Your kids are (finally!) reading on their own . . . Now what?
Well, now is when we parents face the often-herculean task of trying to verify which books are safe and fit for our kids to read—not to mention supportive of traditional values!
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The latest report on school choice in Wisconsin again shows choice schools outperform public schools in Milwaukee’s biggest cities and rural areas.
The Apples to Apples report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty compares proficiency rates in math and English language arts in public schools, charter schools and private schools part of Wisconsin’s voucher program.
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State Representative Scott Cepicky (R-Culleoka) joined The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Thursday to discuss the General Assembly’s legislative agenda for major educational reform, including triggers in kindergarten, first, and second grade designed to identify struggling students and provide them with tailored interventions to bridge the educational gap and accelerate academic success – particularly foundational reading and math skills.
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When my husband and I decided we were going to homeschool, we puzzled over what might be his contribution. Our division of labor as a married couple included me as a stay-at-home mom and him as the primary breadwinner. Nevertheless, we wanted to find a way for him to be involved in the educational aspects of raising our children, despite his being gone all day at work. After giving it some thought, my husband decided on reading to our children at night as part of their bedtime ritual.
As soon as our first born could sit still enough to listen to a story, he began reading to her. As we added more children to the household, the bedtime ritual, already well established with our first, continued with each subsequent child. My husband sat and read his way through all of the books that had captured us as children, while our own children snuggled into their beds, listening attentively.
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A large majority of voters say that public schools should focus on the basics – math, reading, writing, science and social studies – to improve the quality of public education in the country.
That’s according to the latest The Center Square’s Voters’ Voice poll conducted in late October in conjunction with Noble Predictive Insights. The poll of 2,605 likely voters includes 1,035 Republicans, 1,074 Democrats, and 496 true Independents, and is among the most comprehensive in the country.
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Nearly 60% of students in Wisconsin’s Public Schools continue to be unable to read, write or do math at grade level.
The State’s Department of Public Instruction released the latest standardized test scores Tuesday, and they show 39.2% of public school students are proficient or better in reading, while 41.1% are proficient or better in math.
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Gov. Tony Evers has signed a new law that will change how kids in the state are taught how to read.
The governor on Wednesday signed the plan that will return Wisconsin schools to teaching phonics, and place a huge emphasis on making sure kids can read at grade level before the fourth grade.
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Former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) is celebrating the “comeback story” of his state’s fourth graders, who ranked on 2022 national test scores as the nation’s top performers in reading, and second in math, following the enactment of literacy legislation he spearheaded that saved the state from its “dead-last ranking in the United States.”
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Math and reading achievement for 13-year-olds in the United States is at its lowest level in decades, according to test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) examination, also known as the Nation’s Report Card.
According to results released Wednesday by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the average mathematics score for 13-year-olds plunged nine points between the 2019‒20 and 2022‒23 school years, while the average reading score declined four points over the same time period.
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A recent report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) evaluates teacher prep programs across the country and finds several in Tennessee lacking.
The recently released report shows that nationally, most programs at colleges and universities that prepare future elementary teachers still do not fully cover the science of reading.
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Students at Tennessee had the equivalent of 34 more days of learning in reading per year in public charter schools than at their regular public school, according to a study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes.
In math, the students had the equivalent of 39 days more of learning, according to the study.
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Charges were dropped this week regarding Christian street preacher Damon Atkins who was arrested for speaking negatively about an LGBTQ pride-flag-raising he attended at Reading, Pennsylvania City Hall on Saturday.
“After review of the video of the incident, including body-worn cameras, and a review of the case law, we did not believe we could prove a criminal case of disorderly conduct,” Berks County’s District Attorney’s office said in a statement.
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As promised, the Tennessee Department of Education released results from this year’s TCAP test for third-graders to districts on Friday. However, it wasn’t until after 3;30 that the data was delivered.
Districts still have to sort through the data and identify exclusions – students who are English Learners or have a disability that affects their ability to read – before they can send notify families of student status, Students failing to score “proficient” are eligible for a retake. That exam window is scheduled to be open from May 22 -June 5.
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A new report shows Wisconsin schools are marking a significant amount for federal COVID relief on construction projects, outpacing planned pandemic aid for core educational and mental health programs.
The Institute for Reforming Government’s updated K-12 COVID relief Audit found some $265 million of the current $1.49 billion in taxpayer funds allocated is going to construction.
