So I got up really early this morning. In fact I never really went to bed *smirk* so I turned on the Sunday morning news for kicks. They were doing a special on the state of education, namely reading skills, among Florida youth. Being interested in education, I started to watch this special and I was astounded by what is going on down here.

According to the research, over two thirds of tenth graders in the Florida public high school system have reading skills below average for their grade level. Yeah, you read right, TWO THIRDS. Governor Jeb recently got eleven million dollars in funding to revamp the way reading is taught to children in the school system down here. Revamp? You mean there is more than one way to teach children to read?

Apparently the Florida school system employs a “wholistic” approach to teaching fundamental reading skills. Essentially, they expose children to books and give them “meaningful assignments” that encourage them to read. What this boils down to is they put a kid with no fundamental reading skills in a room full of books and give them assignments on their reading. There is no step-by-step process to teach the kids basic phonics skills, model reading behavior, read aloud in groups, or any of the things I did as a child when I was learning to read. Of course I am one of the exceptions to the rule. I was reading books on my own before I started first grade (which was considered advanced even in a New York City private school), so I can’t really compare my experience to what these kids are getting, but simple logic tells me that it’s all bullshit. How can you expect a child to learn to read if you don’t teach them the sounds of the letters. How can they make the connection between written and spoken word without this kind of learning? How can they just pick up a book and spontaneously read it and comprehend it without any of the tools that are necessary to read?

This “new research” that Governor Jeb got the 11 million dollars of funding based on is essentially a laundry list of the skills and tools that were used by my parents and my school to help me learn to read. This research states that children have to be taught the alphabet, the phonetic representations associated with the letters in the alphabet, and basic grammatical structures to begin reading. If this is news to you, faithful reader of my blog, please feel free to contact me immediately and tell me how you learned to read. I was under the assumption that all of the things I mentioned above were necessary requisites for learning to read. The research goes on to also state that reading education should be specific, and the assignments and lessons should be explicit in their purpose.. as opposed to sitting a kid in a room full of books and waiting for them to learn to read via osmosis.

If I sound sarcastic and a little bit angry, you’re wrong. I’m really pissed off about this situation. No wonder why I haven’t met anyone my age down here in a bookstore. Two thirds of them can’t read on their age level, so I’d never run into them outside of the children’s section! Can you honestly believe that this kind of thing still exists in American education system? We are the richest country in the world and the greater population of certain states can’t read on their age level. No wonder why we’re a running joke internationally.

In my humble opinion, I think there should be a national education system with national exams for basic literacy, math skills, science/technology, and analytical skills. More than half of the countries on the planet have similar systems, and their kids are going to be the ones coming here and getting the jobs that our kids used to get. Technology companies are outsourcing their IT work in countries like India and China because the salaries are lower and the talent is much brighter. Let’s face it, national education systems and testing structures work (England, Canada..), why can’t we get together as a country and ignore state’s rights long enough to get our kids to read and write at age appropriate levels? What’s so scary about that? For the life of me I can’t figure it out…

What’s with these so-called educators today? Why is it that when they fail at something, they blame everyone else. They blame the kids, their parents, society, technology, and anything else that they can pass the buck to. Their failures result in the gross undereducation of American children and sorry excuses for teaching methods like Ebonics. Who talks like that? I mean for real. If kids aren’t picking up proper English why would you burden them with ANOTHER vernacular?! It’s this mentality among many of the educators in this country that really lights my fire. They assume that since the children aren’t learning, it must be something OTHER THAN THEIR METHODS that is keeping the kids from acquiring the requisite knowledge.

The newest dying art in America is penmanship. Kids aren’t learning, or rather, aren’t being taught to write in cursive anymore and the blame, so bloody obviously, is falling on technology. Kids are using instant messaging and text messaging on mobile devices and they’re not learning how to write, furthermore they’re barely learning to print legibly. This if course is the fault of society, the parents, the kids, and the technology. The educators take no blame of course. Maybe if kids were held properly responsible for learning and writing in cursive, they’d actually learn it and be good at it. I come from a generation where your handwriting style was one of those things that helped to define you (aside from the silly handshakes with your friends, your favorite song, and those orange Cross Colors jeans you wore in HS). Now I guess your e-mail signature and buddy icon are what separates you from the others.