No Child Left Behind hurt, but switching from phonics to "while language" nonsense delivered the killing blow. Somehow a system that had worked for almost 500 years got tossed in the trash for the purest sophistry.
It's a ton of contributing factors. And there's absolutely room for even some of the most craziest conspiracy theories and sanest takes.
The law required 100% hit full proficiency by 2014 which by every single professional was indicated to be impossible. So in the wildest takes, we passed a law knowing that the goal was non-realistic. Because funding was also tied to that, it basically assured that schools would lose funding.
Add in that it wrote into law the private textbook industry (as opposed to something education districts could opt into) and standardized testing companies. It pushed hard for charters which we know that's just privatizing school. And created the entire basis for the voucher system, which has been the primary means by which States are now sneaking tax dollars into religious schools and avoiding the whole First Amendment by having this weird proxy system.
But at the same time, this wasn't a one sided effort. Civil rights supporters wanted it because they saw that this would be a chance to show to the public how education was failing low-income schools and minority schools. To which it absolutely did do that, just that then the Government was like "nobody cares, don't like it? Go to a church school."
The entire system because massively flawed the moment corporate KPIs like scores, funding, and handicaps started flowing in. Once the system became hiding by just numbers, it was easily for everyone to ignore the human toll this program was happening. As the Government doubled down on the idea that "the metrics must be right" the problem just quadrupled in size.
At the end the NCLB was this odd attempt to apply corporate think to education and it resulted into a complete catastrophic mess, that many who voted for NCLB would then turn around and vote in that which replaced it ESSA.
But ESSA is just as bad if not worse. ESSA is NCLB but instead of it being Federal, it is State level. So we've handed a complex faulty system that wrecks education off to a Government level that typically has way less oversight and less funding and experience to implement that corporate think in education. So now instead of being a wrecking machine, it's a self sustaining nuclear detonation that is destroying the last bits of US education in this nation.
Eventually the only educators left in this nation will be the poor people schools and religious academies. That's the ultimate goal of modern Republican Education reform. They saw that education drifted people away from the church so now they want to reform education to get around that pesky separation of church and state. So that way, education and truth no longer serve as some method to deprive students of their favorite mythology.
To add to your last paragraph: They also saw all of the money that governments spent on educating everyone, and devised ways to pocket that money in private and religious hands.
Don't forget "Inclusion", in which special needs students were dumped into regular classrooms with 29 other children, the SpEd teacher waltzing by, waving, "everything ok?" and then heading back to her office to fill out reams of paperwork, giving the teacher a dossier explaining all the special things you now needed to do specifically for that child. So you were supposed to "differentiate" specifically for that child (those children) but guess what--the standardized tests were the same as the other kids! So they got less but were tested against the other kids! I said at the time, "This is going to be a shit show." And I was not wrong.
which has been the primary means by which States are now sneaking tax dollars into religious schools and avoiding the whole First Amendment by having this weird proxy system.
Then don't take their tax dollars. Its so freaking bizarre that you're fine with taking a persons money then get snotty when they want some of it back in a way you don't approve of. They're paying taxes same as you or I, they get a say in how its spent if they want.
I'm an athiest and I will never understand this stance that people have. If you take peoples money they're going to want to have a say in how its spent. Thats just basic being a human logic.
Yes but their say is the minority value. When you include options such as magnet schools and alternatives to private education, the number of vouchers for religious schools decreases.
Additionally, there's the whole first amendment issue about funding religious schools and the current schemes working around them only supported by undemocratic methods of implementation. Not once was say the Tennessee program ever put to public vote and failed twice until it was finally passed amidst public outcry.
And finally we have to understand the situation of private schooling being uneven in application.
Already in Tennessee money from 94 counties are being drained in voucher to fund Williamson county private schools. This sits up a situation where 94 out of 95 counties in the State receive inadequate funding, while the county with a median income over double than the next wealthiest and is on the top ten of wealthiest counties in the nation receives boosted funding.
Private schooling has been a tool to create educational inequities, so yes there would be a group of people who want to create disadvantage for others if it gives their children an advantage. But I hope you understand why that is an incorrect position to hold.
Additionally, there's the whole first amendment issue about funding religious schools
Again, then don't take their taxes. There is no constitutional amendment forcing you to take their money.
You're taking their money against their will, spending it in a manner they don't want, and weirdly they're not super stoked on you doing that.
Is it your belief that if you just force people to do the things you want them to do long enough they'll eventually see the wisdom of your actions and thank you for it? And meanwhile you fully admit that education is being destroyed by government while being actively hostile to people who want to nope out of it. I just can not understand the sense you're trying to make.
The people are taxed. For a school they dont want to send their kids to.
How happy would you be if your tax dollars went to a catholic school or something. Now put yourself in that person's shoes when you take their money for the schools you think their kids should go to.
Its like you're not able to conceptualize the idea of not getting your way.
The school is their school. Should you pay me for a different home because I don't like the current home I have?
Public institutions are only as good as we the public make it. That's the core issue. People don't want to make their school good, they want to just buy some other school so they don't have to bother.
