History of reading
LITERACY STATISTICS
Classrooms haven't changed much since 1880 -- a teacher stands in front of a blackboard and teaches at the student. After BILLIONS of dollars spent in K-12 education?
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
[1] Although two-thirds of high-growth, high-wage jobs require a college degree, only one-third of Americans have one. Also, while 90% of the fastest-growing jobs in the economy will require higher education, more than 60% of Americans ages 25-64 have no postsecondary education credential. As a result, a U.S. worker with only a high school diploma makes almost 40% less than one with a bachelor's degree.
[2] In its report, " Beyond NCLB: Fulfilling the Promise to Our Nation's Children," the panel acknowledged that the law had "spurred some improvement," but said that was not enough, and recommended a number of changes to make sure high-school graduates are better prepared for higher education or jobs. Forty percent of students at four-year institutions and 63 percent at two-year colleges require remedial education, according to a study cited in the report. In a survey of human-resource professionals, the report says, 42 percent of respondents said new
employees with a high-school diploma were "deficient" in their overall preparation for the entry-level jobs they typically fill. The increasing concerns over how much students are learning are fueled by a U.S. Labor Department report saying that over the next decade, more than 87 percent of new high-wage jobs will require more than a high-school diploma. As states become more aware of the problem, they are developing ways to test soon-to-be graduates. For example, the report says, 26 states have joined the American Diploma Project Network and are now working together to align their high-school exit requirements with the skills required for higher education and employment.
[3] Reading First was a cornerstone of NCLB. The Inspector General Department's Report, a scorching internal review of the Bush administration's billion-dollar-a-year reading program.
50% of all Americans over 65 years old are functionally illiterate.
This means they can't read the previous sentence and they can't read the front page of the newspaper.
What can so-called literate adults do?
WHY IS THIS?
Can it be Racism, Cultural Confusion and Ignorance? Can it be a Culture of Corruption in Education and Politics?
"Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession."
Unfortunately, many educated speakers of English are not really proficient in their own language. They become lost when reading structurally complex sentences. Their working vocabularies are depauperate, a deficiency for which they all too often compensate by mastering a discipline-specific jargon which gives the impression of communication without its substance. A complex tool has value only in proportion to the skill of the person operating it.
Why the majority of the people don't vote. They can't vote because they can't read, and that is just the way the politicians want it. That functionally illiterate will never learn how much money was made by politicians who failed to teach them how to read and sadly can't vote them out of office.
SCHOOL FOR PROFIT - The Bush Family.-
THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION - FOLLOW THE MONEY IN GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS
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READING FIRST AND VOYAGER EXPANDED LEARNING "READING FIRST UNDER FIRE"
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HOW PHONICS WAGGED THE DOG- School For Profit Scam.
And in spite of all of the millions that have poured into the district for new reading programs since 1998, reading scores for most Fort Worth Texas students have not improved.
School For Profit Scam - By 1994, Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best had made a fortune in investment banking.
That year he decided to branch out. He rounded up investors and, with $3.5 million in hand, founded a for-profit company called Voyager Expanded Learning. One of those investors was Charles Miller, a millionaire friend of George Bush. The Texas governor tapped Miller to lead the statewide task force on school reform. Miller was also a friend of Margaret Spellings, another education advisor who would become secretary of education when Bush became president. Best’s most valued political contact, however, was his friend George W. Bush. The Dallas entrepreneur contributed more than $45,000 to Bush’s gubernatorial campaign, according to a report by Texans for Public Justice.
Five years into the 21st century, about 40 percent of American children were not proficient readers — that is, able to read fluently, comprehend, and retain knowledge. In Texas that figure is an abysmal 77 percent. Those figures are not from state reading tests such as the TAKS. They come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an independent arm of the Department of Education that takes the pulse of the nation’s schools each year and looks at trends every five years. Its recent findings indicate that U.S. schools show little “significant difference” in the performance of kids in the early grades since 1992 and literally no differences in the math and reading scores of 17-year-olds over the past 34 years.
LITERACY and DIALECT SPEAKERS
University PH.D's have collaborated with publishers and government over the past 100 years and they have been in charge all this time - we have done it their way all this time and this what "they" have delivered . . .
Retired Indiana University (of Pennsylvania) physics professor Donald E. Simanek has assembled considerable data on just who becomes a teacher. Freshman college students who choose education as a major "are on the average, one of the academically weakest groups.
The Decline of Education 1.
Abstract: Thirty years of teaching in several universities inspires reflection on the past and the and future of education. It's not a pretty picture. This talk includes examples from the real world and also utopian observations from the ivory tower. Educational ineptitude
- 2006 The dropout epidemic: almost one-third of public high school students drop out in America -- and nearly one-half of all African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans fail to graduate from public high school with their class. The report, "The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts," was funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.U.S. STATES: Urban high schools report dropout rates of 20 percent to 40 percent.
- 2006 Nearly half (45%) of the 8.8 million Latino students enrolled in U.S. public schools are ELL [english language learners] students. Nationally, 79% of limited-English-proficient students are Spanish-speaking.
- 60% of Urban School Children do not graduate from High School.
40% of those who do read at only a 4th grade level. - 50% of all Americans over 65 years old are functionally illiterate.
- The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the NewYork Times, Dec. 12, 2004).
- The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
- Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth.
- Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).
- "The International Adult Literacy Survey...found that Americans with less than nine years of education 'score worse than virtually all of the other countries'" (Jeremy Rifkin's book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).
- -- NAEP scores in reading and math have not really improved over 30 years, despite billions of dollars spent in K-12 education.
- Only 30% of 4th graders are proficient readers, 26% proficient in math, 18% proficient in history, and the USA ranks significantly lower than other nations in science and math achievement.
