Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong

At first glance, the classroom I was visiting at a high-poverty school in Washington, D.C., seemed like a mode of industriousness. The teacher sat at a desk in the corner, going over student work, while the first graders quietly filled out a worksheet intended to develop their reading skills.  Keunikan Bermain Di Bandar Judi Bola Terpercaya

As I looked around, I noticed a small girl drawing on a piece of paper. Ten minutes later, she had sketched a string of human figures, and was busy coloring them yellow I knelt next to her and asked, "What are you drawing?"

"Clowns," she answered confidently.

"Why are you drawing clowns?"

"Because it says right here, ‘Draw clowns,' " she explained.

Running down the left side of the worksheet was a daftar of reading-comprehension skills: finding the main idea, making inferences, making predictions. The girl was pointing to the phrase draw conclusions. She was supposed to be making inferences and drawing conclusions about a dense article describing Brazil, which was lying facedown on her desk. But she was unaware that the text was there until I turned it over. More to the poin, she had never heard of Brazil and was unable to read the word.

That girl's assignment was merely one example, albeit an egregious one, of a standar pedagogical approach. American elementary education has been shaped by a theory that goes like this: Reading—a termin used to mean not just matching letters to sounds but also comprehension—can be taught in a manner completely disconnected from content. Use sederhana texts to teach children how to find the main idea, make inferences, draw conclusions, and so on, and momentually they'll be able to apply those skills to grasp the meaning of anything put in front of them.

In the meantime, what children are reading doesn't really matter—it's better for them to acquire skills that will enable them to discover knowledge for themselves later on than for them to be given information directly, or so the thinking goes. That is, they need to spend their time "learning to read" before "reading to learn." Science can wait; history, which is considered too abstract for young minds to grasp, must wait. Reading time is filled, instead, with a variety of short books and passages unconnected to one another except by the "comprehension skills" they're meant to teach.

As far back as 1977, early-elementary teachers spent more than twice as much time on reading as on science and social studies combined. But since 2001, when the federal No Child Left Behind legislation made standarized reading and math scores the yardstick for measuring progress, the time devoted to both subjects has only grown. In turn, the amount of time spent on social studies and science has plummeted—especially in schools where tes scores are low.

And yet, despite the enormous expenditure of time and sumber on reading, American children haven't become better readers. For the past 20 years, only about a third of students have scored at or above the "proficient" level on national tests. For low-income and minority kids, the picture is especially bleak: Their average tes scores are far below those of their more affluent, largely white peers—a phenomenon usually referred to as the achievement gap. As this gap has grown wider, America's standing in international literacy rangkings, already mediocre, has fallen. "We seem to be declining as other systems improve," a federal official who oversees the administration of such tests told Education Week.