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a reasonable goal. Perhaps a bit low
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Data Analyst

mustish1

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The goal is far too low. 90% of third graders should read at grade level within the next 3 years. <br />
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Otherwise functional illiteracy will abound.
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apparently (and unfortunately), the Republicans do not believe that public education should be federally funded (i.e. education, like so many other aspects of life in the US) should be privatized.<br />
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so, with that in mind, perhaps &quot;<i>75% of all third graders reading on grade level by 2025</i>&quot; is the best you can hope for
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I agree that 75% is too low, but may still be appropriate. &nbsp;Goals need to be realistic in order to have the methods be appropriate.<br />
<br />
A couple of important questions:<br />
Where are we at now?<br />
What we be the cost to get to this goal? &nbsp;I'm assuming this isn't free. &nbsp;We'll either have to cut funding for other education or come up with additional funding.
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A low goal seriously waters down the ability to educate people. That (substandard education) is a major problem in the United States.
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Retired

Paul Sauvé

General Factotum

BillDL

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There is one other issue that, in my opinion, has been affecting the literacy of school children. &nbsp;Dependency on mobile phones and text-based messaging as the main means of communication has resulted in a whole generation (perhaps now even two generations) that &quot;converse&quot; in a form of short-hand using abbreviations, acronyms, and ideograms. &nbsp;I fully agree with a lot of what serialband said in the comment above, and in particular with the statement: &quot;The schools only teach the basics. &nbsp;It's the parents that teach everything else.&quot; &nbsp;What chance do many children of school age have when their parents are glued to their smartphones sending inane LOLs and emojis and don't do anything to discourage that same dependency in their children?<br />
<br />
I see young adults in the work environment who can't write or type a properly structured sentence and their written communications are absolutely riddled with the most fundamental spelling and grammar errors. &nbsp;Since they stopped teaching &quot;The Times Tables&quot; in school, on the assumption that nobody in this era needs to do long-hand calculatulations with the availability of electronic devices, I regularly see young adults in the workplace who cannot perform even mundane counting tasks without reaching for their mobile phones.<br />
<br />
A basic example I witnessed a few nights ago was a young man having to count the contents of 7 pallets where each pallet contained 12 uniformly sized boxes per layer stacked to 9 layers. &nbsp;It was a secure environment containing high value goods where mobile phones are disallowed. &nbsp;This lad can hold an intelligent and authoritative conversation covering a wide range of topics, and he is certainly not mentally deficient or uneducated, but he could not add and multiply mentally or on paper and had to ask for a calculator. &nbsp;Similarly, when asked to write down notes, he has great difficulty with forming logical sentences.<br />
<br />
Another lad of roughly the same age has just been promoted to &quot;transport assistant&quot; despite the fact that he cannot work out drivers' hours and compulsory breaks, miles per gallon, unladen and laden weights of vehicles, load capacities based on known commodity volumes, and route mileages. &nbsp;His writing is a childish mixture of uppercase, lowercase, title case and sentence case that is either devoid of punctuation or wrongly punctuated, and in his typed communications (emails and memos) he does not appear to recognise the difference between the vernacular / colloquialisms / vulgar slang and proper English, nor the times when formality is a requirement (for example liaising with a customer). &nbsp;The spelling mistakes he makes are atrocious. &nbsp;To put it bluntly it is quite embarrassing.<br />
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(by the way, any missing &quot;H&quot; letters in this are not bad spelling, it's my keyboard)<br />
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These two examples are not unusual in my experience. &nbsp;These are not &quot;forgotten skills&quot; as might happen when somebody hasn't used a set of learned skills for many years. &nbsp;These are skills that appear never to have been properly taught, or not enough emphasis was given to ensuring that they had been learned. &nbsp;From what I have seen in the last 8 or more years literacy and numeracy are on a downward slide because the education system did place enough emphasis on ensuring that school leavers would be proficient in either discipline. &nbsp;As has been said though, a lot of this starts in the home and much of it is the responsibility of parents. &nbsp;A recent survey involving many thousands of primary school teachers in the United Kingdom revealed that most children starting scool did not have the manual dexterity to hold a pencil or crayon, and teachers had to first teach the children how to hold such an implement before actually teaching them to write. &nbsp;That manual dexterity should be acquired by children during their pre-school years while playing with toys and games that require &quot;assembly&quot; of smaller parts (jigsaws, cutting, gluing and pasting, etc) and by drawing and scribbling with crayons. &nbsp;Instead many children are being allowed to play constantly with mobile electronic devices that require a different (and much more limited) form of dexterity.<br />
<br />
I find it quite frightening, and would welcome more stringent requirements on literacy and numeracy in schools.
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The evidence of declining educational standards is all around us, but people are increasingly too ignorant to perceive it, or too apathetic to care.
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This decline is particularly noticeable in the UK as well as the US, and the reasons listed above are familiar in the UK as well.
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The movie Idiocracy has a pretty funny take on the state of our culture.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E" rel="ugc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E</a><br />
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In CA ,the educational bar gets lowered when too many folks fail to graduate public schools in general.<br />
LAUSD &nbsp;has something like a 33% drop out rate.<br />
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For the most part ,if public schools can just get folks to an 8th grade reading level,it's like a M$ software product,good enough,but far from excellent
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<div class="content wysiwyg-content">
React to the goal of having 75% of all third graders reading on grade level by 2025.
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React to the goal of having 75% of all third graders reading on grade level by 2025.

Third Graders

Education

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