The Democratic Party run school system was already doing a mediocre job in teaching reading skills, particularly since the leftist schools continued to replace real-world, tangible skills and knowledge with all sorts social justice garbage. And now
It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading
The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency.
As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.
In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”
In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.
Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.
What the NY Times fails to mention is that most of the areas where reading skills are lagging are in Democratic Party run states and cities, as Republican run areas minimized the school closures, getting the schools opened as soon as they could while attempting to normalize COVID for the children. GOP areas also minimized the use of masking, so children were not stifled and could see the face and lips of their teachers. That doesn’t mean that GOP run areas are not affected, since those schools spent much of 2020 and even 2021 closed and doing hybrid learning
The literacy crisis did not start with the pandemic. In 2019, results on national and international exams showed stagnant or declining American performance in reading, and widening gaps between high and low performers. The causes are multifaceted, but many experts point to a shortage of educators trained in phonics and phonemic awareness — the foundational skills of linking the sounds of spoken English to the letters that appear on the page.
The pandemic has compounded those issues.
Perhaps young children should be taught reading skills rather than stuff on sex and raaaaacism and that white people are horrible and we’re doomed from ‘climate change’ and stuff, eh?
Even students with well-trained teachers have had far fewer hands-on hours with them than before the pandemic, which has been defined by closures, uneven access to online instruction, quarantine periods and — even on the best days — virus-related interruptions to regular classroom routines. Now, schools are under pressure to boost literacy as quickly as possible so students gain the reading skills they need to learn the rest of the curriculum, from math word problems to civics lessons. Billions of federal stimulus dollars are flowing to districts for tutoring and other supports, but their effect may be limited if schools cannot find quality staff members to hire.
Here’s an idea: drop all the other garbage and teach the core curriculum: reading, writing (not necessarily with a pen, just the ability to write/type literate, cogent, coherent sentences and paragraphs), arithmetic.
From the start of the pandemic, when schools abruptly shuttered in March 2020, math skills were clearly affected, while some early research suggested that students’ reading skills were holding steady, perhaps because more parents read with their children at home than practiced math.
Yeah, no, because, let’s be honest, most adults do not really read, either. They might have the skills, but, they do not read. Remember, all the stuff the schools did was For The Children!
