For decades, California schools have been an awful place for children to learn how to read. The product of it all is adults who are set up for failure – they’ll struggle to secure livable wages, be likelier to delve into crime, and generally live lives without the means to form as rich of an experience of the world as they could.
Governor Gavin Newsom and LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho bragged about improvements last year with Newsom telling reporters, “This is a proud moment. When it comes to public education in this country, in this state, we tend to be focused on what’s wrong. … But I hope what you heard today (is that) things are getting better, that we’re not only moving in the right direction, we’re leading in that respect.”
What are these wonderful improved numbers? In California, 51.2% of students do not meet English language standards, 62.7% of students do not meet math standards. 67.3% do not meet science standards. In LAUSD, these numbers are all worse. This is a failed education system not something to brag about, particularly because California spent $142.4 billion on K-12 last academic year.
Among the many government failures that we become outraged about, it’s confusing why we’ve become complacent with a system that produces functionally illiterate adults so reliably.
To address this persistent problem, last year state legislators passed AB 1454, which offers training to teachers in evidence-based reading instruction, also known as the science of reading. The science of reading is a collection of research and strategies that have been demonstrated to help children learn how to read. Unfortunately the bill stops short of mandating training or a specific curriculum.
Such instruction has been mandated in some form or another by at least 40 states and has contributed to states like Mississippi significantly improving the literacy of their students jumping from 49th in the nation in 2013 to 9th last year. While incentivizing teachers to abandon “whole-language” strategies that were used in the vast majority of California schools is a welcomed sight, the state isn’t going nearly far enough if it truly wants to fix our chronically bad reading scores.
Mississippi didn’t stop at simply providing teachers with science-based reading professional development and their improved reading scores cannot be entirely reduced to that adoption. They also implemented a strict policy that required third-graders be held back if they did not meet a minimum score on the state’s reading test.
Research demonstrated that this test-based promotion system significantly improved the sixth-grade reading scores of students held back in third-grade. In other words, making sure that students internalize what is taught to them before pushing them forward to the next grade helps them learn how to read – who knew? In LAUSD, between 2017 and 2021, less than 1% of students are held back a grade, meaning that most underperforming students are allowed to proceed to higher grades, only compounding their academic struggles.
Increasingly, schools in California excessively coddle students by neglecting to impose penalties for late work, eliminating the possibility for a failing grade, and unlimited opportunities to redo exams and assignments.
An all too common scenario that happens when students get to higher-education is that they are not just arriving with worse reading and writing skills than their past counterparts, many of them also struggle to adapt to the world of consequences and accountability.
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Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at [email protected].
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