Matthew 15:13-14 The Message (MSG)
Jesus shrugged it off. “Every tree that wasn’t planted by my Father in heaven will be pulled up by its roots. Forget them. They are blind men leading blind men. When a blind man leads a blind man, they both end up in the ditch.”
A few weeks ago, on NPR Radio; There was a Segment about The USA Education and Schools Systems, having adopted and Contracted a “Stupid-Is-AS-STUPID-Says/Does-Uses” type of “READING” System, which Was “Failing” to Teach/Educate Children how to Read. THAT Crazy System had done Away with “PHONICS” and “Sounding OUT SYLLABLES”: And I mentioned to my Wife about “HOW-UTTERLY-STUPID-EVIL/CRAZY” THAT TYPE OF Thing Was to have done to Our USA Children.
Soo, Yesterday Morning, I saw a News Segment on MSNBC about a Mississippi Education Person who brought back The “PHONICS & Sounding Out Words & Syllables” and it had Lifted 4th Graders Back UPWARDS from Only 14% Efficiency to over 60% efficiency..”HOORRAAYYY”!!!!
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/06/12/american-schools-teach-reading-all-wrong
United States | The reading wars
American schools teach reading all wrong
Mississippi, a state not often associated with pioneering reforms, is teaching the rest of the country to read
Jun 12th 2021 | WASHINGTON, DC
PHONICS, WHICH involves sounding-out words syllable by syllable, is the best way to teach children to read. But in many classrooms, ff-on-ics is a dirty sound. Kymyona Burk, who implemented Mississippi’s statewide literacy programme, says that some teachers have had to sneak phonics teaching materials into the classroom, like some kind of samizdat. Teaching reading any other way is “malpractice”, says Ms Burk. And yet for reasons that include politics, partisanship and personal experience, most American children are taught to read in a way that study after study has found to be wrong.
The consequences of this are striking. Less than half (48%) of all American adults were proficient readers in 2017. American fourth graders (nine-to ten-year olds) rank 15th on the Progress in International Literacy Study, an international exam. And that was before covid-19 closed schools. According to UNESCO, American schools were closed either fully or partially for 56 weeks, compared with 47 in Canada and 27 in the United Kingdom and China. In theory the need to make up for lost schooling could be an opportunity to try something new. But America remains stuck in debate about teaching children to read that has been rumbling on for decades…CONT…
A closer look at what happened to reading scores in a state where students have long lagged behind
by Devon Brenner and Aaron Pallas August 14, 2023
In 2022, Mississippi low-income fourth graders performed significantly higher on the NAEP reading test than similarly low-income children in 43 other states and the District of Columbia; nine years earlier, Mississippi scores were near the bottom. What led to the gains? Credit: Terrell Clark for The Hechinger Report
The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get stories like this delivered directly to your inbox.
The phrase “Mississippi Miracle” trips off the tongue. Who doesn’t like alliteration? More pointedly, who doesn’t like rising test scores?
In recent months, the phrase has been associated with Mississippi’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the Nation’s Report Card.
In 2022, Mississippi’s fourth graders eligible for free lunch (a marker used to estimate poverty) performed significantly higher on the NAEP reading test than similarly low-income children in 43 other states and the District of Columbia.
A mere nine years earlier, Mississippi’s fourth grade students living in poverty had NAEP reading scores near the bottom of the state scores list.
Although there have been skirmishes about whether or not these test score gains in Mississippi are real, and what they mean, we believe that they indicate genuine, although modest, progress in the literacy skills of young Mississippi schoolchildren.
The gains are due to the steps Mississippi took to support the teaching of literacy skills in early elementary classrooms and not, as some have suggested, due to the manipulation of the student population taking the test or to aligning Mississippi’s learning standards specifically to the NAEP standards.
NAEP is the only assessment used in all states and territories — a small subset of schools from each state participate — and the test’s design allows for state-by-state comparisons in a way no other assessment can.
Mississippi’s NAEP performance gains accompanied new policies that began at roughly the same time: The Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA), passed by the Mississippi legislature in 2013, is primarily known as a policy to hold back third graders who have not demonstrated basic reading proficiency on a state assessment.
Related: Tennessee law could hold back thousands of third graders in bid to help kids recover from the pandemic
But the law is more complex than that one policy, as it focuses on capacity-building as well as mandates for K-3 reading instruction.
A big component of the LBPA and the substantial private investment that preceded it was a new vision for reading instruction. Some commentators call it “The Science of Reading” and highlight a narrow emphasis on phonics instruction. But, as is true for any complex phenomena, teaching reading and learning to read require knowledgeable practitioners able to adapt instruction to students’ needs.
Literacy is about making meaning of the world, and that meaning emerges through the study of content as much as from using knowledge of letter patterns to sound out unfamiliar words.
In Mississippi, there has been a push, backed by private funding through the Barksdale Reading Institute, to build greater understanding of the importance of code-based instruction and word recognition, including phonics and phonemic awareness (the ability to hear individual sounds within spoken words), alongside other components of reading that the Barksdale Reading Institute calls “The Reading Universe” — language comprehension (including background knowledge and vocabulary), reading comprehension and writing.
The LBPA provided numerous resources to support all of these aspects of better reading instruction.
