How the Education Establishment Tries To Blame Everything On Parents

A month ago, the Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.) ran a report on the dropout problem in the city’s public schools.

I sent a response to the paper, which they headlined “A Nation of Illiterates"-- A recent article seems to suggest the epidemic of dropouts is a mysterious surprise and there are no preventive measures.

In fact, tests consistently reveal that one-third of eighth graders cannot read at grade level; ditto for one-third of fourth-graders. These are the future dropouts.

This pattern, going back more than 60 years, shows that the damage is being done early and is easily spotted. Better teaching methods in the elementary grades can minimize the crisis.

Public schools are not doing a good job with fundamental skills, especially reading. The U.S. is said to have 50 million functional illiterates. This is our national shame.”

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I had only about 100 words to cover a really complex subject. But isn’t it clear to everyone that when we talk about “teaching methods” in the context of reading, we are talking about the Reading Wars, about the different ways to teach reading, and specifically about the conflict between sight-words and phonics?

The next week, the paper ran a response, which is almost a textbook-perfect example of how to muddle the facts, deflect criticism, and make sure that nobody stays focused on what is important. Here’s the whole letter:

“In 'A nation of illiterates', the writer stated, 'Public schools are not doing a good job with fundamental skills, especially reading.' The teachers my daughter had in 12 years in Norfolk Public Schools, and those I have volunteered for, worked diligently to help each child reach his or her potential. To blame low scores on poor teaching methods is without merit.

Students who are not reading on grade level, or who might one day become dropouts, most likely don't own a book or possess a public library card or have an adult in their home who will listen to them read each night and insist they do their homework.

They may have no one to help them study, insist they go to bed on time or feed them a healthy breakfast before they head to school. They most likely entered kindergarten without knowing their letters, numbers, shapes and colors. These are the same students who, most importantly, have not learned basic manners, how to follow directions or respect authority and the property of others.

We should be ashamed that there are so many functional illiterates in our country, but it is not the fault of the public schools.

Yes, schools should be accountable, but parents should be held accountable as well.

It is important for children to have learned the basics at home. Parents are the first and perhaps most important teachers of their children.”

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Look at what this writer states flatly: “without merit” and “it is not the fault of the public schools.” Everything bad can be blamed on the parents. The public schools are doing a great job.

The prose is so remarkably soft and squishy. It’s as though someone is describing our economy by saying, “Yes, there are problems but many people have good jobs; and my friends are eating at a fancy restaurant tonight.” That’s comforting.

I posted a response on the paper’s website pointing out that Marva Collins and her Chicago school took all the most disadvantaged kids for 30 years, kids who might never have seen a book, and she taught them all to read in their first year at her school. That’s her boast. And that’s what the Education Establishment must try to hide, lest their own puny efforts drive the public to rebellion.

Sometimes I have the sensation that nothing that appears in our newspapers or other media is real. Every discussion about the public schools will eventually end up saying, YES, BUT IF ONLY THE PARENTS CARED MORE....

Think back 100 years. We had millions of immigrants who couldn’t speak English, never mind have a book in their cold-water flats. The kids came to school ignorant, illiterate, and probably scared out of their minds. Schools took the kids in hand and taught them to read and write. It’s precisely that job our ne’er-do-well Education Establishment has stopped doing.

Please, don’t let them get away with it. When you hear people trying to blame problems on the parents, just say: “Okay, but we have to deal with that and overcome it. Stop looking for excuses. Let’s figure out  how we are going to do this job correctly in spite of obstacles. It’s been done before. Maybe if the Education Establishment really cared and really tried, we can do it again.”

First Step? Find out how Marva Collins worked her magic. Do the same thing.

(For more on reading crisis, see "42: Reading Resources" on Improve-Education.org.)

dumbing down, economy, failing schools, flesch, functional illiteracy, K-12, mediocrity, phonics, productivity, sight words, sight words sophistry, whole language, whole word

How We Reverse the Educational Decline Of The Last 50 Years & Save American Business

One of the most revealing facts about American education is that huge numbers of students arrive in college not knowing, for example, what 7 x 9 is.

Virtually every bad current in education comes together in that one extraordinary statement.

The Education Establishment is clever at concocting justifications for this strange amnesia. But is there, in a sensible world, any justification at all? Everyone graduating from high school should know such basic stuff. So why isn’t it taught?

