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Notes -
Quite right, it is absurd. I'm not going to defend the curriculum-writers as intellectual giants either. A lot of it is bad from the input end I understand, my friend was brought in to make sure the curriculum they were proposing was correct and a lot of it wasn't. Some of it was just nonsense, platitudes without meaning. Constantly changing curriculums is bad as well, I agree that there ought to be stability.
But the issue I'm talking about is to do with the very structure of the system. You weren't told what you need to know to do your job, so you ad-hoc it and it sort of works out. Nobody can even come in to make sure you're doing it right, nobody seems to know what doing it right looks like! This is a bad way to run an institution. There isn't a proper centralized control, so people just do what they were taught the first time...
We all know phonics is the way to go, so why haven't we been doing that primarily for the last 30 years, why are we rediscovering it? I suspect it's the very issues you note: everything is so decentralized teachers do whatever they feel like, whatever they were taught back when they were taught, nobody is checking to see that they're teaching the right things. If they do check, then it's not effective. Feedback checks like exams are gamed and measurable outcomes manipulated. All this public money goes into education and the payoff is pretty meagre. I'm not American but the standard of American education is pretty low, even on that simplest level of connecting sounds to letters (never mind strongly). We can pick and choose whatever stunning illiteracy statistics we like, it's not working.
Just imagine if this was any other profession:
The whole thing is systemically broken.
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