Latest news with #literacy
Fox News
a day ago
- Politics
- Fox News
The war on reading: Children in the crosshairs
When people talk about war, they picture overseas battlefields, not elementary school hallways. But America is embroiled in a civilian crisis – a war that's quietly destroying children's brains and our future. The battleground is our public school system. The casualties are the minds, dreams and potential of an entire generation. Leaving aside the tremendous indoctrination in our country's schools in the alphabet (LGBTQIA++) ideologies, the actual alphabet has suffered. Over the past century, America's literacy rates have cratered. A new study flags that 28% of U.S. adults perform at the lowest literacy level – around third-grade reading level. Worse still, the share of adults reading below a sixth-grade level clocks in at around 54%. Our kids fare even worse. NAEP reading scores dropped in 2024 – fourth- and eighth-graders lost two more points since 2022, deepening a trend that began before the pandemic marking the lowest reading proficiency in 32 years. That's not a blip – it's a nosedive. The fallout: weaker critical thinking, poorer job prospects and citizens unable to parse even basic news headlines. And while we're losing ground in literacy, we are paying a lot more money. Inflation-adjusted revenue for K–12 rose about 25% per student from 2002 to 2020. In 2020–21, public schools spent a whopping $16,280 per pupil, culminating in a staggering $927 billion overall. What a waste! The extra money built the bureaucratic administration while learning outcomes declined. It's like upgrading your Ford to a Ferrari with no engine. Despite billions spent on tech to teach literacy, reading is plummeting. Only 42% of 9-year-olds and 17% of 13-year-olds read for pleasure "almost daily." This marks the lowest in 40 years. We gave them Kindles and Chromebooks but forgot to court their curiosity. One in three eighth-graders can't read a textbook well enough to pass a history quiz. And that's just "basic," which isn't what basic used to be, either. Indeed, the "educators" degraded the very word "proficiency" so they could pile a bunch of lower achievers onto it to see if it floated. Then, to cover their tracks, they shifted the national conversation from "What do our kids know?" to "How do they feel?" They prioritized soft skills over hard knowledge. Participation trophies replaced performance incentives and inflated grades substituted for real learning. Kids left high school more emotionally confused than intellectually prepared. They even coined a new term, "adulting," because mature behavior became such a foreign concept. The schools have been producing eternal children for too long. They're also teaching kids to outsource thinking. (Just Google it.) Artificial intelligence and calculators might help with homework, but they also train in dependency. Students memorize less, understand less and rely more. The question becomes whether America can afford to outsource our intellect. The U.S. once led the world in innovation, from the cotton gin to the traffic light. Now most of our students are meandering toward complacency and mediocrity. Our unlimited imaginations were fueled by reading, not by consuming the visual pablum of our streaming services. This isn't a partisan jab. NAEP scores were falling before COVID, before any woke curriculum debates, before anyone warned about "too much technology." They've been falling since we started the Department of Education and since schooling began. Pandemic interruptions worsened things, but the rot was already there. If we don't reverse course, we're writing an obituary for American exceptionalism. We may be eclipsed by a world that takes competition seriously. There are simple steps to regain that entrepreneurial spirit that provided the engine for nearly the greatest triumph in human history. Instead of sending our healthy children into institutions that essentially mimic prisons, revert back to trusting children's intuitive and curious character – their natural drive to learn. Parents' voices must matter more in our schools. Parental involvement is the number one predictor of academic achievement. They must be included in any dialogue about children's learning. We must teach phonics instead of the failed "whole word reading method" that is pushed in our schools. Standards should be clearly defined: if you can't read above eighth-grade level, you don't graduate. No more participation awards for mediocrity. Show kids that effort matters, not just feelings. Money should flow to classrooms: textbooks, tutors, coaches – not more diversity officers. Streamline school budgets and cut costs to superfluous administrator overhead. Invest in logic, rhetoric and debate. Teaching kids how to argue and dissect arguments will train them to think deeply, which beats shallow scrolling every time. Make books sexy again. Family reading nights. Library trips. Book "flirtation," not forced indoctrination. We've effectively taught kids to edit their selfies, but not their sentences. We aren't doomed – but we're dangerously adrift. The war on reading – the war on thinking – is real, but the front line is in living rooms and school board meetings. America's destiny isn't lost. It lies in the courage to demand more – for our children, and our country. America's future shouldn't be scripted by bureaucracy – but by bright, curious, literate kids. Let's fight back.
