It’s called “push through” and nearly all school districts do it. Rather than holding kids back in kindergarten or 1st grade when they obviously needed to be, they get pushed forward. The lack of foundational knowledge follows them all the way through to graduation. And it’s all about graduation rates, dontcha’no?
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I have a friend who lost her tech job in 2008 and took a job driving a cab in a largish Midwestern city. One of the things that most surprised her (and me) was the high percentage of her customers who were essentially illiterate and innumerate. Now, a regular cab service tends to deal with the poorer and less fortunate in society but she (and I) had no idea at all how many people were thus handicapped in our major cities.
Since then I’ve often thought about and it explains why some cashiers think you are trying to scam them when you give them $11 for a $6 item, or how people agree to (what appears to the rest of us) egregiously bad contracts, leases, or agreements.
And in response to people surprised that you can graduate high school and be illiterate, I definitely tutored college students who were functionally illiterate as well. I’m sure they are now middle managers somewhere with a C average degree in communications or business studies
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So even though they get Fs and Zeros because they can’t do the most basic of assignments, They get pushed through anyway? I guess I am either horribly naive or it is just a whole different world there.
I mean, if I was a parent and I noticed my kid couldn’t read, I would be like, “What’s up with that?” Though I know a lot of people have a completely hands off approach to education - that is the schools job.
My mom worked for years with BD kids in Middle School. I will have to ask her more specifically, but I don’t think they just pushed kids through.
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My wife’s cousin graduated high school functionally illiterate. I’m honestly not sure how.
[quote=“Mister44, post:23, topic:97553”]
So even though they get Fs and Zeros because they can’t do the most basic of assignments, They get pushed through anyway? I guess I am either horribly naive or it is just a whole different world there.
[/quote]Oh, well that part is easy - they don’t get F’s and zeroes. Teachers are not such assholes that when a kid they know is illiterate is in their class that they don’t try and teach them the material and stuff in class. I think he even had tests done orally, and he could read a little - but he couldn’t read a book or even words he had not seen written but knew how to say.Other than being… well really dumb and constantly smoking pot, he passed in math without reading.
I think that the real failure is pushing him through elementary school not being able to read, with the justification he would catch up and wouldn’t feel so isolated socially.
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This is one of those long-term economic problems that I think many Red States don’t think about when they are pursuing short term tax and spending cuts. Making your citizens less educated and less employable seriously undermines efforts to get industry to move to the state, both because they know they will have a harder time filling jobs with competent people, and because competent people won’t want to move there to take jobs. And it’s a hole that’s hard to dig out of; lower taxes leads to less spending on schools, producing uneducated workers, discouraging industry, creating less jobs, reuslting in a smaller tax base which means there’s no way to increase spending on schools. It’s a crisis that some states are already, and which others will face in the next decade or two. And by then it will be too late.
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At least a quarter of the American population is devolving toward a developing-world standard of living on many fronts, education being one. The GOP education programme aims to raise that number – functionally illiterate and innumerate peasants, especially those indoctrinated with religion on the taxpayer dime, are so much easier to control and gull.
The disturbing thing is that in certain southern red states, the conservative politicians do think about it. It’s short-sighted and self-destructive, but they really are content with the large crony corporations and industries (often employers of mainly low-skill/low-education/low-cost workers) they already have in place. As long as they get kickbacks from the companies and their lobbyists and as long as they don’t feel the need to raise taxes to fund public K-12 schools (except the ones their own “deserving” kids attend) they’re very happy. It’s really a plantation-owner mentality with a lot of them.
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Yeah I don’t get some people who don’t even want to play for public schools with property taxes etc. It is extremely short sighted.
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I think Florida retirees who now have home health care aids who can’t read a pill bottle are probably now regretting that.
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I lived in Detroit from 1964 to 1990, in a neighborhood that’s now a ‘hood. Trust me, it wasn’t always like that. I could give you a hundred reasons why I think it happened, from personal experience; but what it seem to come down to is plain ol’ human greed, which comes from the fear of being a have-not. It doesn’t help that the haves, instead of helping the have-nots, laugh and throw things from above.
I’m not advocating home-schooling, but what happened to parents actually sitting down and reading to their kids? Is life for these families such that they can’t even do that? I mean, I’ve been in some households that were bad, but there was still reading material around. When that respect for the printed word is given to one outside of a schoolroom setting, it just seems to mean so much more.
It’s like Tom Waits’s character says in “The Fisher King”: “It’s social anarchy when people start pissing on bookstores.” And that’s what happens when literacy is mocked and/or neglected.
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That’s because you’re doing parenting right. Other parents aren’t quite that invested in their kids’ education and development.
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There is the money aspect (folks in some areas want taxes to be low at the expense of everything else) but I think there is a religion aspect, at least near where I am. I don’t know about other areas.
Some people don’t want kids educated, because educated people tend to move away from religion, especially girls who learn that they are human beings who can accomplish things for themselves. If they learn science, they might question young earth creationism. If they learn biology, they might want to have birth control. If they learn history, they might recognize outdated prejudices for what they are. If they learn to read, they might learn all the other things.
Some people have a vested interest in keeping other people stupid. It is going to bite them someday soon, but short term thinking and party loyalty seem to rule the day.
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Really? Wow this is crazy! How can they even function in society? Isn’t reading something everyone does every day? I live in Canada and from some reports the literacy rates between our countries aren’t too far apart. That said, it really seems like there are as many measurements for literacy and numeracy as there are reports and some put the rates between our countries very far apart.
Either way I just don’t understand how this happens.
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Is this actually true? Do some people really not care about their kid’s education? I get that if you can’t read then you can’t read to your kids but it seems pretty far fetched to suggest that parents who can read are choosing not to read to their kids because they aren’t invested in their kids.
Maybe this is really revealing more about my experiences than anything else though…
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For what it’s worth, neither Trump nor very many (poss. any) of these people in Detroit are illiterate in the “can’t read words at all” sense. Mostly people talk about functional literacy, which involves things like reading comprehension. For example: reads well enough to follow simple on-the-job instructions, can file their own 1040EZ tax form, can write a coherent sentence.
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I’ve been thinking about dumping the whole IT gig and maybe becoming an electrician. Probably make more money and being able to wire up buildings is a good fallback skill.
Which I think is what the TGOP wants. A less educated base is easier to control and con into doing things against their own interests.
That’s cause the Red States put party before country and only care about taking care of the rich. The TGOP figures they will be long gone by the time the whole thing collapses.
You could have just said Drumpf supporters…same thing for the most part.
Which says a lot about their religion.
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Is this a case of “The only people left in Detroit are the ones who couldn’t move away”? If that is true then of course the percentages will be alarming because that’s how math works. It’s the people at the bottom who can’t leave and so when you strip away 2/3 of the population over the course of 50 years, what’s left is heartbreaking (but it was always there only now exposed).
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Yes. A lot of parents just don’t care, assuming they’re present at all in their kids’ lives.
Then there are the wards of the state, who are absolutely screwed when they turn 18.
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I thought I was being sarcastic, but what the actual fuck, she’s already there! 
This goes again to the point:
It’s hard to shame someone for the callousness of their policies when they consider the cruel consequences of those policies to be a feature rather than a bug.
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From wikipedia:
In contrast, a functionally illiterate person may well understand these words and more, but might be incapable of reading and comprehending job advertisements, past-due notices, newspaper articles, banking paperwork, complex signs and posters, and so on.
That’s going to be a lot of people, everywhere.
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Well, yes, these are the people who feel like being prevented from imposing their religion onto other people is an assault on their religious liberties and amounts to persecution. The only people more thin skinned are scientologists and the donald.
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