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"There’s no reason to push children to read early. Their brains have not evolved to the point where they must read at age three or five." -- Nancy Bailey in Give the Gift of Removing Reading Pressure on Kindergartners!
LATEST TIMMS SCORES SHOW DECLINE FOR U.S.
Tom Loveless: What We Learned from the 2023 TIMSS
Was the U.S. score decline caused by the pandemic? The answer is unclear.
From Diane Ravitch
Two trends stand out.
1. Larger negative effects in math than in other subjects. The most prominent explanation is that learning math is more dependent on formal instruction in schools.
2. Gaps increased between higher and lower scoring groups along several demographic dimensions, including race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and the 90th and 10th percentiles (high and low achievers).Note that many of the gaps began widening before the pandemic, but Covid seemed to exacerbate the trends.
A GIFT FOR KINDERGARTENERS
Give the Gift of Removing Reading Pressure on Kindergartners!
Kindergartens should return to providing a developmentally appropriate curriculum.
From Nancy Bailey’s Education Website
This holiday season, give children the gift of reading. One of the best ways to do that is to relieve the pressure of insisting they read early. Some children might pick up reading when they’re very young, but others will learn a little later, and there’s nothing wrong with this.
However, children who are made to feel like failures at this age if they are not reading yet will have a more challenging time learning to read later.
Sadly, examples of kindergarten reading pressure can be found everywhere. A recent Business Insider report describes a mother saddened that their child had to repeat kindergarten because they couldn’t read or write!
Expecting children to read in kindergarten and putting this increased pressure on them became politically motivated with NCLB
TRUST THE EXPERTS
Unintended Consequences
Just because you attended school doesn’t mean you are an education expert or know anything about child development.
From Sheila Kennedy
Rothstein eventually concluded that lower average achievement of these pupils wasn’t due to deficits of instruction, but to the
social and economic challenges that children brought with them to school—for example, greater rates of lead poisoning that resulted in damaged cognitive function; living in more polluted neighborhoods that led to a higher incidence of asthma that kept children up at night wheezing and coming to school drowsier the next day; lack of adequate heal[th care, including dental care, that brought more children to school with distracting toothaches, and on and on...
WE NEED SOME HYGGE IN OUR CLASSROOMS
We Need Hygge Classrooms in America
It would be nice if Americans embraced contentment and connection.
From Teacher in a Strange Land Blog
In Iceland, books are exchanged as Christmas Eve presents, then you spend the rest of the night in bed reading them and eating chocolate. The tradition is part of a season called Jolabokafload, the Christmas Book flood, because Iceland, which publishes more books per capita than any other country, sells most of its books between September and November, due to people preparing for the upcoming holiday.
PUBLIC MONEY SHOULD GO TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS
D for effort
Republicans in the Indiana General Assembly continue to vote to raise the amount the state pays students to go to religious and other private schools...with money diverted from public schools.
From School Matters
Indiana gets a D for effort when it comes to funding public education. Keep that in mind when legislators say there’s not enough money to give schools what they need.
The rating comes from the latest “Making the Grade” report, an annual evaluation of state school funding by the Education Law Center, a New Jersey-based research organization that advocates for equitable funding. Indiana does slightly better, earning a C, for school funding adequacy and fairness.
SCHOOL COUNSELORS NEEDED
School counselors are essential, so let's treat them that way
Here's something that Indiana should spend public tax dollars on instead of diverting money to private and religious schools.
From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**
The 2024-25 Indiana School Counselor Survey paints a grim picture of a profession stretched far too thin. Counselors are overburdened, under-resourced, and struggling to meet their students’ growing mental health and academic needs.
Social-emotional challenges among Indiana students remain at critically high levels, with more than half of counselors reporting an increase over the past year. These issues, many of them lingering from the pandemic, are compounded by mounting academic pressures, career readiness hurdles, and a deluge of administrative tasks. Counselors are drowning in paperwork instead of sitting across from the students who need them most. The state’s student-to-counselor ratio is 351-to-1 and is well above the nationally recommended 250-to-1. This is a massive barrier to effective support.
†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.
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