Thoughts on Literacy in Public Schools

[BP]

I'm about to channel my inner bdt2002 for this one.

Background Information​

I have worked in a public elementary school for two years now. In that time, I have come to find that literacy has become this cash cow of sorts. It seems as if higher literacy rates are indicative of better teachers and a more successful school. This makes sense, as it is no secret that children's literacy has steadily declined over the last four decades. with the most notable decline occurring in the 1990s and 2010s. In 2001, George W. Bush signed the "No Child Left Behind" Act to address this decline. The beginning of this downward trend occurred sometime in the 1970s, with the removal of phonics and the introduction of the "Whole Language" model. This was the precursor to the 2001 bill. It was not until 2013 and 2014 that schools went back to teaching phonics. We do not yet have data to say whether the slide has slowed, but I can tell you from our school's data that our literacy decline has slowed ever so slightly. Phonics works and is the optimal way to teach literacy. This raises the question, why are so many students still struggling with reading if phonics is so great?

I believe there are numerous reasons this happens. Some of which take place outside of school. I will not be focusing on those, as that conversation quickly devolves into a difference in "opportunity" or parenting styles. I will instead be focusing on things in school. I would like to make it abundantly clear that this is purely opinion-based, and if you disagree with my understanding of the systems in place, please educate me below. I would love to learn more and/or discuss different methods.

Lack of Storytime​

The first and biggest problem I am seeing is that children ages 4-8 are not being read to nearly enough. I would argue that you should be reading to your child from 6 months onward to develop language and speech skills, but I digress. Grades 4k-3rd are focusing too heavily on phonics and not enough on comprehension, recognition, and phonemic awareness. The little comprehension, recognition, and phonemic awareness they work on is being done in mind-numbing, memorization-based ways. It is not engaging and visibly drains students. I did say phonics works, and I stand by that. However, from what I have seen, these literacy curricula cannot tackle everything efficiently.

Reading to students is not only engaging but also highly beneficial in many ways. If you are reading a book slightly above grade level, students are being exposed to numerous new vocabulary words. Furthermore, they are actively working on their reading comprehension. In 4K and Kindergarten, this exposure to books lays a strong foundation alongside phonics, creating eager and inquisitive beginning readers. That is the extent to which literacy should be done in 4K and Kindergarten. 1st- and 2nd-graders can shift more heavily toward phonics and independent reading, but should still be read to. This storytime should take place throughout elementary school.

Public Schools shifting toward more professionally developed curricula have taken reading instruction away from students and instead focus on echo and choral reading. Moreover, by having districts pay for those curricula, you are spending taxpayer money that could instead go toward operating costs such as teacher salaries. This, in turn, forces schools to hire better teachers who deserve that higher pay; however, I feel this is a whole new can of worms.

Reading Fleuncy and the Lack of Reading Stamina​

Before I ranted about curricula, I mentioned echo and choral reading. These are done using specific passages meant to enhance a student's fluency while reading aloud. The idea is that better fluency means a lighter mental load when reading. This means you are using your energy to focus on understanding the text rather than decoding words. In theory, this is a fantastic and imperative skill to develop as it boosts student confidence and helps keep reading from becoming a word-by-word slog. In practice, this falls short because students and teachers are using short passages and summaries of texts. These fluency passages are bite-sized and easy to do as a whole class. This is where our problem arises. Students are not building reading stamina.

I am aware that reading stamina relates to silent reading. The whole point of reading aloud is for a test called DIBLEs. The test shows which students are at risk of falling behind and need intervention. There is no way to measure accuracy or speed for silent reading, so naturally, silent reading does not happen as much as it once did. Without consistent time to read silently, our students begin to struggle with longer texts. Fast-forward to middle and high school, and reading two or three chapters of a book becomes a Herculean task. I am not arguing that we should not be focusing on fluency. I am arguing that we should not take a student's read-to-self time away. By constantly drilling fluency, we are actively creating weaker readers.

Literary Candy​

Speaking of weaker readers, I feel this is already evident. In elementary schools, there are a ton of young readers who read graphic novels. The argument I often hear is that as long as they are reading and engaged, it's a good thing. While I agree with this sentiment, I also think these graphic novels (though usually educational) are like eating candy. A little moderation is good and should be encouraged, but eating too much negatively impacts your health. When students read only graphic novels, it weakens their imagination and critical thinking skills. Additionally, this also negatively impacts their reading stamina. Graphic novels are not packed full of words. There are pictures everywhere, offering a constant distraction from the text. Again, in moderation, I would be a big supporter of these due to how educational most ofthem actually are. However, I am seeing students only ever read these, and it shows in our school's data.

