Would show light at the end of the tunnel.
It's not rocket science. It's learning to read and write.
1
@Andy Deckman
No, what Devos et al are doing is funneling your tax dollars to for-profit debt mills like Corinthian Colleges.
23
Oh, but I thought Betsy Devos’s school choice, charters, and vouchers were going to solve all of these problems and bring quality education to every single child!
4
DeVos certainly won't solve this crisis. What role does social media play? Texting has slaughtered correct spelling and sentence syntax. Giving tax breaks to private religious schools, making it harder for students to repay student loans, mismanaging student loan forgiveness are all strong clues that the current administration wholeheartedly supports the "dumbing down of America." Vote blue no matter who to turn this around.
2
The more children we have in poverty, the lower the scores will be.
9
I believe part of this problem may start at the top "Before the inauguration, Trump told Axios, “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.” It's documented that our current President doesn't read, so why should students care about it? They can be President without reading. They can be a "billionaire" without reading. They can be a reality TV star without reading. Our culture is debased when the leader of the free world doesn't read.
2
It is clear that Betsy DeVos is a horrible cheerleader for education. Kansas had 8 years of cuts to education, so large that school districts sued the legislature to get more money. This is the first year even part of that money has returned.
In addition, summer school is no longer funded, and was the place where students who were behind were given more attention and helped to catch up. Library reading programs are voluntary, and those with reading problems are less likely to join them. But a school summer reading program, targeted at children who are behind, could be helpful. I would agree with Barry, there is no substitute for reading to improve a reading skill.
167
Don’t move your kids to Mississippi quite yet. Instead of referring to Mississippi’s improvement without qualification, it would’ve been useful to point out that Mississippi’s batting average wasn’t that great in 1992 or 2017. Luckily the raw numbers in the study are posted on the DOE website to review and draw your own conclusions. Basically, Mississippi’s fourth graders just caught up to the national average...awesome. Less awesome...by the eighth grade, they were well below the national average again.
Here’s the fundamental takeaway. The DOE went to great lengths to collect this data but it’s interpretation of that data leaves a lot to be desired. It’s leaving it up to states/politicians to spin the data any way they want.
I wish the authors of this article would’ve calculated the difference between each state’s scores and the national average over for each year. Sounds like a big ask but it takes about an hour or two. Doing this would’ve controlled for the validity of the different versions of the test...how do we know the test isn’t getting harder with each version? Then they could’ve commented on the policies of the states that performed at either ends of the spectrum. They could’ve additionally addressed the issue of how this delta probably wouldn’t budge for the states that hit it out of the park year after year and what those states are doing to keep their performance up.
7
@Jon Smith - Agree. This felt like it should be part of a series diving into that.
1
Scores are a very poor measure of learning.
But even if they are considered a proper measure, the outcomes indicate what I have written about for several decades.
The rote, test-based curricula forced on young students would inevitably lead to decline in reading ability. It's bad practice. And then, when scores didn't improve, we doubled down on bad practice. The chickens are coming home to roost.
We need smaller classes, less technology, more reading in context, more reading for pleasure and less time preparing for the tests that erode motivation and dampen curiosity.
Lots of brilliant people know how to fix this, but they have no power.
11
While I appreciate this briefing, I found myself wanting more information. What does it mean that some schools improved and others declined. Knowing that Mississippi improved on math and reading is good for Mississippi but doesn’t tell me where they were ranked to begin with. Am I supposed to assume there is large room for improvement across all states? What is the top score, average score, median score?
5
@GM - Mississippi has traditionally been one of the bottom states in education, so the fact that NJ went down and Mississippi went up probably means that NJ is still miles ahead of Mississippi. Agree this would be helpful context, though.
1
I suspect the overall decline in reading scores has to with the amount of screen time.
Reading starts at home, reading as a family, trips to the library, storytimes, discussing books and characters, book reports, etc.
This report is another wake-up call that as a Country we are going in the wrong direction.
Limit screen time and put a book in your child's hand.
57
@Hope
Based on what I can see I agree 100%
My daughter is in kindergarten and her friends all get more screen time than I would have expected. The parents are college educated professionals for the most part, and it's a fairly progressive community. Of course it's a nice release now and then but as a way to keep kids occupied it's terrible. Not judging- parents have to do what they have to do.
