Angie Hackman teaches chemistry -- and reading, reports Hechinger's Julian Roberts-Grmela. Every teacher at Health Sciences High and Middle College (HSHMC) in San Diego teaches reading, in addition to their subject matter. Many middle and high school students arrive without basic reading skills.
Hackman devotes 20 minutes of each 80-minute class to to "closely reading passages from their textbooks, “breaking apart” prefixes and suffixes for relevant vocabulary and identifying root words," he writes. "During a recent lesson, she discussed the word “intermolecular,” dissecting its prefix, “inter,” and connecting it to other words with that same prefix."
Math teacher Maggie Fallon teaches math vocabulary and asks students to annotate word problems.
“We have kids that on our benchmark knowledge assessments are scoring what is the equivalent of second grade, first grade, fourth grade,” said Douglas Fisher, a school administrator who is also a professor of educational leadership at San Diego State.
The push to align K-3 reading instruction to researched-based methods leaves an open question: What about the students who were passed along, not really knowing how to decode unfamiliar words? "On the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, nearly 70 percent of eighth graders scored below 'proficient' and, of those, 30 percent scored 'below basic,'" writes Roberts-Grmela.
Few middle and high school teachers are trained to teach basic reading skills. And it takes time from content instruction in science, math and history.
This isn't a new problem. I remember talking to a first-year biology teacher nearly 50 years ago. She said half of her students never did assignments. "They can't read the textbook," she said. "They can't read."
Poor reading isn't a rare problem either, reports Elizabeth Heubeck on Education Week. Forty to 50 percent of middle and high school students can't read well enough to understand grade-level text, estimates Rebecca Kockler, executive director of Reading Reimagined.
A 2019 study found a “decoding threshold." Students who couldn't decode grade-level text accurately and efficiently "made no significant growth in their reading comprehension ability over the next three years." Researchers said that as many as 38 percent of fifth-graders and 19 percent of 10th graders were below the decoding threshold.
My brother is teaching high school math in Madison WI. He mentioned a right angle to a student, and they didn't know what that was.
"It's like the corner of a rectangle," he said.
"What's a rectangle?" said the student.
You have to know something to learn something, and kids today have been taught and learned nothing.
Ann in L.A.
The lack of literacy reported here agrees with what I've been reading on reddit in r/Teachers and r/Professors. Yes, students are getting to college, even grad school, without being able to fluently read and write their native language.
Reading is the most important thing we teach in K-12, and I say that as a math teacher.
This is what happens when we are more worried about minimum "F" grading, social promotion, and self-esteem, rather than having the students learn the hard reality of failing in life...
Once again:
"Carthago delenda est" To modernize Cato: The public school system must be destroyed (Ratio scholae publicae delenda est).
It's past the point where it can be "evolved" or "transformed" into something sane. It has to be abandoned and rebuilt from the ground up.