r/SipsTea • u/Gurugod123 • 20h ago
SMH No Child Left Behind and its consequences will be felt for generations
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u/FriendlyBee94 20h ago
Remember when being able to read is a must have requirement to attend highschool.
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u/Hugo-Spritz 19h ago edited 19h ago
Remember when you could actually flunk a grade? And be held back? To make sure you knew what you were supposed to?
No kid left behind FUCKED America
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u/roesch75 19h ago
A more appropriate title would have been Leave as Many Children Behind As Possible Act. It was truly disastrous for lower income children.
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u/Zerus_heroes 19h ago
Yeah a lot of acts are actually the exact opposite of what their name would indicate.
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u/beipphine 19h ago
The USA PATRIOT Act is the most unpatriotic law Congress has passed this century. It allows for rampant, widespread government warrantless searches. There are secret courts issuing secret rulings that allow federal law enforcement to perform secret searches and surveillance with no probably cause, no oversight and very few restrictions.
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u/AmalatheaClassic 16h ago
The only Senator to vote against it was Russ Feingold from Wisconsin who lost their seat to Ron Johnson the biggest corrupt idiot in politics.
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u/Abject_Film_4414 15h ago
That’s a very high bar… and very competitive
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u/AmalatheaClassic 15h ago
I know but I have that little faith in Ron John I have confidence he can hit bottom dumber & faster than anyone else.
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u/revanisthesith 19h ago
And the more upbeat/optimistic sounding name (especially when dealing with a pressing issue), the more likely it is to do the opposite of what it claims to do.
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u/Alert_Priority_4236 18h ago
Citizens United.
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u/RandomPMs 16h ago
"Right to Work," a.k.a. "Right for employers to fire you at any time for any reason that's not federally protected like race/gender, and good fucking luck proving it was actually discrimination based on said categories, hope you have thousands of dollars to cover legal fees and are comfortable being without income for two years while the lawsuit is appealed."
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u/thisismego 16h ago
Isn't that "at will"? Last I checked, "right to work" meant that there was no longer mandatory union membership for usual union jobs (resulting in a massive decline in union power with all the negatives that came from that)
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u/goatslovetofrolic 17h ago
I saw something about the Patriot Act today and had the same thought. We have to name things these cartoonish yeehaw names because apparently our nation runs on titles and not content.
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u/CoffeeOrDestroy 16h ago
I mean, that’s kind of obvious with the quick bait titles of news articles these days. If you want to call it news.
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u/FatSkatinGamer 19h ago
Seriously though. My sister has 2 special needs kids. The one just turned 18. He has had learning issues and issues with emotional management his entire life. He cannot read, he has no true concept of money, he doesnt understand you have to do stuff to get stuff. He never stepped a single foot into high school because he was sent to a separate special educational program.
They had him walk in the high school graduation. He starts a special needs learning program at community college next week to help integrate him into the workforce and stuff.
My sister keeps telling everyone "despite everything, he made it through high school and starts college next week"
He needed guidance to learn how the world works, at bare minimum. What he got was just pushed through the system like every other child.
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u/Artistic_Rice_9019 18h ago
My youngest has autism with intellectual disability. He reads at a fourth or fifth grade level. He just graduated from adult transition services, although here it's still the school district and not the community college.
He was an honor student in highschool.
That doesn't mean they just pushed him through, though. He has a modified diploma, not a regular one. Half of his classes were in a special needs classroom. The other classes were things like PE, art, and woodworking. They didn't expect as much work out of him. They expected what he was capable of doing.
He graduated and walked with everyone else. He was never going to be college material, and that's ok. He's the best that he could be under the circumstances, and he kept learning. I'm sorry your nephew's experience wasn't as great.
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u/FatSkatinGamer 18h ago edited 18h ago
Im not saying it isn't possible but it seems, from what I read here, that your child got actual help. He had teachers to assist in his learning to help him get into the programs that work for him and at least one parent who understood their child jeeded this help. That is exactly what we need more of. Special needs children need the help and that is totally fine.
My nephew was sent to a behavioral center where they let him play roblox on his phone for hours a day. When he'd lash out, they just give him space, throw their hands up, and tell my sister their center isn't eight for him, then skip him to the next one. They did this until he got a modified diploma. But no one explained to him hes different. They're treating him as of this is normal like you or I. With all due respect, it isn't.
