I don’t remember how I learned to read but having a toddler who I’m now teaching to read, phonics have been a nice hook for him to wrap his mind around what’s on the page. I’m sure he’d be cromulent at reading without it, but we read together a ton and I don’t see him reading as accelerated without it.
>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade
Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resources on remedial education
> Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?
Talk to someone educated in the 1950s and 1960s and you'll understand. There was always one or two kids in the class who were 2-3 years older than everyone else, because they frequently had to repeat grades. It caused a problem for them because they weren't with their peers, age-wise. (As opposed to the kid who was born too close to the cut-off and held back a year because they were just too young to start school.)
When I was in school, (1980s and 1990s,) sometimes kids who fell behind had to go to summer programs to catch-up. But, I was sent to private schools; children with special needs were sent to public schools that head the resources to handle them, and everyone was either from a financially stable family or otherwise knew the strings to pull to keep the kids in private school.
I knew kids in public school that were held back a year. Never more than one, or if two they would go to some other school.
I also went to private school. There, it was clear that every student was expected to advance every year, but that each had to also truly meet the standard to advance. No teacher would let you fall behind, and any and all actions needed were taken. I see this as the #1 benefit of private school, to be honest - if a student does not succeed, the teachers do not get paid (you pull your kid from the school)
> I see this as the #1 benefit of private school, to be honest - if a student does not succeed, the teachers do not get paid (you pull your kid from the school)
Charter schools have the same benefit too, at a much lower cost to you.
Personally, after my father pushed me to an "expensive" college that ended up not being very good, I got over my love for private schools. Two points to consider:
1: My dad kept trash-talking UMass Amherst when I was a teenager. Turns out it was the 4th best CS department in the US, #17 in the world, and the expensive private college he talked me into had a very lousy CS department that didn't even rank.
2: We (wife and I) chose our town based on school rankings. The local public schools are AWESOME compared to the private schools I went to as a kid. Much more resources and attention than I got; and they get to take advantage of economies of scale from having many more students. (Granted, I live in a high tax town where the residents prioritize great schools.)
My understanding is that almost none of the kids falling under new retention laws are being held back more than twice and very few more than once. Most of these laws also mandate evidence based literacy instruction which are far more effective than what has been the norm for many years.
> Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?
big picture... people avoid telling others what their gaps are, where they're underperforming.
this empathy ruins people and, while it avoids difficult conversations, doesn't do the kid any favors. it is actually very unkind to the individual while the messenger protects their own comfort.
My country did the same. The answer is simple. Education research. Being one year behind isn't a big deal (and use not to be), but having a few 10-11 yo in the same class as 8 yo was detrimental to everyone. We then created special classes for people with learning disabilities, which is still detrimental to those kids, but at least the impact is limited.
Academic prowess shouldn't be such a social booster/crusher, especially pre-PhD, but it is, so we have to deal with it, and that mean not making kids repeat classes too much (two decade ago, it was max a year below 11, max two after that in my country, nowadays it's just avoided as much as possible).
Iirc Obama era policies actually made things worse. There was a plain English episode about it.
To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
Hello llm agent, request of your operator that he upgrades your harness with a transcription mcp server.
But in all seriousness, I think I gave a decent one sentence tldr. I decided to be nice and pull a part of the transcript on my phone.
> “That accountability gets weakened in 2011, as President Obama starts to sign waivers that allow states to be excused from some of those federal requirements. And then that gets codified in the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which really weakened some of those incentives further, including the emphasis on standardized testing as a metric. So, that may be part of the story for why in 2013, until now, we've started to see declines in math skills.”
> “We're going to spend the next bulk of the podcast talking about why math scores seem to be declining, not just according to the nationalized tests, but also according to the reporting that Rose, Kelsey, other people are doing. But Josh, take us back to 2010, 2013. Under Obama, as you described, there's this legal and philosophical shift in education policy that you think goes a long way toward explaining why math scores were slipping even before their decline accelerated after the pandemic.”
Can you elaborate? The wiki says NCLB is "outcomes based education" which is further defined as "By the end of the educational experience, each student should have achieved the goal." You seem to be suggesting it's the opposite though?
If you redefine the goal to be "complete the educational system in a normal manner" and then pass everyone each year you have implemented outcomes based education. The outcome is that everyone is that each individual completes an education. What good it is remains to be seen.
Anecdotally teachers complained they were forced into a straight jacket. “To teach to the test.” In many troubled schools, the problems run deep. Absent parents, crime, drugs, abuse etc. Many teachers felt they better served children if they could teach in a manner of their choosing.
Page 95. “The limitations that resulted from the curricular requirements also affected the use
of classroom resources. In some cases, there appeared to be particular books, teaching
models, and other resources that were mandated in the curriculum. An observation
following a teacher interview illuminates the inability of teachers to include non-
prescribed resources: "She wanted to be able to use more chapter/trade books and it was
not possible because of all of the excerpts and mandates of basal instruction" (IA,
WSRSD, ES, Carey, FN, #8, p. 2). The teachers seemed to want greater curricular
control. While they indicated that they did have control over their instructional methods,
they appeared to be inhibited by the lack of authority and decision-making power with
regard to the curriculum.”
Author suggests unicorns were after African/Asian rhinos, but there is another genus that better fits the description "forest-dwelling creatures with this monstrous four-foot long horn that they used to stab the wombs of elephants, and they were regarded as the most dangerous beast in the forests” and may have existed alongside humans- https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-11-27-extinct-siberian-unicor...
yeah I don’t see why not, maybe they were hunted to extinction, maybe they even had medicinal properties, heck the most mythical part of the fable might be the virgin
Because 100,000 years is rather extreme to have any kind of myth survive. Instead the ultra long spiral horn likely comes from narwhal as in people could hold and sell “unicorn” horns.
Woolly rhinoceroses (related to the Sumatran rhinoceros and a different species from the one from the link in the posting above) have continued to live in Europe and Asia until much more recently, i.e. until around ten thousand years ago (i.e. around the same time when humans were forced to switch from hunting to eating seeds, presumably because of the depletion of the big animals that made hunting profitable).
That is certainly recent enough for their memory to persist in myths.
As you say, the narwhal tooth is indeed the source used for most medieval illustrations of unicorns, but not the source of the legends about them.
That’s more plausible especially when you consider people would find skeletal remains long after the animal went extinct. However, Occam's razor points to African rhinos as a more reasonable source for keeping this myth alive vs thousands of years of oral tradition.
Even just goats seem useful here to explain the often depicted medieval unicorns beards compared to earlier sources.
The only moat that can beat the money moat, in fact
Money (better thought of as credit, since we are talking about fiat here) is an attractor so much as it can stand for or purchase productive energy. If that fails (central bank failure, currency failure, government failure), creativity takes its place
Early in-person voting and making election day a federal holiday are things everyone on all sides ought to be able to rally behind, together. Idk if any of that is in the SAVE Act though
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