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Half of Minnesota’s students can’t read at grade level.
At a recent press conference, legislative Republicans said this is because the education establishment bought into the “whole language” and “balanced literacy” approaches to reading.
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I must admit that I have not always been a serious reader. Like the vast majority of consumers of art, I was more interested in the escapist element of fiction and cinema. I would read a book or watch a film as a way to escape into another world for a couple hours. I was enthralled by the likes of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and Stephen King’s The Shining.
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Governor Lee is an avid advocate for literacy in Tennessee. In that spirit, he has proclaimed March 2023 as Tennessee Literacy Month, and throughout the month, the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) will be highlighting how reading is an essential skill for all students.
Commissioner Schwinn and the TDOE invite all Tennesseans to celebrate Tennessee Literacy Month, by spotlighting the Reading 360 initiative and the focus Tennessee’s educators, families, elected officials, and community partners have placed on improving literacy rates for all learners in the state.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed education reporter TC Weber in studio to discuss problems with TCAP testing and gauging the academic proficiency of students.
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There’s a world of difference in the abilities of elementary school students in the Trotwood-Madison City School District, outside Dayton, Ohio. Some low-performing fifth graders are only capable of reading first-grade picture books with basic words like dog and cat, says Angie Fugate, a district specialist focusing on gifted education. In the same classrooms, the aces read at a sixth-grade level, devouring thick novels that adults also enjoy, including the Harry Potter series.
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In 55 Chicago Public Schools, not one student met grade level expectations in either math or reading during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a Wirepoints report.
Out of 649 Chicago Public Schools, 22 schools have zero students who met grade level expectations for reading while no students were proficient in math in 33 schools during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a Wirepoints report. The data analyzed is from the Illinois State Board of Education annual report which details how schools within the state are performing.
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When I first attended a Shakespeare play, I have to admit that for the first few scenes I was pretty lost. Shakespeare’s English is of a much older and more formal style than ours, so sometimes experiencing his work is almost like hearing another language. Confused and concerned that the play wasn’t going to make any sense, I began to fear that most dreaded of sensations in our modern age of instant entertainment: boredom.
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In his work The Western Canon, Harold Bloom wrote that a “reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.”
The apparent message in Bloom’s flourish is that a reader ought to be after something more difficult to attain than mere pleasure. Passive consumption of entertainment will simply not do. Instead, readers are to be fully engaged with the work in front of them, especially when the process is difficult. It’s through this difficulty that a reader inevitably enlarges what Bloom refers to as a “solitary existence,” or, put another way, an existential engagement with the human condition.
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Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed education reporter for The Tennessee Star, TC Weber and official guest host, Aaron Gulbransen in studio to define literacy testing and discuss the Tennessee General Assembly’s big issues.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Chairman of the Education Administration Committee in the Tennessee House of Representatives (R-TN-83) Mark White to the newsmaker line to address the core of the third-grade retention bill and confronting issues in earlier education.
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The Tennessee Department of Education announced a partnership with the Governor’s Early Literacy Foundation (GELF) on Wednesday aimed to deliver books to the parents of young elementary school-aged children this winter. The books are offered at no cost and are for kindergarten through second grade children. The effort is part of the state’s increased commitment to early childhood literacy under Governor Lee.
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The dominant response to the recently-released NAEP Report Card on 4th and 8th grade proficiency scores has been to focus on the adverse effects of school closures: declining competencies, particularly for the lowest performing students. What is buried in the report is the continued alarmingly low black student scores on both reading and math sections and their inability to close the racial gap as they move from the 4th to 8th grade.
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Florida’s highest-ever 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress rankings indicate that the state’s students are “well ahead of their peers, especially with younger and educationally at-risk students who were harmed the most from distance learning in other states,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said when announcing the ranking.
“We insisted on keeping schools open and guaranteed in-person learning in 2020 because we knew there would be widespread harm to our students if students were locked out,” he said, adding that the results “once again prove that we made the right decision.”
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A new analysis of data from the Nation’s Report Card shows that Tennessee students lost, on average, what equals five months of math learning between 2019 and 2022 while the state’s students lost four months of reading learning.
The Education Recovery Scorecard, from researchers at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project, includes interactive district-level learning loss information from across the state of Tennessee and the country.
