Another reason to pull your kids from public school.
By Phyllis Schlafly
A high school English teacher at Rosemount High School in Minnesota, which was called a “top-ranked school” by the Minnesota Department of Education, given the Blue Ribbon School of Excellence Award by the U.S. Department of Education and named a top school in the nation for 2014 by Newsweek Magazine, just wrote a shocking letter alerting parents and the public that her high school juniors can’t read. Her letter, published by the Minnesota Star Tribune on Dec. 4, was eloquent, so I quote it verbatim.
“We are in the midst of one of the greatest literacy crises ever encountered, and we are fighting an uphill battle. Every day I experience firsthand what it means to be illiterate in a high school classroom. Average students with average abilities can fervently text away, but they cannot read.”
She said some of her students just sleep away an assigned unit. Others resort to depression or aggression. She gave them a not very difficult test, but they couldn’t read the test.
When she assigns her students a book to read, they often don’t even try to read it. Ask them why and they say, “It’s boring.” She wrote that this translates into “It’s too hard to read.” The teacher appeals to parents and the public, saying, “I need your help.”
Don’t count on the shift to Common Core to teach school kids to read. Common Core will change the assigned stories and books, but it won’t change the fact that elementary school kids are only taught how to memorize a few dozen “sight,” mostly one-syllable, words, but not taught phonics in order to sound out the syllables and then read the bigger words in high school and college assignments.
Students are not assigned or motivated to read whole books. In the name of “close reading,” they are given short so-called “informational” excerpts to read over and over in class, almost until they are memorized. You don’t find the students going to the library to take out and read the classics, and students don’t acquire the vocabulary necessary to do college work.
Limited reading skill means that what the students read is tightly controlled. Common Core has rewritten the history of America’s founding to present James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and other Founders to fit the leftwing narrative of gender, race, class and ethnicity, and students have neither motivation nor skill to seek out the true history of the Founders.
Common Core does, however, find space for stories that many parents find morally objectionable, such as “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison.
Read more: Townhall
