"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
As a result, we got a tedious, dumbed-down, inflammatory and supercilious discussion. Just what we don't want here.
Another approach is to post a first comment to the thread, explaining what you think is significant in the article. That can help.
People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. Sure teachers especially in public schools are over worked, however, what happened to me is abuse. It was always I who failed and never the teachers or my parents who strangely both have PhDs. The onus to understand how to learn was the responsibility of a child and not the adults. We expect children who fail to understand pedagogy? They told me to think harder, to work harder. What does it mean to think harder? I suffered anxiety attacks and mental breakdowns trying to keep up. They ushered me along through graduation because I never had antisocial behavioral problems.
I taught myself a trade so I could survive. Then taught myself how to write. Then taught myself a second trade for fun and a third. At some point, I'll change my focus to educational software. There have been several individuals, groups, and initiatives over the past few decades since I graduated who have developed amazing tools I wish existed when I was in school with the Khan Academy at the top of that list. Nonetheless, the people at the Khan Academy who designed their course on grammar also happen to be people who are naturally talented at grammar, the fundamental crux teaching. I have one paradoxical advantage: my disadvantage which plagues every working moment gives me a perspective nobody has, er, correction, 46% of people who also happen to be the people doing the teaching with higher education degrees don't have.
One thing is for sure, I would be an idiot to expect a child to solve pedagogy for her or his self. When children fall behind they give up, they don't contemplate the philosophy of how they learn.
People are probably hostile because you're going against scientific consensus and saying a range of disabilities that affects millions of people doesn't exist.
That is absolutely a massively distributed pedagogical failure of outstanding degree. Unless the average adult is so mentally disabled that acceptable-or-above teaching should result in this outcome.
The lack of ability to benefit from this farce in millions of students isn't surprising; and it can be absolutely address with better instruction and individual approach.
I say this as a former instructor, math PhD[1], and also a person with ADHD[2] who persevered through a fair amount of failing grades on the way there.
The #1 reason[3] I ran away from academia was that the system simply doesn't allow one to teach the right way. It's a conveyor-belt manufacturing process with the model 9-5 worker as the intended results, and if you don't fit the mold — tough luck.
One has more leeway in teaching topics courses, but even world-class professors don't get away with not teaching intro/foundation courses, which are as rigid as they're atrocious.
And K12 is where souls go to die. An enthusiastic teacher will burn out in just a few years, and come back with PTSD and a 1000-yard stare.
Anyway. The OP's statement should be seen as "learning durabilities are not an obstacle to a good instructor" — which, in the vast majority of cases, is true.
[1] https://romankogan.net/math
[2] https://romankogan.net/adhd
[3] The #2 reason is that the industry pays 4x as much; #3 is the 2-body problem; #4 is ..., oh wait, I'll be here for a long time if I keep going.
"Look, even though someone was at fault through all of my early years i still managed to learn these rudimentary tasks on my own as an adult, not everyone is as good as i am".
We should be very careful with scientific consensus of a social science. Maybe we should say if you lead a horse to water, it doesn't drink, and you need that horse to work on the farm to grow food to feed your family, you are going to have a very bad time instead of what teachers told me time and time again, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." What type of person gives up on a horse that doesn't drink instead of figuring out what is wrong with the horse or understanding animal behavior to train the horse to drink and pull plows and stuff?
There is such a thing as dyslexia, and that cannot be fixed by teaching better. You can still form sentences, apply grammar and tell stories without writing, but the reading+writing part is a major problem for some people. Your story of beating the challenges of your bad early education can't and won't apply to all others who struggle.
Having said that, I do believe that some lazy teachers like to mark failing students as disabled more often than necessary because that way the student's failings aren't a result of the teachers' lacking abilities, but rather an inherent flaw in the students themselves that they have no control over. The general knowledge of the existence of learning disabilities has helped many kids get the resources they need, but has also to them being used by the lazy or incompetent to completely write off children that couldn't keep up.
This, combined with the utter disconnect between the way many words are spelled and pronounced in English, is a recipe for disaster that will likely continue to ripple through the education system for years.
Can you support this assertion? My understanding of the topic, having a person close to me with a dyslexia dx, is that the appropriate educational intervention is training the brain to use alternate pathways for different parts of the reading process. This isn’t “teaching better” but is “teaching.”
http://dyslexia.yale.edu/research-science/ycdc-research/payi...