I am convinced that technology (smart phones/ streaming/ social media/ tablets etc) are a clear net negative.
5
And people are shocked that economists have finally realized that we need more English majors. My oldest son just finished a Ph.D in English from UCLA. He has walked away from academia mostly for family reasons, preferring to provide some stability to his family, rather than hop, skip and jumping across the country chasing tenured jobs. My true feeling is the country needs more people who will write stories, paint pictures and play instruments.
17
This story doesn't make sense without looking at the demographics of the students. If more educated parents are having fewer kids and children from poor families or non-English speaking immigrant families are making up a bigger portion of the pie, then you would expect to see this drop. Without controlling for the demographics we can't know if the approach to teaching is causing the problem, or if it is just socio-economic change. Either way, focusing on 8th grade isn't the answer. If you make sure that 4 and 5 year olds have the foundation to learn to read and then follow the researched backed models for reading education which means a focus on phonics, you will actually see progress.
16
@Andrew They aren't focusing on 8th graders. They are simply using them as a baseline.
Ms. DeVol, investing in children could be called "throwing money at the problem" if you wanted to deride the idea of investing in children. I believe you really don't care about children's education, or education in general, unless you can find a way to funnel the money intended for it into the private and/or religious sectors. This has been the Republican goal for decades. You are looking at the results now. Bad faith efforts bring bad returns.
5
You know what part of the problem is? The lack of professionally degreed and certified librarians in schools. Library technicians, while professional in their own right, are not qualified nor educated to develop appropriate collections for school libraries, promote reading as a lifelong activity, and teach information literacy and critical thinking skills. There are studies that show how well students score in reading tests where there is a funded school library program at their school. Unfortunately, librarians, like arts and music, are always cut when budgets get tight. Kids don't read much anymore, but one way to get them to read is to have a librarian who develops high quality collections with high interest subjects and stories that kids can relate to.
Another important issue is that us adults are not reading they way adults used to read. We are not modeling reading at home as much as we should - we stare at our phones just as much as kids do, and that's a disservice to children. They do look to us as role models. Start reading to your children while they're in the womb. Read to them when they are infants. Keep reading to them as long as they will let you. Then help them pick out books that speak to them. Even graphic novels (comic books in book form) are an example of a way to get kids interested in reading. Visit your public library if your kids' school doesn't have a good library program. And lobby for librarians in your schools.
8
I agree. A librarian made all the difference for me in grade school.
2
@Michelle i absolutely agree. l have been horrified that libraries and library classes are often the earliest to be cut from budgets in financially challenged districts When I taught in adult literacy programs, many students had not thought of reading to their children even though their own skills would be thereby improved in addition to all the other benefits. The school library helps to fill that gap but it is in the impoverished areas that funding goes away
Reading builds reading proficiency
3
The notion that the secretary of education is responsible for the reading scores across the country is laughable.
Education results are driven by the individual student, their parents and immediate surroundings not federal government bureaucrats.
19
@Ed SO $$$ has absolutely no effect?
@Karl Schneider Actually very little impact. i'd urge you to check out the Kansas City Desegregation case or even the Coleman Report from the 1960s.
2
When kids this young can navigate their smartphones better than their parents, this is not a surprise. Just when they should be learning to navigate the pages of a book...very sad.
4
The problem isn't in the schools. It's in the families and the obstacles they have to overcome.
6
@Steve M
The classic excuse for accepting a poor status quo.
Parents have always been, and always will be, a mixed bag.
It’s up to schools to teach the students they have, not theoretical children with responsible parents.
This past Monday, I had to run some errands...my home is just down the street from the Middle School. As I pulled out onto the street there was a convoy of yellow school buses fully loaded and pulling out in front of me.
It was 2pm.
I don't understand the short school days. When I went to school it was 9am to 4pm, with a half-hour lunch and two 15-minute recess breaks.
How in the world can any teacher do a proper job with today's large class sizes and too few minutes to devote to any subject—reading, grammar, history, match, etc.
Our schools can be better than this.
9
"In a statement, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who is championing a $5 billion school choice program, said that the results “must be America’s wake-up call.”
