[tzs]

> Mark Seidenberg is not the first researcher to reach the stunning conclusion that only a third of the nation's schoolchildren read at grade level. The reasons are numerous, but one that Seidenberg cites over and over again is this: The way kids are taught to read in school is disconnected from the latest research, namely how language and speech actually develop in a child's brain.

I presume that at some point in the past most kids could read at grade level, because presumably when it was initially decided what grade level was it was based on how kids actually performed at the time.

So how was reading taught then? They certainly did not know today's latest research on language and speech development in a child's brain.

Did they just stumble into the right approach, and so a reading program based on the latest research would end up being similar to how reading was taught in, say, the 1920s?

Or was the 1920s (or whenever kids were at grade level) approach also flawed, and it is just that today's approach is even more flawed, and so if we based reading programs on the latest research most kids would end up above grade level?

[maxerickson]

The scales are made up. Many of them are formulaic, counting sentence length or syllables or whatever and digesting that into a number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability_test links various measures.

I'd be curious to go back and see what and how much my grandfather read in ~1910, after he stopped school in the 8th grade.

[sp332]

When my grandpa got the news that he was going to ship out to the Pacific in WWII, the CO said to the men: "Gentlemen, there is a time and a tide." None of them had more than a sixth-grade education and they all knew what poem he was referencing.

Edit: it appears I have misquoted it myself, or I can't find the reference. It's probably the Shakespeare thing though.