Curricula​

When I talk about curriculum, I do not mean for it to sound like some big evil corporate plan. It is not, and a lot of these curricula work and reduce the number of at-risk students. My problem is that they do not create lifelong readers. They make reading a task to be overcome, and this bleeds over into teachers' "teaching for the test". Furthermore, they put a stick in the ass of most administrations. Once admins gamble funds on a curriculum, they tend to get upset when teachers purchase lesson plans from Teachers Pay Teachers because the curriculum is not engaging. No curriculum will have everything. If it did ther would never be enough time or energy to get through it all. The fact of the matter is that every public school will have some kind of required curriculum.

 

[realiti]

Disagree with your point about phonics being overly prioritized, it's the foundation of reading and students with weak phonics knowledge will struggle in all aspects of literacy in future grades. Kindergarteners come in with little knowledge of what sound each letter makes, and if they can't master that, it'll be an issue later on. Perhaps your issue is that phonics is taught in a boring, monotonous way in your elementary school - which is a valid concern, given the attention span of the young ones. There are definitely ways to make phonics more interesting to learn.

Agree that reading is important, although I wouldn't say public schools aren't prioritizing reading. It may vary from district to district, but the schools where I've worked at (in SoCal) all encourage reading in and out of school.

Agree that graphic novels should be read in moderation, and that reading stamina & silent reading should be encouraged.

I'm interested to hear which district your elementary school is part of, and if you think this is an issue prevalent across America or just within certain areas.

 

[BP]

Disagree with your point about phonics being overly prioritized, it's the foundation of reading and students with weak phonics knowledge will struggle in all aspects of literacy in future grades.

I explicitly said that phonics is effective. My point was that in 4K and Kindergarten it's all thats being done when it comes to teaching literacy.

Agree that reading is important, although I wouldn't say public schools aren't prioritizing reading.

Im not saying they aren't prioritizing it. The whole point of me writing all this down was that reading and literacy are everywhere. I feel like you skimmed each of my points.

 

[Blizihguh]

I'm curious where you teach? Education policy and practice varies so wildly by school, region, and country that having this conversation without that context feels kind of silly. For what it's worth, I went to a public school in New England, in roughly the middle of what you describe as the "no phonics" period; we definitely did phonics, with lots of teacher-reading-to-students and independent reading in the early grades. So it's not like it totally disappeared from the US.

With very few exceptions, I don't teach kids that young, so I don't have that much to add. I will say, in my experience, the #1 issue with older kids is a lack of skill matching. A lot of schools have academic tracking systems (ie, normal/honors/remedial classes) that basically do not work. By the time a student reaches grade 12, it's fairly likely that they've either had 3-5 years of classes that were far too easy, or (more often) 3+ years of classes where they were hopelessly lost.

I'm not saying it happens to most students, but if it happens to even 5% of students that's way too much, and realistically I think it's more like 10-20%. This is a very solvable problem, but incentives are not there to solve it. And it definitely impacts literacy! If a student is struggling with reading in 4th grade, and they just move onto 5th grade reading material as if nothing was wrong, they'll typically fall further behind. If this happens a few years in a row, it's not really recoverable with the level of resources available to even a well funded school. It more often impacts math, but I suspect that this is the cause of high school students reading at an elementary school level. Of course, the root cause can probably be traced back to what you describe: insufficient practice and uneven distribution of targeted skills.

Curious if you have any thoughts about how students can rectify literacy problems after they develop, and how a motivated teacher can best help them. You probably have more training than I do in this regard.

 

[BP]

I'm curious where you teach? Education policy and practice varies so wildly by school, region, and country that having this conversation without that context feels kind of silly.

I teach in Wisconsin. For reference my Elementary school uses SIPPS, UFLI, and HMH for kindergarten-5th Grade. In 4K which isn't required we use Heggerty which i think is horse shit but thats beside the point.

I'm not saying it happens to most students, but if it happens to even 5% of students that's way too much, and realistically I think it's more like 10-20%.

I'd agree. Id argue part of this is because of the increase in students with IEPs and the influx of special education students as a whole. My school is pretty great about meeting student where they are at. We have an accelerated learners program (AL) and plenty of Paraeducators who specialize in literacy and math intervention.

I'm not going to dox my school but I will say we've won numerous blue ribbons over the years for our schools performance or report card as they call it.