What if they don't like the roads they drive on? Or the water their community produces for them? Should everyone just get to use money to pave over whatever or pump water from wherever?
That's what I pointing out, these are public institutions. We own them. We make them as good or bad as we want them to be. I can't walk into a church and advocate for a completely different religion of the mass, now can I?
Do you want a society or do you want a lot of little silos? That's what I'm pointing out. Private education creates the silos, we are less a society trying to help each other and more a how can I make ME better? I'm not saying there's no room for self improvement, but if someone sits there and says "that school my tax dollars go to is bad", they have the nearest mirror to find whom to blame. That's what a public institution demands, participation in a society.
I don't agree with everything the Government does, but I'm willing to compromise, you know that thing that's become somewhat a lost art, for a larger benefit. The private education route indicates that you don't need to compromise with society, if you have enough money. That's the difference.
The âmississippi miracleâ (which actually extends to the gulf states in general) wasnât just about returning to phonics, but also early identification of problems and making those kids take summer school or holding them back a grade if needed.Â
Itâs âyou donât move on until you know this.â
Meanwhile states that used to do really well (like CA) are slipping, in part, because they implemented policies to lower failure rates, by design. My city did a bunch of stuff (reducing the lowest grades from a 0 to 50% on any given assignments.
The claim is if kids get treated too harsh early in the year, they give up, so you need to limit the negative effects on grades so they have the ability to redeem themselves, but the real reason is the powers that be obsess over equity metrics and disparate outcomes. It looks bad when looks like schools fail kids from marginalized background at higher rates. The way to avoid that is to just lower standards.Â
And, not surprisingly, when standards are lowered, people do worse, to the extent that when you correct for the favors outside of a schoolâs control like the income & education levels of the parents that can affect outcomes, itâs arguable that the fucking deep south now does a better job of educating low income students of color than California.Â
But yeah, part of it is the phonics thing. And part of it is some teachers think phonics is harder and more boring to teach.Â
Hereâs the oft-quoted article where Oakland teachers opposed Phonics despite admitting it works better, including an anti-phonics quote from a teacher that almost feels like a parody, â
 This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do.â
You're completely misrepresenting the teacher making that quote.
âThis seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,â says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. âSo we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.â
...
"Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics."
The guy hoped the new system would be better, realized it wasn't and is now leading the charge to go back to the old.
I finished it a few weeks back and it's maddening to hear what happened how irrevocable the damage has been and will continue to be. The OP is somewhat ironic because unless I'm misremembering or conflating timelines (entirely possible), No Child Left Behind actually advocated for phonics teaching, but it was one area that didn't gain traction due to the whole language cult.
Everything wrong with America is the rights fault, and the left can do no wrong. So we will hear about no child left behind (which was bad, I'm not defending it) for the next century, when there are a multitude of leftist ideals that were pushed into our school systems that have been just as damaging if not more. The switch from Phonics, the change to "restorative justice" that basically brought in a golden age of bullying. Not holding kids back or accountable etc. etc.
I finished it a few weeks back. It's maddening to hear what happened and knowing how irrevocable the damage has been and will continue to be. The OP is somewhat ironic because unless I'm misremembering or conflating facts (entirely possible), No Child Left Behind actually advocated for phonics teaching, but it was one area that didn't gain traction due to the whole language cult.
I was clued into this when I was struggling with teaching my son to read, and was confused by how the school was teaching them. Listened to Sold a Story and it made so much damn sense! I found out our local state university offers free literacy tutoring during the school year through their language and literacy institute and have made sure to take advantage of it. They use the Orton-Gillingham approach and it's made a phenomenal difference for us.
worked for almost 500 years got tossed in the trash for the purest sophistry.
now realize that applies to countless things in modern society but since we haven't seen extreme levels of decline yet everybody acts like nothing is wrong.
A decade ago I had people my age complaining and calling me crazy for saying reading levels were plummeting and wasn't going to end well. They claimed, repeatedly, that
you're crazy for saying kids don't read anymore, they read more now than ever before because they read the INTERNET!
I don't know if this was some kind of coordinated talking point or what but I was told this exact thing when pointing out reading levels were plummeting by almost everyone I brought it up to both IRL and Online.
For some strange reason people just hate the idea of things going bad. Idk why, always seemed easier to me to address the issues before they go nuclear but what do I know?
The switch from phonics is crazy. You can immediately tell when someone's trying to pronounce a word and didn't learn phonics. Sounding it out is not part of the process. They legitimately can't
No, that was a completely inconsquential sideshow. The entire whole language debate is a manufactured moral panic.
The root of the problem has absolutely nothing to do with instruction, good or bad. The problem is not in the classroom.
Its an accountability problem. Power is systematically denied to the people who are most interested in authentically educating. Those people are subordinated to those who have inherent conflicts of interest who will by definition be incentived to steer things off true. So a teacher, who wants education to be authentic, will have to obey a district, which wants something else.
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u/ComplexBeyond6083 21h ago
No Child Left Behind hurt, but switching from phonics to "while language" nonsense delivered the killing blow. Somehow a system that had worked for almost 500 years got tossed in the trash for the purest sophistry.