Reading in SC–Reform?

So this is another one of those educational endeavors created and lauded by non-teachers that will undoubtedly be passed into law and forced upon educators who (and I know this comes as a shock!) might actually have a better idea.

Look–I get it. We need to do a better job with education in this state. And yes (yes, yes yes!) reading is fundamentally important. Should students know how to read by 3rd grade? Ideally. Teachers know that, y’all. For crying out loud, they spend 8 hours a day with these kids. They know who can read and who can’t…and they probably know why better than you–or a bunch of politicians.

What’s particularly maddening about this particular case is that Greenville County already recognized the reading problem and developed a program for fixing it. And their program is outperforming everyone in the state. What they are doing is working. They’ve got research to prove it. But the State would rather have them throw all that good work out the window to adopt some new system that they’ve chosen (a new system that likely requires teachers to fork out an estimated $4800 each to be retrained  while creating a new office within the Department of Education to give oversight to the whole thing–yay! More government!). Further, this system is reactive (if you can’t read by 3rd grade, we’ll keep you back a year and make you do summer school too), whereas the interventions Greenville County has seen success with are proactive and help students before there’s that serious a problem.

It just doesn’t make sense. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if you’re going to change education, talk to the teachers–ask them what works and what doesn’t–what are they doing and what aren’t they doing–what resources do they need to get their students where they need to be. Ask them. Because they actually know more than you (evidently) give them credit for. And how about let’s stop scrapping programs that work just to say we’re doing something different. If it works, don’t just throw it out.