Well, because it is wrong. Nonetheless, those are not mutually exclusive. The fact that there are bad teachers that do not know how to teach, does not mean that there are no people that legitimately do have learning disabilities.
It still blows my mind that a person whose job was to teach did his best to praise those who came already prepared and vigorously kick everyone else.
Only my calculus teacher in college’s methods really clicked with me and then I magically got it.
The gist is that it probably doesn't matter. Culture does a lot of work in letting us communicate in fragments.
Good choice of reading there.
Also, in the future maybe submit the primary data source, rather than a Wikipedia link that cites a Forbes article?
A more accurate metric would be "prose literacy in the individual's at-home spoken language," which would probably yield a significantly less drastic picture. Perhaps not the best one, but nowhere near as eye grabbing as "54% of Americans can't read beyond a middle school level."
My dad taught English at a community college a decade ago, mostly to soldiers returning from the war. They were mostly smart, motivated people determined to succeed and facing many obstacles. It was shocking to him that they were writing 5 page essays for the first time as 20-something college students.
Socioeconomic status probably best explains that one, and is probably at least a component everywhere else.
In any case, the geographic visualization on that page suffers from the same problem as electoral maps, where areas with very low populations (e.g the Texas border) occupy lots of visual space. The problem is really much worse in the South due to higher populations.
The HN submission queue is an arbitrary place. And clickbait is popular beause it works. (I strive strongly against it myself.)
And this was a member of the staff. In a school district! Blew my mind.
[0] Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; although in this case “educated” may be sufficient: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias
(To poke at this more substantively: Hanson's evidence tests L1-English reading comprehension, not how "stupid" someone is. Somewhere around 70 million Americans don't even speak English at home.)
The second Wikipedia citation is to a Forbes article.
Many schools in Califonia use an unproven/inferior method/curriculum for teaching literacy, based on the work of F&P.[1]
[0] https://caaspp-elpac.cde.ca.gov/caaspp/DashViewReport?ps=tru...
[1] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2021/11/19/fountas-pinnell-...
The schools are nearly identical everywhere. Even crap schools, if you put those teachers in an upper middle class setting, they would shine.
And the most talented teachers in the nation, put into one of those violent inner city schools - would not magically make the the kids pass math.
The kids grow up with single/no parents or one/both parents in jail, no stable job or income, total lack of support at home - or worse, parents that actively call them 'stupid' or tell them they're worthless, zero educated role models, by age 8 idolizing street tough guys, by age 11 wanting to join them, by grade 10 hardly ever showing up, 5 years behind, could care less, getting into fights, peers mocking them if they do well, haven't been out of the neighbourhood in a decade, no serious extra curricular activities etc..
The 2018 OECD/PISA scoring really highlights a lot of these issues.
I was driving through Detroit one night 'for fun' with my work mates to give them a taste of 'some parts of America' - it was 12:45am and on the street corner at the gas station was a child, on his bike, just sitting there waiting for something.
Think of much you can surmise from just that one little thing: a 7 year old, up at 1 am, out in the neighbourhood, hanging out on a Tuesday night. There is no way that story is good, and there are probably 100 things that are bad. Just from that one glimpse you can probably estimate that kid might not be likely to finish school.
Most schools and teachers are good, esp. the one's that have the tenacity to teach in the inner city.
We need decent jobs, stable families, boring nonviolent neighbourhoods, kids who can be free to be 'into' school stuff and the chess club, basic healthcare - i.e. your normal, middle-class semi-aspirational upbringing. If we can do that, grades will go way up to the normal middle class level.
So the % of kids that schools are successfully teaching to read is maybe 30% or 40%.
Spanish has almost perfectly logical spelling. I mean: given a sound, there's one way to write it. And, given an unknown written word, there's one way to pronounce it.
Even if English were to have these two properties:
- we would still need a method for teaching reading
- it would be possible for more than one method to exist
- it would be likely that one method would be generally better than all other methods
Figuring out the sounds is a small part and we definitely shouldn't assume it's the bottleneck.
Olso, zis kaind of speling luks strainj to old pipl.
I have no idea how California does it, but it's not uncommon to define the grade levels as the median score kids in that grade get on the test. And 50% of kids scoring below the median would only be a worrisome result in the Lake Wobegon school system.
The % of kids who are expected to (at least) 'meet expectations' is, by definition, 100%. But the actual rate is less than half that.
These tests aren't difficult by design. They're not graded on a curve, forcing the pass rate to be ~50%.
