Hmmm. It’s been a while since elementary school. Are kids actually taught to read in groups if they’re not able to read when entering school?
Are they shown the alphabet & then sent home to practice?
My parents taught me to read before school. Perhaps we should offer incentives for poor families to do the same, or possibly hire more teachers to give a greater chance of individualized instruction between grades K-3.
Confusion about this answer reflects your assumption that not all children can perform equally. While this is true in a small sense, I think the outcome of scholastic achievement can be influenced by a number of social factors.
A poor parent may be more concerned w/ watching sports & drinking beer than teaching their child to read. This may result in the child’s disinterest in a teacher’s lesson or the educational process in general. The teacher may pick up on this & spend less time with an unmotivated student.
Clearly it’s the parent’s fault, but what should be done to influence this child’s future life? What benefit may society see if the child enters a profession rather than a trade?
You stated correctly that not all children have the same scholastic ability. IMO, this can be best influenced between grades K-3.
IMO, a lot of money should be dumped into ensuring academic success @ that point. Once the child’s personality & habits are formed by later ages, then schools could revert to a traditional teaching model.
The civil rights act resulting in desegregation was passed less than 50 yrs ago. This IMO has had a strong effect on black culture today. We can either let poor people & their children stagnate in our society, or we can do the right thing & use as much resources as possible to get everyone to an equal starting point.
I gotta ask a question here.
Why are they shooting the messenger? Why are they attacking the tests instead of using the tests as fodder for an attack upon the more fundamental flaws in the institution? It’s amazing, though, how they play so well into the hands of those who would not want educational equity. Yes, of course, Mr. NAACP, we’ll adjust the tests so everybody passes them. We won’t actually improve the schools in the low-scoring areas, we’ll just diddle with the tests. Now you’re happy and we’re happy, and we didn’t have to actually make anything better.
Ah, the good ol’ NAACP, when arent they screaming racism? I would think that rather then bring an expensive lawsuit against a county school board that is already struggling, maybe they should invest that money into helping to provide tutors to the underprivliged children who are failing.
I would bet that 2million spent on tutors that work directly with children would go farther to increase test scores, then 2million spent on trying to prove racism.
May I just chime in for a moment and exclaim how awful Flordia public schools are, at least judging by the experience of my cousins who live there? They are not stupid girls, and yet they lack even a basic comprehension of things I learned in high school in Illinois.
I remember one year in my early 20s, I went to see them on vacation. My older cousin was taking HS bio, and was really stumped on how basic 2-gene traits are transmitted. Really basic HS bio stuff. Her class had been working on this unit for several weeks, and she was worried she was going to flunk bio. No matter what the teacher said, it wasn’t getting through to her.
I spent about 5 minutes going over the material with her, and believe me, I’m no scientist. (I got As in HS bio, but I was a Spanish major and never took a basic science class at the college level, so HS bio was then about 8 years behind me.) A light went off in her head, she finally understood the material, and she aced the test. Of course, then the same thing happened with all her remaining bio units; somehow the material as presented in class wasn’t getting through to her. I think she ended up with a C for the semester. The same goes for my younger cousin.
They are intelligent, and they apply themselves, but somehow the way the FL school curriculum presents the material just never worked for them. And they come from a nice professional middle-class household with books in it, and have two college-educated parents who are still married to each other, read to their kids at every opportunity, and keep lots of books in the house. One of them is even a kindergarten teacher.
Sounds to me like the system is broken if only 34% of the students at ANY given high school can read at grade level, let alone if the racial disparities mean that certain groups are at an even more extreme disadvantage.
Nothing about these failing scores demonstrates to me that the kids “aren’t trying to learn.” For my part, I’m glad that so many people are alarmed about this kind of thing. Education is a very important issue to the American public, as it should be.
I don’t know that racism is the problem - what I read here does make me think it’s mostly the schools, and the kids shouldn’t be punished or given up on because their schools are bad. Schools have to be improved if they’re not up to par, period. A sucky school denies its students vital opportunities that everyone deserves.
None of that’s to say I know what the solution is, of course, although I don’t think it’s “take the funding away from schools that aren’t good.”
All this reminds me of a story I read yesterday in a friend’s profile. It’s about a New Orleans-area valedictorian who failed an exit exam… five times. Pretty thought-provoking in my opinion.
They went to THE SAME HIGH SCHOOL, but that doesn’t mean that their early educations were equivalent. Most high schools have multiple feeder (grade, middle, junior high, etc.) schools, some of which are poorer in quality than others.
There are two problems here. One, a lot of Florida students are performing poorly, so the school systems need some work. Two, and this is the one that you seem to be glossing over, almost all black students are performing poorly, leading one to either believe that blacks aren’t up to par with their white cohorts, for whatever reason, or that their feeder schools are doing an even worse job than the other schools. Either the 35th percentile of white students are better students than the 92nd percentile of black students, or there is a problem that is affecting blacks more than whites.
