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better in the past. 50 years ago, even those parents read, whether it was the newspaper every day or periodicals. Now, they read nothing except social media on their phones. That puts their kids at a huge disadvantage. When a parent reads, it changes how they converse with their kids and introduces abstract concepts that the children of non-readers never receive.

Many English teachers have given up. Instead of actual literature, they have their classes read moden garbage, or they only read parts of actual literature. Imagine pulling out 50 pages of Huck Finn and thinking that anyone will get anything out of it? If you read, you can write. If you read nothing, you will struggle to write anything. Reading is essential in any subject area, even math.

My school is like an increasing number that have a "skills-based" math curriculum centered on group work and "real life" applications. Most of these similar approaches too quickly jump over the fundamentals and the rote memorization that is necessary to engage in higher-level application of concepts. This isn't opinion. There is plenty of science behind the determination that an awful lot of memorization must happen before moving on to complex, abstract cognition. The group work part presents problems most people can figure out on their own. First, you have the students who do nothing and rely on other group members to do the work for them. Second, it increases the amount of socializing around topics unrelated to classwork. Then, to top it off, when it comes time for tests, these students who have done everything in groups are then expected to perform individually. It's not difficult to understand why this doesn't work. Consequently, at my school, a majority of students, and usually a super-majority of students, have to "retake" their tests because they failed, to the point that they treat to initial test as a practice run, knowing they can retake and retake and retake until they receive a "3" or a "4" on the standards-based grading 4-point scale.

Smart kids with supportive parents will usually succeed, regardless how misguided the curricula or even the incompetence of their teachers. Plus, they will tend to be the ones in AP or college credit courses, where they will be surrounded by similarly intelligent and disciplined students. Meanwhile, the other kids will be surrounded by other kids who perform in math and English at several grade levels below where they should be, and will be in classrooms where disruptive student behavior is a daily occurrence. You can easily find data on the increases in disruptions and violence in America's classrooms, and it has been answered with ridiculous approaches to school discipline that only make the situation worse. We have abandoned many/most time-tested approaches to education, and this is the primary failing in modern public schools. Yes, we returned to phonics, but only when the failure of "whole language" was so brutally obvious and pronounced. It can take decades to eradicate such kinds of educational weeds.