Please take a look at sample tests and judge for yourself: https://www.compton.k12.ca.us/media/5234/elpac_grades-6-8_pr...
In an earlier age, it was common for newspapers to target a 7th grade reading level.
It's almost like saying "90% of Americans have below median literacy skills." In that one it is obviously false, since we define median as being at 50-percentile.
But this is not a lot different. To me "6th grade reading level" should mean "the reading skills of a 50-percentile 6th grader." But then the statement can't be true, unless you accept that the typical 6th grader is just as good at reading as a typical adult.
So.... how do you define "6th-grade reading level"? It seems that you are left with defining it as what you might wish it were. Which is going to vary widely.
The standard required to pass the 6th grade, I guess? Possibly people are reading at that level but then forget how to do it later in life? That's definitely the case with for example knowledge of maths.
I mean, where does the standard come from? Does it have nothing to do with what the typical student in a typical school is able to accomplish? If not, it is just arbitrary and meaningless.
2021 and 2020? Maybe 10 total.
Part of it is I just don't know what to read lately! I look at lists of books and cannot decide! I wish there was a place I could go and find recommendations by authors I admire.
The other part? No bars or coffee shops! I love the bustle of a crowded room full of people. If I get bored with the book, I can order another beer, or eavesdrop on a nearby conversation. Covid has taken that away, and I am trapped in my distraction filled room!
I guess there is a THIRD reason: I've been learning guitar for the past year, and that has eaten up a lot of my time.
My impression from reading the Wikipedia article is that the U.S.’s literacy standards are higher than most other countries. I also wonder how much the immigration rate affects this stat.
Probably not much? Looking at reading achievement by race, we see that whites do worse than asians, and blacks doing worse than hispanics. In both those pairs we see the group with more immigrants do better than the group with less immigrants.
The base level of literacy in the US is similar to that of other advanced nations. Particularly accounting for its large immigrant population who don't speak English as their first or primary language.
Adult Literacy in the United States
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
HN? Attack the article. And that’s the nicest comments, the ones that don’t attack the people with reading issues.
As a French guy, if you tell me that my English is 5th-grade level, I take it as a compliment.
While HN submissions are generally held to a higher standard, the general comments/discussions are equally toxic. Apparently FB is such a cancer and everyone else is such a problem - but we’re actually part of the problem.
The US is certainly behind much of the world in education, but these metrics are really hard gauge accurately. Diving in to where these numbers come from and how they compare to the rest of the world, I'm finding that no one tracks this in any way that we can really draw a conclusion across countries.
I also see other commentors jumping to trashing schools or the education system for this. Does a flat number really point to education? What about poverty levels, general cultural attitudes towards literacy, accounting and definition of proficiency, etc.
I have no numbers to back this, but I felt growing up that the biggest problem with education was not the schools or education system, but the students and the general culture around education. Students and their parents just did not care at all about education, most (adult and kid) were actively hostile towards it. There is only so much an education system can do if 1/3 to 1/2 of the students will do absolutely everything they can to not learn, and their parents encourage them not to learn.
Some completely anecdotal examples from my childhood: - In high school I had a friend who's dad flew into a rage when he suggested he wanted to try going to college, because college was the devil (it'll turn you into a liberal sissy, they just steel your money, James down the street fixes motorcycles and don't need no degree, you think you're soooo much better than us, etc.). This attitude was only slightly more extreme than most in the town. And it didn't just apply to college, it applied to anyone who wanted to do any kind of academic learning.
- I have distinct memories of being ridiculed by multiple full-grown adults (!!) when my parents took me to math competitions, for being a loser nerd. Some were serious and meant it, others maybe weren't serious but thought it was funny to ridicule.
- I remember bringing a book to read while my mom worked, when I was 8 years old, and having someone (again, a full grown adult) who told me to stop reading in public because it might get me beat up.
- At school in general, many students never got punished by their parents for skipping school or failing. The school would bend over backward trying to help them in every way reasonable, but what do you do if half your students do everything they can to not learn? Threaten to punish with suspension? Many parents treated it as "who cares, school is dumb anyways".
No amount of effort into the education system could solve what I grew up around, it's a lot more insidious. Maybe I'm from a uniquely shitty part of the country tho, maybe most of the US would benefit from more focus on the education system itself, I wouldn't know. But I feel like I hear similar stories from others who grew up around the decaying rust belt, the collapsing small towns that scattered around the midwest, and inner city schools in places like Kansas City and OKC.