That sounds like a call for action but the reality is that school choice and a niggardly $5 billion will do little to change anything.
Here's a dose of reality; Across the nation public schools have had their budgets slashed and pay for teachers has fallen below that of other professionals. School buildings are literally falling down in some cities. Books are not replaced and general supplies for education are less than scarce. In fact they are non-existent requiring outside organizations to help purchase supplies and even school lunches for many students of impoverished parents. Mobile class rooms rather than new buildings are the norm in PA and Florida. Students and communities have suffered greatly as They insist charter schools, parochial schools and school choice are the answer to failing public schools.
In Sumter, Marion and Lake counties in Florida there is one gold-plated charter school in The Villages, a wealthy retirement community yet there are dozens of elementary, middle and high schools with mobile classrooms, with crumbling buildings and mobile class rooms. The Wildwood Soup Kitchen collects funds from residents for "Take Home Weekend Lunches" for hundreds of students from impoverished families. Coats are purchased for students too poor to afford warm clothing.
Republicans say they do enough.
6
It would be interesting to see if they adjust for immigration. Reading skills are the hardest to obtain for ESL students.
6
De Vos is trying to use this failure on her watch as some form of vindication for her anti-public school agenda?
The mendacity of the Trump administration really knows no limits.
6
Just add this shameful situation to the list of critical issues on the nation’s to do list. My children are grown and all avid readers like their parents but it does not make me feel smug or self congratulatory. We must do better for today’s kids, this is a good place to start. But with Betsy DeVos in charge of Donald Trump’s Department of Education, the place to start is at our voting precinct.
9
How about putting the list of states I the article, not just a percentage?
4
Kids that spend a large part of the day reading and writing texts devoid of proper grammar in every respect, as well as maintaining smart phone-level attention spans can only confirm that we are raising the “scholastically challenged”.
3
This is why the home environment has become exceedingly important. The parents from the Asian households which surrounded me made sure they read to their kids all the time and provided them with a plentiful supply of cheap books from the library and used bookstores.
5
Is it too politically incorrect to present this data by ethnic group? How much of the stagnation/decline is attributable to ethnic group mix changes? In most areas of the country, Hispanic students do only slightly better than Black students. Both groups badly trail other groups.
The performance of schools and our failure to adequately enforce our immigration laws are very closely linked. Not for the better.
7
@Kurfco
I just looked at the raw data and Hispanic students have gone from 6% of the nation's students in 1990 to 27% in 2019. In 2019, only 28% tested at or above proficient.
3
@Kurfco I think the stress many Hispanic and Black students' families are under along with the underfunding of our schools and underpayment of our teachers explains a lot. Way to try to spin it though. If you think immigration is a problem now wait until Bangkok and Mumbai go underwater in a couple decades. Simply keeping people out isn't a realistic strategy. We need and benefit from immigrants and must stop demonizing them. And we need to address health care and money related stressors for parents (oh, and immigration and racism related stressors too!!) if we truly desire to foster the best in all our children. Do we?
The number one issue that is not mentioned enough is that there is over a 30% drop in teacher college enrollment. We have no way to replace teachers that are leaving because of retirement or frustrated with the educational system. No "silver bullet" plan is going to solve this and you can have all the choice in the world but without qualified teachers in the classroom, you are going to run into the same problems year after year. What is Betsy going to do to make the teaching profession more attractive because that's the only question that needs to be answered?
1
We all agree that healthcare costs are too high, that housing is too expensive, and so on. This is something which causes short-term pain to people when their living standards do not match up with their expectations. But there is also a longer-term problem, and we see the effects of it here. There are many successful people in their twenties and thirties who are contemplating having children, but who are simply unable to give them the upbringing which they deserve. Their housing is cramped, their healthcare is expensive, their living costs are high. These people, who are the backbone of the professional class, have responded to this cost of living crisis by having fewer and fewer children. The end result is that their talent is simply not being passed on.
9
A kid without a book, is like a plane without a propeller.
We need the fables, we need the tales, we need the well-being a shared story affords..
Our culture is moving at too fast a clip to slow for readers.
It takes a porch, a hammock, a lap, and some dedicated time to read, to share stories.