The act included state funding for assistant teachers in grades K-3, access to literacy coaches and additional training. Reading Universe, for example, provided online classroom videos, interviews with teachers and detailed guides to support the teaching of specific literacy skills, such as identifying phonemes and drawing on background knowledge to make meaning of a text.
It would be a tragedy if policymakers in other states were to take away a surface lesson like “retention works” without a deeper understanding of the supports needed to bring about change.
Additionally, for many years leading up to and following passage of the LPBA, the literacy faculty at teacher preparation institutions discussed how to prepare teachers to teach reading in the early grades.
These supports, we suspect, have been influential in better preparing Mississippi elementary school teachers and changing instruction in K-3 classrooms. But they have also been hit or miss, with some schools and educators deeply understanding multiple facets of literacy instruction and others more exclusively relying on curriculum packages emphasizing the decoding of words.
Recognizing this hit or miss aspect is important. In Mississippi, there are geographic and demographic disparities in school funding, teacher availability and access to advanced coursework…CONT…
I WAS “ONLY” ABOUT 2-3 YEARS OLD, WHEN I SAT IN THE “FAMILY’S HAND-ME-DOWN-MISSING ROCKERS-ROCKING CHAIR, AND I “MIMICKED/COPY-CATTED” MOM’S READING OF “THE BIBLE” AND OTHER BOOKS, AS SHE READ, I WANTED TO READ! I GREW UP, READING HER AND MY BIG SISTERS’ FINISHED: “THE ENQUIRER”, “TRUE LOVE”, “TRUE CONFESSION”=THOSE LAST TWO/2, WE KIDS HAD TO SNEAK TO READ=WE WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE READING THOSE..LOL/SMILE!! BUT, ALSO I READ MY BIG BROTHER’S “FINISHED COMICS BOOKS” AND I READ THE “DAILY PAPERS”, WHICH MON AND MY BIG SISTER GOT EVERY DAY, AND LATER THOSE TURNED INTO WEEKLY PAPERS. BUT, “READING WAS/IS FUNDAMENTAL” AND “WHAT “IDGET/IDIOT” DECIDED THAT “PHONICS/SOUNDING OUT WORDS & SYLLABLES”=WAS NOT THE BEST WAYS TO LEARN/TEACH READING???.
I TAUGHT MY SONS, TO USE THE TOILETS, BY TEACHING THEM TO READ; BECAUSE AS I WOULD READ THE PAPERS AND BOOKS, WHILE “SITTING ON THE THRONE”, MY BOYS/SONS WANTED TO “COPY-CAT/MIMIC” THEIR “DADDY”, WHILE THEY ALSO SAT ON THEIR “POTTY” AND WHEN I “PEE-PEED” THEY WATCHED AND COPY-CATTED AS WELL! LOL WORKED LIKE PERFECTIONS!!!
“IF” SOMETHING IS “TRIED/PROVEN & TRUE METHODOLOGY” WHY IN THIS WORLD WOULD/SHOULD IT BE CHANGED=LIKE” THE WAGON=”IF IT AIN’T BROKEN, DON;T FIX IT, YET”!!!!
AND ITS LIKE: REMOVING “ALL OF THE NUMBERED CLOCKS” FROM SCHOOLS TO GIVE THEM “DIGITAL CLOCKS”=INSTEAD OF TEACHING OUR CHILDREN TO “COUNT” AND DO “SIMPLE MATH”! ANND NOOW WE GOT THESE “EVIL FREAKS” BANNING BOOKS, EVERYWHERE TO “DUMB DOWN USA KIDS MORE AND MORE…SO, WHO’S GOING TO HELP CONTINUE OUR “TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS” IN “TECHNOLOGIES, MEDICINES, BIO, GENETICS, SPACE AND ASTROLOGICAL, ETC…???
Acts 2:40-47 KJV And with many other words did he testify and exhort, saying, Save yourselves from this untoward generation. Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls.
When Jesus said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me,” He was reaching out to a segment of society that was thought to be insignificant. Children, in their weakness and vulnerability, have much to teach us as adults. As we grow, the hardness of the world often makes our hearts callous.
FINALLY: WHEN WATCHING THAT MSNBC SEGMENT, I SAW THAT “CHILDREN WERE “FOOLED” INTO PICKING “A SHEEP” FOR THE WORD “DOG”, BECAUSE SOME CHILDREN HAD NEVER SEEN A SHEEP. THAT CRAZY EVIL SATANIC STYLE WAS “CONFUSING” AND EASY TO DO WHAT “LYING ABOUT HISTORY/HERITAGE/LEGACIES” DOES=AS MY LATE/GREAT FRIEND “CY CECIL ROKINS” TAUGHT ME=DEVILS/DEMONS CAN “MAKE YOU BELIEVE THAT A CHICKEN IS A DOG, AND THAT A DOG IS A CHICKEN”=”PROGRAMMING” AND “MIND CONTROLS” AND SOO SEEING THAT WHEN A “CHICKEN CLUCKS” IT REALLY/TRULY IS A CHICKEN ; AND “WHEN A DOG BARKS”, IT REALLY IS A DOG!!!
NOOWWW; ANY QUESTIONS, Y’ALL??? “READING IS FUNDAMENTAL” AND IS “MENTAL”!!! SATAN/LUCIFER/DEMONS=LEAVE THE CHILDREN ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!