Regarding my thoughts on rectifying literacy problems. I think the best and most important thing is to work on fluency and stamina at older ages. Fluency is probsbly a bit more important. I do think these things should be done in engaging ways though otherwise they'll never work. I'm unsure how you'd go about doing this in a way that this engaging though. Students who struggle with literacy tend to hate it more and more as they get older.

 

[BIG ASHLEY]

I will say, in my experience, the #1 issue with older kids is a lack of skill matching.

schools should implement an elo system to ensure skill-based matchmaking at all levels.

 

[phoopes]

This is a neat thread.

Background Information​

snip

This was good info to have. My background is that I was going to college to be a high school math teacher (and even made it up to my student teaching so I had a decent amount of actual classroom experience) before dropping it when I failed out of school. After that I came back and got a psychology degree and then worked with students in an undergraduate admissions role. All that is to say that my experiences are not with younger students like yourself, but I have seen the long-term effects of what you're talking about in the students I've worked with, especially in a math-related context.

The first and biggest problem I am seeing is that children ages 4-8 are not being read to nearly enough. I would argue that you should be reading to your child from 6 months onward to develop language and speech skills, but I digress. Grades 4k-3rd are focusing too heavily on phonics and not enough on comprehension, recognition, and phonemic awareness. The little comprehension, recognition, and phonemic awareness they work on is being done in mind-numbing, memorization-based ways. It is not engaging and visibly drains students. I did say phonics works, and I stand by that. However, from what I have seen, these literacy curricula cannot tackle everything efficiently.

Reading to students is not only engaging but also highly beneficial in many ways. If you are reading a book slightly above grade level, students are being exposed to numerous new vocabulary words. Furthermore, they are actively working on their reading comprehension. In 4K and Kindergarten, this exposure to books lays a strong foundation alongside phonics, creating eager and inquisitive beginning readers. That is the extent to which literacy should be done in 4K and Kindergarten. 1st- and 2nd-graders can shift more heavily toward phonics and independent reading, but should still be read to. This storytime should take place throughout elementary school.

While I can't say how much students ages 4-8 are being read to from personal experience, I would argue that the "reading to students" idea should even be continued beyond 3rd grade. This is entirely anecdotal, but I remember an experience I had in 5th grade very well. Our teachers were split into math, social studies, and science, but each of those teachers also had a homeroom of students that they taught things like English/grammar, etc. to. My homeroom teacher in 5th grade read "Where the Red Fern Grows" to us (other books too, but this is the one that sticks out) over the course of maybe a week or two and I feel like it was a great experience for all of us. We didn't have a text to follow along with, we didn't "popcorn read," we were just engaged listening to our teacher read the story to us. My guess is that this helped with comprehension of the text, whereas reading it on our own it would've been very easy to just glaze over what was really going on. We had some kind of reflective assignment on it too which was definitely more enjoyable because of the way we all got to experience the story.

Before I ranted about curricula, I mentioned echo and choral reading. These are done using specific passages meant to enhance a student's fluency while reading aloud. The idea is that better fluency means a lighter mental load when reading. This means you are using your energy to focus on understanding the text rather than decoding words. In theory, this is a fantastic and imperative skill to develop as it boosts student confidence and helps keep reading from becoming a word-by-word slog. In practice, this falls short because students and teachers are using short passages and summaries of texts. These fluency passages are bite-sized and easy to do as a whole class. This is where our problem arises. Students are not building reading stamina.

I am aware that reading stamina relates to silent reading. The whole point of reading aloud is for a test called DIBLEs. The test shows which students are at risk of falling behind and need intervention. There is no way to measure accuracy or speed for silent reading, so naturally, silent reading does not happen as much as it once did. Without consistent time to read silently, our students begin to struggle with longer texts. Fast-forward to middle and high school, and reading two or three chapters of a book becomes a Herculean task. I am not arguing that we should not be focusing on fluency. I am arguing that we should not take a student's read-to-self time away. By constantly drilling fluency, we are actively creating weaker readers.

Before you even get to the reading stamina part of the post, I think this also shows an issue with reading comprehension as well like I kind of mentioned above. It is absolutely possible for students to be able to read something aloud perfectly fine (either alone or in a group, "choral reading") and not really understand what was going on in the text. I saw this a lot with the "word problems" that were assigned in my math classes when I was student teaching. If you asked a student what the problem said, they would be able to recite it back to you no problem. But there was often a disconnect with what the words actually meant. This could've been an issue with the more specialized mathematics vocabulary not really sticking but I think it applies more generally as well.