The Party Line for almost a century is that children don’t need to memorize things. John Dewey dismissed the importance of reading, writing, geography, etc. Other top theorists specifically claimed that “arithmetic....include[s] content that is intrinsically of little value," this in 1929.

The throwaway line “They can look it up” is a distillation of this wrong-headed tendency. Living in Manhattan 25 years ago, I knew a woman studying at Hunter College’s School of Education and she actually said those words to me, with total seriousness. I knew then we were in bad shape.

We should go in exactly the opposite direction. The brain is designed to acquire new information, and to enjoy the process. Kids need to learn basic foundational knowledge. Why leave them struggling in the dark? 

How many days in a week, how many hours in the day, what are the names of the oceans and the continents, how much is 7 x 9, and so on? Suppose children learned just one little fact each day. They would probably look like Einsteins compared to many of the kids coming out of high school now. But they wouldn’t be Einsteins. They’d just be ordinary kids whose brains have been used at least a little.

I’ve become quite fascinated by the poor teaching of arithmetic. I read up on New Math, Reform Math, Core Standards, National Standards, Race to the Top. New names, same old hooey. I think today’s methods simply extend Dewey’s dismissal into the future. The top educators are still trying to create undemanding classrooms where everybody learns little but gets a good grade.

 Look at New Math, then skip forward 50 years and look at Core Standards. You find the same love of  jargon, obfuscation, and difficult  topics mixed in with easy material. Arithmetic is most beautiful when it is elegant and spare. But our Education Establishment is in love with math as a wordy maze that almost no child can penetrate or fully grasp.

The multiplication tables are the very symbol of this entire debate. The public schools can launch a barrage of reasons why you don’t need them. But you do, if you’re ever going to multiply and divide quickly and easily.

If they can prevent the memorization of something as basic and traditional as the multiplication tables, then our Education Establishment can prevent memorization of anything and everything. 

Here again we see a pattern where so-called “Progressive” education turns out to be regressive. What, after all, is the difference between the students from disadvantage homes and what we might call advantaged homes? In the latter, children routinely hear information discussed. Conversely, in the disadvantaged homes, the parents are less educated, less verbal, less communicative, less informed. The children are not learning much from their environment. And this deficit is what schools must fix as quickly as possible in the children who show up to be educated. Catch-Up is what those kids need.)

A recent book--“Testing, The Chinese Way” by Elizabeth Rosenthal--tells about the author’s two kids going to school in China. The children were strafed by relentless testing. But the kids look back on it with pleasure, according to their mother. They thought of it as puzzles they had to solve. I believe most kids would welcome far more structure and discipline than they currently receive. It’s not the kids who demand permissive education. It’s the Progressive theorists who force it on the kids. 

You often hear academic debates couched in terms of memorization: it’s bad, it’s not necessary, it’s too much work, so let’s forget the multiplication tables, dates, history, whatever. In essence, the Education Establishment ends up arguing for zero content in the classroom, and zero content in the minds of children. 

For almost a century, the Education Establishment has waged its strange war against content, memory and knowledge (i.e., what you know). The so-called educators don’t seem to care which content -- they don’t want anyone to know it. So they always have a big satchel full of excuses for making schools dumber and more mediocre. 

The correct approach is to identify all the basic information that children would be better off knowing, and then teach it in a systematic way. Let’s see what kids can learn. Let’s give real education a chance.

(Bruce Deitrick Price writes about education, language, and culture on Improve-Education.org. See "45: The Crusade Against Knowledge." Also see "56: Top 10 Worst Ideas In Education.")

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How To Be More Involved in Education Reform

Here's the formula: 1) Learn More. 2) Jump In.

THE PROBLEM is that even the country’s smartest people--the movers and shakers in business, politics, the military, and the community--can't explain what is happening inside the public schools. What chance does the ordinary citizen have?

Truth is, American education is a swamp of misinformation. 

Try to find even one doctor, lawyer, stock broker, or business exec who can explain why Sight Words are kid-killers; why New Math and Reform Math are so harmful; why Constructivism is a pretentious and destructive fad; why Self-Esteem is counter-productive; etc..

Our public schools are burdened by dozens of flawed methods. Understanding the flaws is the first step to getting rid of them. Take a little time each week to learn more about what’s gone wrong, then you can explain the flaws to others. 