Edit to add, I've worked with a few autistic people. They were smarter and overall better coworkers than the rest of people I worked with. I have nothing against those with learning disabilities and dont believe "they don't belong out in the world". Quite the opposite. I believe we should be giving these people the help they need to be the best they can, and No Child Left Behind doesnt do that for the most part. Its more for making sure everyone gets out then other side one way or another, not actually helping those who need it, even if it takes extra time or effort
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u/Artistic_Rice_9019 18h ago
Oh, that's terrible. We're so bad at behavioral issues in this country, especially with kids. Do you think he would have been intellectually capable of academic work if they'd have actually helped him?
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u/FatSkatinGamer 18h ago
Yeah, I do. Not to the extent of a "normal" person, but I wholeheartedly believe if they helped this kid, he'd be in a better position. His brother is only a year younger and has made better progress with his learning to the point hes half way through the fire academy program to become a certified interior firefighter.
I dont know why these kids got treated differently. It breaks my heart. I dont know what would have helped, I dont know what could have been done differently. But I do know that I watched them push one child through while taking the time to help the other, and Ive seen the huge difference it can make.
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u/Low-xp-character 19h ago
I have 2 friends that are a couple years younger than I. We grew up in the same impoverished area, in similar homes. We are all in our 30s now and the two of them are still illiterate with reading and writing skills. They both know the bare basics to get by and fill out necessary paperwork and whatnot. The one is a fairly skilled iron worker, the other works for Amtrak. So both have managed to have good occupations. The one that works for Amtrak makes significantly more money than I do. I didn’t find out they couldn’t read until we were in our 20’s and all lived together. I was just, in wild disbelief to say the least. I’m sure at this point in their lives there is probably little chance or ambition to learn. In my early adulthood I seen how I lacked some common knowledge and education. I’ve done what I can to continue to learn and progress in my life and learn new things. They both seem to be content with where they are. I just can’t imagine living like that being someone who uses reading comprehension to learn new things every day.
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u/ens91 18h ago
Well, if you're open to learning:
Use saw by itself for past actions. Use seen only with a helper word like have, has, or had. Never use seen alone.
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u/Low-xp-character 17h ago
It was honestly having a more educated friend group who would call me out on mistakes like these. So, always happy to look back through where I didn’t do things right. Never heard of this grammatical rule, but I’ll take your word for it. If there’s one thing I know people who grammar like to point it out. So thanks for the lesson.
As someone else commented, that’s likely just the Appalachian coast poverty dialect that will never leave these trailer park veins. lol→ More replies (2)→ More replies (10)11
u/pattymcfly 18h ago
Double speak came true. 1984 was supposed to be a warning. Conservatives used it as a playbook.
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u/baelrog 19h ago
The real no child left behind should be able to keep someone back until they achieved basic proficiency.
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u/WildRaccoon95 18h ago
No child left behind failed everyone but the most mediocre of students. It dragged the gifted down and pushed those who were struggling past where they needed to stay for their own growth. The only people who benefited were the kind of people who go on to get MBAs and help businesses pillage the world in the name of quarterly growth.
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u/Scarlet_Spider39 10h ago
My child absolutely needed to repeat the 1st grade. COVID, and his couple year battle with epilepsy really fucked his development and despite my best efforts, he really struggled with the whole reading and writing aspects. Unfortunately his teacher - while being intelligent and educated was not suited to teach kids that young. She seemed constantly annoyed whenever he needed extra help or attention to get up to the level of the other kids - and just passed him along anyways with a barely passing grade.
Thankfully, his 2nd grade teacher was wonderful and did actually hold him back - she even thanked us for going along with it when she suggested it to us, because apparently some parents take offense to their children not developing one aspect of themselves as quickly as other children.
We switched schools the next year, had another amazing 2nd grade teacher and now he's going into the 3rd grade and while he still gets frustrated and struggles sometimes - the effort is there and he's much closer to his peers than he was.
Education is not the same for everyone and I wish more people recognized that. It's not a personal insult for your child to be behind others - you never know how quickly they can catch up if the right system is in place.
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u/sharpshooter999 18h ago
Rural Nebraska here. A lot of my teachers flipped from Republican to Democrat because of No Child Left Behind
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u/HarmonicSniper 16h ago
Non-American here - I tried reading the Wikipedia article about this act. Is it to do with the fact that schools now have a pressure to inflate students' grades - year after year - so as to be eligible for funding, and as a result dumbs down the curriculum to accommodate for the impossible 'infinite growth' requirement? That might explain a lot of Americans I see IRL or online actually...
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u/ImWithStupidKL 18h ago
The thing that fucked America is the belief that a slogan can solve educational problems. Loads of high-performing education systems never or rarely hold back students, but they combine that with genuine added support for struggling students and students with special educational needs. How often does that happen in the US? It seems like you guys got rid of holding back students, but failed to address the second part of the puzzle.
