Is there a disconnect?

Blog readers will be aware of the ongoing debate and controversy over what courses should be required in high school, particularly math, to be eligible for entrance into a UC campus.

Recently, however, the LA Times carried an article indicating many high school students have basic problems of reading and literacy. In that context, distinctions between advanced high school math courses seem disconnected from what high school teachers are dealing with:

Like many high school chemistry teachers, Angie Hackman said she instructs students on atoms, matter and how they “influence the world around us.” But Hackman also has another responsibility: developing students’ literacy skills. She closely reads passages from their textbooks, breaks apart prefixes and suffixes and identifies root words. She dissected the word “intermolecular,” and its prefix, “inter,” connecting it to other words with that same prefix.

Every teacher at her San Diego charter school, Health Sciences High and Middle College, teaches students literacy skills, regardless of the subject. That’s because so many students arrive at the school struggling with basic reading, some scoring at the first- or second-grade level, said Douglas Fisher, a school administrator. The goal is for high school graduates to attain “reading levels ready for college.” ...

Poor reading skills are a nationwide issue. On the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, nearly 70% of eighth-graders scored below “proficient” and, of those, 30% scored “below basic,” roughly the same as California scores. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 72% of eighth-graders scored below proficient and 33% below basic in 2022...

That may be due, in part, to larger troubles with literacy instruction. For decades, the primary methods for teaching students how to read in the U.S. were out of line with evolving research, known as “the science of reading.”

A wide body of research indicates students need explicit instruction in foundational reading skills, like phonics, in order to be able to recognize and make sense of words on the page. But many schools have also used a rival curriculum called the “whole language” approach, which generally de-emphasizes phonics. Some high school teachers see the fallout... Some experts and educators worry reading reforms have left older students behind...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-08-14/how-teaching-reading-in-every-high-school-class-can-improve-literacy.

Note that the effects of lost schooling due to the COVID pandemic, particularly on kids of elementary school age, are also yet to be fully felt. It is now generally understood that attempts to substitute remote education for in-person learning resulted in setbacks for cohorts of students. And even before AI came along with its challenges, we had a generation of students who learned a kind of cut-and-paste-from-web-sources approach to writing in high school.