Jim Christopher
16.6K posts
@JimRChristopher
Dr. Jim Christopher is the retired head of KGMS/Maplewood a K-12 school for children and young adults with learning differences.
🇨🇦 It's shockingly easy to walk into restricted areas of Canada’s busiest airport in Toronto.
As the school year comes to a close, a new analysis shines a harsh spotlight on what's being called a "learning recession" among American students. It's a problem that started long before the pandemic, according to the latest National Education Scorecard — an annual deep dive into data about kids in grades K-12. The findings of this report are sobering. Children had a steady decline in math and reading scores beginning all the way back to 2013, which happens to be when smartphones and social media really took off. Compared to a decade ago, math scores today are down in 70% of school districts. Reading scores are down in 83%. Scores have climbed a bit since 2022, but nowhere close to making up all the lost ground. In fact, 8th grade reading scores are now at their lowest level since 1990. @wmbrangham recently spoke with Thomas Kane, one of the authors of the scorecard and a professor at Harvard University.
Considering Jimmy Carter wasn't president during the Bicentennial, it would have been very hard for him to make it about himself.
In an excellent post, @mcglynn3 spotlights something that also troubled me about the Fordham report: This was a real mixed bag, and I get worried when supplements, core programs, interventions get commingled... to say nothing of the possibility that respondents were answering with assessments or frameworks. Come for this conversation, stay for the “Just Fold in the Cheese” metaphor that is constantly apt in literacy circles.
Join the kickoff meeting for Supporting The Right to Read in Quebec Anglophone Schools and help support equitable access to evidence-aligned reading instruction for Québec’s English-language students. 🗓 May 20 | 7 pm 🔗 : bit.ly/3P8qXEb