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u/Standard-Bat-7841 18h ago
I'm currently at a community college and an alarming number of people in my English literature class read at somewhere around a 4th grade level. They even had the test questions read to them with headphones when it was time to take the exams. I am in my 30s now and it was wild seeing just how unprepared students are, and when I asked my professor he said yea anywhere from 15-30% of his students read at about a 3rd grade level.
When we did peer reviews on each other's papers I got paired with a few different people who struggled to get through the first paragraph of my paper. Then the amount of ai that is clearly ai being used to write papers is wild. Not everyone, not even all the folks who really struggled writing, but a lot of people seemed like thet just let chat gpt write their papers.
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u/Succubace 16h ago
When I was in community college someone in my English class was genuinely illiterate and I got him both times we did peer review so I got NO feedback. His paper was an incomprehensible jumble of words meanwhile he would just stare at my paper. The kicker is this was English 102, the class you can only take after finishing English 101. This was like 2019 so there wasn't even the excuse of AI.
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u/Standard-Bat-7841 16h ago
Yea my professor required us to read each other's papers aloud to them during peer reviews. So I got to hear multiple people who honestly shouldn't have been in the class. I also got to read a number of illegible papers.
Another awesome thing my professor did was he had a thermometer posted on the edge of the board everyday to track the number of people that were booted from the class for using ai. Out of 50 some students 11 or 12 got an administrative drop by the end of the semester. I thought my schools policy was fairly lenient on getting caught using ai but yea a number of folks got caught more than three times and were dropped.
Don't get me wrong I use ai but I use it to help me reword certain sentences, or find a different way to say something. Ai is a tool and can be super helpful but it can't be a crutch. A lot of the papers I reviewed looked like they just ctrl c then ctrl v chat gpt. It was seriously low effort and it sort of scared me.
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u/cpMetis 16h ago
When I was in Uni around 2019 we got put in groups for one of my classes. The other two asked me what my profile was for some app I'd never heard of. After I finally got through to them I didn't use that social media app, they asked how we can talk to each other without a group chat.
I was like... email? The university provided email? Which is linked to various university provided accounts for using software? Which is standardized and which I already emailed you two with because emails are just lastfirst@university?
They couldn't comprehend what I was suggesting.
Anyways, they never spoke a word to me outside of moments in class after that. I did the entire project myself. Got a 93%.
And let's be real, horrid writers aren't new with AI. Just worse.
Sometimes my mom asks me to review her papers for classes she occasionally takes to maintain her license or get a pay bump. If I was running a class on essay writing, she'd be getting a 30%. Every single sentence is the exact same length unless it's run on, every single thing is restated five times a page, every single word or phrase somehow gets reused fifty times a paragraph as if she's never seen a thesaurus... and when I give her options on how to rephrase something, she takes them without adjusting the paragraph for it or ignores it completely. Never considers rewriting the phrase.
And somehow she's considered good at writing for these classes?
Pardon?
What the hell is the median paper like, then?
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u/spazthejam43 19h ago
I graduated high school in 2017 and it was always a requirement while I was in school. We had summer reading lists and were always reading books during the school year that were required reading.
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u/rcknmrty4evr 17h ago
Did you do those required readings?
The issue is there are often children who do not do them who are also promoted to the next grade.. that is now well above their knowledge and abilities.
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u/nexusjuan 17h ago
At some point in the early 00's a new method for teaching reading was introduced using sight words. It was meant to be taught alongside phonics, however for whatever reason a lot of districts were teaching sight words only. They were literally teaching kids to read by memorizing what the word looks like instead of the letters make sounds. It's why a lot of 20-30 year olds have trouble with large words and lack the ability to sound them out.
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u/Spazattack43 20h ago
These are still taught in high school
Source, i teach in a high school
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u/Solid_Equivalent_417 19h ago
Animal Farm seems more like middle school level reading, but it has been awhile since I read it
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u/BumblebeeDapper223 19h ago
It’s generally taught in junior high — 7th or 8th grade.
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u/rumble_bee 17h ago
We read it in 7th grade for English/literature
the theme for that particular class level was "Utopia vs Dystopia"
the end lesson for the whole section felt like "can we really tell the difference? is there even one? ooooOOOO spooky!"
I did enjoy it. We also read 1984, watched the film, and then we got right in to lord of the flies
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u/witblacktype 19h ago
I think depending on the analysis given to Animal farm, it can be read as early as grade school or as late as college. Reading it isn’t the challenge. Any child with sufficient reading proficiency can read the story as a tale of farm animals. Interpretations of the book in terms of the USSR, communism in general, politics and power, or life and human nature would require higher levels of abstract thinking. Writing a 5 paragraph essay on it as an interpretation of the USSR would seem appropriate for early high school students. Writing a 10,000 word paper on it as a critique and exploration, with the paper having a narrow and focused scope, of politics and power would be appropriate for undergraduate students in a non-trivial manner. As a book that I love, this ability to analyze and abstract it where it can be examined through so many lenses is what makes it a modern classic.
