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David Ziffer's avatar

This article merely touches on two enormous school and societal problems: what to do about schools that teach little (populated by teachers who know little) and about whole segments of our society who do not value education. Add to this a technological revoluation (the "smart" phone) that is destroying the relationships between parents and children. Yesterday I was stuck waiting in a checkout line, along with a mom who had her one-year-old son sitting in her cart with her merchandise. The little guy was as cute as they come and he was getting into everything; I was tempted to interact with him but we have boundaries about adults interacting with others' children, so I mostly refrained. In a previous time the mom would've spent this time interacting with him, but instead she was staring at her phone; she lost this chance to forge her relationship with him and to build his vocabulary. On a larger scale, we have entire sub-populations (blacks, specifically) who are known to spend less time verbally communicating everyday knowledge their kids during their crucial pre-school years. How does a school compensate for such a cultural difference? And then we have the schools, which have eradicated much classical knowledge from their curricula and replaced it with Marxist, racist indoctrination. Other than the rantings of Ibram Kendi, what exactly is a modern child in a public school expected to comprehend on a "comprehension" test? How much comprehension can we expect of a "student" who literally cannot multiply numbers and who has no conception of the world around him? Like these, for example: https://youtu.be/Ufmcubp2szg?si=0O8h89ojivDRHCy6

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Reeshiez's avatar

Thanks for this. How would you go about writing state standards of learning that are content based? I am a parent with no education experience whatsoever (other than serving on various parent advisory boards). I’ve been selected by my state’s department of education to serve on a citizen advisory board for new ELA standards of learning. I’ve been following your work a lot and admire what you have to say. There has been a lot of focus in my state on phonics and structured literacy so I’m sure we will face no problem with that. What I would like to focus on grounding structured literacy in a knowledge rich curriculum and also on systematic writing instruction. I am struggling with how we can incorporate standards that mandate a knowledge rich curriculum when developing ELA standards of learning. I can see how we can do that for social studies or science but not for English. My sense is the best way to go about it is mandate that certain curriculums are used but not to push for knowledge based standards in the standards of learning. Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts! I think with writing standards it will be easier as I can focus on sentence construction, paragraph construction and outlining

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