“Now I’ll grant you we moved to a specific area to access the highest rated public schools we could find...”
Well, there you have it. You exercised your (white? I’m assuming here, sorry) privilege to seek out schools with more qualified and competent teachers. Kudos to you for doing so.
But as Don Corleone has pointed out, many public school teachers are themselves functionally illiterate. Again, kudos for sparing your kids that.
My son’s original third grade teacher could neither write a coherent sentence, nor perform long multiplication, and she was teaching her ignorance to the class. When I brought this to the principal’s attention, she -—with a sigh—pointed out that any formal complaint would result in a racial uproar, so I’d best seek another school. I did.
I’ll also assume that your children’s more competent teachers are simply **incorporating** the sight words and common core methods alongside the traditional, old school methods, only because they’re being **required** to incorporate these new methods.
So a point could be made that the new, common core stuff which you are “on board with” might be actually incidental, mere examples when removed entirely from the foundational basics and presented alone, thus too complex for children who have not been provided with prior references to the rote basics. IMO this is so.
I have 2 award winning teachers in my family. Both will tell you that their success is based trying different approaches. If the student doesn’t “get it” try another angle, but basic building blocks such as the alphabet and the addition and multiplication tables **must** come first, because these building blocks are foundation of the ability to reason, ie to think.
The lefties are advocating altogether abandoning teaching the alphabet and basic arithmetic altogether, to push a political agenda that says everything old must be swept away, regardless whether it works, and replaced with what’s new and “revolutionary” and made up, even when it defies all logic and doesn’t work.
Actually, I have been pretty vigilant at not trying to "rewrite" the teacher's methodology, though I must confess I'm not good enough at it to resist defaulting to the ways I learned to solve the problems I guide my daughter through when doing homework.
Also, I do not practice "tolerance" of word errors, and baby has learned she has to get the words "right." Further, that giving the same word over again is NOT correcting the problem.
And thank you for the kudos!