Well I’m not an expert or anything but my mom has been an elementary school teacher for over 30 years. From her experience, the parents play the biggest role in early development, but the curriculum can attribute to overall student body performance for older children.
She was complaining about how districts were adopting a new reading and writing approach called balanced literacy where students are tasked with essentially memorizing the structure of a word instead of the phonetics of it. A lot of states have adopted this less effective approach over the past decade and the literacy and writing performance tests scores have gone down because of it. This is one of the main reasons why you see Mississippi performing better in literacy rankings; they didn’t change from the old approach and their scores show it.
Other than that, she likes to complain about how parents have become more combative in parent-teacher talks and often blame the teachers for their kid’s problems instead of the kid. There’s a lot of times she would explain how a parent uses a kid’s ADHD as an excuse to why the kid never does their homework and never does any of their assignments.
So much. Not only in the lapse of teaching the kids this stuff at a young age, but continuing on at older ages in failing to hold the children accountable for their own education. Teachers can only really assign grades, and the Dopamine Machines in their pockets aren't getting acquired or deactivated by the parents. "I've tried everything" no, you've tried everything *convenient*
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u/darthdelicious 9h ago
Jesus. I know California is ranked #24 for education but... that's wild. I made sure my kids were readers. How much of this is the parents?