Spain is right there in the table you linked, with their 98%. And what's common in countries you listed is not untrustworthy regime, but writing system that allows to easily achieve those numbers of literacy in their respective native languages.
Sure, poverty and attitudes matter, but achieving literacy in some languages just doesn't need that much of effort and privilege.
A somewhat similar study is the 2016 OECD report (based on a survey conducted in 2011--12), "Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills "
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926...
Jacob Nielsen addressed that in the context of computer UI/UX requirements for general-use application and website design, "The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think":
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
I've referenced both in my own essay, "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", which acknowledges both that general-use systems must be generally-usable, and that this requirement reduces functionality for advanced users by numerous mechanisms.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
They can easily get 100% literacy rate by the end of kindergarten.
That’s the benefit of a logical writing system that has few exceptions.
"Spelling bees" are largely an English language phenomenon. If you can pronounce a Spanish word, you can likely spell it. You might miss an occasional "h", but that's about it.
Adults not trusting schools is probably related to the belief that the school system is incompetent anyway. Having the "wrong" politics definitely makes it easy to consider an administration incompetent.
"I also see other commentors jumping to trashing schools or the education system for this. Does a flat number really point to education? What about poverty levels, general cultural attitudes towards literacy, accounting and definition of proficiency, etc."
If you only look at a specific segment of students (e.g. Socio-economically disadvantaged Hispanic 3rd graders), you can compare school districts and individual schools, without having your data polluted by different poverty levels etc.
If you look at the careads web site, you'll see they compared districts in California, and found (i) significant variation between districts, and (ii) worse-performing districts had a higher prevalance of using F&P/Calkin type reading curricula.
The folks who run that site didn't compare individual schools (so as not to over-interpret random variation). I was curious so I looked at the data for the schools in San Francisco.
For my local school (Glen Park Elementary), the % of that segment reading at grade level or above was 4%.
For Hillcrest Elementary, for the same segment of students, it was 65%.
In each case, the sample included at least 15 students.
What explains the large difference in results between schools, even after we control for poverty and home language?
If I remember correctly, the NYTimes is written for the 8th-grade level. Similarly, many hospitals/healthcare facilities don't allow writing above the 8th-grade level. So, expressive, detailed, and stylized writing are all easily possible at the 8th-grade level. In fact, I probably write at the 8th-grade level, albeit less clearly.
What's the gap between an 8th grade reader and a 6th grade reader?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...
If so, then the difference between 8th and 6th grade level works out to about 0.17 syllables per word, or about 5 words per sentence, or some blend of the two. So the gist would seem to be, don't be like me; use periods instead of commas and semicolons, and don't use a word like "orthography" when a word like "spelling" will do.
I doubt that that this is what the department of education was looking at when they assessed adult prose literacy, though. But I'm having a bugger of a time tracking that down, too. I'm not sure that I agree with Wikipedia that a Forbes article that doesn't properly cite its own source is an acceptable citation for that figure.
The goals they list on e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy match exactly what I was told I was being tested on when I was taking the standardized tests in school.
Roughly, there are these breaks in understanding: 1. Understanding the literal words on the page, 2. understanding the implied context of the words, and 3. understanding the motivations of the author. Progressing in order of difficulty. As well there are ways to gauge how well you can read and how fast you can read, such as are you able to sound out and break down complicated words based on their roots or do you remember whole words.
Not so. Rather, demonstrably not possible, at least not by some writers currently assigned to the task of rewriting instructions for prescription medicines. Subtleties of dose timing, interactions with other medicines and such I have seen mangled into ambiguity, or dropped altogether. So I was able to medicate myself with a reasonable degree of confidence.
Fortunately, in my case, the manufacturer's original advice as written for physicians was preserved, bottommost of three, behind maddening "plain English" rewrites from both insurer and local medical group.
They can both interpret the instructions on the side of an AT4 but the 8th grader will be able to tell you that it did not have any alliterations, foreshadowing, or personification.
People always forget that at some point in middle school "getting better at reading" stops being about interpreting the literal meanings of sentences and paragraphs and starts being about spotting and understanding the more advanced structures that makes for good creative writing and (outside some wordplay the advertising department engages in) is completely superfluous to what it takes to transact business.
Except that it makes you aware of the techniques used on you, and able to use them yourself.
I bet English teachers in the UK loved (the 90s Prime Minister) Blair's 'education, education, education' (as a teaching point, aside from how their colleagues might have)!
