• The Center Square: Federal employees reportedly told to remove pronouns from email signatures.
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    18 hours ago

    21% of adult Americans are considered to have low English literacy. Two thirds of these people were born in the US. This basically means they can read the words in a paragraph, but not understand the meaning of the paragraph. A further 4% are functionally illiterate.

    This is disgusting.

    Fuck “No Child Left Behind”. Kids shouldn’t pass elementary school without being able to deduce the meaning of a paragraph unless they have a mental disability. I don’t care if they have to repeat 5th grade three times. And of course any non passing student should be offered tutoring for free long before they get to the point of being held back.

    • @[email protected]
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      15 hours ago

      Oregon, despite being home to Powell’s books and thought of as progressive has one of the worst high school graduation rates,ath and literacy rates in the country. After the pandemic they straight up removed many math and English requirements from high school curriculum under the guise of “equity” for those affected by the learning disruptions cause by COVID. It was pretty clearly less about serving disadvantaged students than raising the abysmal education statistics.

      That said, educators are doing as much social work now as they are education as society collapses in on itself and generational poverty, social ills related to poverty, poisons in our environment and relating depression and anxiety from young to old metastasize nationally. Teachers cannot hope to fix all that in a few hours a day let alone make up for years of lacking learning environments outside of school for their students.

      They’re teaching phonics still in 3rd grade.

      • @[email protected]
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        15 hours ago

        Yeah, I know a little about what they’re dealing with. My sister-in-law is a high school history teacher. She still has to bartend at least two nights a week to afford to raise her kids. On top of all that extra unpaid work.

        The Oregon thing is new to me but not surprising. They’d already begun changing teaching to be about passing the standardized tests rather than learning by the time I graduated high school, over 20 years ago.