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Ohio recorded three-year decreases in scoring across the board for fourth graders and eighth graders in math and reading, respectively, according to a national study released this week.
The Nation’s Report Card, a product of the National Assessment of Educational Progress which began producing the report in 1969, cited an overall trend of decline in the United States. It comes in the COVID-19 era, when schools were closed by governments and students scrambled to learn remotely or get back into classrooms.
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The Biden education department announced Thursday that U.S. students’ plummeting scores in reading and math during the COVID-19 pandemic is all due to former President Donald Trump.
“Today’s data confirm the significant impact the prior Administration’s mismanagement of the pandemic has had on our children’s progress and academic wellbeing,” said Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Thursday, following the report that U.S. students showed their steepest decline in decades in math and reading scores during the COVID school shutdowns.
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Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Metro Nashville Public School District Four candidate Amy Pate in studio to discuss growing up as a Nashville native and her mission to reinstate the ABCs of learning.
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Roger Simon in studio to weigh in on ACLU open records request and the abomination of education.
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Friday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Tennessee Textbook and Instruction Materials Quality Commission member Laurie Cardoza-Moore to the newsmakers line to discuss the hiring of progressive Rachael Maves to the DOE.
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The Evers Administration will not support the Republican-backed push aiming to ensure sure younger kids are ready to read before the third grade.
State School Superintendent Jill Underly last week wrote an op-ed that dismisses the new reading readiness proposal from Wisconsin’s Republican lawmakers as simply more testing.
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For the first time in nearly 50 years, the National Assessment of Educational Progress results showed that the reading and mathematics scores of 13-year-old students fell from 2012 to 2020.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results showed no change in the scores of 9-year-old students since 2012, according to the assessment, also known as The Nation’s Report Card. Among lower-performing students, scores declined in both the 9 and 13-year-old groups in both reading and mathematics.
“This was the first time in the almost 50-year history of the long-term trend assessments that we observed declines among 13-year-olds,” said National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy G. Carr in a press release. “These performance drops are especially notable among lower-performing students, who no longer demonstrate competency in skills that students were able to do almost a decade ago in both subjects and age groups.”
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When Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) line-item vetoed a $155 million program for K-5 reading scholarships in the $17 billion school budget she signed earlier this month, teachers’ unions and other school choice opponents likened the scholarships to vouchers.
Many proponents of the scholarship expenditure are responding that while they would welcome broader choice-oriented education reform, a plain reading of the program does not jibe with unions’ and school administrators stated concerns about impact on public education.
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Utah is one of many states in America considering banning critical race theory in public schools.
Republican State Representative Steve Christiansen sponsored a bill that takes direct aim at critical race theory concepts being taught in public education. The bill passed the Utah House and is awaiting the signature of the Speaker to move onto the state Senate.
That bill, HR901, calls on the Utah Board of Education for a re-evaluation of guidelines to weed out critical race theory in publicly funded classrooms.
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A Minnesota professor recently debated in an editorial published by The New York Times whether it is “fair” to read his daughter classic children’s books because they are set in a natural world that is now “vanishing.”
Paul Bogard, an associate professor of English at Hamline University in St. Paul, wrote in a recent opinion piece, “The wild world my favorite books had encouraged me to love has been under assault.”
The books he refers to are “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Swimmy,” “The Story of Babar,” “A Snowy Day,” and “Make Way for Ducklings.”
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Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed TN (R) Representative Susan Lynn to the studio to discuss the upcoming special session in the General Assembly and its focus on education.
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Tennessee House Republicans have said childhood literacy is a top priority for 2021, but one literacy initiative endorsed by a drafter of Common Core standards and designed to encourage 40 school districts to comply with state standards is on track to be implemented before lawmakers return to Nashville.
The Tennessee Department of Education’s (TDOE) Comprehensive Literacy State Development program is designed to raise literacy achievement in 40 lower performing school districts.
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Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Principal Rachael Bradley of Thales Academy of Franklin to the newsmakers line.
During the second hour, Leahy and Bradley discussed the upcoming Thales Academy-Franklin event on June ninth at 6:30 p.m. and how Thales will teach reading to their students.
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Despite numerous monumental government efforts to improve standardized testing scores around the country, the average test scores for reading and math have remained virtually the same as they were ten years ago, according to USA Today.
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Our economy goes hand in hand with quality education. A strong educational system is essential not only to the successful functioning of a democracy, but also to its very future.
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