Posted on 03/01/2023 12:31:34 PM PST by george76
Recent reports attribute the nationwide low reading proficiency for K-12 students, in part, to progressive curricula from teachers colleges.
Progressive approaches to teaching reading, one education advocate said, come from a 'desire to ... move away from what had been thought of as the drudgery and pain of institutional style education.'
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Recent reports show that school districts are ditching progressive curricula from teachers colleges and returning to best practices for reading.
The nationwide low reading proficiency for K-12 students is attributed, in part, to these curricula. Though Campus Reform has identified teachers colleges as sites of social justice and anti-racism, a popular approach to reading sold by teachers colleges failed to close achievement gaps.
The fallout from progressive curricula is widespread, with a headline from a Feb. 10 episode of The Free Press’ podcast declaring, “65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read.”
The episode featured journalist Emily Hanford, whose extensive investigation for American Public Media (APM) examined why “there’s a huge body of research on how kids learn to read,” yet “many teachers didn’t know about this research,” according to a statement she shared with Campus Reform.
Hanford’s podcast series Sold a Story suggests that there are two general approaches to teaching reading. One is phonics, or the relationship between letters and their sounds in spoken language.
The second approach treats children as natural-born readers who can learn mainly through exposure to books and includes strategies such as asking students to guess words based on pictures and other clues or repeatedly presenting the same words to help students commit them to memory.
“[W]hat reading scientists have clearly shown is that you can’t be a good reader without good phonics skills,” Hanford said.
Whether teachers adopt a curriculum that focuses on phonics can depend on their philosophy of educating children. “[T]here's been a long sort of separation between people you would call progressives in terms of pedagogy,” Neal McCluskey, the director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, told Campus Reform.
McCluskey continued to share “broad generalizations” of the differences between progressive and conservative pedagogy. Conservatives believe that, “by virtue of their experience,” adults are responsible for imparting knowledge and skills on students.
Meanwhile, the progressive approach is “student-centered,” which views a teacher as more of “a guide” or “coach.”
Sujatha Hampton, the Second Vice President and Education Chair of the Fairfax NAACP, similarly told Campus Reform that progressive approaches to reading come from a “philosophical desire to expose children to the richness of literature and to move away from what had been thought of as the drudgery and pain of institutional style education.”
“Professionals tried to make the emotional desire that children love school and books be enough to overcome the inconvenient reality that they weren't able to actually read the words," she continued. "Soon this became the way universities trained teachers.”
In 2021, the Fairfax NAACP sent a letter to the superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) demanding a “switch to an evidence-based” approach to teaching reading.
“The NAACP point[ed] out that [FCPS] first promised to make ‘minority achievement’ a priority in 1984, yet the achievement gap in reading between black and white students has persisted,” David Boaz, a distinguished senior fellow at Cato, wrote in Jan. 2023.
Since the NAACP “lit a fire under the school district,” according to Boaz, The Washington Post reported that FCPS “gave all kindergarten through second-grade teachers scripted lesson plans featuring phonics.”
The NAACP letter did not mention a specific curriculum or teachers college, but FCPS used a similar approach to the infamous curriculum at the center of Hanford’s investigation.
Columbia University’s Teachers College curriculum is used by “as many as one in four elementary schools,” according to Sold a Story. In New York City–another district where schools are switching to phonics-heavy curricula–the public schools chancellor said that Columbia’s approach “contributed to poor reading outcomes,” according to a Feb. 14 report in Chalkbeat.
Chalkbeat continued to describe the extent of these schools' poor reading outcomes, which show “large gaps between racial groups." Reading proficiency is at two-thirds for “white and Asian American students” compared to “37% [for] Black and Latino children.”
These reports depict New York City public schools, FCPS, and even Columbia as joining the national consensus on how to teach reading.
“We are seeing action on this issue in a number of states–red states and blue states,” Hanford told Campus Reform. “Since Sold a Story, legislators in at least five states have introduced bills to encourage districts to select curriculum aligned with the science of reading.”
Despite the revelation that, for decades, teachers colleges sold a defective product, they still maintain what McCluskey called not “exactly a monopoly but nearly a monopoly on producing teachers.”
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For an alternate pathway towards teacher certification, McCluskey suggested that school choice could reduce “rules and regulations,” including the common requirement that teachers complete an education program.
“And that's really the key because you want a free market in K-12 education, regardless of [the] teacher pipeline.”
duuuuuhhhhh!!!!!!!!!
So all this progressive teaching crap is in place because we don’t want to hurt the feelings of underperforming students? Talking about dividing by the lowest common denominator.
Idiots! When you are an athlete it's the day-in, day-out, week after week, month after month and year after year of “drudgery and pain” that makes the athlete great. Same dedication needs to be practiced by the student. These idiots were in charge of educating the next generation? We were fools to allow this!
Progressive ideology should be crushed out like a cigarette butt wherever it rears its ugly head.
Some beneficial things in this world can’t be accomplished without drudgery and pain. Deal with it, kids.
The only way to guarantee equity is to make everyone is as stupid as the dumbest person.
Oh, but those “Progressives” (I prefer CommieRats) are soooo smart. If you don’t believe it, just ask one of them!!!
Kinda like Fredo . . . “I’m smart. I can handle things!” No he couldn’t and that was right before he got whacked in the fishing boat on Lake Tahoe.
So, what about teaching that reading, like math, is racist...does that work?
No, it’s been put in place to insure that the end results are stupid citizens who are dumb enough to vote for democrats.
It’s really that simple.
I’ve said this from the very beginning university/college education departments are a source of much of the problem.
It would be difficult to get the state legislatures to shut them down. The cries of “think of the children” would be deafening & frightening to the state legislative politician.
Better solution is to make the “Ed credential granting institution” irrelevant. Have the legislatures open up the education profession to anyone with a degree for most of K12. If preference is to be given, give preference to those with degrees in their respective fields. For example, real English degrees & reach history degrees teach English and history. STEM classes can be taught by anyone with a degree in STEM\Engineering. Stop allowing the Ed. degree holders to be gatekeepers to the profession. Given preference to outside real-world experience & veterans.
They're already well ensconced in the K-12 Nationalist Indoctrination System.
Harrison Bergeron is a cautionary tale, not an educational policy guide.
Give to Turning Point USA if you really want to put your money where your mouth is. Charlie Kirk and his team is making big inroads to high schools and colleges to help give our kids the TRUTH about America, about History, about God. We NEED a change and it has to start at the education level, for that’s where the LIBERALS have been busy corrupting the truth for DECADES!
I’ll buy that. We as a society certainly seem to be getting dumber by the minute.
John Dewey’s methods have been proven as a failure, becuase it intended to produce poor readers.
Reading was reserved for the elites which is what all languages prior to Latin and it’s derivatives were. Graphical representations or glyphs of words and they were intended to be sight read, and could not be sounded out.
Learning/teaching phonetic reading is not painful drudgery unless the teacher is a stupid unimaginative harpy.
I recommend Open Court blended with the Writing Road to Reading and have some fun with the kids.
One of the ways to promote reading is by having parents actually read with their kids.
But leftist parents are probably too busy promoting “social/green justice” or whatever the cause of the week is.
“ANALYSIS: Schools are abandoning progressive curricula from teachers colleges”
Better than nothing, but not much better. What I want to see is a headline that reads:
“ANALYSIS: Schools are abandoning GRADUATES from teachers colleges”
I don’t even think most countries have ‘teachers colleges’...yet they kick ass over our results.
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