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
There is no reading crisis in the U.S. Here's what's really happening.
Paul L. Thomas is a professor of education at Furman University and author of 'How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students.' After her controversial appointment, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted this apparently uncontroversial claim on social media: 'When 70% of 8th graders in the U.S. can't read proficiently, it's not the students who are failing — it's the education system that's failing them.'
New York Times
2 days ago
- General
- New York Times
Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
When I was a kid in the 1980s, my parents sent me to a Waldorf school in England. At the time, the school discouraged parents from allowing their kids to watch too much TV, instead telling them to emphasize reading, hands-on learning and outdoor play. I chafed at the stricture then. But perhaps they were on to something: Today I don't watch much TV and I still read a lot. Since my school days, however, a far more insidious and enticing form of tech has taken hold: the internet, especially via smartphones. These days I know I have to put my phone in a drawer or in another room if I need to concentrate for more than a few minutes. Since so-called intelligence tests were invented around a century ago, until recently, international I.Q. scores climbed steadily in a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. But there is evidence that our ability to apply that brain power is decreasing. According to a recent report, adult literacy scores leveled off and began to decline across a majority of O.E.C.D. countries in the past decade, with some of the sharpest declines visible among the poorest. Kids also show declining literacy. Writing in the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch links this to the rise of a post-literate culture in which we consume most of our media through smartphones, eschewing dense text in favor of images and short-form video. Other research has associated smartphone use with A.D.H.D. symptoms in adolescents, and a quarter of surveyed American adults now suspect they may have the condition. School and college teachers assign fewer full books to their students, in part because they are unable to complete them. Nearly half of Americans read zero books in 2023. The idea that technology is altering our capacity not just to concentrate but also to read and to reason is catching on. The conversation no one is ready for, though, is how this may be creating yet another form of inequality. Think of this by comparison with patterns of junk food consumption: As ultraprocessed snacks have grown more available and inventively addictive, developed societies have seen a gulf emerge between those with the social and economic resources to sustain a healthy lifestyle and those more vulnerable to the obesogenic food culture. This bifurcation is strongly class-inflected: Across the developed West, obesity has become strongly correlated with poverty. I fear that so, too, will be the tide of post-literacy. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
BBC News
2 days ago
- General
- BBC News
Call for volunteers to boost literacy levels in schools
A reading charity based in Nottingham has set a target to place a volunteer in every primary school - as the city and county remain below average in literacy Volunteers, founded in 1996, supports children aged four to 11 with one-to-one reading time during school Jaggard, from the charity, said research showed that children who read for pleasure "will do better" at school, and that this leads to better employment statistics show the percentage of pupils below expected reading, spelling, grammar and punctuation standards in Nottinghamshire and Nottingham has been worse than the England average since at least 2015. Ms Jaggard said five years after the pandemic, which proved "incredibly challenging", the charity now has volunteers in about 90 schools."I think our big focus now is building ourselves back up to what we were pre-Covid and then expanding beyond that."She described literacy across the UK and locally as being in "a bit of a crisis" because of a decline in follows a recent report by the National Literacy Trust, which showed that fewer than one in five children read daily outside of school - the lowest level in two decades."Individual schools are doing an amazing job, they're committed and passionate, but having the time to spend one-to-one with children [to read] is just impossible," she said."Our volunteers go the extra mile, they spend half an hour with the child, they read together, they have a box of resources, and they spend loads of time really getting to know the children." Kate Marusiak, from South Wilford Endowed CofE Primary School, said the scheme was working well for its pupils, and it would be "really fantastic" to extend it to every school."Once you get the right book into children's hands, then actually you can turn around a reluctant reader."I think the relationship that [their school's volunteer] has created with the children is really special. They feel really safe, they feel really happy to get things wrong."It's just a joy to see them giggling or hear them chatting and really see that love of reading develop." 'More volunteers' Ms Jaggard said their target to reach every school in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire would not happen quickly, but that it was "realistic".There are a total of 362 primary schools across both local authority areas, which means the charity is almost 25% towards its goal."We've recently built Bassetlaw back up from losing pretty much every volunteer during Covid, so we're now back in ten schools which is fantastic."It's taking that kind of measuring approach, focussing on the areas that need us most first."She added that to achieve the goal, it required "more volunteers", and to this end the charity had appointed its first ever patron - author and campaigner Jacob Dunne, 33, was jailed in 2011 for manslaughter after he threw a single punch at James Hodgkinson, who died. He was then given help to turn his life around by Mr Hodgkinson's mother, Joan Scourfield, after a restorative justice meeting and has since campaigned against violence alongside Dunne said he struggled at school only read his first book at age of 20, but wants his own two children to have a better added: "We need as many people as possible with some time on their hands that want to have an impact on young children's lives."If you're one of them, then you should reach out and get involved."