If you weren’t making any racial stereotypes, then why did your quote:
include race at all? Wouldn’t “poor basketball players” have been a better analogy?
For the record, I don’t think there is racism involved at the school administration level, and Florida happens to be one of the more equitably funded states in the country. They also just happen to be one of the more underfunded ones.
Isn’t this about third-graders? 
According to the article quoted above:
Ok i cant comment on Florida or the US in general, but it seems to me that you are not unique in the problem of certain minorities not succeding in academics. I have read many people commenting on funding and racism personaly i dont think it has anything to do with either. I have worked ina few 3rd world countries for a number of years, i have seen schools with one classroom, a couple of text books and one teacher, most of the kids could read and write above the standard of many of our children in our schools, i think the main difference is those children want to work to better themselves and realise education is their only way out, whereas many children in the west seem to think it is going fall on their laps for them. If racism was the problem why is it that Asian students seem to do well, also many from the Indian continent do well also. Would it be to PC uncorrect to sugest some cultural problems within certain minority groups to the attitude to education in general holding their children back, and not some too convenient excuses that we allways seem to hear.
I’ve been out of the classroom a long time, but if I understand the new No Child Left Behind policy, schools are expected to produce certain levels of results within each racial group. A school will be “targeted” if one cultural group lags behind.
All of the terms used on a test should be equally familiar to all races and cultures. If Gullah vocabulary were incorporated into a national reading comprehension test, that test would be culturally biased. Conversely, computer terminology might not be as familiar to Gullah children as it would be to someone living in Seattle. That’s just an example.
For a discussion of the possible causes of the “racial gap” in education, visit Teach For America: Recent Press. Scroll to the bottom and read the articles by Wendy Kopp and Jeff Archer.
Possibly relevant anecdote: I had an Ethiopian friend in college who majored in physics. After slogging through mechanics, electicity and magnetism, thermal physics, and laboratory work, he started the quantum mechanics sequence. He confided in one of the physics professors that he was enjoying the course immensely, having found a subject that was not polluted by what he called “Western physics”. When pressed to explain what he meant, he said that all earlier physics texts had culled their examples from western culture, for example: using guns and cannons to illustrate projectile motion, pulleys and springs to illustrate Newton’s laws, steam engines to illustrate Carnot’s upper bound on heat engine efficiency, or accelerating elevators to illustrate the principle of equivalence. In quantum mechanics, by contrast, the material was presented as almost purely mathematical, with the only examples being laboratory situations that do not feature heavily in the everyday experiences of the western world.
The physics professor responded that the distinction between laws of nature and demonstrations of those laws must not be forgotten. Any society could have come to the same conclusions as Galileo, Newton, Carnot, or Einstein, basing their conclusions on superficially dissimilar evidence. The law itself is independent of the particular society in which it was formulated, and should not be considered tainted for having been discovered by a people whose worldview differs considerably from your own.
There may be a component of hopelessness that could account for some of this phenomenon in American schools.
A child who sees few people in his community succeeding has little incentive to strive in school. For many kids, college is out of the question unless they’re given a full-ride scholarship, and for kids of just average academic performance, this is highly unlikely. The kid may feel, “Why bother?” since he knows his fate is to end up in a low-paying job.
I don’t think this is confined to minorities, either. The elementary and middle schools I attended were almost entirely white. We only had two black students, but a large portion of the white students were poor.
Many of the poor kids in my school did very poorly on tests, and some of them were very bitter toward learning in general. Some had parents like a friend of mine whose father actively discouraged learning all that “stupid stuff.” The smart kids in school were mercilessly picked on by some of these kids. (Once, a girl spit in my hair because I was reading a book.)
Many kids in school do not perform as well as they could out of fear of what their peers might say. But that’s not “black culture” or “poor culture”-- it’s kids’ culture. You can see it all along the socio-economic scale. It’s not cool to try very hard.
Hell, look at the man who is our president. Not a scholar by any means. He was, by all accounts, an average student. Had he put effort into his studies, I’m sure his grades would have improved, but he was most likely too busy goofing around with the other rich kids, and didn’t want to be thought of as a “nerd.”
In third-world countries where education is a rare opprotunity, schooling will make a discernable difference in children’s lives, because of the scarcity of educated people. In the US, having a high school diploma is almost ubiquitous-- you’re simply supposed to have one.
It’s much like the old quandry: If everyone get’s a bachelor’s degree, bachelor’s degrees don’t mean much. You then need to get a master’s to stand out from the crowd.