The articles recommended here are lucid, to-the-point, and can be read in less than 20 minutes. Ask a friend to read the same material; argue the ideas back and forth. Take your time. This can be an exciting journey. 

1) READING--WHY DO WE  HAVE 50,000,000 FUNCTIONAL ILLITERATES? Almost nobody learns to read by memorizing words as graphic designs. Trying to do this impossible task leads to illiteracy, dyslexia, and behavioral problems. Pushing phonics out of the public schools is arguably the greatest crime in American history. Here’s the quickest way to find out what happened: “42: Reading Resources” (all articles are on Improve-Education.org). 

2) MATH--WHY CAN’T CHILDREN MASTER BASIC ARITHMETIC? New Math circa 1965 and Reform Math (umbrella term for about a dozen curricula) circa 1985 employ the same improbable gimmick--making children learn advanced, almost college-level material mixed in with elementary material. Spiraling (moving  unpredictably from one topic to another) is encouraged, as is reliance on calculators. Mastery, however, is actually discouraged. There is constant chatter about thinking mathematically; but children don’t learn to do basic arithmetic. The simplest explanation of this malpractice is “36: The Assault on Math.”

3) CONSTRUCTIVISM--WHY IS THIS EMPTY FAD ALLOWED TO RUN WILD? The theory is that teachers shouldn’t teach; they should merely prod and nudge. Children must invent their own new knowledge (in all subjects). Take a simple piece of knowledge:  Paris is the capital of France. How will a child ever invent this? What happens in practice is that the teacher maneuvers the child into finding this fact. The problem is that Constructivism takes a lot of extra time and is simply not a practical way to learn all the foundational knowledge the children must learn ASAP in their early grades. For a deconstruction of this fad, see “34: The Con in Constructivism.”

4) MEMORIZATION--WHY IS THE EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENT HOSTILE TO  LEARNING FACTS? Ever since the time of John Dewey, there has been a relentless attack on asking children to learn and retain basic information. That’s why children can reach high school and not know where Idaho is on a map. The whole point of school since the beginning of time was to give children broad general knowledge so they can move on to  a deeper study of history, science, art, literature, etc.  For an analysis of this anti-intellectual prejudice, see “45: The Crusade Against Knowledge -- The Campaign Against Memory.” 

5) LEARNING STYLES--ANOTHER FAD THAT MAY HAVE NO SCIENTIFIC BASIS SO WHY IS IT ALLOWED TO CONFUSE THOUSANDS OF CLASSROOMS? This pedagogical method is used to justify creating categories of children -- some are X, some are Y, and some are Z. You have to set up alternate  classroom techniques, teacher training, textbooks, etc. Learning Styles is also a way of blaming the school’s failure on the children. Schools say, in effect, “Your child is failing due to a defect--his learning style is W-X. Children like that tend to be slow.” See “51: Learning Styles: How Educators Divide and Conquer.” 

6) INEFFICIENT TEACHING-- WHY DOES IT SEEM THAT ALL THE MOST POPULAR  METHODS TEND TO BE DREADFULLY INEFFICIENT... There really is a science here; it’s called ergonomics, human engineering or, often, common sense. If the Education Establishment were interested in what actually works, they would stage elaborate comparative testing to find the best ideas. They don’t do this. Our top educators seem all too comfortable with ideological goals, not excellence. See “49: How Do We Learn? How Should We teach? And Why Do Experts Always Get It Wrong?” 

Consider Self-Esteem as a final example. It sounds harmless but think about what happens in the average classroom. No matter what you try to teach, some children won’t get it. They’ll feel badly about themselves; their self-esteem is damaged; and that can’t be allowed. So the teacher has to shrink what is taught. And shrink it again.

Just imagine how these bad ideas, as the weeks and months go by, will produce a horrific downward synergism. It’s called dumbing-down. 

(Referenced material can be found on Improve-Education.org. Or just Google the titles.) 

Become an ed warrior. Translate knowledge into political action.

Bruce Deitrick Price

Improve-Education.org

A work in progress. Created as "Volunteer To Help Educate America About Education."

Obama’s Ed Plan Is Anti-Ed (and thus Anti-Biz)

This is a fine kettle of fish. The Obama administration is throwing money at all the states to make them toe the line. His line. I fear that what he wants them to do is the academic equivalent of putting a lampshade on your head and dancing in the middle of the street.

