In spite of high-profile efforts to improve the reading skills of the USA’s poorest schoolchildren over the past several years, their reading abilities barely improved last year compared with 2007, results of a federally administered test show.
Reading scores essentially didn’t budge in 2009, both for students overall and minority students, according to results issued Wednesday on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Fourth-graders’ scores were unchanged at 221 points on a 500-point scale, and those of eighth-graders rose just one point, from 263 to 264.
Likewise, achievement gaps between white, African-American and Hispanic students changed only slightly since 2007, though in fourth grade, the difference between white and African-American students’ scores has tightened six points since 1992. Overall, though, average scores in both grades have risen just four points since then.
Both a hunger for learning and a disinterest, even a hostility toward learning, begin in the home environment and secondarily in a child’s neighborhood environment.
We now have one to two to three generations of semi-literate, even illiterate, parents raising children.
Government can’t change this situation because government can’t be in the home and government can’t change the dynamics of the average impoverished neighborhood. Housing projects with their associated schools and recreation facilities have been an attempt at improving both the home and neighborhood environments and they have both failed miserably.
The only thing that seems to work in impoverished neighborhoods are private efforts by churches to improve the family/neighborhood environment and charter schools that provide an opportunity for young children to be educated apart from the very negative dynamics of impoverished neighborhoods.
For the last 45 years government expenditures on “education” have soared, with no perceptible progress. One can even argue that in such disciplines as civics we’ve moved backwards.
During the same period, expenditures on health care have grown by nearly identical percentages, but accompanied by huge improvements in quality of life and life expectancy beyond age 40.
The left’s answer to education’s failure is “spend more,” and their answer to medicine’s progress is “spend less.”
If you wish to see the future of medicine under heavy government management … look no farther than the pitiful husk that government schools have become.
The left’s answer is always the same — more money and more government — and when confronted with the repeatedly abject failure of their programs they say it’s their [i]intentions[/i] that matter, and that we need to spend more … because their ideas “haven’t really been tried.”
South Dakota’s 4th graders averaged 222, slightly above the national average, while 8th graders here avg’d 270, well above the nat’l avg.
Perhaps the answer is that we are using the wrong tool to fix a problem. People think education will fix dysfunctional homes. The old saying goes “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Professional educators try to fix things using schools, since school worked for them. Maybe the schools aren’t broken so much as they are the wrong tool for the job?
If education is not valued in the home, there is little that schools can do to instill an interest in learning in the child.
I grew up in a rural township with working class incomes, but no other tax base than property taxes. We had no kindergarten; classes were half day through grade three, with over 40 in a class and no teachers’ aides. Text books were often falling apart from age.
Our kids did fine, however, because these working class families wanted something better for their kids and emphasized education as the way to an improved life. About half of us went on to higher education. The few kids that did not achieve were usually from a dysfunctional or poor home. They did not get the support at home that the others did.
In-school penalties for getting in trouble were not nearly as bad as the reaction waiting at home, and Dad was not going to retain a lawyer when you disagreed with the teacher. The failure of education starts in the home, and until that changes, education will flounder.
#5, I attended a one-room school for K and 1st where my grandmother was the teacher. Proper diction was a matter to be drilled. And to misbehave …. my grandmother had no problem taking a hairbrush to a bare behind for back-talking. Family members were expected to behave in an exemplary fashion. To this day, I do not dare engage in an activity that would “bring shame to the family name.”
Hey, Fr. Tim (#3),
I’m glad you hailed the relatively good score in SD. I’m a product of the Sioux Falls public schools, and I received a fine education in the 1960s and early 1970s. My late mother taught 1st grade in Sioux Falls for 29 years and mostly loved it. She spent much of that time in a public school in a poor neighborhood where lots of kids came from families on welfare.
And here’s the kicker, that tends to support Bart Hall’s point above, i.e., that the answer to social problems isn’t just throwing money at them. My mother frequently lamented that SD has ranked near the bottom in the national teacher pay scale for ages. During most of her long career, SD was no higher than 48th among the 50 states in teacher compensation. Often only Mississippi was lower. And yet student test scores in SD were consistently above average (almost makes you think of Lake Wobegon, doesn’t it?, where all the kids are above average).
I hate to say it, but one reason is probably that apart from native Americans, SD is lily white and Anglo. Minorities (again, other than the Lakota people for whom the state is named) are still virtually non-existent. When I grew up in Sioux Falls, the class was usually 100% Anglo, or close to it. No blacks, no Hispanics, no Asians. In fact, the largest minority group were us non-Norwegian-Americans (wink). That’s not, BTW, a racist statement, but a comment that cross-cultural communication makes things more complicated and tends to impede educational progress.
And another key factor behind SD’s success was probably that the percentage of two-parent families back then in SD was way above the national average. Divorce and co-habitation were simply much less common than today. I think that may have been the biggest factor really.
Alas, being a public school teacher in America today is largely a thankless, frustrating job. Bart is right, schools can’t substitute for the basic educational role of families. And the breakdown of the family in America has sabotaged the schools, making effective universal education all but impossible. But those brave teachers who accept the call (and it is a divine vocation) to teach in our failing schools today, deserve our thanks and support.
David Handy+
I think some of the problem can be attributed to an increasing view that computers in the classroom are the answer to learning woes.
I believe that reading or being read to causes a different response in the brain than does doing schoolwork on a computer. I don’t believe a young child’s brain is designed to best learn in isolation. Rather I believe for pre school age children one on one learning is best and for school age children a combination of group learning and one on one learning is best.
Computers in the classroom encourage isolation. They also make it harder for teachers to quickly pick up cues that a child is having trouble with comprehension or other reading skills. A teacher can respond all the sooner to a child she hears trying to sound out a word than she can to one who turns in wrong answer from a interactive computer skills test.
And family does play a very important part in this.
Why do they need to read? The government is going to feed, clothe, and house them. Why on earth do they need to read?
bl