Anyway, it sounds like more reading in general (storytime/reading to a kid, reading with an adult's support, and silent read-on-your-own time) is a general, if not very specific solution. It's just more difficult these days than ever, in my opinion due to the abundance of technology out there that takes away the attention from reading. Yes, I'm blaming new-fangled gizmos on this problem, but I really believe that that's a large issue here. The term "iPad baby" has become popular in recent years because it is so much easier for a parent to just... sit their kids in front of a screen rather than read with them. In fact, we're seeing this in Gen Z parents who grew up with screens, kind of passing it onto their kids but worse. I saw an alarming stat recently: fewer than half of parents of children up to 13 years old say that reading aloud to children is "fun for me." As you can probably guess, Gen Z parents are more likely to feel this way than millennial or Gen X parents. I think this really speaks to the negative effect that technology has had on kids/parenting.

I feel like I grew up in kind of a golden age (early 2000s) for parenting. Not saying that my parents had it super easy or anything, but it was well-established that reading to/with your kids was not only the right thing to do, but could also be a lot of fun. And I think this is in part due to the fact that technology wasn't as readily accessible, especially not in the palm of your hand. I (vaguely) remember having dial-up Internet at our house, and didn't get my first smartphone until I was 14. So I was able to spend a lot of time with guided reading, as well as reading on my own for fun. I loved video games (shocker, here I am on a Pokemon forum), but reading for fun was a more present option for me, higher in the priority list than it is for the kids of today.

All of that is to say that it doesn't surprise me that "reading stamina" is also an issue for the kids that you're teaching, or even high school/college age students. I think it's a problem that starts early and compounds on itself as time goes by.

Speaking of weaker readers, I feel this is already evident. In elementary schools, there are a ton of young readers who read graphic novels. The argument I often hear is that as long as they are reading and engaged, it's a good thing. While I agree with this sentiment, I also think these graphic novels (though usually educational) are like eating candy. A little moderation is good and should be encouraged, but eating too much negatively impacts your health. When students read only graphic novels, it weakens their imagination and critical thinking skills. Additionally, this also negatively impacts their reading stamina. Graphic novels are not packed full of words. There are pictures everywhere, offering a constant distraction from the text. Again, in moderation, I would be a big supporter of these due to how educational most ofthem actually are. However, I am seeing students only ever read these, and it shows in our school's data.

But without graphic novels how will these kids learn about the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy???

Anyway, not too much to say here, but I remember there being a kind of graphic novel boom when I was in elementary school. I was never super into them, as I was kind of a prick of a kid that only liked "real" books, but it seemed like for every Invention of Hugo Cabret (a great blend of traditional reading and pictures, making for a unique graphic novel experience), there was a whole bunch of Owly books (these are the ones that I was a snob about, because they mostly contain just pictures and no actual words). These are two extremes in the graphic novel category, but I think it illustrates your point about "literary candy." If you need pictures all the time to be engaged, I agree that it does damper their imagination and critical thinking skills, as well as reading stamina. I'm with you: moderation is best for these kinds of things (even if it means less kids are going to be reading One Piece lol).

When I talk about curriculum, I do not mean for it to sound like some big evil corporate plan. It is not, and a lot of these curricula work and reduce the number of at-risk students. My problem is that they do not create lifelong readers. They make reading a task to be overcome, and this bleeds over into teachers' "teaching for the test". Furthermore, they put a stick in the ass of most administrations. Once admins gamble funds on a curriculum, they tend to get upset when teachers purchase lesson plans from Teachers Pay Teachers because the curriculum is not engaging. No curriculum will have everything. If it did ther would never be enough time or energy to get through it all. The fact of the matter is that every public school will have some kind of required curriculum.

In the survey I linked above, more and more students and parents are thinking of reading as "more of a subject to learn than a fun thing to do." This doesn't surprise me at all, again, due to anecdotal experience, but I think this is fairly common. My cousin has an 8 year old daughter who hates reading. She does what she has to for school bare minimum, but that's about it. Her parents are trying to encourage her to read more on her own but I think she'd rather play on her Switch or just about anything else than read, and she's not doing particularly well in school because of it from what I understand. You talk about teaching to the test, I think this is one of many cases where students are just learning for the test, and not actually taking skills with them that they can build on for use later in life.

No real thoughts on school administrations (other than the one I had experience with when I was a student teacher) but I did want to make a note of the other stat from the survey I linked.

---
I've already written a book in response to the OP, but there's more I want to say as well lol so I'll try to keep it brief in responding to other people.

Kindergarteners come in with little knowledge of what sound each letter makes, and if they can't master that, it'll be an issue later on.