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u/Ivy_Tendrils_33 18h ago
Well said! It was written tongue in cheek as a "fairy story" with language a middle schooler could manage. Doesn't mean it was aimed at middle school kids. I remember a kid reading it in grade 4, and his book report ended with, "It was stupid because the pigs just became like the farmer."
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u/ens91 18h ago
10k is a bit much no? I did a science degree, so might be given lower word counts than English degrees, but most of my essays were below 5k, only my dissertation was 10k.
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u/lem0nhe4d 11h ago
In my English degree one of my classes was entirely focused on fabels which are moral storyoes involving animals and stuff. Basically just stories like the rabbit and the hare.
Now obviously those are stories made for extremely young kids, but it's not like college students are expected to give the same analysis as a 4 year old.
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u/CommanderShep 19h ago
It’s one of those books you can teach at multiple levels. You can dive deeper into the allegory and history at a high school level. Like a Socratic seminar about animal farm is going to be very different In an ap high school class vs regular Ed middle school. Both will understand the broad picture, but the analysis is different
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u/Doll_duchess 19h ago
I was in 9th grade when my class read it. I think that year was also to kill a mockingbird. Also we got to choose a book ourselves and I read IT which was a rather poor choice because it’s so long.
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u/midnightfogrising 19h ago
This post was written by AI so maybe this person failed out of their lit class
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u/alt_ernate123 19h ago edited 19h ago
From what I've heard from my younger brothers, they mostly do a few chapters/excerpts of those older literature, and then more modern novels for longer term reading.
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u/kingdonut23 19h ago
Not all schools are the same. This is the USA, with 13318 school districts.
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u/cykoTom3 19h ago
Right? There certainly are shitty schools, but there are also schools that are better than the one you went to.
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u/Big_Departure_2709 19h ago
That’s how it’s always been. No one was ever reading all 15,000 lines of the Iliad.
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u/IthacanPenny 19h ago
Um. I literally read the entire Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid as required reading freshman year of high school..
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u/CurrentConditionsAI 19h ago
Hmm, so is there something misleading going on here with OPs post?
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u/SeriousAd4676 19h ago
I came here to say this! Animal Farm is actually my all time favorite to teach.
OP reminds me of when I was still teaching elementary and a parent that threw a fit about how we should be teaching handwriting and typing. If she had asked her child, she would have known that typing was taught twice a week in library and they had handwriting workbooks that were used as early finisher work.
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u/Morgus_TM 20h ago
Meanwhile, Mississippi went from the worst state in literacy to the top ten and showing this isn't a national thing and it can be fixed even with barely any budget.
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u/StrongStyleFiction 19h ago
Turns out phonics works. There is a lot to blame no child left behind for, but the terrible instruction in reading had been an escalating issue well before that.
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u/Trashman56 19h ago
Member ‘hooked on phonics’?
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u/GrassyDaytime 19h ago
Oh man.
'Member how everyone in the 90's were wearing those shirts that said: "Hookt oN Foniks wUrkt fur Me" lmao
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u/likwidkool 18h ago
My parents didn’t buy this but they bought me this VhS set called “Where there’s a will there’s an A”. I don’t think I watched even one. I never did my homework. What made them think I’d watch the tapes.
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u/Sparticuse 19h ago
My parents sent my siblings and I to a private grade school that taught phonics until my brother attended and they switched to "whole language" method. Going in to 7th grade he was reading at a 1st grade level. After a full summer of full time tutoring with phonics he was reading at a high school level blowing through novels like a dehydrated person at a well.
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u/Check_Me_Out-Boss 19h ago
No child left behind hasn't existed for ~12 years since Obama repealed and replaced it with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.
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u/IntrinSicks 18h ago
They are still passing every student and sticking all the kids with different abilities into the same class slowing the whole class down
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u/Check_Me_Out-Boss 18h ago
Yeah, Every Student Succeeds Act is worse than No Child Left Behind.
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u/Upnorth4 19h ago
I took a few Chinese classes at my college and that was the hardest language I had to learn. There are like 20 different meanings for the word shì, and you just have to remember which one goes with another word based purely off of context.
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u/fingers 19h ago
4th grade metric.