I don't know what alliteration and personification means and I miss foreshadowing all the time. TIL I'm a 6th grade reader with a master's degree in a computer field. (Basically I'm reading text off screens for ~14 hours per day, doesn't mean I'm necessarily good at it but it's also not as if I'm likely to be barely average at it.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/California-Sixth-Grade-Reader-Pournel...
Then I went to say that in my spare time I like to listen to music and reading. You'd think I'd have said that I'm into being a serial killer. Just weird puzzled and uncomfortable looks.
It then struck me that many people, if not most, cannot comprehend spending their leisure time in any way other than passively watching movies, TV or videos on their smartphone or playing video games.
And believe me, I'm not saying it just to be pretentious, but a lot of the time, reading is way more exciting than whatever's happening on the small screen. There's nothing wrong with TVs and movies but they're certainly not the only way to spend your leisure time.
And then you go on to describe your own leisure time as two other passive forms of entertainment. There’s really nothing magic about the written word that makes a medium more challenging, because by historical standards people are literally reading more words than ever. And probably listening to more music than ever too. There’s just as much to dissect and analyze in artsy movies and TV as books and music.
Normally when you want to be snobby about leisure time you’re supposed to talk about creating over consuming.
I've found it best to avoid saying "I don't watch much TV" though, precisely because of the reaction you mentioned. People will either think I am a freak or just trying to sound smart (or both) - it is a lose-lose situation.
I’m now a two bullet point max kind of emailer.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/01/book-reading...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/15/us/university-of-california-s...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/us/harvard-admissions-act...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/move-end-standardized-t...
Without going too political, yes, I think that an unacceptably large amount of Americans are undereducated for the task of choosing between two candidates. Recently, many candidates have been appealing to the worst instincts and using things like conspiracy theories to gain an advantage. And bad things have been happening as a result.
It's really a matter of critical thinking, not reading per se, but presumably reading can contribute to an overall better ability to use logic and reason.
Also, it isn't just down to two candidates. In the last presidential election, there were many more candidates, and they were weeded out by both primaries and just polling. Both of which rely on the voters being able to wisely choose.
In my city, there were 12 mayoral candidates, all on the ballot. The ranked choice system made it workable. (not that instant-runoff ranked choice is the best system, but it is better than the plain-old plurality used in most elections) If more people were well-read (and had the mental capabilities that tend to come with that) we'd probably have better voting systems in a lot more places.
A functioning political system shouldn't only have ever have 2 viable candidates. Much less have the only viable candidates belong to one of two viable political parties, both of which have cartoonishly stable views over time.
Maybe the broken, overly simplistic US political system is a _symptom_ of shockingly terrible education outcomes. Not vice-versa. Like many of the other social ills currently ravaging American society.
2) If amount of money spent were actually a factor then why do we show no plausible link between literacy rate [1] and per pupil spending [2] by the government in public schools. This also doesn't account for how homeschoolers and private schoolers tend to do better in standardized testing (and other areas of academics) and yet homeschoolers spend vastly less in comparison to public and private schools (Finding a public source for spending that I am comfortable with is a little hard, so I am basing this on what I know of spending in my local homeschool groups. The test score comparisons are fairly easy to find.).
3) I think to try and simplify it down to simply the amount of money spent is disingenuous to an issue that, honestly, has very little to do with the amount of money spent and more to do with factors like like of parental involvement, politicization of schools by parents, teachers, and administrators, lack of motivation and work ethic in students, and a whole host of other issues.
4) Ultimately, and this is likely a simplification in and of itself, I think the largest factor is more about the willingness of a student to apply themselves and put in the work. A school is one of the few places where the playing field is as equal as it can be and a child/teenager does not need to be the smartest individual in the room in order to do well in school. They really just need to apply themselves. I remember reading some parenting advice many years ago about how it is better to encourage your children to work hard than it is to tell them they are smart as this helps put the value where it belongs, on hard work rather than one's natural abilities of which they have little control over.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy...
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-s...
This short sighted attitude is the peoblem.
Do you know your representative? Have you ever spoken to them? How do the two presidential candidates come about? Have you ever been in a political party? There is a lot more to democracy than choosing a front clown
All the talk in this thread casting the blame on "standards" being lowered is bizarre. I'm not sure how pushing more poor kids to drop out is going to make people more literate.
edit: the real shame comparatively should be how high Chinese literacy is when faced with an equally difficult writing system. China isn't at all confused about whether public education is a good thing, though, so you'd expect superior outcomes there.