It’s important to note that the NAACP is not amongst those calling the test racially biased, if the article posted earlier is any indication:
In a nutshell, that’s about it. The schools cannot do this alone, and the parents are dropping the damn ball, because many of them are barely more than kids themselves. This is epidemic in most black communities:
And so on and so forth, et bloody cetera. More and more states are going to see these kinds of results as “No Child Left Behind” wends it way across the nation, because these kinds of situations are present across the nation.
The answer to this problem, however, does not lay in the schools. The schools do not have the ability to reach far enough into the communities to shake loose the entangling roots of these problems and set things straight.
Unfortunately, I have little faith that any other institution can do it, either.
For a thread and an article that are supposedly about biased tests, there was remarkably little discussion of the test. And I’d say we had more discussion of test bias in the thread than I saw in the article excerpts.
Racial bias in testing can be a legitimate issue. Reading comprehension can be extremely prone to it, and the example of New England kids reading about chitlins and grits is a good example. Another example might be reading a passage about traveling on an airplane. Kids from low income families would have little experience with this, and would have a hard time with the passage.
And yes, this bias could even occur in math. Personal anecdote here. I recall striding confidently to the blackboard to do a trig problem when I was studying in Europe. The teacher read the problem starting out “There is a cliff …” Well, trig I knew, but “cliff” is kind of an obscure word. So I stood there like an idiot until someone drew a cliff for me. Then I did the trig problem. A well-validated test will take care of this.
So I guess my point is that the claim of potential bias of the test should be investigated on its own merits and the whole issue of education and societal reform be addressed separately.
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Part of reading comprehension is being able to gather a definition of an unfamilar word through reading carefully the rest of the passage. It may be that a child may not know what chitlins are, but would at leat be able to grasp that it’s a food item from the rest of the text. Coming across unfamilar words and being able to infer their meaning from context is a very important skill. The test, if nothing else, tells us which children are unable to do so.
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I’ve never been on a submarine, yet I could understand *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. *Just because a child has never personally experienced something doesn’t mean they’re unaware of the item’s existance. I knew a kid in highschool who had never been on an escalator, yet could fully explain the appearance and function of the item.
Even if the child never reads, chances are high they watch television, in which they would be able to see all sorts of things which they may never do. This is not a time in which a child has knowledge only of things in the immediate vicinity, like it would have been 100 years ago. This is an era in which TV, movies, magazines, etc. show a child almost everything under the sun.
Ten Zoogabas, plus three Zoogabas equals thirteen Zoogabas. What’s a Zoogaba? *It doesn’t matter. * The numbers are the only thing that matters. “A goomer weighing 90 pounds falls from a tranagnon 1597 feet high . . .” is a problem solvable no matter what definition you give to the nouns. The italicized portion of the sentance is the important part.
Though it does occur to me to wonder how it was possible that you had never come across the word “cliff” being old enough to be in trig classes,
I think it’s even simpler than that: Teachers can’t teach anybody to read. Every time I see one of those “If you can read this, thank a teacher” bumber stickers, I chuckle. My parents taught me how to read. That’s also the case for pretty much everyone I’ve ever known. I’m not sure if the problem has its roots in racism or classism (I’m sure both are contributing factors), but if you’re a parent and you’re relying on anyone other than yourself to teach your kids to read or to enjoy reading, you are the source of the problem. Multiply you by a couple hundred thousand, and you’re Florida.
Show of hands: Who here was taught to read by a teacher? Who here was taught to read by parents? C’mon, prove me and my facile generalizations wrong!
I was tought to read completely by teachers. It wasn’t hard. My parents “read” to me, but I never figured out the letters (or even asked) until I went to school.
For large %s of kids to go through 12 years of school and be functionally illiterate (as is the case in many urban schools) tells you that something is dreadfully wrong.
I don’t think your post makes that much sense. Teachers spend hours with kids, parents might read to them an hour a week in my case. If parents can teach a 5 year old to read, why wouldn’t a teacher be able to teach a 6,7,8 year old how to read over a period of years.
If teachers can’t teach kids to read then what should be done? Does each kid need his own teacher? Should the teacher/student ratio be 1:1? I can see it now: Anything less than a 1:1 teacher / student ratio is racism.
Sounds feasible.
My parents taught me to read as well, but I think bri1600bv has a point. Teachers should be ensuring that every child under their care can read. It’s as simple as making an effort to have each student read aloud at some point during the school year. If a problem is identified, there should be a way to inform the office who could then have tutoring arranged.
Catching the problems early could prevent a lot of trouble later on. Instead of passing the problem to the next teacher, perhaps there could be some sort of effort to keep track of each student’s progress in essential skill-development.
Teachers taught me to read. Before I was in the first grade, I was around books because we had them in the house and my grandfather read to me and took me to the library with him, but nobody at home or at the preschool I attended taught me how to string letters together to make words. Since I went to school knowing the alphabet and how to write my name, I think I was primed to read.