A tree, a bed, a couch, a desk. it takes someone home to read to you, it takes a quiet house, and a rested, curious mind to follow a winding tale.
Many of us, think back on reading with nostalgia, tinged with shame for leaving an old friend on the battle field of life.
Our culture is a fast moving river, full of debris, and keeping eyes open long enough to take in a story is too demanding given all the moving bits and bytes in our lives..technology is too loud, and I for one can't concentrate long enough or relax long enough to sit with a story.
Speaking of stories.. The Little Train that Could, reminds me, its not too late to pick up a book, not to late to read to your cat, to your kid, to your mother. its not too late..
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...
8
People will say I’m a Luddite but the best thing Americans - and humans, really - could do is round up all the smartphones and turn them into a grotesque monument warning against the dangers of technology addiction, fractured attention spans, and the demise of quiet reflection and authentic communication. Brains are so busy they no longer have time to think.
2
This is a strong argument for Marianne Williamson's Department of Children and Youth. One-off gimmicks from high-profile billionaires, and fashionable Ivy League experiments in scaling up a technique that worked for one teacher with one school community in one geographic locale are good for headlines, award ceremonies and MacArthur grants, but not much else.
4
We need to do what Finland does--put an educational SWAT team in place to support those who are having trouble reading. They do intervention and then the kid typically does fine. I also think we need to stop pushing kindergarteners to read. Some are just not ready yet and our national standards say that they are.
The school system is working very well for my child, but she is white and we are well-off. That said, in 1st grade, she hated to read. I realized that, when she read out loud, she'd sometimes skip words or the ending on long words. I googled it and took her to a pediatric ophthalmologist; she had eye tracking issues. Her teacher was a lovely woman (very nurturing and a great teacher) but she had never heard of this and I think was a little dubious. It took 9 months of very expensive therapy and then my daughter began to love to read. But I can't help but wonder what kids DON'T have this relatively common issue caught by a parent or in school?
7
interesting, it's almost like 30 years of defunding public education has an impact.. maybe we need to fund schools for a change
10
Even more important than policy is parenting. Parenting, however, is a chicken and the egg situation. Parents who allow early access to screen time - whether television, video games, smart phones, or tablets - are not helping their children. Children cannot self-regulate. That is the responsibility of parents. But to be a good parent, you must have had good parenting yourself. You can quickly see a self-fulfilling prophecy here. That’s not to say that some children cannot succeed in spite of their parenting, but when interest in reading and learning is not coached by parents and embraced by children, you can quickly see how poor education and mental faculties can become generational, which will have a devastating impact on socio-economics and mobility.
12
Look at social situations. Most kids grew up in a 9-5 world in earlier time. Today, kids don't know when a parent will be home . The 24/7 economy eats away at home life and parental involvement. Now school lunches are to be reduced for the poor. Health and learning depend on nutrition, safe housing and health.
6
Throwing money at education doesn't work. That is especially true when the majority of the money lands in the pockets of for-profit corporations that funnel those funds away from any hope of meaningful results.
We don't need more schools. We need better schools that are unburdened from the crushing expenses of Elsevier, Pearson and the rest of the hoard of profiteers. Their influence through bribery of elected officials is at the heart of this and just about every other serious problem that we face.
6
We live in the reign of quantity. As though all the testing we put kids through could make them grow in proficiency!
1
Here we go again. Time for new standards, new pilots, new research, round and round we go.
The path to better reading is paved with books. Actual books.
5
Step 1: Parents need to skip a kids' social or sporting event, take their kids to the library, or shopping at the bookstore or Amazon or whatever.
Step 2: Bring books home and read.
Stop blaming Trump, the GOP, the entertainment industry and/or technology for problems easily ameliorated on your own.
1
The GOP do own most of this problem. Because they controlled many of the state governments. The GOP is also known for “starving The Beast”. Quit spending exorbitant amounts on programs and consultants. Provide intensive reading and math tutoring by qualified professionals on a one on one basis. Hire people from your community that will spend those tax dollars in your community. Teachers know how to teach but they can’t give every student the one on one time that he or she might need to improve reading skills. Decreasing income inequality would help tremendously.