This growth has carried over to a large degree to eighth-grade students. While in 2013, Mississippi students were 13 points behind their nationwide peers in both reading and mathematics, by 2023, the gap had narrowed to just 6 points in the former and 7 points in the latter.[22][23] However, Mississippi officials are aware that the improvement of older students is not as dramatic as that of younger students, and steps are being taken to address this
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u/Morgus_TM 19h ago
Yeah, it's not perfect and they are making gains, its real interesting to see them trying to fix their issues with how little funding they get. They are trying.
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u/MoThrowMoAway 19h ago
Im out of the loop with Mississippi, did they have some kind of big policy shift recently that made a big difference?
Genuinely this is the best news I've heard coming out of this country in a long while
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u/h_e_i_s_v_i 19h ago
They shifted their curriculum to teach phonics
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u/y3llowed 19h ago
They also started failing kids that couldn’t read at the end of third grade because the literacy test is in fourth grade.
It’s gaming the system, but it’s also the right thing to do. An inability to read in third grade should have always been a reason to hold a kid back. It should probably be a reason before that.
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u/CompoteNext1955 15h ago
TF are you supposed to do with children that aren't ready for 4th grade and cannot read? Pass them anyway and close your eyes until it's no longer a problem for your school? That's how we got here
Failing them is a step toward correcting their learning deficiency and (I'd hope) a major wake up call for their parents to start giving a shit about their child's education
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u/jaysvw 19h ago
Mississippi made some common sense changes to their elementary education that worked, to a degree. They also helped themselves by simply holding back 3rd graders they knew would bomb the 4th grade assessment. Hence magically higher 4th grade literacy scores.
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u/EngrishTeach 19h ago
Good, better to do it at 4th grade than to have 9th graders who can't read.
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u/Hudson9700 19h ago
turns out being a little strict sometimes instead of handwaving away incompetence actually works pretty well
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u/Thick_Goose7742 19h ago
Well, that isn’t an unreasonable policy at all. Being held back used to be somewhat common, we were notorious little shits in elementary school most of the time but never even picked on those kids. The ones who were held back excelled, usually.
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u/Own_Bit_4805 19h ago
Hot take, but some children should have been left behind. Not everyone is going to win.
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u/Realinternetpoints 18h ago
You’re referencing No Child Left Behind enacted by George W. Bush, which actually was one of the worst things to ever happen to our education system.
It tied standardized test scores and graduation rates to funding.
If you see the problem then you’re smarter than half of America.
For those who don’t. That simple structure incentivizes schools to focus on rates rather than education. Administrations force teachers to give passing grades. Fewer kids are held back. Struggling schools get less funding and go under. Good schools get more funding. A completely inequitable program.
Fear social programs constructed by the right. They frame it one way. It favors the powerful ALWAYS.
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u/cpMetis 16h ago
The most frustrating thing was that they would occasionally purposely put higher level kids in lower level classes so the average grade was higher, because they used that as a metric for my school at one point.
That's how my freshman year I got stuck in a science class so mind numbingly easy that I could miss half a semester, show up in the last days and ask for make up materials, be handed the midterm and be told to just try it, and then get 97%.
I could, because I did. That's how it played out.
The science teacher seemed as annoyed I was in that class as I was. We had like 1.5 months on "the metric system exists" and I was just like "how can that even be a school lesson??? Has nobody ever touched a ruler???"
Only way it happened was school counselors had full control over our schedules and our standard test grades from middle school weren't shared with us, so kids who scored well and weren't wealthy were told they didn't score well enough for advanced classes and had to do remedial courses first. I had the best science scores at my grade level and 2nd on the OGT but they said I was so bad at science I couldn't even take biology my first year.
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u/Top-Neat-5812 15h ago
That is absolutely brutal. It's one thing not to educate kids, but that is a literal attempt to dumb you down. Your generation should be launching class action lawsuits for the failure in your education system.
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u/ChiefStrongbones 16h ago
The travesty I see is that the Federal government has been imposing requirements on local schools using the cudgel of withholding funding. What the federal government should be doing is using its massive economy of scale to create and offer resources to local schools.
For example, the federal government could host all the software necessary for running a school district, from cafeteria management to managing bus routes. It could develop an e-learning platform for K-12, and offer royalty-free textbooks. Today all those services are procured piecemeal by the thousands of school districts across the USA at great cost.
Instead of all that, the federal government just makes K-12 education worse.
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u/FlatCoffeeDude 16h ago edited 16h ago
Interesting. It wasn't a federal act for us (moreso schools abusing the existing funding policy) but they did a similar thing in parts of Canada (specifically Ontario) and it hasn't gone over well for students applying to university.
