Shitposter while I tend to two babies. Maybe when I have my life back, I’ll help us get a few more niche communities back?

  • 0 Posts
  • 2.25K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 8th, 2023
  • taiyang@lemmy.worldtoJust Post@lemmy.world•Well, this is quite upsetting to read.
    5·
    2 days ago

    Sure, I’ll give you another piece of the puzzle: reading (and language deficits in general) start young. Like, very young-- by age 2, you’ll see a difference in working class families and upper class families by “6 months of development” or more, depending on the study. (I lost my Zotero citations, but you can search Google Scholar for “differences in vocabulary by socioeconomic status of toddlers” to find a few).

    Experts try to offset that by promoting not just preschool, but early childhood education from birth onwards. Of course, widespread implementation stalled in Congress but you can still see some districts with at least free education at age 3, and you do have (or had?) language support for toddlers through disability services. It’s very minor compared to the need, though.

    That said, there’s still a billion other factors. Free breakfast and lunch at school, for instance-- easy enough to pass in a sane state, makes a tremendous difference at all grades. Parent involvement programs that are sensitive to parental schedules (like night shifts) and home language and so on. It only makes a dent, though- a statistically significant dent, but until family life isn’t as stressful and difficult for the working class, it’s a bandaid over a gushing wound.

  • taiyang@lemmy.worldtoJust Post@lemmy.world•Well, this is quite upsetting to read.
    6·
    3 days ago

    That’s quite correct, but it’s two fold. Even if you have funding from the state and feda (which we do get to offset this effect), the home lives of these kids are generally much worse than middle and upper neighborhoods, which also brings down the mean. We’re talking pollution, 80 hour work weeks, higher incarceration, etc. it all brings down the mean.

    Then the feds have the gall to REDUCE funding if schools can’t bring themselves to by the bootstraps? It’s awful. That said, Obama admin did help a little in this regard, since at least they did listen to the educational research on this.

  • taiyang@lemmy.worldtoJust Post@lemmy.world•Well, this is quite upsetting to read.
    11·
    3 days ago

    I’m not sure if it played out quite like that originally, though I guess there would be some people’s parents thinking that way, especially in 2026. Keep in mind, NCLB was bipartisan.

    In 2003, though, I read that the reality for a majority of schools is a bit more stupid, they don’t understand testing and statistics at the federal level and designed a system of accountability that promoted teach-to-the-test methods, which is mostly memorization. That’s because low performing schools (read: poor schools) got punished for not meeting an arbitrary test score, so it was a go to survival tactic.

    Conservatives still get their desired result, though, which is an education system with minimal critical thinking practiced. Perhaps it was a poison pill, or something, given it’s made Americans by and large even dumber since then (and we were already doing bad for other reasons and Reagan).

  • taiyang@lemmy.worldtoJust Post@lemmy.world•Well, this is quite upsetting to read.
    63·
    3 days ago

    I’ve studied this a little before (at graduate school) and I don’t think we know exactly why, mostly because it’s a ton of factors and none of the different camps in academia seem to agree on one.

    Your standard Lemmy user may appreciate that late stage capitalism probably is the biggest factor, since poverty and illiteracy are hand in hand. The professor I RA’d for, for instance, just did projects that gave families money and they just did better. It was really that simple, since a ton of this is in the home, even before starting preschool.

    But others have argued that there’s also an anti-intellectualism in our culture (even before MAGA, kids go “ew nerds”) and even more say it’s pedagogy. That includes theory, like whole word vs phonics (my advisor spoke of the reading wars of the 90s like he had PTSD lol) as well as practice, like memorization vs reading for reading sake.

    And, of course, the government under Bush Jr. really did the opposite of research by enacting the bipartisan No Child Left Behind which fucked both poor folk with contextless “accountability practices” while pushing soulless memorization.

    Sorry for a long rant, just, y’know in 2025 onwards it’s easy to forget that education has been routinely fucked, usually by conservatives. I can always explain more though, just don’t want to make this comment too long, lol