{"id":4662,"date":"2005-02-23T14:51:57","date_gmt":"2005-02-23T14:51:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4662"},"modified":"2005-02-23T14:51:57","modified_gmt":"2005-02-23T14:51:57","slug":"reading-and-civics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4662","title":{"rendered":"reading and civics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s hard to modify the current regime for elementary education in America, which revolves around annual high-stakes tests in a few subjects. However, without changing the fundamental structure now in place, we could infuse civic ideas and values in <i>reading <\/i>education. In general, there is a remarkable lack of nonfiction in early reading texts. According to studies summarized in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aft.org\/pubs-reports\/american_educator\/spring2003\/void.html\">this article<\/a>, nonfiction represented just 12 percent of the texts included in five major ?basal? reading series for first grade. &#8220;Furry-animal stories&#8221; dominate. A survey of 83 primary school teachers found that just 6 percent of the material discussed or used in their classrooms was factual.<\/p>\n<p>However, students perform better on existing reading assessments if they have had practice reading in a variety of genres, including history, news, and science as well as fiction. Thus schools should incorporate more social studies into k-8 education as a strategy for complying with existing &#8220;No Child Left Behind&#8221; reading requirements. As a very important by-product of reading about George Washington, Rosa Parks, or Nelson Mandela, civic knowledge and skills should also increase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s hard to modify the current regime for elementary education in America, which revolves around annual high-stakes tests in a few subjects. However, without changing the fundamental structure now in place, we could infuse civic ideas and values in reading education. In general, there is a remarkable lack of nonfiction in early reading texts. According [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}