The app for independent voices
"At the risk of simplifying complex problems, the answer is books."
A line I wish I wrote, but it's actually Mary Katharine Ham in National Review, chonicling the disappointing shifts in US Ed... and noting the Southern Surge as an important counterpoint.
I appreciated her spotlight on our efforts to sound alarms!
“Karen Vaites, a literacy expert who founded the Curriculum Insight Project, reports that books are gone from much of school instruction as a matter of policy. She notes that there are actually skeptics of the idea that reading whole books helps people learn. The most popular and rubber-stamped reading curricula in the country have young kids reading, at most, seven- to twelve-page excerpts of books. Last year, Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C., put a viral exclamation point on that finding by announcing that it would remove full novels entirely from its eighth-grade English curriculum.”