The stressful part is I have to read in the Pilot (Norfolk, Va.) that Obama and Arne Duncan have all these great ideas, but our stupid governor insists on being uncooperative. The nerve. I’m ready to hate the guy. But when I  actually listen to what Obama is pitching, I start seeing 50-gallon drums of snake oil. 

Our educators are always talking about critical thinking. Apparently not one of them can do it. So they assume you can’t, and they can say anything. It’s not like George Orwell told us in “1984” where they torture you until you agree that 2 + 2 equals 5. No, they just say 13 + 26 equals some two-digit number or other, one of the REALLY GOOD two-digit numbers, and assume you’re impressed. 

If you can stand to take a quick look at a recent AP story of hardly more than 200 words, you’ll find that it contradicts itself in almost every sentence. We seem to be listening to that guy who thinks his wife is a hat. There is only one intelligent response. You want to scream.  

In the first paragraph AP says that No Child Left Behind “tagged more than a third of schools as failing, and created a hodgepodge of sometimes weak academic standards.” Standards are weak but a third of the states can’t pass? What? Isn’t that like saying that the center fielder dropped the ball but he caught the ball? Seems to me the standards aren’t weak at all and may be just right. (***Note 2 below)

Obama, in the next paragraph, says he wants to move away from “punishing schools that don’t meet benchmarks.” Instead, the bold new idea is to focus on “rewarding schools for progress.” Hmmm. But if those schools that are being punished could just make some smidgen of progress, they wouldn’t be punished, would they?? Does any of that make sense? 

But our experts are just warming up. The third paragraph says that the new standards will ensure that “students are ready for college or a career” rather than messing around with mere grade-level proficiency. What? If children don’t have grade-level proficiency, talking about college and career is totally a case of hyping vaporware. Are people fooled by this stuff? Kids put on socks, then shoes. Grade-level proficiency is what we have to take care of first. 

This last bit may be the silliest of all. The new blueprints allow states to use subjects “other than reading and mathematics as part of their measurement for meeting federal goals.” This is crazy, because reading and mathematics are the sine qua non on all education. But according to this AP story, “many education groups” (i.e., the usual suspects) believe that No Child Left Behind encourages teachers not to focus on history, science, social studies and other “important subjects.” Why? Because they are busy teaching math and reading! As if you couldn’t teach math and reading while teaching all those other things; as if in the process of teaching those other things, kids wouldn’t learn to read and do math at a higher level. Please, everyone focus on this. They want to pretend there are classrooms where students will advance in history, science and so on despite not being able to read or do math. Here’s my translation. We’ll teach kids to write books but we need not bother with grammar or spelling. We’ll move right up to the fancy stuff. Basics are overrated. An illiterate teenager can learn history and science just like anyone else. Of course, you may see some simplification in the curriculum, some dumbing down in the testing. Illiterate children can’t be expected to know very much, but that’s hardly germane because they are moving quickly toward college and career. OMG.

I want to argue that sophistry as practiced by our Education Establishment is a form of poetry. Okay, maybe it’s not as good as the Menendez brothers saying they should get leniency from the court because, after all, they were orphans. But our elite educators can look you in the eye and say that kids can count to five so surely we don’t have to worry about teaching them to count to two. Excuse me? What did you just say? We must be sure of the simpler tasks to guarantee they do reach more difficult tasks.

Somewhere in this mishmash, President Obama says “unless we take action there are countless children who will never realize their full talent and potential.” But here’s my suspicion: most of what he is proposing will impede that potential. 

Never forget why somebody invented the phrase “dumbing down.” It was a quick way to describe the overwhelming tendency of our public schools since progressive educators took over. All those flawed innovations and poor results now flow seamlessly into what AP calls “Obama’s new plan for education.” It’s also called Common Core Standards. I urge everyone to go to corestandards.org and check out, for example, the math standards for lower grades. People with a Ph.D. in Gibberish wrote the stuff. The impression, overwhelmingly, is of bad ideas and bad faith. 

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Bruce Deitrick Price is an author and artist. He writes widely about education. He founded Improve-Education.org in 2005.

