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Jill Biden (sorry, Dr. Jill Biden) is just the tip of a giant wasteful iceberg. Schools afloat with MAs and even PhDs on the faculty can’t seem to manage to convey even the most basic skills to their students.
Here’s a breakdown at the most basic level where teachers with MAs can’t teach children to read.
JoLynn Aldinger has taught kindergarten through 2nd grade for 20 years. But for much of that time, she hasn’t felt adequately prepared to teach reading.
She ended up taking the job. “I used whatever basal reader they had,” Aldinger said. “I just basically followed that. It was what I now know was balanced literacy. I kept chugging along using the district-provided curriculum, trying to find my way.”
Aldinger said she assumed that when she returned to school to earn her master’s degree in elementary reading and writing, she’d develop the mastery she felt was missing. It didn’t happen. She recalls learning a spelling program while earning her degree that, she said, had many “holes” in it.
“I never learned about the syllable types,” she said. “I didn’t get an understanding of all the phonics rules.”
The grim joke here is that she had an MA in elementary reading and writing, but didn’t have the basic skill set of the old one-room schoolhouse or mothers from time immemorial.
Betty Jane Mitchell, a teacher at South Hancock Elementary in Hawesville, Ky., had a similar experience. Despite earning a teaching certificate and a master’s degree in education, she took only one course in reading instruction.
Mitchell describes the literacy instruction she was expected to teach at the beginning of her decade-long career as leaning toward the balanced approach, with students encouraged to use context to figure out words and read for meaning.
“It was a hodgepodge of methods, Mitchell said. “I did my best for three or four years, then stopped teaching reading for a few years because I didn’t feel confident.”
Schools and taxpayers have been wasting a ton of money on the notion that more degrees make for better teachers. It quite clearly does not. Academic degrees very loosely overlap with teaching skills, if at all.
Worse still, the entire education industrial complex overcomplicates simple things, building jargons, specialized abstractions, and all sorts of cultish theories around what should be fairly simple. Many teachers are unable to teach students on a human level, all they know is the theory, not the actual education.
Fixing our educational system begins with getting rid of incentives for degrees. They are at best useless and at worst turn education into a hamster wheel based around fashionable theories (many of them leftist ones) rather than results. The education industrial complex pushes its theories and when they fail, claims that it’s because students and teachers are being too stressed, and that the answer is to get rid of testing.
When teachers with MAs can’t figure out how to teach children to read, that’s a devastating indictment of a failed system. If we want more kids reading, we need fewer MAs.
Do not Schools of Education at land grant universities boast of the highest Undergraduate GPAs on campus, while at the same time admitting the majority of these undergraduates from the bottom quartile of university applicants?
BA and BS degree programs tend to be rigorous. BEd degree programs tend to be otherwise.
Who can do a better job at teaching your kid math, the BS guy with a crew cut who took 4 semesters of differential and integral calculus, or the purple haired BEd floozy with three credits of “calculus appreciation”, but holds 15 credits of teaching theory to satisfy Teacher’s Union hiring standards?
Guess whom your kid’s school hired?
I used to Be an English teacher. My students learned. I knew to intersperse my tutoring with games to keep the teens and few adults concentrated on the lessons.
Those were the best years of my life.
Whoever down voted me licks his own butt like a dog and then smiles about it.
I a was a Computer Science prof at our states flagship public STEM University for 45 years. I had a friend who had access to the internal institutional research database.. He did a study of “change of majors’.. Computer Science and all Engineering lost about 1/2 of our ENTERING majors by the end of their Freshman year. After that it was a slow drip out with a few transfers in The folks that left a STEM major for a non-STEM major overwhelmingly went to the business school (Econ, Finance, Management, Marketing).. Students that couldn’t hack business went to liberal arts or social sciences (Psych, Poli Sci, Sociology. ) Students that couldn’t liberal arts or social sciences went to Ejukashun…
He also checked the GPA’s of graduating seniors by major. Ejukashun majors had an ASTRONOMICAL 3.79 on AVERAGE. STEM majors were at the “bottom of the barrel” between 3.02 and 2.94 with Business, Lib Arts, and Social Science in the middle..
Conclusion (according to DOCTOR JILL): Ejukashun majors are BY FAR the best and brightest students. Computer Science , Computer Eng, Mech Eng, Civil Eng, Chem Eng, Physics, Math, Biology and Chem grads are the least bright and and laziest.
Sounds like a load of shit to me.
Arts degrees are the goto choice of the modern liberal, because science is hard and stuff (…and racist as well). This being the case, we can’t be surprised that teachers are confused because they started out that way, Moreover, their modern day curricula was written by confused liberals, so it all becomes cyclical. Is there any wonder why children turn out the way they do? The modern young teacher is well versed, though, in political hate, being able to spot racism at 50 yards and providing literature (on the down low, of course) and counseling for those young one’s who didn’t know they needed to transition.