I think it really depends. There are some kindergarteners who really have no clue how to read, what sounds letters make, need to learn their ABCs from the ground up, etc. and there are some kindergarteners who come in already knowing how to read basic children's books. A lot of this has to do with factors outside of the school's control (for example, how much the student's parents read to/with them), but I think this creates another challenge. How do we get the kids who come in at essentially level 0 up to speed while also not holding back the students that are far ahead of their peers? I think the solution a lot of the time is the "tracking" that Blizihguh mentioned, but as stated by them (and by me, and by many other people including experts in the education field) this really isn't an effective solution.

---

WARNING: THIS SECTION IS LARGELY FOCUSED ON MATH AND NOT READING. CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK (lol)

Nobody said there'd be math

I will say, in my experience, the #1 issue with older kids is a lack of skill matching. A lot of schools have academic tracking systems (ie, normal/honors/remedial classes) that basically do not work. By the time a student reaches grade 12, it's fairly likely that they've either had 3-5 years of classes that were far too easy, or (more often) 3+ years of classes where they were hopelessly lost.

I'm not saying it happens to most students, but if it happens to even 5% of students that's way too much, and realistically I think it's more like 10-20%. This is a very solvable problem, but incentives are not there to solve it. And it definitely impacts literacy! If a student is struggling with reading in 4th grade, and they just move onto 5th grade reading material as if nothing was wrong, they'll typically fall further behind. If this happens a few years in a row, it's not really recoverable with the level of resources available to even a well funded school. It more often impacts math, but I suspect that this is the cause of high school students reading at an elementary school level. Of course, the root cause can probably be traced back to what you describe: insufficient practice and uneven distribution of targeted skills.

God one of the things that annoyed me the most about teaching math to high schoolers was tracking. I guess to back it up, where I grew up, there was some tracking before middle school I'm sure, but I remember this very well: everyone took a test at the end of 6th grade to determine what math track they would be on when going into middle school. Based off how you did on the test, you were either placed into Algebra I (advanced track), Pre-Algebra (normal track), or insert whatever class they they called the remedial track class here. Looking back on this, this is kind of insane. I'm sure there were some exceptions, but unless you took a class during the summer to "catch up," if you were on the remedial track to start, you would never have the opportunity to take AP math classes in high school, because our progression went as follows:

Remedial Track:	Normal Track:	Advanced Track:
Remedial math	Pre-Algebra	Algebra I
Pre-Algebra	Algebra I	Geometry
Algebra I	Geometry	Algebra II
Geometry	Algebra II	Trigonometry/Pre-Calc
Algebra II	Trigonometry/Pre-Calc	Calculus/AP Calc AB
Algebra III/Trigonometry	Calculus/AP Calc AB	AP Statistics/AP Calc BC

I understand that not everyone is going to have the same interest or ability in math. But it feels wildly unfair to me to base the entire future of a student's math schooling (mostly) off taking one test on one day in 6th grade lol. There's got to be a better way, much like with literacy, to get students up to speed in math while not hampering the students that have more of an ability and/or interest in the subject.

To bring it back to my student teaching experience though, my school district had three tracks. There was "honors," "academic," and "intervention." First off, these names suck ass. I know because I was teaching "intervention math" and the kids there already felt bad about their math skills and/or didn't like it very much, so to label them as "intervention" kids just did not help with motivation at all. But secondly, this district did something very similar to what mine growing up did, with taking a test in like 5th or 6th grade to determine what track they were on. Most of the students in my classes learned at the level they were taught to I would say. So like, yes, there were some that struggled, but vast majority understood the concepts just fine and I think they would've been okay on the "academic" track with a little bit of extra push.

But I remember two kids out of my 60 or so that were actually really interested in math and certainly had the skills to test out of the "intervention" track. However, I could tell that they weren't motivated to do so, because having been on the "intervention" track for the last few years, they had it in their brains that "Oh, I'm not good at math, I'm kind of stuck on the intervention track." Add to the fact that they would've needed to do an extra math class to get caught up and they were just... stuck in a class that was too easy for them. This really frustrated me as a teacher. I had already had issues with tracking before, but that really sealed the deal for me. Again, there's got to be a better solution.

