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How bad are childhood literacy rates?
Is there a literacy crisis? Or am I just old?
Carlson, a professor of Victorian literature at Pittsburg State University, didn’t set out to make a grand sweeping claim about the literacy of all college students, but to look closely at the inner workings of the minds of a specific cohort to figure out how they thought about reading. Carlson’s study also doesn’t provide a comparative data set from previous years that might show us whether or not there’s been a change in the number of students who can evaluate a complicated text like Bleak House well. Forzani is concerned that the recent wave of reforms that have hit schools since Sold a Story have narrowed into a focus on phonics drills (although the podcast emphasizes multiple times that reading involves a lot more than that).
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