Literacy

[s1m0n]

Students as illiterate as the ones
I was describing wouldn't have graduated the public highschools when I was a kid (I graduated in
58). In fact reading and writing were tested by the state and nobody like most graduating
college seniors today could have gotten through.

They'd have graduated, but not from the stream you went to. They'd have been streamed off to a technical school, taught technical subjects, and would have graduated, often with apprentices' papers as well as a diploma. On the other side of the wall from my computer there's a mirror with a wooden frame chip-carved with egyptian motifs. On the back is a label from the Leeds D---ing School, identifying it as the work of a 19 year old student. The piece appears to have been in an end of year show. From the style, this was some time in the twenties.

My point is that this model no longer works. Technology is ubiquitious. These days, you can't be an auto mechanic or a cabinet maker without strong computer science skills, so the kids
who used to be streamed off into trade schools or apprenticeships are now being kept in a more academic stream longer. Industry, which used to a lot of it's own training, now does very little. They want job-ready hires only, which means that the school system has also inherited the task of training those individuals who'd have in your day been hired out of high school and trained on the job.

So, kids who would once have been diverted from college are now encouraged to stay in school to receive as much academic education as they can absorb. Dropouts can't do what the dropouts of your day could, which was to get a job at GM and a middle-class lifestyle to go with it.

However, if you keep more of the less promising students in an academic stream longer, they'll pull the average down. In your day only one kid in ten went on to tertiary education. These days its closer to one in two. If your argument is that the decline is average scores indicates a general decline in ability, it's incorrect. What it actually means is that far more kids are being educated to a higher standard than ever before. The average score has declined because we're now testing kids who'd never have been tested in the past. However, the scores attained by the top ten percent of each cohort - kids who used to the only ones to get to college, but are now only the top 20% - haven't declined at all. In fact, they're rising slightly. It's only this last pairing which is a true apples-to-apples comparison.

[benhall.1]

Students as illiterate as the ones
I was describing wouldn't have graduated the public highschools when I was a kid (I graduated in
58). In fact reading and writing were tested by the state and nobody like most graduating
college seniors today could have gotten through.

They'd have graduated, but not from the stream you went to. They'd have been streamed off to a technical school, taught technical subjects, and would have graduated, often with apprentices' papers as well as a diploma. On the other side of the wall from my computer there's a mirror with a wooden frame chip-carved with egyptian motifs. On the back is a label from the Leeds D---ing School, identifying it as the work of a 19 year old student. The piece appears to have been in an end of year show. From the style, this was some time in the twenties.

My point is that this model no longer works. Technology is ubiquitious. These days, you can't be an auto mechanic or a cabinet maker without strong computer science skills, so the kids
who used to be streamed off into trade schools or apprenticeships are now being kept in a more academic stream longer. Industry, which used to a lot of it's own training, now does very little. They want job-ready hires only, which means that the school system has also inherited the task of training those individuals who'd have in your day been hired out of high school and trained on the job.

So, kids who would once have been diverted from college are now encouraged to stay in school to receive as much academic education as they can absorb. Dropouts can't do what the dropouts of your day could, which was to get a job at GM and a middle-class lifestyle to go with it.

However, if you keep more of the less promising students in an academic stream longer, they'll pull the average down. In your day only one kid in ten went on to tertiary education. These days its closer to one in two. If your argument is that the decline is average scores indicates a general decline in ability, it's incorrect. What it actually means is that far more kids are being educated to a higher standard than ever before. The average score has declined because we're now testing kids who'd never have been tested in the past. However, the scores attained by the top ten percent of each cohort - kids who used to the only ones to get to college, but are now only the top 20% - haven't declined at all. In fact, they're rising slightly. It's only this last pairing which is a true apples-to-apples comparison.

Never mind the lack of the word "do", I've been waiting all thread for someone to write "it's" wrongly. Thanks S1m0n!

[I.D.10-t]

Parents these days...

[Walden]

I'm literate.

[talasiga]

It's literate.

[carrie]

I like the writing and grammar programs we've used and wish more schools would adopt something similar.

Just curious which programs you refer to, if you don't mind saying. I'm in the textbook publishing business and focus on language arts.

Thanks.

[Mockingbird]

PM'd you!

[carrie]

Thanks!

[Doug_Tipple]

Its terrible. Its terrible (Ive forgotten what I was going to say). Oh yes, its terrible that their is so much illiteracy every where you look. When you think of it illiteracy is sort of unamerican because the fondling fathers wanted us all to be able to read the constitution so that we could be aware of our freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Without freedom there can be no literacy and every body will be illiterate and that isn't good for the country. So lets get rid of illiteracy once and for all.

[Denny]

Hey there, I don't think the public school system is their fault.

[SteveShaw]

The goalposts have shifted so much in recent years in terms of what criteria we use to measure academic achievement that it's difficult to say whether there has been a general upping of standards (a brilliantly vague expression in itself), though I don't share Simon's optimism. Through the 80s and early 90s I was an examiner in "A" Level biology at the University of London (rising to the heady heights of assistant chief examiner towards the end, a role which involved moderating the marking of a team other examiners). My speciality was the final essay paper, in which candidates had to select five questions of a fairly unstructured nature. In the twelve years I was doing that work I saw the paper change from being a stiffly academic test, requiring students to marshal some fairly sophisticated concepts and opinions with little assistance by way of pointers in tersely-worded questions, into a far more "can-do" exercise with plenty of user-friendly pointers in wordier, more structured questions. Eventually the paper was abandoned altogether in favour of a semi-structured approach. My subjective opinion at the time (shared by most of the team leaders) was that the marking scheme gradually became quite a bit more lenient in that time as well in that we were far more frequently giving marks for buzz-words in the answers rather than consistently looking for terms used in appropriate contexts. As the years advanced we were getting far more scripts scoring in the 80s and 90s but in our guts we knew that this was not a reflection of a rise in standards. I'm not necessarily saying that the changes I saw were regrettable or retrograde, but I am saying that it makes claims of rises in standards impossible to verify. The obverse is that it also makes a fall in standards equally hard to discern. Something political in it all I think.

And I do think that the decline in standards has a lot to do with Americans using extra commas all over the place, all the time.

[Innocent Bystander]

No, no! It's the neglect and decline of the semicolon!

[MikeS]

And I do think that the decline in standards has a lot to do with Americans using extra commas all over the place, all the time.

We Yanks, literate folk as we are, find, most times, that commas, carefully considered and placed, do, almost without fail, make sentences, in casual, as well as academic, writing, clearer and, generally, easier to understand, mostly.

[mutepointe]

I alliterate.

The Fatal Comma

[SteveShaw]

And I do think that the decline in standards has a lot to do with Americans using extra commas all over the place, all the time.

We Yanks, literate folk as we are, find, most times, that commas, carefully considered and placed, do, almost without fail, make sentences, in casual, as well as academic, writing, clearer and, generally, easier to understand, mostly.

Genius!

Now, on to those apostrophe's...