---

Side note, again, this is more math-related than literacy-related, (so maybe more your thing Blizihguh) but another thing I saw in the world of education recently was a report that 1 in 8 UC San Diego students aren't meeting middle-school math standards. They needed to create essentially a remedial course for the remedial course because of the influx of students post-COVID that are that lacking in math skills. What's even crazier is that out of these students in the lowest remedial math class, 25% of the students had received a 4.0 average in their high school math classes. This opens up another can of worms for discussion in regards to grade inflation, the fact that a lot of schools post-pandemic eliminated the SAT/ACT score requirement for application, and more, but that may be outside the scope of this thread and I have gone on a very much math-related tangent at this point lol so I'll quit there for now.

---

Anyway, once again, very interesting thread BP. I didn't know I had so many thoughts on this until I typed it all out.

 

[Celever]

I have some light experience here, as whenever I'm unemployed I volunteer with a charity to help dem kids read. One-on-one sessions where kids choose a book and read them aloud, at their own speed, with help when asked or correction when required, and crucially discussion around what it is they're reading so they engage with the meaning of words. Knowing how to form the sounds doesn't help kids if they don't care what the words mean, and you see that disengagement with the content itself happening often with strong readers.

Literacy's 99% a class issue, in my mind. It's upsettingly accurate for class signifiers I've noticed on kids to correlate to their strength of literacy when they start reading. Which makes sense, because being a lower class in society is hard. It both drains the capacity of both parents and children to do things that are hard, and makes them experience more hardship that uses up the reduced capacity. Enhancing literacy simply falls down the priority list of parents until it ends up neglected, and kids don't understand what they're missing out on because you can't know what you don't know. Even in areas I agree with like a greater emphasis on silent reading, the UK has programmes in place as part of its literacy curriculum to try to encourage this like reading diaries for kids to do at home that parents have to sign off on to verify the reading took place, and disproportionately working class parents sign off on these without the kids actually doing the reading for any number of genuinely valid reasons (like being at your second job and legit being unable to know whether your kid read it or not -- life's hard man).

This of course gets further compounded by the marketisation of education under neoliberalism leading to class segregation between schools. A school with more disadvantaged kids has to invest more resources into those kids to remediate for what they're not experiencing at home, and for every kid receiving this remedial care and attention they deserve and need, that's resources not being given to another kid who deserves and needs the remedial care just as much, and so when you segregate the kids who need this support into one school and give them no more resources to do it with, you're screwing everyone over. The abandonment of phonics in the first place was by all means helped by cueing and similar being cheaper and faster than phonics, particularly as it's easier for one staff member to teach it to a larger group. In a marketised education system, that's treated as a good thing for the school by organisations / quangos / government departments that assess the neoliberal market value of schools even in spite of the resultant declining literacy rates.

Which obviously isn't to say that working class kids can't learn to read, nor does it mean that working class parents don't help their kids with literacy (I grew up dirt poor and was read to every night by my Dad to a way older age than most, he believes hard in this stuff), but whenever children are failed there's almost always clear societal and infrastructural explanations for why the child was failed.

Educational professionals are doing their best in a system and society that seems hell-bent on manipulating the limitless potential of kids towards futures in manual labour by making them unqualified for other types of jobs and reducing their choices and freedom in later life, just to shore up decreasing supply of these jobs. If the Government doesn't want kids to have deep language proficiency, schools and charities can only remediate so much with the decreasing per-pupil resources given to them by the Government. With, for example, the UK Government announcing plans to encourage kids and teachers to use AI in schools and I believe similar aims announced in the US and more, which is gonna have a huge negative impact for the development of these kids' brains in literacy and beyond, I'm incensed by the life those with the most power are trying to give to the next generation. Literacy's the tip of the iceberg, language proficiency is a key determinant of social proficiency too for example, and if you're not already angry about this, you should be.

As ever, respect your teachers if you're a student or parent. They're not paid enough for you to make their lives harder, and if you think they're making your life harder, it's not because they want to. What you should be angry at are the same people responsible for them not being paid enough in the first place.

I haven't had an online rant in a long time thanks for hitting on something I care about BP lol

 

[Blizihguh]

I teach in Wisconsin. For reference my Elementary school uses SIPPS, UFLI, and HMH for kindergarten-5th Grade. In 4K which isn't required we use Heggerty which i think is horse shit but thats beside the point.

Oh hey, fellow Wisconsin teacher. Please do em good so I don't have to deal with them not knowing how to read in 5 years

Tracking stuff (I'm not going to go through and highlight the relevant text on mobile lol)

My big issue here is that it could totally work with like, 10% more effort!! Give the bright kids some incentive to test up. If they're failing, drop them down a track instead of just giving them a B and passing them into a class they have no hope of understanding. The issue of "now they have to take a whole extra math class" is tough, but I think this could be alleviated a lot by just staggering the classes. Like, there's no reason you can't teach a section of "the end of Algebra I + the beginning of Algebra II." Works even better on a semester/quarter system. Making up the gap is a lot easier if you're only jumping ahead by half a class.

