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I would like to see if phonics are really necessary for an entire classroom of children to learn, or if individual learning styles could be identified and catered to. I would like to see why it is necessary to have differentiated classrooms in the elementary years, or if is this is merely some bean counter's version of education where the maximum is squeezed out of a teacher and the available space. I would like to see if the model that is successfully followed in Finland, for example, has anything to inform systems where formal teaching begins much earlier.
If you're familiar with the current state of public education in the US, you will be aware that it's taxpayer funded, by district, through property taxes and therefore highly segregated according to wealth/income, albeit with some funds provided by the individual states, and that it is not a federally run programme (though the Department of Education has the right to issue mandates like No Child Left Behind).
The debates around education include funding, whether throwing more money at education improves outcomes, whether the problems of integration and levelling the playing field can really be tackled through schools, whether America really is a classless society 'with liberty and justice for all'; above all the debate swings on the money, why parochial (church, mainly Catholic), fee-paying schools seem to do a much better job of educating even inner city children, whether financing of schools should be more equitable and not based on the property values of the school district, whether big city school districts squander money in administration, whether public money should be given to parents in the form of vouchers to allow them to send their children to private (church) schools, whether 'charter schools' (essentially private schools independent of school districts) should be set up (Engelman runs such a school) -- Engelman can't be taken out of the context in which he works, which is specifically the American school system with its rigorous separation of church and state and its long heritage of serving as a nation-building sausage machine, that is routinely ordered by the courts to undertake various make-overs of society, like racial integration, secularisation, etc., roles that have nothing to do with teaching academic subjects at all.
I do not believe that any old way will do when it comes to teaching reading or any other subject. I am concerned with the question of why some countries experience great success in the international rankings even though they start formal teaching later, while British schools seem to achieve mediocre results yet start younger. I am concerned with the loss that some students experience as a result of that insistence on starting younger and the sorting of students at a young age when it is possible that rates of neurological development may be very different from student to student yet students may be vulnerable in the emotional sense to such sorting.
It seems to me that there is a preoccupation with sorting and classifying of people in Britain (expressed in the class system and identifiers of 'class' markers) that gets full rein in schools, to the detriment of educational goals, and I would like to see if this is justified, given the experience of other countries where no such preoccupation exists.
The poor educational outcomes in America that you mention are not experienced across the board. A huge number of American students from a wide variety of socio-economic and linguistic backgrounds succeed very well in school. Trouble is, the reasons they do are not very well understood. Hence the need for data, and much more research.