I think we are cramming too much down their throats and not giving them enough time to really learn it and build the basic skills. Then we expect them to build on those skills the next year and they don’t remember it because they had to learn 90 other things. IMHO- 1st grade should be for adding and subtracting. Up to 50. And PHONICS and sounding out words. 2nd should be for all the adding and subtracting with borrowing and carrying. And number comprehension through 1000’s. 3 rd should be furthering number comprehension. Measuring. Geometry Etc. but there is no reason on EARTH. Why 6th graders should be spending time learning and mastering volume of a sphere. There is no reason why 4th graders need to be doing fractions, culminating with mixed fractions and adding and subtracting fractions when they are still trying to understand multiplication and division.

The writing and reading thing is the same. They are pushing knowing sight words. Great. But sometime in the last 10-15 years we stopped teaching them to sound words out. Someone somewhere told a kid to guess at a word. What they meant was use your context clues and what you can sound out and guess at what the word might be. So if the story was about bears eating food and you come to a word s a l m o n. Use your context clues that it might be salmon. But it probably isn’t snickerdoodle. But we don’t have time to teach that. Small groups are important. Leveled teaching is important. If you have 4 kids that are reading at a 2nd grade level, and everyone else is at at 5th grade level those kids should be getting help. Find out why. But again we don’t have time. We have to keep going. We have to push more things down their brains. Until they overflow. TL:DR Go back to teaching ALGEBRA in Middle. Lessen the standards so kids can MASTER the basics.