Yeah? Let me know when the system adopts phonics again to teach speaking English; which is of course — a PHONETIC language.
While I would applaud any improvement in our schools, I am suspicious of any program that doesn’t teach the way kids were taught back when the USA was number one in the world in reading comprehension and writing, not to mention math and science. Today, we rank below freakin’ Zimbabwe in all international standards.
There was nothing wrong with teaching rote memorization for math, phonics and writing comprehension for English and all the other “old fashioned” techniques. They actually WORKED! But somewhere along the line, the unions and their puppets (teachers) decided that we should bring the smart kids down to the level of under-performing students and that parents should have little say in their children’s education.
Now, it’s been downhill all the way. I interviewed a new college graduate last week for a job. The application was filled with spelling errors and the kid couldn’t speak good English.
“. . .and that parents should have little say in their children’s education”
Not true.
They want to hear from parents. . . . . . . . as long as the parents support them and go along with ‘The Plan.’
Oh, I agree whole-heartedly. The entire education field has tried to get children to build castles of insight in the air without any foundation on the ground, leap-frogging over memorizing, summarizing, and sheer volume of reading to try and find a shortcut wherein a child can read one little story about a Mexican boy in a barrio and glean all sorts of remarkable insights with it, manipulate the text to milk out symbols and messages and connections and meaning... Because children just inherently possess the ability to make profound insights about life based on a simple short story they can barely read, see? It's very frustrating. But that's not specific to Common Core, that's been the field of education for decades now.
This isn’t new. Sadly. I worked with teens a decade ago, one of them a National Merit Scholar. She left hand written instructions to the alterations lady at a local dress shop to ‘take in at waste’ on a dress. She was a HS senior. What’s worse, when those of us over 40 said something about it, she couldn’t understand all the fuss.