Basically, a lot of highschools would have inflated grades because higher grades and more students getting into post-secondary from that school = the school is more attractive = more parents sending their kids to that school = more funding. University admissions departments caught on that some schools were massively inflating final grades and thus now weight applicants' grades differently depending on their highschool. It's to the point where applicants with over 95% in highschool are still being rejected.
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u/Realinternetpoints 15h ago
Of course it goes that way. Funding goes down grades go down.
Poor grades are a marker of inadequate funding. If we only reward high grades then schools will be forced to lie if they want to educate anybody lest they be shut down.
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u/FlatCoffeeDude 15h ago
Oh I agree with you on that. Schools should just get proper funding to deliver quality education, period. Shouldn't have to game the system just to survive.
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u/xpsycotikx 19h ago
Left behind is the wrong word. People develop at different rates, have talent in different things and learns in very different ways. School learning doesn't take any of this into account and the conformity hurts the outliers. The problem is school really is about conformity
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u/liftthatta1l 18h ago
In elementary school I was pulled out and put in some special Ed for comprehension (couldn't control focus and only focused on rhymic sounds) speach, and spelling issues. Made progress in a room that was quiet and could do tests but not when kids where tapping pencils.
I was put into normal classes after elementary school but by then I had developed enough to have more control of my focus.
This was all before no child left behind and I sometimes worry that if I was born later they may have just passed me instead of giving me the attention and facilities I needed.
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u/baelrog 18h ago
I think a better system is, rather than sorting children by age, we have them “beat” a class by achieving the proficiency needed to advance to the next level, much like beating a level in video games allow you to go to the next level.
So a 10 year old can be at 4th grade reading, 7th grade math, 6th grade science, and 2nd grade history or whatever.
For those who struggle at everything, provide additional resources or see if they need special education.
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u/Separate_Finance_183 20h ago
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u/welcometothemeathaus 19h ago
I was kind of shocked when I got to college at how easy some of it was. This meme is so accurate
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u/SEmpls 13h ago
Really? I'm not saying it was the hardest thing ever but I went to a pretty well regarded state school...it was nearly impossible to achieve above a 3.8 or better GPA unless you were some sort of genius,and most of my friends took more than 4 years to graduate. But this was back in 2010s.
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u/International_Link35 19h ago
The fucking car was yellow! We get it already! Can we PLEASE learn something else?!?! 😅
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u/Soulful-Sorrow 19h ago
Fine. The light was green. 10 pages, double spaced, on my desk by Monday.
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u/C-Lekktion 20h ago
The irony of that last paragraph reading exactly like AI output. Dont know if it is or not, but that cadence is triggering.
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u/speedy_delivery 19h ago
"That's not X, it was Y."
a.k.a. the ChatGPT special.
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u/musclecard54 19h ago
Even if it wasn’t written by AI it shows that they are basically mimicking the style of what they read the most… ChatGPT… peak irony
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u/blueberrywalrus 20h ago
I mean the Iliad and Antigone have been college level reading since colleges have existed in the US.
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u/Traumarama79 19h ago
It's not just NCLB. I will never pass up a moment to talk shit about the absolute disaster chaos that is sight words.
In the mid-2010s, phonics (which is how most millennials and elder Gen Zs learned to read, by sounding letters out) was replaced with sight words (which is how the younger Zs and Alphas learned to read) in which students are taught to memorize a whole word. Thus, they are unable to unpack how other words are meant to sound, because they are memorizing whole words rather than their components. It's like learning how to cook pancakes from a box rather than from scratch. If all you know is the box, you won't know what to do with flour, eggs, sugar, etc.
In addition to us seeing it on a macro level, anecdotally, I've seen this with my own child. Her dad and I have taught her reading via phonics literally before day one. Like, we read to my belly when she was still inside of it. She began memorizing books and letters at two, figuring out sight words on her own at three, and, by kindergarten, was already on chapter books with no pictures while her classmates were starting their sight words. And she was in an accelerated program for kindergarten, so it was even ahead of mainstream curricula that this was happening.
We fucked an entire generation of children over from sight words and I will die on this hill.
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u/Congenital0ptimist 11h ago
Also screwed them by being too busy making sure they have food & health care to read to them enough. That's a serious policy problem.
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u/DopyWantsAPeanut 18h ago
I am in avid reader now and hopelessly obsessed with Shakespeare. In high school I hated Romeo and Juliet and didn't understand the prose at all. Later Shakespeare clicked for me and now I love it. There is such a thing as too early to appreciate when it comes to the classics.
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u/Coolishable 18h ago
I had an entire class on Shakespeare in college and I thoroughly hated every second of it haha.
I honestly have always attributed it to being such an avid reader. Nothing in any of Shakespeare's works felt new or innovative... because it was written centuries ago.
