Ken Burns: ‘Vietnam’ Doc Relevant In Country’s Current “Stew Of Anger And Recrimination” —TCA

Ken Burns is such a hypocrite on so many levels. I find much of his work one-sided and suspect.

Will have to keep an eye out for when they have it on the local PBS channel.

I wish that the media would find someone that knows how to use language properly.

And people wonder why they are not understood, nor why the US appears to be falling behind in hard skills education. Here is a perfect example.

But then again we also have a couple of generations where the current education mavens are the same ones that their parents could not accept that their offspring would not study and put forth a true effort in becoming educated.

These individuals are also some of the same ones that when writing up job requirements are stating that a college or university degree is mandated for an entry level job.

From 2006 - More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.
That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees, or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
“It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree and they’re not going to be able to do those things,” said Stephane Baldi, the study’s director at the American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social science research organization.

From 2013/2014 - The U.S. Illiteracy Rate Hasn’t Changed In 10 Years
According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.
The current literacy rate isn’t any better than it was 10 years ago. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (completed most recently in 2003, and before that, in 1992), 14 percent of adult Americans demonstrated a “below basic” literacy level in 2003, and 29 percent exhibited a “basic” reading level.

From 2017 - About a year ago, I was really confounded by my students’ trouble with reading for deep understanding. While I could see that the students were completing assigned readings, they weren’t always able to process the information deeply to analyze the concepts or apply the content to new situations.
In our conversations, Jen and I began wondering whether any large-scale studies had been done to examine college students’ reading abilities. After searching around a bit, we found a 2006 study conducted by the American Institutes for Research titled The Literacy of America’s College Students. The study looked comprehensively at college students’ literacy levels from a variety of different perspectives. If Chall’s work was eye opening, this study was even more so. In the study, the authors identify four literacy levels (below basic, basic, intermediate and proficient) across three different a literacy types (prose, document and quantitative). Looking at the average literacy levels for students enrolled in two- and four-year institutions, the authors report that while college students on average score significantly higher than the general adult population in all three literacy types, the average score would be characterized at the intermediate literacy level.
Expanding the lens to examine the collegiate student population closer, the authors uncover some important findings for those institutions of higher education whose missions include working with first-generation college students or with international students. Students whose parents are college graduates score significantly higher across all literacy types than those students whose parents did not attend any post-secondary education. Foreign-born students score significantly lower across every literacy type than their US-born peers.
(One thing that this fails to properly define - Intermediate level is 9-12 grade proficiency.)
Military writing is supposed to be written at the 8th grade level and has been that way since circa the 1950s. Testing of college freshman shows that their testing at the 7.56 grade level.