$750 Million a Year Bought This California School District Failure to Teach 72% of Black Kids to Read; Why Is This Acceptable? – Opinion

The situation appears great on paper. The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has a budget of $750 million to allegedly educate about 34,835 students. It is more than $21,000 for each student. Not only is the district well-resourced, but it is also led by a big-brained thinker of a superintendent who rakes in a salary and benefits package worth over $425,500 per year. What is the reason elementary schools in this area rate lower than 50% among all California schools? Average reading proficiency score is 34%, compared to 50% for the state. What is the reason that only 18% of Black children and 23% Hispanic students are on track for reading by fourth grade?

It turns out that the perpetrator is actually a group of spoiled teachers who place SJW beliefs above children’s welfare. This story comes from an unlikely source, a TIME Magazine article titled Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read. Although the headline may be misleading, it actually describes a rebel against the ignorance that conspires to stop students from learning a fundamental skill.

Kareem, who was a fourth-grader in Oakland, California, taught struggling fifth-graders how to read with a structured and phonics-based program called Open Court. The students loved it, but the teachers didn’t like it. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

Weaver has started a campaign in his former school district to have many of those methods restored. These include consistent, and systematic instruction on phonemic awareness and basic phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver, who received an early and vivid lesson in the value of literacy in 1984 after his cousin got out of prison and told him the other inmates stopped harassing him when they realized he could read their mail to them. “It has been an unmitigated disaster.” In January 2021, the local branch of the NAACP filed an administrative petition with the Oakland unified school district (OUSD) to ask it to include “explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension” in its curriculum.

NAACP Petition to Oakland Unified School District by streiff  Scribd

It begs the obvious question: If your goal is to help children learn to read and associate symbols with sounds, how will you teach them?

There are many schools of thought on how best to aid this process, but the main contretemps has been about whether kids need to be taught how to sound out words explicitly or whether, if you give them enough examples and time, they’ll figure out the patterns. According to this theory (sometimes called whole language), teaching phonics becomes boring and repetitive. A large number of English words do not follow the rules. But, hello there! But if you immerse children in beautiful stories, they’ll be motivated to crack the code, to recognize each word. Contrary to popular belief, reading is just as closely related to hearing and sight. According to phonics supporters, it begins with speech. The science of reading is a result of this understanding and all the supporting data.

In 2000, the National Reading Panel released its report. This large panel of literacy experts examined hundreds upon hundreds of studies to determine what instruction was needed for children reading. It recommended explicit instruction in the things Weaver’s petition asks for: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. It was a win for the phonics groups. However, declaring war isn’t the only thing. It is quite another to seize territory.

This article continues to provide a detailed overview of the activities of different states to return to basics of learning.

I don’t think the problem as laid out by Mr. Weaver is all that different from that facing a lot of professions. The experience of teaching Third Grade Reading is not unlike the one that Third Graders go through. For 45 to 50 years, the teacher will continue teaching this class in the exact same manner if they decide to become teachers. This is why police departments end up with “taskforces,” SWAT teams, kiddie porn viewing teams, and all kinds of other manpower sumps at the expense of cops in patrol cars or on the sidewalks. A few times you see the cop walk around a block. This is what the cop continues to do for his entire career. My time as a junior lieutenant was in the Basic Combat Training Battalion, Fort Leonard Wood MO. Drill sergeants needed a break form road marches and teaching drill and rifle marksmanship. This was what they had done week after week. However, the trainee scores dropped when they abandoned tried-and-true basic techniques.

The problem with teaching reading is that reading is the only thing possible. They don’t catch up unless a child is reading by around fourth grade. If you believe in the “school-to-prison pipeline” bullsh**, this is where the process starts. Kids check out of school around age nine because they can’t understand the material they are taught in all classes. If we know what works, we’re allowing a clique of teachers who think they are much smarter than they are to cripple a generation of kids because they are bored and too spoiled and arrogant to follow a plan.

Last week I posted on Ron DeSantis’ new program to get veterans into Florida’s classrooms; Ron DeSantis’ Veterans-to-Teachers Program Is a Great Idea Except for One Huge Flaw. That post contains the following:

Anything that brings normal people into the classroom will be appreciated. They’ll spend less time telling students about sexual deviance and more on the fundamentals. Still, the answer to our education system’s woes doesn’t lie in putting bandaids on a sucking chest wound by increasing the pool of applicants. The answer lies in new models of public education that are not subject to fads and don’t create barriers to keep competent and dedicated people out of the classroom.

Teaching methods in critical subjects like reading and math can’t be left to the trendsetters in academic education or to the nutters who are attracted to an education career like lint is attracted to Velcro. You cannot teach the basics if you want to show off your theories or originality. We will continue spending trillions on failing systems that fail because they work unless we address the issue of teachers not following a system that actually works.

 

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