

California teachers lack the resources and time to teach science - ilamont
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-science-20111031,0,3957251.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fmostviewed+%28L.A.+Times+-+Most+Viewed+Stories%29

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tokenadult
From the article: "At some Los Angeles elementary schools, teachers have
drastically cut time for science because of pressure to focus on reading and
math."

If they are that sorry in teaching reading and math, so that it is taking them
that long to teach those subjects, it's time to get new teachers in those Los
Angeles elementary schools. Teaching reading to beginning pupils is a solved
problem. It's even a solved problem in countries that present unusual
challenges to elementary teachers by requiring that elementary reading
instruction be provided in a language that the elementary pupils do not speak
at home. (My wife grew up in one such country, where the sole language of
school instruction was the home language of no more than 10 percent of the
population in her generation. Singapore, a country with FOUR official
languages and English as the primary language of school instruction, had a
majority of pupils in my generation who spoke none of the official languages,
and certainly not English, at home but still did a great job of teaching
pupils reading and math in that generation.)

What is described in the interesting submitted article is evidence that
improving United States education by replacing some teachers in current
classrooms with new teachers

[http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads...](http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads/Hanushek%202009%20CNTP%20ch%208.pdf)

is a viable strategy for improving United States education.