- 42 million adults in the US are "functionally literate," meaning that can't read the front page of the newspaper. This situation is acute; education has passed the economy as the 2nd highest issues important to Americans this election cycle.
- Dissatisfaction with public school bureaucracy, teacher shortages, teachers teaching out of their field, ESL issues, and other factors contribute to the failure of public education.
-- After climbing in most of the 20th century and peaking in the late 1960's, the national graduation rate steadily declined, settling around 70 percent in the last few years. For black and Latino students, the numbers are worse. Only about 55 percent of African American students and 53 percent of Latinos graduate, a study last November 2002 by the Manhattan Institute shows, though there are many competing theories to explain such disparities.
-- Students Show Few Gains Since "No Child" 2005
Fourth-grade reading scores nationally showed a modest one-point gain over the past two years, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), after demonstrating a significant six-point jump between 2000 and 2002, before the No Child Left Behind law was implemented. Only three states showed a significant gain in fourth-grade reading -- and three states showed a significant drop
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2007 The U.S. Education Department reported
nationwide, 73% of 12th-grade students achieved a "basic" reading score in 2005, down from 80% in 1992, according to the NAEPa sampling test the government calls the "nation's report card." Sixty-one percent scored at or above the basic level in math.
National Assessment of Educational Progress Report - Download Report Could these disappointing results be blamed on stupid, malformed tests and the are making so much money for the companies who publish them?
National Center for Education Statistics
Can Johnny read yet? 2003 What the numbers revealed was that the nation's fourth-graders have made some progress in reading throughout the 1990s, while 12th-graders are actually doing worse. At the eighth-grade level, the lowest performing students made gains since 1998, when the test was last administered. Overall, however, eighth-grade scores remained fairly stagnant.There also was evidence that in some states - particularly in the Southeast - students are reading better. Also encouraging was evidence that in some areas and at some levels the gap between the reading skills of white students and minority students is narrowing. But overall, for many reformers, the results seemed mildly encouraging at best.
The Nation's Report Card Fourth-grade Reading 2000
National Center for Education Statistics
Washington, D.C. April 6, 2001
http://www.ed.gov/Speeches/04-2001/010406.html Remarks as prepared for delivery by U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige
Ed Rubenstein: The Stupid American? Look again.
Edwin S. Rubenstein Archive December 22, 2005
National Data, By [17]Edwin S. Rubenstein
RACISM
50 Years Later Brown vs. Board of Education
HISTORY OF EDUCATION AND CREOLE DIALECT SPEAKERS
RACISIM TOWARDS DIALECT SPEAKER
GULLAH / GEECHEE SEA ISLAND CULTURE
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas [is / was] a Gullah speaker. (12/14/00) issue of the New York Times in Thomas's own words.
Mississippi Desegregation Suit Settled for $500 Million
By Michael A. Fletcher Tuesday, April 24, 2001; Page A01
Mississippi agreed yesterday to end more than a quarter-century of legal battles over the desegregation of its higher education system, reaching a $500 million settlement intended to remedy decades of state-sanctioned racial discrimination. Pioneer James Meredith, was the first African American student accepted by the University of Mississippi. His attendance provoked riots. Here he is escorted to class by U.S. marshals and troops. Oct. 2, 1962.
Confusion and Ignorance
The "standard" is the variety of language used in business and academic writing and the mass media - the variety you need if you want to get a college education or a high-paying job. It is the variety of the powerful, unmarked by any features associated with a particularly powerless group. But people have come to believe the standard variety is inherently better for effective communication than other varieties - more logical, more precise, even more beautiful. The result is that society at large has stigmatized these other, nonstandard varieties rather than considering their contributions to effective communication, including their use in the teaching of standard English.
Richard Riley Former Secretary of Education
"54 percent of all teachers have limited English proficient (LEP) students in their classrooms, yet only one-fifth of teachers feel very prepared to serve them.
REPORT: Exemplary practices, programs, and individual schools that are helping to transform education.
Link between literacy and prison. "Read or go to jail." - In California they plan how many jail cells they will build in the future by how many children are not reading on grade level by third grade.
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WHAT IS THE SOLUTION? THE NEW PEDAGOGY AN
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In "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" 1 of my favorite books Pirsig says,
"We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past 'facts' which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don't throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too . . . Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing."
FACT:
Understanding is best achieved when aspects of reality are studied in isolation from each other (biology, history, physics, language, etc.).
CONTRADICTORY FACT:
Understanding is best achieved when the holistic nature of reality is recognized so that all knowledge becomes part of a single, mutually supportive conceptual framework.
HISTORY
National Voting Rights Museum and Institute
1012 Water Avenue
Selma, Alabama 36702-2516
(334) 418-0800 contact
Only 1 out of 3 people vote in elections - CNN 11/4/02
Congress extended the Voting Rights Act again in 1975. The authorizing bill retained the automatic triggering provision that sent examiners to states maintaining discriminatory voting policies in 1964. New provisions then banned all literacy tests permanently, established new federal policies designed to increase voter turnout among American Indians and Spanish-speaking Americans, and allowed individuals (as well as the Department of Justice [http://www.usdoj.gov/]) to sue in federal court to request that voting examiners be sent to a particular area. Congress set the 1975 extension to run out in seven years. It reauthorized the Voting Rights Act once more in 1982 ? this time for 25 years. The 1982 bill permitted private parties to sue in federal court under the act to overturn any election law or procedure that produced de facto discriminatory results. However, areas could now escape oversight by federal examiners if they maintained a clean voting rights record for ten years.
A little History. Can't Pass the Literacy Test? Then you can't vote.
