If schools stop forging grades. My son has an A in French. No way in hell should he. He can't tell me a single word. Same went with Spanish.

Oh yes this is a huge problem, and I can tell you it is not new. When I started teaching college in the mid 1990s, I was shocked to discover that many of my students had significant difficulties with simple reading comprehension. I would say that about 30 to 40 percent of college freshmen in 1995 were reading at a sixth grade level. And it has only gotten worse since then. In addition, written and spoken communication skills were very low, as you can imagine. There were just so many students who could not write a sentence in English. And these were native speakers. I do not understand why K-12 public schools are passing and graduating children who do not have sufficient basic reading and writing skills. There are some bad trends in public education that contribute to this for sure, like grade inflation and not giving homework and spending too much time on autoscan testing.

I'm fairly bright, but I failed math all through school. I remember even having problems in first grade. When I graduated high school, I passed a math equivalency test by three points. I had problems at home and I can tell you straight out, when you have home problems, school? You don't care a jot about school. I decided to start math again when I went back to college in my 20s. I had to start with basic arithmetic. I didn't know decimals, fractions, or how to cancel. Thanks to some great teachers, I continued through Algebra to Calculus and finally to Physics classes. But I wish things could have been different and I could have learned all this when I was younger. It would have saved so much time and money.

Sadly not limited to just the US either. Friend is going through similar problems with his kids. Problems like failing basic English and Math but there is no holding kids back a year until they understand it. Or even giving them remedial work to catch it up. I believe it shouldn't just be on the teachers, but many parents are working long hours so they don't have the hours needed to help the kids either.

This is a many faceted problem, but one of the things I see as a part of the problem that leads to these kinds of gaps [admittedly this is just my opinion] is that we are too reluctant to hold a kid back. I was held back in 3rd grade because my multiplication skills were behind. This was early 80s. When I've expressed concern about my own kids being ready for the next grade level, I'm told that we don't hold a kid back until there is a significant learning gap. But by then it's almost always too late. We used to hold kids back to PREVENT a significant learning gap. Repeating the 3rd grade did wonders for me.

Holding kids back looks poorly for the teacher and the school, and sometimes the behavioral issue kids just get pushed through. Parents being uninvolved in their child's education is far too prevalent, they claim they don't understand, are too busy, or other silly excuses. Take the PHONE away from your under 18 y/o, shut down youtube, even kids youtube. Bring the computer back into the living area and WATCH what they are doing, engage with them and monitor their school work, review their homework. It is a collaboration teacher, student and parents. Schools be more supportive you job is to educate the kids not pass them off to the next grade, WATCH the teachers, HELP the teacher, SUPPORT the teachers. And the lazy teachers who are phoning it in - LEAVE.

Wow. Future voters... or non-voters, since they might not learn how to register to vote.

When my 3rd and 5th grade kids get home today I will be asking them about the things on these lists that they should know already. My 3rd grader scored almost 80 points higher than the state average on his state test this year, but now I'm curious if he really is as advanced as I think, or if he's just where he should be and if everyone else is behind. My older one is the one I'm most worried about..I already told him this year if he doesn't pass his next state test, I'm along the school to hold him back. He was held back already in first grade. It was my decision. The school would have let him move on, as they have the past two years, but I didn't think he was ready. He has been just below the scores he needed to "pass" state tests last year and the year before and has been able to get passing grades on classwork, so I didn't make too much of a fuss about them allowing him to move on. But again, as I've told him, if he doesn't get that passing score on his state test this year, I will. If there are things on these lists he doesn't know, he'll be learning them, even if that means I have to teach it to him myself. And his sports will be put on hold until he has. I'll be damned if my kids graduate from school when they aren't ready.

I did AP calc junior year. It was so damn easy, I have no clue how my classmates were failing. I was an exchange student from Germany and half the stuff I already knew from regular 10th grade math. (Well, let's call it honors maths, germay has different level of schools based on academic performance) I was also the only person that got an A in English, despite the fact that I wasn't fully fluent back then. My teacher was very depressed about that. It really wasn't hard to get an A, all you had to do was turn in 5 sentences of homework a day. You could finish that during class hours. I got an easy 4.0 and I know from other German classmates that their classes were even easier. One had a history teacher that would write all the answers to the test on the board the day before and the students were allowed to copy them down an take the list int the exam. And still students failed. All they had to do was copy down the answers, they didn't even have to memorize them.