Could this outcome be due to children no longer reading books, magazines and newspapers? Children are on their phones and tablets constantly playing video games, watching videos of "influencers," and sending each other texts that read like lyrics to a Prince song as in "R U there?"
Reading informs the ability to write well. I am increasingly seeing people (adults) writing 5$ instead of $5 or incorrectly writing "wahlah" in the place of "voila." I can only conclude from these and many other similar examples that people base their writing on what they hear and not necessarily what they read. I am still trying to figure out how and why the word "tooken" entered the language.
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@Lynn in DC
I don't think many kids ever read books. I think the bookworms have always been a minority. The rest spent their time playing, or working, or watching tv and now on their phones. My children are 10, 11 and 13 and they read every single day. They also do all the stuff you mention, especially the boys and their ridiculous waste of time watching other boys play video games. Still, we've always read and our kids picked up the habit. They scored in the 99th, 98th and 95th percentiles on last year's standardized test, so I guess they're doing well. I guess their classmates who didn't do as well will take the blue collar jobs and make more money than my kids. Lol
By the way, my daughter came home apoplectic the other day because a kid in her class had said tooken. I didn't realize it was a larger problem. Should I break it to her gently?
15
@Lynn in DC, slow your roll!! Keep Prince out of this debate. That man could play every instrument he touched. Otherwise, I agree with your assessment :-)
3
@Lynn in DC Not to confuse the issue, but the reason you're seeing more people make mistakes in their writing is that you're seeing more people's writing overall thanks to the internet.
As someone who used to tutor in college and has always enjoyed reading letters to the editor, I assure you that semi-literate people have always existed, and have always been the majority. But now they have a venue to advertise their ignorance.
Education in the US is and has always been an afterthought.
21
This should be the "reformers" wake up call, that testing, testing, and more testing does not actually do anything worthwhile but create profitable testing companies.
Almost no schools even allow teachers to offer time for students to read books of their choosing in their classes because "it's not a valuable use of time". Instead direct instruction and "passages" (not actual stories or books) are considered to be the greatest thing since sliced bread!
Bring back books! Bring back librarians! Bring back reading!
14
It'd be interesting to see the list of states where scores declined.
5
"...declines were largest in Indiana, Virginia, and New Hampshire." Aren't these states experiencing drug epidemics, both meth and opioid?
5
... our local schools do not provide or use textbooks anymore, and none have libraries with books. All classes are taught from handouts and using google classroom, schoology. Kahn and other online sites using google chromebooks or student owned computers. All printed library materials were tossed and pulped in China 5 years ago. Bottom line - there are NO BOOKS in the schools. And yes, when the centurylink internet drops out, regularly, nothing can be done in school - outages are often all day.
14
Teenage daughter, prefers phone to reading books. Told us of an instagram page she enjoys with kids contributing their own writing for others to read. First response - hey great, sounds good. Then I asked her why she likes those stories: "They just get to the point, no unnecessary buildup, setting the stage, distracting detail."
Another thing to thank Steve Jobs for. No wonder he didn't let his kids have phones.
26
"While there was no significant change for Asian students." People need to wake up to the fact that it is culture and not household income that often determines academic success. Parents that consider school a place where you dump your kid for a few hours while you pursue your own activities, sometimes very necessary employment, may see poor achievement. Americans like to think we are number one, when some rankings put us around 20th among advanced countries in reading and 30th in math. Part of the problem is our educational system, or rather the lack of one. Better performing countries have national curriculums and funding of schools. Often it boils down to, "I don't want to pay for the kids of those people." Concern for the public good is woefully lacking.
6
Reading is soooo passe. Who has the time to sit down and look at words, letters, syntax, grammar, punctuation marks, and style. Pictures and videos are worth a thousand words (thank you instagram, youtube, and facebook). My tablet can read to me. My phone shows me a picture of who is calling. And if I need anything I have several personal assistants: "Hey google", "Siri", and "Alexa". Don't get me wrong. It's important to learn how to read, just like it's important to know basic arithmetic. Reading used to be fundamental. Now, it's optional. And don't get me started about standardized testing for reading skills. It's full of bias (race, class, language, SES, gender, sexual orientation); it's especially bias to those who are illiterate.