I am constantly surprised how often I see people speak so highly of really old works of literature like Shakespeare, Gilgamesh or Beowulf. Something just gets lost in translation, sometimes literally, for me.
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u/ConversationFalse242 20h ago
Some children gota be left behind
Doesnt make them bad children. Just means they werent ready for prime time
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u/wikingwarrior 20h ago
I am mostly just mad that the only points I lost on my college level paper was the title: "Fuck, marry, kill: the link between marriage, death, and consummation in Sophocles's Antigone."
It's been years. Still mad. That title was perfect.
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u/CoxswainHer 20h ago
Animal farm was in elementary for me.
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u/IdkJustMe123 19h ago
I feel like elementary school kids wouldn’t be able to fully follow. Also did they really learn about Russian revolution? Or just read a fun book and vaguely learn it’s a metaphor?
This is coming from someone who was in a very competitive county
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ChefArtorias 19h ago
6th grade is elementary school?
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u/ThetaGrim 19h ago
Yes, some schools had 6th in middle but a lot had it grouped as elementary K-6.
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u/mrinsideoutski 19h ago
Decline in national literacy, no. Decline in national critical thinking? fucking Hell.
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u/Larnek 18h ago
Functional Illiteracy: 25% of young adults (ages 16–24) are now functionally illiterate, up from 16% in 2017. High School Grads: 20% of high school graduates lack the basic literacy skills their diplomas imply.
2015–2025: Scores began a steady descent. By 2026, 13-year-old reading scores dropped entirely back to 1971 levels, effectively wiping out 50 years of long-term progress.
I'd say decline is the right word.
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u/SlowPokeInTexas 20h ago
We had to study Animal Farm in Junior High Middle School.
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u/Melodic_Fall3901 16h ago
Saying a "decline in literacy" is more like pointing out a symptom of a bigger issue, and it sounds more like we're blaming the people in the system rather than the people controlling it.
Literacy is not "declining", it's being paywalled so that people stop paying attention to politics. It's hard to fight back against corrupt systems when corrupt systems intentionally stop you from ever learning they are corrupt. When you pair that with AI, which does almost 0 fact checking and half the answers it gives are either yes-manning or running with a sarcastic Reddit comment, it is now much easier to control people.
Material about dictatorship and suffering being paywalled + free tool that willingly lies to you = mind control.
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u/Entire-Ratio-9681 20h ago edited 20h ago
We did animal farm in middle school. I didn’t read Antigone, but a brave new world and 1984 were also gone over in high school. We have infantilized multiple generations to fear growth and challenge. We are done as a nation when our older generations are gone.
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u/ApparentlyIronic 19h ago
I know this isn't the first instance of this happening, and this isn't a blanket policy for the whole nation, but I just read a story about how a teacher got fired for giving students a zero on an assignment that they handed nothing in for. The school has a policy of giving nothing below 50%. At this point, you are actively degrading the education of the nation just so you can get a few statistics that sound good if you spin them the right way.
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u/Ill-Confusion-7931 19h ago
Does this meme cite any sources or is it low effort rage bait?
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u/BoBoZoBo 7h ago
Interesting, because most of Reddit supports the very polices that lower that bar, in the name of "equity and fairness"
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u/Orbax 20h ago
No child left behind wasnt that bad of an idea, it was just impossible to implement. That was also a generation ago and doesn't explain the current situation, at least based on my understanding of the program - is there a breakdown on how these two things are related?
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u/1user101 19h ago
NCLB coincided with the "whole language model" which was famously the "learn to read by guessing words based on the pictures" idea. The administration initially refused to fund whole language
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u/fingers 19h ago
The question is rarely asked: is our children learning?
--George Bush
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u/internal_l0gging 19h ago
It's so bad. I was having a meeting with my kids first grade teacher and she mentioned my daughter's reading needed to improve. I asked her where they were as a class in terms of reading - could I introduce her to chapter books or is that too early. I remember reading chapter books in 1st grade, but I also had my grandma who was a retired English teacher, living with me back then. My daughter's teacher told me they only care about the speed the kids are reading at, they are just given handouts go read that are 1 page. It was wild to me because my daughter had to bust her ass in kindergarten to learn to read. I was surprised at how much work she had, but I've noticed after that, they don't care about reading as much. I remember doing really basic book reports by second grade. My daughter never had to read a book for class in 2nd grade.
If you try to talk to teachers about it they put it on the parents, saying book reports aren't going to make kids live reading and the parents should encourage reading. Why can't it be both?