Holy s**t! I was reading and speaking in full sentences by the time I was 2. I knew my name, address, and phone number before starting kindergarten. I knew cursive script before I was officially supposed to and the teacher had to keep correcting me for using it, telling me, "You can't use that until you're in the next grade." All of this came from my - working, first as a realtor, then as a nurse - mom. My mom, who also took care of the house because my father simply worked and "brought home the bacon" - all he took care of was the yard and outside stuff. I get it, times are f*****g hard, but how much harder are things going to be with us turning out actual idiots who'll eventually be responsible for running things in 30 years? No wonder it's so much more common to see unintelligible "English " around the web today - no one knows how to do any better. How utterly depressing.

I agree in the extent that this has gotten much much worse over the past decade or so. I remember when I was in junior high and high school (early to mid 2000s), my class became one of the first classes that was a victim of No Child Left Behind. They had to change all the requirements to graduate. I was an honors student, so nothing impacted me, but the requirements got changed to where now instead of learning grade level information/taking grade level classes, the school was fine with whatever those kids learned back in 6th grade. I work at a credit union, I speak with people of all ages every day. Everyone in every age group is lacking basic fundamentals of life. Daily, I have to explain that when you spend money your available balance decreases.

I'm not a teacher but an occupational therapist in a middle school setting. The other day I had a seventh grader that had no idea what STATE she lived in. Then I asked her if she could name a state. She couldn't. None. Zero. She couldn't tell the difference between cities and states.

These kids will grow up to be the people taking care of us when we're in nursing homes, so we'd better come up with real solutions fast, not just point our fingers and kick around blame.

Like it or not, the film Idiocracy is slowly becoming a reality. And people are letting it happen.

I drive a bus. The back talking from the students and not knowing their bus stop or what their address is or understand what I mean by crossing street. Some will give me their address, like I'm supposed to know exactly where it's located, and they don't even know their own streets. Some od these are high schoolers, by the way. And I'm in my mid-30s.

The person who mentioned the push to pass kids, and the bent on inquiry learning (while omitting memorization) is absolutely correct.

This makes me sad

As a gen z (in grade 9) I promise we aren't like this.

In my experience the underlying problem is that children can't read. Learning is difficult if you can't read. Comprehending anything made of symbols is harder. At every step the cognitive load of understanding new concepts is added to the load of trying to read and understand words. It's too much for anyone. Imagine trying to learn a new concept by reading about it in a language you don't understand. The solution for most children is easy. Read to them from infancy. As you read, point at the words. That's it. They will learn to read just as they learn to understand spoken language. They will learn to read before they know what reading is. They couldn't avoid learning to read if they tried.

I am currently teaching grade 12 Calculus. I had students ask me why 4 times 2/3 is 8/3 (not 8/12) why we don't change the sign when dividing by the 2 to solve 2x = 10. They had no clue what perpendicular means. Fun times!

It's Common Core. I have a gifted daughter who was adding and subtracting up to ten digits in kindergarten, now in 2nd grade they institute common core and they're still teaching adding and subtracting 2 and 3 digit numbers and she's struggling because they are making her do all this pointless guessing, regrouping and drawing boxes/ lines instead of actually solving the problem. She reads adult fiction novels for fun, but she can't spell, construct sentances or capitalize, because all of their curriculum is taught on chromebooks at school. They're learning about water tables in school, and this consists of watching a very long, very boring YouTube video and copying the map key on a piece of paper. I sat in on that class... The info in the video was wrong. I tutor my kid at home and they say she's at 80th percentile in math, but then say she is not meeting state requirements. Common Core is garbage.

Last semester my English class was doing Macbeth and someone read “agitation” with a hard G 😭

I teach third grade_ bilingual. 55% percent of my students are on kinder and first grade reading level. Every week we get new students from South and Central America,, some can't write their names or count to 20. The other students are not interested in writing, only a few have help at home. This problem is complex.

I teach 7th grade ELA. My students are struggling mightily due to my insistence they can write a complete essay in a week's time that is 500 or more words. They honestly think the concept is insane. So many kids don't capitalize I, some have no concept of spaces for paragraphs or sentences. We're left with a dilemma: I can either triage and teach them how to use sentence stems to have vaguely coherent thoughts that show their understanding... Or they can completely fail as I try to fix fundamental problems that happened in 3rd grade. There is a limit to how much can be made up in a school year if there are gaps in knowledge. They're being graded on a 7th grade curriculum and I'm being judged on their understanding of it... But they legitimately have NEVER used a dictionary or even knew what a thesaurus was so do I just let that desert grow? It's... Awful and depressing.

I remember when my son was just starting High School I asked him how many ounces there were in a pound and other such common knowledge. He had no idea. He was probably taught these things at one time but just forgot them from lack of use.

Here's how you make money: use cash to pay, after they punch the numbers for the money you show them into the register. Change about slightly like adding a nickel. Now they have to do the calculations in their head. If they make a mistake in your favor you made money. If they make mistake where you lose money you point it out.