RNZ News
3 days ago
- General
- RNZ News
Schools in literacy crisis, advocacy group warns
Educators say recent cohorts of teenagers entering secondary schools have had unusually numbers of students who badly need extra help with reading and writing. Photo: Unsplash/ Simeon Frank Schools have told advocacy group Lifting Literacy Aotearoa they are struggling with record numbers of students with poor literacy. They say teens are wagging classes and schools are blowing their budgets on extra lessons because they are unable to cope with tough new NCEA reading and writing tests . A snapshot of school experiences gathered by Lifting Literacy and shared with RNZ showed some students were so far behind in their learning their teachers did not know what to do with them. Lifting Literacy said the situation was a crisis and the government needed to develop a five-year plan to help schools help teens learn to read and write. Principals and teachers from 29 secondary schools responded to an informal Lifting Literacy survey. Their comments revealed the introduction of high-stakes NCEA literacy and numeracy tests called "corequisites" had coincided with the worst-prepared cohort of teenagers some schools had ever seen - thanks to Covid. "It's an enormous issue. We have an increasing number of students who are very limited in both reading and writing," wrote one respondent. "Each year students who come to us at Year 9 are showing increasingly low literacy levels and increasingly high learning needs. The impact is huge," said another. The respondents said teachers were struggling to teach classes that ranged from the barely literate to high-achievers and schools were "scrounging" for funding. "Most high school teachers do not have qualifications to address this," said one respondent. "Pressure has fallen on high schools with little or no support," said another. "We are now operating in planned deficit budgets to fund the high level of need and high stakes for students due to NCEA changes," said one principal. Several respondents said their schools bankrolled literacy catch-up classes and training from the Kahui Ako scheme that gave some teachers release time for specialist work with other teachers in their school or across groups of schools. An English teacher from a large, low-decile school who RNZ agreed not to name, said that arrangement allowed her to work with four classes of Year 9 students who could not read. She said the school would have to cover the cost itself next year because the government axed the scheme in its May Budget . Despite the relatively high numbers of struggling Year 9s, the teacher said her school's current Year 11s had entered the school with the lowest level of education of any Year 9 cohort before or since. "They're the ones that are really struggling with the corequisites because they're expected to pass but as they're failing their identity of their ability is dwindling," she said. The teacher said teaching teenagers to read was often "quite a quick fix", with most requiring only three or four "structured literacy" lessons to learn how to decode words by learning which sounds went with each letter. "Teaching kids how to read and read longer words, which seems to be the biggest problem, that's quite a quick fix," she said. "Teaching younger kids takes a longer time, teaching these older kids, even kids who really struggle and some of them who are dyslexic, once they're shown a certain way some of them are off within three or four lessons, they're gone," she said. "Some might take a lot longer, but the majority of them in high school there's nothing wrong with them other than they haven't been taught that A-U is an "or" sound or O-U-G-H can have 6-7 different sounds, or how to split up longer words," she said. She said the government could achieve great results if it funded similar programmes across the country. Another teacher who worked with others across a major city said secondary schools had been left in the lurch. She said teachers were having to figure out themselves how to help their students. "We have a cluster of people who are all working in the literacy space and we're working together and sharing our ideas and sharing with each other because we've got no support from the ministry and no guidance," she said. Janice Langford provided structured literacy training for primary schools, but recently started working with secondary teachers because of the need. She told RNZ English teachers were being asked to do the work of specialist literacy teachers and they were not trained for it. Lifting Literacy Aoteroa chair Jennie Watts said in five or 10 years, improvements the government was making in primary schools would flow through to secondary. But in the meantime, students were not getting a fair deal. "There's an urgent gap. We can't let those kids, the kids who are struggling right now and the ones who are about to hit secondary school, we can't just let them fall through the cracks. She said secondary schools needed a five-year strategy including training and funding to improve teens' literacy. It should introduce a new optional literacy subject separate to English, and remove the co-requisite numeracy and literacy requirement for NCEA. Watts said the government should also provide funding for literacy lead teachers, targeted intervention for the students who needed them, and resources aimed at teenagers. 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