I knew almost immediately that my wife and I made the right decision, when placing our son in a private Christian school, when he came home with a phonics book. He’s probably the most grammatically and phonetically correct person I know now…to the point of annoyance. Lol
Um…the leftist do not want a literate public. That is the goal.
These teachers have all been “educated” in teaching colleges that have bought into Brazilian communist Paulo Freire’s theories of “critical pedagogy.” This posits that teaching standard academic subjects simply prepares students to replicate the existing “oppressive” society. Instead, the object of teaching should be to create in students a “critical consciousness” to prepare them to be activists and revolutionaries who will overthrow the existing society. And that is why Johnny can’t read and his teachers can’t or don’t teach.
When they way too busy letting t he kids out to march though the streets over totally fake threats like Climate Change/Global Warming then wonder why Johnny Cant Read. Lay the blame on the leftists NEA
My daughter, PhD in Literacy Education, wasn’t taught what was most effective in teaching reading until she was in her PhD program, having already spent years as a teacher. Much of the problem goes back to the Whole Language programs that took reading education by storm in the 1980s and 90s. Now discredited, these programs consigned millions of kids to forever being poor readers.
Listen to the podcast, “Told a Story” if you’re at all curious about what happened.
As an aside, it seems that those with PhDs look with at least some disdain on those with Ed.Ds, aka Jill Biden and Bill Cosby. (Apparently, Ed.Ds are more about becoming a bureaucrat than a teacher.)
Just a quick example of how hide bound education bureaucracy has become. I know of at least one instance when a teacher with a doctorate was teaching a university course to prospective teachers on some education related subject. However, because the teacher had not, herself, taken that same course recently, she was told that she was not qualified to teach high school students.
“Worse still, the entire education industrial complex overcomplicates simple things, building jargons, specialized abstractions, and all sorts of cultish theories around what should be fairly simple. Many teachers are unable to teach students on a human level, all they know is the theory, not the actual education.”
This is spoken by a person who has not the slightest idea about the field of literacy education, nor the actual reality of teaching reading in actual schools. This is ignorance disguised as expertise. This is excrement you pulled out of your ass.
You spelled your screen name incorrectly. We’re not fooled.
You visit this site, criticize the author, offer no basis for your criticisms.
Then, unhappier than you were before coming here, you go back to your safe space and another bottle of booze.
Then why this:
“Columbia quietly walks away from Teachers College project that ruined countless lives”
https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/columbia-quietly-closes-down-teachers-college-project-that-ruined-countless-lives/
Maybe it’s you who dont know squat? Or maybe YOU just want to wreck peoples lives for the sake of your leftist cult?
“…a person who has not the slightest idea about the field of literacy education,…”
That’s the point, dumbass. Today’s ‘experts’ in the “field of literacy education,” don’t have the slightest idea of how to teach literacy. The results speak for themselves. All you over ‘educated,’ overpaid, and overfunded fools have is excuses, as if teaching was something new, and not eons old.
Teaching reading is intimidating, but should not be. Human beings are wired for language.
I have used with great success a book called “Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons” by Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox and Elaine Brunner. Most children are reading at a 3rd or 4th grade level after completing 70 – 90 days of the program. Each lesson takes about 10 – 15 minutes and it is fun.
It works with pre-school children, even 4-year-olds. It is like a miracle and so easy. The book is inexpensive, too.
It begins with a modified alphabet that slowly morphs into the regular alphabet about halfway through. Don’t be intimidated.
Sounds like a good primer. I taught myself to read at a rudimentary level at ages three and four and really took to it in kindergarten. I still remember the hippy dippy pamphlets used as reading education and the anthropomorphic characters in them. I loved them. Leo the Lion, Mitt the Monkey and Sis the Snake.
My older brother had a reading tutor come to the house. I used to sit on the floor listening to them and following the lessons. My brother’s problem was later diagnosed as dyslexia, but I was 4 and learned to read and was reading well when I began 1st grade 2 years later.
The book I recommended is from SRA / Distar. You may remember the SRA readers in their various colors indicating reading level when you were in elementary school. I did not use the entire curricula, but only the little book about teaching reading in 100 lessons.
My eldest son has autism and was nonverbal until age 7. He was in a special needs program that taught “touch math” and “whole word.” I was militant that they would not confuse him with that crap! My whole purpose with him was to stimulate language in a setting in which no one knew him or could speak for him (as his siblings at home did). It worked. The school was amazed at his capacity for reading anything placed before him.
The next problem was comprehension. That took longer, but he did it.
If those were the happiest years of your life, you could teach reading again, perhaps part time? There are a lot of sane, beautiful women in that setting, Jeff.
Thanks. We seem very similar.
I could use a beautiful women in my life. My girlfriend and me broke up recently and I’ve been despondent ever since. I have to get back together with her. We were in love.
By the way, I keep trying to post a photo of me but I keep failing.
Just go to jeffbargholz@gmail if you want to see how drop dead handsome I am.