It's not their fault; it's the fault of everyone who has let the standards of public education be horrifically low.
I have yet to read anything written by anyone in my writing class which is at the level of 6th grade in a decent public school. There are two levels of remedial English and one level of what is supposed to be college English that students have to pass or out of which they have to place by testing to be in the class that I'm taking. After all of that, these are students who write grammatically correct sentences by accident, and that about half the time.
I haven't known how to talk about this problem or to whom I should try to talk about it. I'm sure that publishing this page won't cause me to be liked at school; however, all of the illiterate students who are passed through each grade, from kindergarten to college graduation, are being failed in a much more fundamental way.
It's a problem that is happening around the country. You aren't guaranteed to get a good education if you have money or live somewhere that money is spent on education; however, it seems that it is almost guaranteed that not having those advantages means that you will be an illiterate adult.
The public narratives about people who get out of impoverished situations by working hard in substandard schools are not bad except for the way that they are used by the privileged to avoid the issue of why those schools are substandard.
Copyright L. Kochman, March 6, 2016 @ 6:21 p.m.