I genuinely think you could get 5-10% of any class to test into a higher track by giving them a reward of, like, a $40 ticket to Six Flags. Better value for money than any textbook, honestly. It's not just the carrot of going to a theme park, it's also the FOMO of all your friends going without you. Of course, you have to give the honor roll kids something too. That's where you introduce the Guilty Gear tournament.

I get that schools are incentivized to try to get basically every student into college. But there are lots of colleges that will accept a student with good grades in "remedial track" classes. You don't have to give everybody an A just so they can get into UC, only to end up wasting a ton of money on classes they're not prepared for. Unfortunately almost every student is actually served by going to college, even if it's a bad fit, but like they don't all have to be top schools. I truly believe the prestige game is a racket; the reward I got for graduating from a top school is that I get to namedrop it once every six months. I got a starter job that I burnt out on marginally easier than I would have otherwise, I guess.

 

[BP]

Our teachers were split into math, social studies, and science, but each of those teachers also had a homeroom of students that they taught things like English/grammar, etc. to. My homeroom teacher in 5th grade read "Where the Red Fern Grows" to us (other books too, but this is the one that sticks out) over the course of maybe a week or two and I feel like it was a great experience for all of us. We didn't have a text to follow along with, we didn't "popcorn read," we were just engaged listening to our teacher read the story to us. My guess is that this helped with comprehension of the text, whereas reading it on our own it would've been very easy to just glaze over what was really going on. We had some kind of reflective assignment on it too which was definitely more enjoyable because of the way we all got to experience the story.

This is called departmentalization and is common in middle schools. Some elementary schools do this and usually start around 2nd Grade, depending on their size. Elementary school teachers are not required to obtain a reading license; however, most assigned professional development is literacy-related or simply a review of the literacy curriculum. I would be willing to wager that in homeroom, your teacher is required to spend some time doing literacy and/or literacy-adjacent activities.

Regarding your teacher's book of choice, excellent novel! I also shared this experience, but it was in the 3rd grade. I recall holding onto every word and being deeply moved by the freedom and kinship the protagonist experienced throughout the novel. These shared experiences are indicative of the positives of reading aloud to your students. I can say that my 5th and 4th-grade coworkers do this as well, covering books such as "Hatchet" and "Holes," both of which are defining novels in their own right.

It's just more difficult these days than ever, in my opinion due to the abundance of technology out there that takes away the attention from reading. Yes, I'm blaming new-fangled gizmos on this problem, but I really believe that that's a large issue here. The term "iPad baby" has become popular in recent years because it is so much easier for a parent to just... sit their kids in front of a screen rather than read with them. In fact, we're seeing this in Gen Z parents who grew up with screens, kind of passing it onto their kids but worse.

I mentioned in my introduction that I wanted to avoid what happens at home. Particularly because it is not my job to raise or parent another's child. I would rather focus on how to address these issues in the classroom. However, I 100% agree with you that the rise of technology and lazy, arguably soft parents has created numerous problems.

That said, I would like to return to the classroom. Many, if not most, elementary schools use Chromebooks or other laptop brands in everyday instruction. There are numerous educational apps, such as Epic!, Waggle, and Happy Letters. My school uses all of these, and it's genuinely mind-boggling that we pay for these subscription-based programs. I would argue that for math, I could see them working, but I cannot for the life of me understand why they help with literacy. Epic! is similar to Netflix in that it's a digital library of books, but it reads the books to you. Waggle and Happy Letters are just different curriculum apps. Why in God's name are we employing like 6 different curricula for the same subject? I would argue that we should do away with laptops altogether and return to computer labs. Perhaps this is my early 2000s nostalgia speaking, but I think it makes more sense.

These are two extremes in the graphic novel category, but I think it illustrates your point about "literary candy." If you need pictures all the time to be engaged, I agree that it does damper their imagination and critical thinking skills, as well as reading stamina. I'm with you: moderation is best for these kinds of things (even if it means less kids are going to be reading One Piece lol).

I feel my initial claim was insanely bold, but I am happy you agree with it. I still stand by the claim that it has negatively affected students' ability to remain engaged with longer texts.

