New York’s literacy disaster: Letters – Latest News
The Issue: Majority of third- to fifth-grade college students in New York public faculties failing their ELA take a look at.
There is no excuse for the declining literacy of New York college students (“95% give NYC schools a failing grade,” Aug. 9).
My dad and mom attended segregated faculties within the Jim Crow South and nonetheless knew how to learn, though their faculties didn’t obtain the identical quantity of funding and a spotlight as different faculties.
Why don’t we go back to educating youngsters how to learn the way in which anybody over the age of 40 realized how to learn: good old school phonics?
James Johnson
Brooklyn
What is lacking from tales in regards to the abysmal studying and math scores in grades 3-8 is consideration of the cultures youngsters reside with at home. The terrible lecturers unions are culpable, however no more so than these youngsters’s dad and mom and guardians.
Speaking English proficiently, studying to your youngsters and emphasizing studying — reasonably than watching TV — are essential example-setting actions. To consider in any other case is a nanny-state mentality that can proceed to lead to wasted taxpayer money.
Cary MacDonald
Boulder, Colo.
Many many years in the past, the strategy of educating studying in public faculties was modified from phonics to the dumb “look-say.” Now, New York City public college college students can barely trudge by a sentence when requested to learn from a choice.
Meanwhile, parochial college college students are glorious readers. Why? Many parochial faculties saved the phonics methodology of educating studying.
Public faculties have wasted countless {dollars} on training strategies that don’t work. Parents should insist town rely a lot more on phonics.
Maureen Healy
Manhattan
The lecturers union deserves most of the blame for the gorgeous drop in ELA proficiency, however there’s one other issue that needs to be thought-about, and never simply in New York City.
Today’s households need to have two incomes. That means children are getting picked up by a latchkey program, as an alternative of after-school hours. Then comes making ready dinner, cleansing up and baths. Throw in weekend chores and arranged actions, and oldsters are overwhelmed.
Parents at this time lack the time to sit down and browse with their youngsters, the way in which it was once after I was a teen.
Rob Feuerstein
Staten Island
Remote studying during college closures compelled by the trainer unions’ was a studying and developmental catastrophe for all youngsters. Parents, particularly the poor, need to demand college selection.
Also, The Post ought to examine the place the politicians and trainer union members ship their youngsters to be educated.
Bruce Collins
Middletown, NJ
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The Issue: President Trump’s government order affirming the CDC’s new childhood vaccine schedule.
I had a pal in school who had polio. Additionally, my late spouse suffered from that dreadful illness (“Vax ‘split’ decision,” Aug. 11).
Having seen the difficult lives they led, I can not perceive how any caring mum or dad wouldn’t vaccinate his or her baby based mostly on a medically-recommended schedule — not one endorsed by an unqualified politician and his equally unqualified health secretary.
Paul Newman
Merion Station, Pa.
Science says vaccines don’t trigger autism. Yet President Trump and his supporters are selling this fallacy and even issuing government orders that needs to be shredded.
Vaccines needs to be out there to everybody, free of value and simply accessible, however that’s not the fact. Getting three vaccines directly takes much less time, prices much less for appointments and also you don’t have to fret about forgetting one. Separating the photographs won’t help anybody.
Dennis Fitzgerald
Box Hill, Australia
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