Government schools in California are failures. Worse, the more money you give them, the bigger the failures in the classrooms.
“More than 20% of students in fifth through seventh-grade trip over words they don’t recognize and can’t sound out. This obstacle keeps them from grasping the main idea of school reading assignments, according to a study released Wednesday from the Educational Testing Service and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund.
Plunging literacy rates in the wake of the pandemic are drawing more attention to the lack of adolescent reading proficiency. National tests from 2022 showed grim declines in eighth graders’ reading skills. However, experts have long known that many older students lack a strong foundation in reading skills such as phonics, grammar and vocabulary.
While that is bad news, there is good news!!! Government is granting diploma’s and promoting students that are function illiterates. So don’t worry, McDonalds will still have a few jobs for the illiterate diploma owners.
Many middle school students struggle to read well, study shows
EdSource, 10/31/24 https://edsource.org/updates/many-middle-school-students-struggle-to-read-well-study-shows
New research reveals that many middle school students hit a “decoding threshold,” the 74 reported.
More than 20% of students in fifth through seventh-grade trip over words they don’t recognize and can’t sound out. This obstacle keeps them from grasping the main idea of school reading assignments, according to a study released Wednesday from the Educational Testing Service and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund.
Plunging literacy rates in the wake of the pandemic are drawing more attention to the lack of adolescent reading proficiency. National tests from 2022 showed grim declines in eighth graders’ reading skills. However, experts have long known that many older students lack a strong foundation in reading skills such as phonics, grammar and vocabulary.
“A lot of kids could very well have their basic K-2 foundational skills down pat, but they still need decoding support,” said Rebecca Sutherland, a co-author of the report and the associate director of research for Reading Reimagined, a project of the research and development fund, the 74 reported. “There’s an assumption … that kids can self-teach.”
The trouble is that working memory is easily exhausted so if you have to think too hard to sound a word out, you don’t have the mental bandwidth left to understand the whole sentence, let alone the paragraph.
“If decoding a sentence is consuming all of your cognitive capacity, then you’re not going to have anything left for comprehension,” Sutherland said
Steve! Just reading the headline to this article makes me cry! I taught at Modesto Junior College for 30 years. In the last 10 years, students came into my class and could not read at a fourth grade level. How do I know this? One of my colleagues was going through a masters program in reading and tested all of my students. Ergo, yes… They were reading at a fourth grade level. And they all had high school diploma’s! Additionally, some of them had never written an essay in high school. Their teachers didn’t wanna be bothered.
And we wonder why California’s reading, writing, and math scores are the lowest in the nation? No need to wonder. It’s California. And look at the rest of California. All of it is in the toilet.
Please disregard grammar errors in the above commentary. . I should’ve proofread. Autocorrect is a demon! Please… Forgive me.