According to the Nation’s Report Card, only 27 percent of 8th graders attain proficiency in writing. But no problem, right? They’re just leaving middle school. Give them a few years under the instruction of high school English instructors and all will be well.

That seems to be wishful thinking, for the Nation’s Report Card shows that writing proficiency is still 27 percent by the time students head to college. Unfortunately, college doesn’t improve the writing woes of American students either. As writing expert John Maguire explains in The Washington Post:
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According to a recent article in the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, preschool-age children have a special talent for memorizing and remembering rhymes. As the Digest explains, a recent study found that, compared to their parents and other older adults, young children are able to recall “nearly twice as many correct words” from the rhyming stories they hear, all while making “far fewer errors.”

Anyone who has been around children for a time would readily affirm such findings. Children, as Oxford scholar Dorothy Sayers noted in 1947, follow three stages of development, the earliest of which she calls the “Poll-Parrot” stage: Continue reading →

For a number of years, it was assumed that public education was swimming along, efficiently educating children of all ages. More recently, the products coming out of public schools have caused a troubling concern to leap into the minds of adults: are schools dumbing down the content they teach to students?

That concern seems to have now made its way into the minds of university professors, as evidenced in a recent study conducted by the Times Higher Education. The study examined over a thousand higher education professors and administrators in several English-speaking countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, and predominantly the U.K.

Judging from the comments of these professors, the students they are seeing come through their classrooms are ill-prepared, unwilling to study, and in need of kid-glove treatment. Some of the choice comments from these professors include… Continue reading →

The other day, a judge used a unique punishment for a handful of teens who desecrated a historic school building with derogatory statements: read books.

The novelty of the sentence testifies to the fact that kids simply don’t read very much anymore.

But why this dearth of reading? After all, parents try to get kids to read. Teachers bend over backwards to get their students into books. Politicians and other public figures continually tell us that “readers are leaders.” Why then, with all this encouragement, are only 37 percent of high school seniors proficient in reading? Continue reading →

It’s no secret that homeschooling has experienced exponential growth in recent years. So much so, that Chris Weller noted in Business Insider that the homeschool population may soon overtake that of charter schools.

As Weller goes on to note, this popularity is attributable both to the advance of technology, the growing familiarity with homeschooling, and last but not least, evidence that “homeschooled kids do better on tests and in college than their peers in public schools.”

But apparently, some colleges have yet to get the memo on that last point, particularly Kennesaw State University (KSU) in Georgia. Continue reading →