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1/3 of US schools teach reading in a way that doesn't work.

arthwollipot said:
Australia has a National Curriculum, whereas in the US, teaching methods and even what is taught is up to the whim of the states or even the school districts. There is no enforced consistency like there is here.

When my kids were being taught to read (early 2000s) we as parents were specifically told not to use phonics at home. We ignored that.
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Much more a feature than a bug of the US really. That way when its screwed up, it only effects some kids and if some jurisdiction gets something right, others can copy. Imagin the ******** fights we'd have in congress if we had a national curriculum. CA and TX Reps would come to blows.

Aside from that its only partially true.
Federal funding comes with strings attached, part of this story is that This method of teaching reading had to fight to get that federal funding and thus some of the versions were modified to include phonics.

Most states also have established curriculum of one sort or another, there's a fight about that in FL right now. Which is roughly the equivalent of Australia establishing a national curriculum.
 
ahhell said:
Much more a feature than a bug of the US really. That way when its screwed up, it only effects some kids and if some jurisdiction gets something right, others can copy.
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That logic only applies in a country where the education profession is obsessed with constantly changing things just for the sake of changing them instead of sticking with what works or even really researching their own changes first. That description might not fit other countries.
 
Australia is much smaller, less populous, and more homogenous than the US. It's depressing how few people understand what the US really is. Especially intelligent, informed people who should know better. Probably the closest analog is the EU. Which doesn't have a "national" curriculum, because it's not that kind of arrangement. Rather, each member state sets its own policy. While the two are not identical, the US more like the EU than it is like other, smaller nation-states.
 
theprestige said:
Australia is much smaller, less populous, and more homogenous than the US. It's depressing how few people understand what the US really is. Especially intelligent, informed people who should know better. Probably the closest analog is the EU. Which doesn't have a "national" curriculum, because it's not that kind of arrangement. Rather, each member state sets its own policy. While the two are not identical, the US more like the EU than it is like other, smaller nation-states.
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While I agree with our main point, I wouldn't say that Australia is more homogenous than the US. They've also had a great deal of immigration since WWII. I've read that something like half the population is descended from folks who came there in the last 50 years.

Otherwise you are correct, the US should be thought as something more like the EU than any single EU Country. Not quite but sorta, something a little in between maybe.
 
theprestige said:
Australia is much smaller, less populous, and more homogenous than the US. It's depressing how few people understand what the US really is. Especially intelligent, informed people who should know better. Probably the closest analog is the EU. Which doesn't have a "national" curriculum, because it's not that kind of arrangement. Rather, each member state sets its own policy. While the two are not identical, the US more like the EU than it is like other, smaller nation-states.
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I've long said that the United States isn't one country divided into states for administrative purposes like Australia is, it's fifty more-or-less independent nations that have all agreed to work together in certain limited ways.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
 
arthwollipot said:
I've long said that the United States isn't one country divided into states for administrative purposes like Australia is, it's fifty more-or-less independent nations that have all agreed to work together in certain limited ways.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
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The primary advantage in the US's case, is that its the only way they would have agreed to it in the first place.
 
arthwollipot said:
I've long said that the United States isn't one country divided into states for administrative purposes like Australia is, it's fifty more-or-less independent nations that have all agreed to work together in certain limited ways.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
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The main disadvantage of the second seems to be that everyone keeps imagining it's the first, and misjudging it accordingly.
ahhell said:
The primary advantage in the US's case, is that its the only way they would have agreed to it in the first place.
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Much like the EU.
 
theprestige said:
The main disadvantage of the second seems to be that everyone keeps imagining it's the first, and misjudging it accordingly.
Much like the EU.
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IMHO, this is one of the things that is really driving the tribalism in these days. If we would let states do their own thing more and not try to legislate everything from the feds it wouldn't matter so much what the feds did. I have these political conversations with people and they get up in arms about what's going on in some state 1500 miles away. Usually distorted and exagerated. How much do the French protest about laws in Itally?
 
ahhell said:
IMHO, this is one of the things that is really driving the tribalism in these days. If we would let states do their own thing more and not try to legislate everything from the feds it wouldn't matter so much what the feds did. I have these political conversations with people and they get up in arms about what's going on in some state 1500 miles away. Usually distorted and exagerated. How much do the French protest about laws in Itally?
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Fully agree. The US Dept of Education should be abolished. Leave it to the States and their governors and legislators to decide- as was intended by having a republic. They have the right to compete on this for 'best practice'. If they suck at it, a report let us know. States can defend reasons why and we can decide if valid. People will leave for the better ones til it is fixed.
One size does not fit ALL and hampers timely innovations.
 
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arthwollipot said:
I wasn't the first to compare the US educational standards to Australia. But not all comparisons are invalid.
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There is no such thing as a common US standard for curriculum or testing.

It would be more apt to compare all of NSW to Los Angeles County. Or the whole country to California.
 
Sherkeu said:
There is no such this as a common US standard for curriculum or testing.

It would be more apt to compare all of NSW to Los Angeles County. Or the whole country to California.
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Yes, that is what the original comparison (which was not mine) sought to contrast.
 
arthwollipot said:
Australia has a National Curriculum, whereas in the US, teaching methods and even what is taught is up to the whim of the states or even the school districts. There is no enforced consistency like there is here.
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This is only partially true. Under the constitution, education is the responsibility of the states.

However, the states and the federal government do get together to work out common goals. A national curriculum was progressively developed by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). ACARA was established under Section 5 of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Act (Cth) on 8 December 2008. Roll out of the national curriculum commenced in 2012.

https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/australian-education-system-foundation.pdf
 
theprestige said:
...
Of course, someone can introduce typos, or play silly buggers with long words ...
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It's possible to mix and garble letters in words quite a bit without making a written text unintelligible:

Fro emxaple I ma suer yuo hvae no pborlme raedngi thsi, rghit?

None of you is deciphering phonems in the above line, none of you is matching words as a whole with remembered words. You suck in a bunch of letters, and somehow the words jump out at you. Your brain is doing a lot of associative work here that doesn't quite match neither the phonetic nor the pictorial approach.
 
Oystein said:
It's possible to mix and garble letters in words quite a bit without making a written text unintelligible:

Fro emxaple I ma suer yuo hvae no pborlme raedngi thsi, rghit?

None of you is deciphering phonems in the above line, none of you is matching words as a whole with remembered words. You suck in a bunch of letters, and somehow the words jump out at you. Your brain is doing a lot of associative work here that doesn't quite match neither the phonetic nor the pictorial approach.
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<joke>

That only works because we're used to Americans misspelling everything all the time.

</joke.
 
Sherkeu said:
The difficulty in navigating to find even the simplest information is bizarre.
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No kidding. Reason #357 for homeschooling.

We were amazed at how easy it was to blow the "professionals" out of the water. You wonder what they could possibly be doing 7 hours a day.
 
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