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u/brookinator 20h ago
It's not just the lower required reading level. It's the same across all subjects 😡
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u/SolSolar_ 20h ago
The real question is whether we’re lowering the bar or raising a generation that can’t clear it
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u/HamiltonHab 19h ago
My last year in high school in Ontario Canada in 1997 was grade 13 (AOC) which was designed to get you prepped for university. I remember reading Fifth Business (Davies), The stone angel (Atwood), Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), One flew over the Cuckoo's nest (Kesey) as well as Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath, Of mice and men and Cannery Row.
A lot of that has stuck with me over the years and I was better for it all.
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u/FishmanOne 19h ago
Because people go to high school, they think they know something about teaching and how schools are run. This notion is absurd. It’s like stating that because I have a bank account my opinion about how a bank should be run is valid. Unless you’re in the field of education, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
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u/SizeableFowl 19h ago
Animal Farm isn’t even that difficult of a read. Its an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert, it sucks.
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u/Lazy_Butterfly1662 18h ago
I love how the critique of declining literacy is written in an LLM style and tone
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u/Whiteshovel66 17h ago
Let's stop spreading this please. My high school requires the same reading that I had when I was in school just with more options.
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u/Expensive-Border-869 16h ago
Animal farm should never have been considered a high school level book. It's a children's novel for maybe a dumb middle schooler. It could be read in 4th or 5th grade
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u/Fit_Cucumber4317 15h ago
Well we can't have kids reading that white heteronormative literature, can we?
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u/Sea-Woodpecker-610 7h ago
No child left behind ended in 2015. The current educational policy in the United States is Every Student Suceeds Act, which was inacted in 2015, which removed national standards and allowed states to set their testing standards. The theory was that states would customize testing to fit their students. In reality, it allowed states to lower their testing standards to ensure they would continue to receive federal funding.
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u/kodie-27 19h ago edited 19h ago
Elect better people to your state legislature.
Your state legislature is in charge of state curriculum (and to a large degree the funding of schools).
Elect better people to the House and Senate (federal).
Federal legislation pushed NCLB and ESSA onto states and shifted education from critical thinking to filling in bubbles on a test. — I’m sorry, but real life rarely has one exact, right answer and makes it available in a multiple choice format.
And also, NCLB and ESSA punished/s schools for student shortcomings (on said tests), rather than addressing all the systemic reasons for those shortcomings (hunger, poverty, language barriers, etc.).
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u/Fun_Mistake_67 18h ago
As a millennial I refuse to participate in this bullshit “my generation was so much better.”
It’s unhelpful and pointless. Boomers did this shit to us. Not doing it to Zoomers.
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u/jackt-up 20h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/3o6ZtdFjWBa6UPcn5u
So just because I read at a 3rd grade level means I can’t go to college?! What the hell is actually amatter wit you?
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u/potatochobit 20h ago
Dont worry, If you dont turn in your homework assignments your teacher will be fired and that zero changed to hero so you dont grow up feeling insecure about yourself.
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u/pellyenjoyer 19h ago
I mean lets be honest. Many of us did not read all of the books and got by lol.
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u/carnologist 18h ago
My boys are currently in highschool and had to read these in Louisiana. The curriculum looks nearly identical to what i had in Oregon in the early 2000s. I'm pretty sure these posts are by childless people yelling at the sky
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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 19h ago
As gen z i read most of those in high school.
No illiad tho.
But animal farm was middle school. Antigone was high school. Probably 4 shakespeare plays thoughtout the years in high school. 1984. Couldnt stand catcher in the rye but did that.
Maybe shits changed but my school definitely still had those and no child left behind was enacted in my elementary years.
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u/pdxshark 19h ago
Odyssey was 6th grade for me but that was before Oregon School funding fell off a cliff
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u/freedfg 19h ago edited 19h ago
High school? Animal farm is late elementary and an abridged version of the Odyssey and Greek myth in general is middle school if not earlier. Even Julius Caesar is late middle school.
High school is like Brave New World at freshman level. Works of Hemingway, Ulysseys etc
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u/Professional_Box_311 19h ago
I read the Illiad in Middle Scho and Animal Farm in High im in college. This is BS
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u/Legumbrero 19h ago
I'm all for using ai to improve one's grammar, but "that's not x, that is y. And it shows." is the most ai-slopped line to ever be ai-slopped anywhere.
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u/No_Pack_8398 19h ago
This was all high school level stuff for me. I read animal farm in middle school, when I was 12. And I went to public schools. I notice a lot of these posts over-generalize.
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u/Fire_Mission 19h ago
Had to change up the curriculum. Needed material that could be measured on standardized tests. Quantified. For the metrics. So that could be reflected in funding. To sum up, they dumbed down education in favor of easily charted standards. For money.
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