<p>In Finland, they woudn’t even have started reading and math before seven, and maybe later. There would have been LESS practice, no phonics before seven, no reading readiness, no “remedial reading” for six year olds, and no testing. </p>
<p>Oh, and no shoes. (It’s a great equalizer.)</p>
<p>There is no single solution that will work separately. What can work, though, is multiple solutions tried all at once.</p>
<p>I think this ranking is, like most international educational rankings, an “apples-to-oranges” one.</p>
<p>I agree Mini that socioeconomic security plays such a huge role in student success.</p>
<p>The parent organization for my kids’ elementary school funded a breakfast snack program based on a similar effort in New Mexico. Every kid (and teacher) received a healthy snack each morning. Tardies were down, participation and scores went up.</p>
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<p>Very John Holtish.</p>
<p>What do parents do if kids want to teach themselves to read at two or three years? Tell them that they should wait until they are seven?</p>
<p>There is a little bit of both societal attitude towards education and socioeconomic factors in student success.</p>
<p>Did you know that in Finland, school lunches are FREE for everyone, and food accounts for 8% of their educational budget?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.oph.fi/download/47657_school_meals_in_finland.pdf[/url]”>http://www.oph.fi/download/47657_school_meals_in_finland.pdf</a></p>
<p>But let’s be clear: I think the American public education system is a great success story, and is producing precisely what is intended. Eating junk food at an early age translates into buying junk food later. Expecting lack of access to health care now leads to no expectation of health care when employed. If you fail 10th grade math, you don’t deserve health care - and you know it (and your employer need not provide it). </p>
<p>The demand for low-grade service workers in the U.S. is insatiable; for math and science graduates, not so much.</p>
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What do parents do if kids want to teach themselves to read at two or three years? Tell them that they should wait until they are seven?"</p>
<p>Let them read what they want. There is plenty of “free time”. Free, voluntary reading has been shown (Krashen, et al.) to be one of the single most important factors in predicting future reading success. But DON’T teach it. Teaching reading is negatively correlated with future reading success.</p>
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<p>What do you do if they’re not reading when they are 14?</p>
<p>After all, you can’t teach them.</p>
<p>I’ve often thought the American education system is more of indoctrination than true education, mostly due to the realities of economics and social strata (see Mini’s post #48). Apparently, my 13 yo thinks so too.</p>
<p>He was frustrated yesterday with his 8th grade social studies teacher (normally his favorite ) because Mr. M was spending too much time explaining the free market system. Ds told me that the continuation of this “myth” shows that the public school system is failing as a whole.</p>
<p>I don’t know if many of you still have children in elementary or middle school in systems that have adopted the Common Core. While I am not a fan of all the testing and accountability that is being pushed, I will say that I am impressed with the rigor and depth of the curriculum so far. Of course, my children are in school in the South and our standards were probably pretty low to begin with.</p>
<p>Because of the spacing of my children, every 5 years or so, our family repeats a grade. What I have seen is that the curriculum is much improved than when our oldest or our middle went through. What I don’t see is a solid plan on how to help kids who simply can’t do the work or keep up. In 6th grade social studies, this year for example, my daughter has done intensive work on several periods of World History. This is very different than our older children’s experience.</p>
<p>Each subsequent child has been required to write more than the preceding child, but I am not convinced that writing is well taught.
I believe that our teachers need far more support and training than they receive.</p>
<p>If they’re not reading when they’re 14, you’ve proven you can’t teach it, haven’t you?</p>
<p>(There is almost no one who can’t read at 14; there are hundreds of thousands of people who read poorly, and hate reading by that point, a direct result of schooling. It serves us well, though - if people are reading, will they also be watching tv commercials, or be out in the malls buying stuff, or expect more stimulation in their jobs than their jobs will provide? As I’m sure you know, reading is a subversive activity; once people are really reading, who knows what else they might do?)</p>
<p>(Do you remember Neil Postman’s chapter on “Crap Detecting?”)</p>
<p>Lastminute: Oregon has just adopted the common core standards, but too late to catch my youngest who is an 8th grader. He’s heading to private next year. I will say that there has been a tiny improvement in curriculum within the three year difference between DS and DD. But that’s only because a group of parents (including yours truly) filed a complaint with the state.</p>
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<p>The unschooling model is that you let the kids do whatever they want to. If they don’t want to read, then they don’t have to. You don’t teach it if they don’t want it.</p>
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<p>I’ve known a few parents using the unschooling philosophy where the kids aren’t reading at that age. I know one family the parents both had advanced degrees but one of their kids wasn’t reading at 13 or 14.</p>
<p>But you think that kids shouldn’t be taught, right?</p>
<p>I do think children can be mentored. I also have been hired as consultant with families of so-called “late readers”. In every case that I’ve dealt with (maybe a half dozen), there was some kind of family trauma (illness, death, abrupt move, abuse) between the ages of six and eight. Once this was recognized, and steps taken in remediation, the kid was reading in each case. (As it turns out, there is a case in my own family, and the kid - my cousin - went on to a masters in transportation engineering and designed the Atlanta Airport Metro.)</p>
<p>(To be fair, while I think “poor reading” is usually a direct result of schooling, no reading by kids in schools is subject to the same causes, which is almost never recognized or dealt with adequately. I don’t blame the schools for that, as I do for the “poor reading”.)</p>
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<p>And how is that supposed to happen if nobody has ever taught them to read? You can’t read in your free time if you have never been taught.</p>
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<p>Well, your sample size is of parents that could afford your services.</p>
<p>There’s a pretty wide variety of parents and kids out there. A kid might not want to read because they don’t have the motivation. Once they get the motivation, they take off. Haven’t you read John Holt?</p>
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<p>That depends on the state and individual school concerned. For instance, the NYC public STEM magnet high school I attended required 4 years of nearly every core academic subject except foreign language(3 years minimum) and 3 out of the 4 years of required science courses must have weekly labs. The 1 year of non-lab science electives I took included Psychopharmacology, a class usually taken by aspiring pre-meds and those going into the medical sciences. </p>
<p>Then again, if you are struggling to the point you can barely tackle algebra, geometry, or trig…you’re unlikely to be admitted or if you somehow are admitted…find the academic workload and rigor to be such that you’re one of the students who voluntarily weeds him/herself out by going back to his/her regular high school within the first two years. </p>
<p>Similar requirements exist for the more humanities centered Hunter College High School and other academically comparable high schools in NYC and some other cities/towns I know of…whether magnet schools or not. </p>
<p>As for failing English classes being unheard of…not at my high school or its academic peers. The English teachers had no issues handing us Ds or Fs if they felt it was warranted and plenty of us received such grades on our papers/final class grades…including yours truly.</p>
<p>Long conversation. Holt wrote entire books about how schools sap motivation. Poor readers lack motivation. Haven’t met a single example of “no readers” in their teens simply (meaning: only) lacking motivation. (Of course there must exist one somewhere - it’s a big country. ;))</p>
<p>In general, the folks in my national home education list had good outcomes with their kids, even those that didn’t acquire the expected skills until their mid-teens. The outcomes may have been fine but it caused considerable anxiety for their parents.</p>
<p>It’s hard to stick with a philosophical course when you aren’t getting results that you see in the child’s age-peer group.</p>
<p>If our education system is so awful, why are the parents of math geniuses from China, Korea and India obsessed with getting their kids into American colleges?</p>
<p>Once social lives and peer pressure kicks in, it is a bad thing to be good at math or science. If you’re a good writer, that’s great among kids, but if you’re good at math or science you are a nerd. This causes people to hide their knowledge, or try not to learn as much. I think that’s the main problem, not the teaching.</p>