In the survey I linked above, more and more students and parents are thinking of reading as "more of a subject to learn than a fun thing to do." This doesn't surprise me at all, again, due to anecdotal experience, but I think this is fairly common. My cousin has an 8 year old daughter who hates reading. She does what she has to for school bare minimum, but that's about it. Her parents are trying to encourage her to read more on her own but I think she'd rather play on her Switch or just about anything else than read, and she's not doing particularly well in school because of it from what I understand. You talk about teaching to the test, I think this is one of many cases where students are just learning for the test, and not actually taking skills with them that they can build on for use later in life.

Your cousin is among millions of other 8-year-olds. Video games and media have infested almost every crevice of our lives. This remains true for elementary school students. I cannot tell you how many students I know who go home and immediately boot up Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, etc. I was also one of these kids booting up my Game Boy to play Leaf Green. My parents insist that the greatest decision they ever made was making the rule "no video games on school nights." Knowing what I know now, I am inclined to agree. I am not attributing a slower rate of academic growth to video games and media. I attribute that slower rate of academic growth to the lack of self-control children exhibit when it comes to indulging in those things. We are giving children magical boxes that have unlimited access to information, porn, and anything else you could possibly think of. We then expect them to exercise good judgment and limit themselves. Children lack self-control; they do not understand the concept of overindulgence. I think I lost the plot a little there, so I apologize. I sincerely hope your cousin gets back on track.

How do we get the kids who come in at essentially level 0 up to speed while also not holding back the students that are far ahead of their peers? I think the solution a lot of the time is the "tracking" that @Blizihguh mentioned, but as stated by them (and by me, and by many other people including experts in the education field) this really isn't an effective solution.

So, previously, I talked about how your 5th grade was departmentalized. The way my school handles literacy intervention is much the same. For example, say there are three 2nd-grade teachers. You'd split the entire 2nd grade into 3 groups: remedial, on track, and advanced. This allows you to teach all students at their level. Furthermore, most of the remedial students will be pulled at some point throughout the day by a literacy interventionist to complete a SIPPS lesson. As I mentioned before, this seems to be working well for our school and has steadily reduced the number of "at-risk" students according to the DIBELS.

 

[Blizihguh]

Your cousin is among millions of other 8-year-olds. Video games and media have infested almost every crevice of our lives. This remains true for elementary school students. I cannot tell you how many students I know who go home and immediately boot up Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, etc. I was also one of these kids booting up my Game Boy to play Leaf Green. My parents insist that the greatest decision they ever made was making the rule "no video games on school nights." Knowing what I know now, I am inclined to agree. I am not attributing a slower rate of academic growth to video games and media. I attribute that slower rate of academic growth to the lack of self-control children exhibit when it comes to indulging in those things. We are giving children magical boxes that have unlimited access to information, porn, and anything else you could possibly think of. We then expect them to exercise good judgment and limit themselves. Children lack self-control; they do not understand the concept of overindulgence. I think I lost the plot a little there, so I apologize. I sincerely hope your cousin gets back on track.

To be frank, I don't think it's really possible to have an honest discussion about the literacy problem without acknowledging this. I don't think it's a new trend (TV was this before games!) but I suspect parenting culture has gotten worse about it. When I was a kid, I had a few hours at night reserved for reading (not games). As I got older that transitioned primarily to manga, but by that point I was already spending free time reading about my interests on the computer. Older kids (say, double digits and up) can be guided gently into using their time wisely, but only if you're more deliberate early on. I genuinely believe that just sticking your child in front of the TV all day was widely regarded as shameful when I was a kid. Even outside of work, I know plenty of parents now who feel no remorse about doing exactly that with an iPad.

I don't know how this happened. Economic stress giving parents less time to monitor their kids? Fear of stranger danger stopping kids from playing outside? Parents being too overwhelmed with new technology to evaluate it, or maybe just trusting the value of "educational content" implicitly? Peer pressure around smartphones? Probably some combination, I guess. Could also just be a slippery slope thing. If you're replacing your iPad every few years, and throwing out the old one feels wasteful, it's very easy to give it to the kid. Educational issues tend to attract attention once they affect the middle class, and that theory also has a big class angle to it -- but I don't want to spend the next hour digging into that one.

I do have to wonder if the premise is just wrong here; I'm guessing anyone in this thread is way more likely to have been an early reader. Adults who are concerned about literacy and education statistics are a VERY self-selected bunch. Maybe there were just as many kids raised by the TV in the days between Saturday morning cartoons and iPads. Would love to see data on that, though it sounds difficult to measure. In general though, I would expect a child to choose friends over TV, at least when nothing good is on. Games are, at least, a lot more fun with friends. But iPad is so much easier than finding friends, and it's like 80% as engaging.