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Notes -
It would only be evidence of bad teaching for blacks though, since other groups have much better literacy rates with similar teaching methods. To that point I asserted that you have no baseline for what the literacy rates for blacks should be.
Again, if the point was not about blacks, why specifically mention blacks? If a method is bad since it can't teach blacks then would it be, by the same token, good since it can teach Asians? This rubric is obviously faulty. I don't buy the sincere proposition that we are specifically mentioning blacks because that's the best way to illustrate the problem.
I don't disagree. I just can't manage to fit all those pieces together. I mention the black white gap because of the implications that has to any methodology that assumes that you can in one way or another uniquely affect the literacy of blacks whilst assuming that blacks and whites are of equal cognitive ability. I assumed the people doing the podcast were not race realist HBD types. That was a complete guess on my part though. But for anyone that is not, I don't know how you piece that narrative together. It's not as if most kids that aren't black are born with a silver spoon in their mouth.
The reason I said you didn't lead with that is because you didn't. The point made by you was not a study controlling for relevant factors concluding that kids learned to read better using phonics and that this would greatly benefit all children. It's was: "The results, the podcast claims, are dismal. As evidence, it includes some agonizing statistics, like that 80+% of African American 8th graders do not test as proficient readers."
You're right. Those adjectives all apply. But by the same token the constant reliance on black tears to garner sympathy sickens me on a fundamental level. I mean, are the illiteracy rates of poor white kids not good enough? Do we really need to weave a narrative including the white kids that have vs the black kids that have not when talking about what methodology works best to teach kids how to read? Like, really?
In any case I explicitly responded to vitriol I felt was implied but that might not have been warranted when directed at you. My bad.
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