Also, who gives a hoot about the oxford comma?
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@I Heart
I miss the oxford comma dreadfully.
42
@I Heart - Don't give up hope. Just last week my 11 year old came to me and asked what the purpose is of the punctuation with both the comma and the period. I responded, animatedly, that that's a semi-colon, which is a marvelous piece of punctuation, then explained its usage. She's not alone, we've had sleepovers here where her friends bring their books.
If you are giving up hope, do something to affect the trend. Volunteer at a literacy program or in a classroom, find a way to share your love of the written word and the wonders of punctuation with someone who could use it.
31
@It's a mad world
I do too. On a side note, I hope others see the utter sarcasm in my post.
27
Number one: ban social promotion, with all of the management measures that drive it, such as paying administrators more for a higher graduation rate.
A careerist principal can quite easily defeat teachers and parents who see a child has not mastered the material he needs to learn at any grade level.
What happens next is not hard to predict. As he falls farther behind, the child -- and it is 90 percent boys who suffer from this -- becomes less capable of following the next year's material, and even more discouraged. These are the students who develop compensatory behaviors, such as schemes to game out their trusting teachers and to evade the more demanding ones.
Idling outside, cutting classes to hang out, do drugs and commit petty crime, alienating more people -- it's all familiar to everyone except the administrator, who's busy racking up accolades and raises.
The practice was especially pernicious at Centennial Middle School in Boulder, Colorado in the late 1990s and beyond, an upper income area where there were two tracks: competitive colleges, or drugs and rehab, then vastly reduced choices for the victims of low standards.
2
What costs more and more for less and less. Education. There's no end to what teachers "deserve" and no improvement in what they deliver. The sad part is collective bargaining forces schools to pay for the median teacher, and that teacher's performance is flagging. The good teachers get anchored by the bad ones, and the incentive to improve goes away, driving a downward spiral of talent and results. But hey, let's throw more money at it!
2
@TL At the primary education level, parental involvement is key. Too many people think it's the sole responsibility of the teacher to ensure their child's success at learning.
1
@UL
Unionized states typically have higher scores than non unionized.
1
Ah yes, defund the schools. That'll solve the problem!
4
Math skills are much easier for schools to control than are reading scores. Math has almost always been done pretty much exclusively in school, and with tweaks to curricula, methods, significant improvement can be made. Reading, on the other hand, is done--or should be done--mostly at home. Teachers in school can show students how to read, provide them with books, but if the parents at home don't hold their children accountable for actually doing the reading, nothing the schools can do will matter much.
Parents should demand to see their children sitting with a book for at least an hour every single day, electronic devices nowhere to be seen. They should be reading along with their children, discussing books with their children, taking them to the library regularly, filling their bedroom with books. As a teacher, I rarely see or hear of that happening. Most parents are thoroughly involved in their kids' sports schedules, and will spend hours each week gazing lovingly from the sidelines at their children as they chase a ball around a field. But spending time with them on books? Not so much.
Parents, drop the sports in favor of books. Your kids will benefit much more in the long run. Reading is the foundation not only for academic success but also for a good life.
41
Dropping sports is not the priority. When 7/10 Americans are overweight or obese, suggesting a reduction in sports or physical activity will only serve to worsen the obesity epidemic.
Screen time and devices are the problem. Children cannot self-regulate. We are becoming a nation of sedentary illiterates.
7
@EB Not just ‘accountable’. Children need to see their parents reading. They need their parents reading to them at a very young age. Reading isn’t just something one imposes on children by forcing them to sit and do it.
3
@EB The parents don't read. Without modeling behavior and family discussions that express the joys of reading, kids turn to screens instead.
2
Reading comprehension levels arguably are most influenced by a child's parents. To attribute the drop in reading scores as a fault of the nation's schools is to ignore the overarching factor a parent has in a child's life. While not the only consideration, the behavior and habits of the parent has the biggest impression on how well their children perform.
The culture in the home is where it starts.
49
@ArthurinCali E.D. Hirsch argues that reading comprehension is largely a function of background knowledge, not "reading skills". This explains why the kids of educated parents tend to read well, regardless of whether they get modern "reading skills" instruction. What this suggests is that schools should shift their focus away from skills practice to transmitting background knowledge.
