[Harmon]

Originally Posted by mrscoach

I'm not sure how lack of money meant the students were not learning to read. My point earlier was that some students do not have access to books at home, only through school libraries and regular libraries, even though I did not say it. I never said they weren't learning to read.

Well, you can't expect people to deal with points you don't actually make.

I even said that only having cereal boxes and dictionaries to read would turn them off of reading, not foster a love of it.

Baloney. If you are a teacher, you should be able to make reading cereal boxes and dictionaries FUN. Heck, I'm no teacher, and I can think of a dozen ways to engage children with reading cereal boxes and dictionaries. Throw in the Bible (whoops, that would be "religion" - can't do that! I obviously mean "throw out the Bible") and you have more than enough material to show kids how to read. Let the kids tell their own stories, and kids who can already read write them down. The world is FULL of words to read. Books contain some of them.

I'm not even going to address the changes in teaching reading, because that is too big of a subject. It changes in waves as research shows that this or that works better. For better or worse, schools keep trying their hardest to teach students to read, even if the students don't care if they do or not.

It is not big at all. Phonics work for most kids. Schools and teachers who can't teach kids to read are failures. I'm not saying it's not a harder job than it used to be, and that there aren't problems to be overcome.

But then, schools don't exist to educate kids. That's secondary to providing jobs for administrators and teachers, handing out contracts to suppliers, and establishing political fiefdoms.

There are some signs of hope, though. My niece is a teacher in a school system out west, where every teacher in her school had to reapply for their job. Guess what - only 25% (including my niece) were rehired.

And when she wanted books for her students, she reached out to friends & family and we bought her the books. She didn't just sit around passively blaming the lack of libraries for her problems. Which is probably why the school had the sense to rehire her.