For the first time in modern history, a generation scores lower than the one that raised it. The reason sits on every school desk in America.
The $30 Billion Classroom Experiment That May Have Made Kids Worse at Learning. Image credit: Shutterstock
James Welsch teaches American politics at Gorham High School in Maine. His classroom runs almost entirely on screens. Students write blog posts, trade articles, and pull up videos mid-discussion. But a few years ago, Welsch noticed something wrong with the writing. Essays submitted digitally had grown choppy. Whole passages looked copied. The fluency he expected on the page was not there.
So he changed the routine. In some courses, Welsch now requires students to write first drafts by hand. Continue reading
It’s a bold claim – but the truth is more complex, and far more interesting than the headline suggests.
I’ve spent many happy hours volunteering in a program for inner-city children in Minneapolis since I was a teen. One of my tasks over the years has been helping these children with writing.
Unless we become Amish, (which is probably a healthier lifestyle), the mastery of technology is essential for success in the 21st century and should be taught in schools. But this guest opinion is going to cover three areas where the use or overuse of technology is not beneficial to students and can be dangerous.
Ralph Rodriguez, an attorney at Home School Legal Defense, told “Washington Watch” he was being interviewed on the program just hours after helping homeschooling families in Connecticut fight a bill that would allow the Department of Children and Families, or DCF, to investigate families for child abuse.
Not so very long ago, school districts and education leaders told us that technology in the classroom was essential to the success of our students. “An iPad on every desk” became the new “chicken in every pot” slogan, as experts tried to convince us that technology could be a panacea for the nation’s test scores.
The quality of the education that our children are receiving in America’s public schools just continues to go down. At one time, the concern was that not enough students were taking advanced courses. But now we have reached a point where a very large portion of our high school graduates cannot read effectively, cannot write effectively and cannot do basic math effectively.
Okay, parents, how many of you have gone to your local city hall, county commission meeting and petitioned that they work with you to get all schoolbooks removed until proven innocent of brainwashing your children?
The Department of Education is getting a bigger budget, less than a year after President Donald Trump ordered the department’s closure.
So long as the government controls the “public” schools, there are bound to be conflicts over what should be taught there. Only if all schooling is supplied by the free market will the problem end. In a free market, parents can get schools that supply them with the sort of education they want for their children. 
Democrat-run cities are failing when it comes to education. The unsatisfactory results have worsened through the years. Too much taxpayer money has been thrown toward the problem, without seeing any improvement whatsoever. Too many students in the big blue cities graduate while being functionally illiterate. Teachers can’t be fired due to teachers unions. The curriculum has been dumbed down in order to allow students to pass. This is also happening in red states.