1
An interest in reading starts at home, not in the school. If at least one of the parents read stories to their children many, perhaps most, of their children will see the entertainment and study aspects of reading. My mother read all the time, often to the detriment of not having dinner on time. There were always books in the house for us to read. Out of the six of us, 4 are avid readers. The problem with teaching reading in schools is that the books that they choose for the class are chosen because of particular reasons. While the is good, that does not encourage people to read. What encourages people to read is to find things that they are interested in and let them read on that. We had book reports in elementary school, but the books were not chosen by the school system or by the teachers. Other problems with reading is that the children today do not know the mechanics of the English language. Students today do not have a good vocabulary and there is this tendency to gloss over words that they do not know and in doing that, what they are reading might not make much sense. I sold into the education market and throwing money at this problem is not a solution. As a matter of fact, it is common for the governments to throw money at things without a real plan for its use. Throwing money at education is not an answer and neither is a continued increase in pay for teachers. The best teacher that I had in my 18 years of education never went to college.
26
@Bill Dooley
My mom was a teacher. She would be up early in the morning as is often the case with moms all over the world. She would be in the kitchen making school lunch for us kids and I, an early riser, would be at the kitchen table. Between feeding the turtle, making lunch and getting everyone and everything ready, she would practice spelling words with me every single morning. A ritual we loved doing together. My 8th grade scores were in the 95th percentile. I have been a life long reader and user of the local library. And yes Bill, I can remember choosing which books to do book reports on. The article mentions that there was not much of a decline for Asian students and that is not surprising as the emphasis is on studying and reading.
21
The tests are not taken seriously by students and parents and a significant portion of students (usually in upper percentiles) don't even take the tests. Test scores have been a steady source of high profits for national testing companies, while a being a continuous source of time drain in our schools. Students will be demoralized with the test scores, teachers will be more stressed, and Pearson Publishing company will be richer!
29
Public libraries and school libraries are crucial to literacy. Summer reading programs preserve reading skills and help students return to school ready to learn. If just half of all the money spent on testing and test prep and consultants were invested in school and public library programs, it would make a huge difference. A kid who chooses to read is a kid who will succeed in school.
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@ Sue
I am in agreement and a huge supporter of libraries. I suggest adding a critical ingredient to success: parental involvement and encouragement.
5
In order to reader better--like anything else--one of the essentials is to do more of it.
Videos and podcasts help people to experience stories, but push them further away from reading and the feelings and thoughts and human connection that reading inspires.
Just do it.
11
@Barry McKenna This is very common belief, and there's something to it, but I agree with E.D. Hirsch when we says that reading comprehension is mostly a function of background knowledge and that schools can make better readers by giving kids this knowledge. It's indirect, but it's a crucial way of making readers. An engaging lecture on Egypt, even though it doesn't entail reading, puts one on the path to understanding a text about Egypt. Reading alone is not sufficient; there's more schools can do.
Children are reading less, period. At home, they use devices to do their work. Actual book reading is down. Actual book reading and learning to spell, increase scores on these exams. Children look up things online. Most do not know that Encyclopedias used to be bound. The act of opening a hardcover book and getting lost in it, is dead and the effect shows. Spelling is so important to learn. Reading helps this task. Interestingly, when I grew up in the 70s, we watched a lot of TV but usually on the weekends. We read during the week and did paper and pencil homework.
41
There is ample research that the social determinants of educational success that start well before kindergarten. Whether parents speak to a child or hand them a device, whether there is food and housing security, education of the caregivers to name a few. Insofar as a school ( private or charter ) can select students who have these advantages or a parent, already aware of these needs, can select a school that further serves their needs these schools will have better "achievement." The charter/public argument is a proxy for these issues. Funding for food for toddlers and families, universal pre-K, family leave are all "educational policy" issues.
This article is frustratingly vague about the test under discussion What makes the sample representative? What is a "point?" Are we to assume a 100 point scale or is this like the SAT. How much do scores change with repeated administration? How does the test change from year to year? What constitutes a significant change in scores ( is it really one point?) I could go on but it is difficult to understand the significance of these tests or use this information to inform oneself about policy. Please add more information or a graphic.
14
I am an English teacher in a NJ public school. My colleagues and I have noted, through student self-reporting, that the substantial time students spend at home (often unsupervised) on screens of all kinds (mostly texting, playing video games, and watching YouTube) reduces or eliminates the amount of time students spend on assigned reading at home. Students are also sleeping fewer hours because they have these screens in their bedrooms. Especially with regard to students in grades 1-4, the addictive nature, fast pace, and instant rewards inherent in playing video games and trolling YouTube is no match for the required concentration, slower pace, and use of the imagination students need to comprehend grade-level texts.
495
@Kat Z.
As a teaching veteran with many years of experience, I concur wholeheartedly with your observations. There is little in our cultural moment that glorifies the experience of sitting down for hours with a good book, or pouring over a difficult text with the aim of mastering the content. The lives are youngsters are living are very different from the lives children lived in the past.
We are in unchartered terrritory. Reading test scores may be just one of the first metrics to indicate the changes in human development wrought by technology.
42
@Kat Z.
I don't know about this. Sounds like something the teachers said about the "boob tube" when I was growing up.
I have four kids in elementary and middle school. None, not even my 14 year old, has a phone or other personal electronic device, but they do have an xbox and I allow them to use my laptop for internet time wasting of various kinds. Each one is excelling in school despite engaging in these fast paced activities. Believe it or not, they love to read. I actually had to institute a "no books at the dinner table" rule because they "get addicted" to their books.
But to varying degrees they all waste hours and hours playing dumb games. I don't think it's much different from the hours and hours my friends and I wasted when we were kids.
Likely, the bigger culprit is lack of adult interest/interaction with the kids. I always talk to mine, show them interesting stuff I'm reading, take them to see new things, dance and sing with them in the kitchen, and I always ask them questions that make them think. Kids who don't interact with adults are in bigger trouble than kids whose hobby is Fortnite. And sleep deprivation is a killer.
24
@Kat Z.
You need to parse your rant here a bit.
Spending time on screens rather then on paper print is NOT the issue per se.
WHAT they spend their screen time on IS.
My high school daughter reads almost all her text books online.. and she has reading skills several years above her grade level. She prefers electronic to paper and given her reading skills, we are fine with that. She also uses her tablet for all her math needs as well.. including advanced graphic plot calcuators, etc.
On the other hand... spending all of a students time electronically on non-school related reading, writing, math, etc... is I'm sure a real issue but this is something that simply must be solved by the parents, not the schools.
5
We need to put funding into our school to level the playing field for those from wealthy and impoverished backgrounds. The students should not be penalized because of factors from long before them. They should at least have the same opportunity, and it must be considered that there is a need for more support for those already struggling. Particularly those from low-income, special education, and ELL backgrounds need more support and it costs more per-pupil to educate them.
I also feel that we are trying to push skills so much earlier to the point where it is not developmentally appropriate. You can only push things onto earlier grades for so long. Yes, some students will succeed with this, but for the vast majority we are not considering development.
I also wonder about the fairness of the test in assessing across the nation and all of the factors that make a test reliable, valid, and generalizable.
Proper, EQUITABLE, funding and developmental considerations must be a part of designing curriculum and instruction.
19
Betsy - invest in reading instruction. Let us start by acknowledging that reading instruction, unlike writing instruction, stops in grade school. We do not teach formal reading instruction in high school or college. Reading discipline experts understand that reading is critical thinking, and it is also a transfer learning skill that serves as a foundation for success in all subjects, promotes student success, and it is correlated with college attainment. National studies have shown that even many college students are graduating without college level reading skills. To my knowledge, the University of California at Santa Cruz is the first to offer a mandatory post-secondary reading course, Academic Literacy Core 1, within its first-year writing program. We need to institutionalize reading instruction in middle school, high school and college. We institutionalized writing ages ago, and it is time to do it with reading.
24
@Gema All we do in K-12 is teach "reading skills"! It's not working. I recommend you read some critics of the "reading skills" regime --e.g. E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham (whose pieces are published by the New York Times). Their core claim: reading comprehension is mostly a function of background knowledge, not "skills".
1