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Note 1; written for the Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va. Governor is Bob McDonnell

*** Note 2: my fifth paragraph is not a perfect analysis. Here's the problem. The word "Standards" is used loosely to mean: goals that students must reach; goals we dream of reaching; levels that are normal/acceptable in our society; and the means/methods we'll used to reach certain goals. Ergo, we can never know what the Education Establishment is talking about in any particular case. Take the simple sentence; "Our Standards are too low." No matter what you take that to mean, they can say, no, we were talking about something else. 

Here's YouTube video titled: "How We Fix the Public Schools: 8 Reform Ideas" 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJGzE0xpz70


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Announcing new blog called Ed Frontier;  http://edfrontier.blogspot.com/

New York Times Agrees With Me (Again)

Learning Styles In Denials

What an exciting day. New York Times agrees with me.

This is getting almost too easy. Here’s my secret formula. Figure what the Education Establishment unanimously agrees on. Then assume that it’s false, foolish, destructive. You will usually be on the right path then.

For example, just two weeks ago, I put a new article on my site with this title “51: Learning Styles: How Educators Divide and Conquer.”

I argued that “learning styles” are for the most part imaginary. The Education Establishment concocted this phenomenon, and continues to use it, by way of creating an alibi for their failures.

If your kid can’t learn, it’s not the fault of the school or the top-level educators. It’s the fault of some weird learning style that your kid is silly enough to possess. Your child, instead of being the victim of the school, becomes a criminal, guilty of having an odd learning style! You are guilty for having such a child. Be ashamed of yourself.

Well, obviously, this is an extremely complicated, far-flung cottage industry that our Education Establishment has created here. There are scores of experts, devising hundreds of learning styles, and thousands of people writing and commenting on them. How in the world could anybody figure all this out? I just took my best shot and worked on the premise that this thing is overblown, an easy conclusion for me because I assume that much of what the Education Establishment says is dishonest and self-serving. I learned this from studying Whole Word, New Math, Constructivism and all the rest of their trickery.

Truth is, I worried that I had as well overstated my case.

But then, much to my astonishment, hardly two weeks passes and the New York Times actually confirmed everything I said:

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded. (Sept. 6, 2010)

Zero support?!!! But our elite educators have turned loose 10,000 naked emperors on the schools of America. All the different learning styles require different kinds of teachers, different kinds of preparation at the ed schools, different kinds of tracking and testing at the local schools.

One of the most interesting points I made was that EVEN IF there are learning styles, why would you want to bow down to them? Why wouldn’t you want to saturate every child with MANY different kinds of stimuli? So the evil of learning styles is twofold: they probably aren’t real; and they warp and distort the workings of the school.

Please visit Improve-Education.org and see article #51. A few weeks ago it might have seemed somewhat radical. I meant it to be. Now you can relax and enjoy this seminal but safe article knowing the New York Times has confirmed the underlying premise.

Stop "Race to the Top"

The big story now is the Race to the Top. The federal government throws money at the states to make them surrender their standards and conform to what the Education Establishment wants. No good.

Well, that’s my suspicion. Ever since John Dewey, our elite educators have consistently worked to dilute content and nullify grading. It seems to me that Race to the Top is more of the same.

You can go to corestandards.org and read for yourself. Everything is very grandiose but finally sort of empty.

The Center for Education Reform (in its press release for August 25th) has counterattacked: “WHIMPERING TO THE TOP? A multi-billion dollar competition ostensibly created to drive education reform around the country resulted in rewards for states that don't support charters and other forms of choice, real teacher accountability or a limit on union meddling in the implementation of reform proposals....”

Perhaps the most dangerous subtlety goes by the name Authentic Assessment. It's a full-scale assault on factual knowledge. The Education Establishment is obsessed with making everything subjective. Education will be about feelings and opinions, which the schools likes to call Critical Thinking.

Here is a hypothetical. The teacher says, “The US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan near the end of World War II, killing more than 200,000 Japanese. How do you feel about this?”

Traditionally, students would learn about the US, about Japan, about nuclear bombs, about World War II, and all the other background info. Then you could have an intelligent discussion about the pros and cons of a particular action. Subjective education prefers to skip the foundational information and go directly to chatter.

Another “Authentic” tendency to watch out for is letting students prepare projects or presentations, as opposed to answering questions with right or wrong answers. Students are asked about their presentation. If a teacher thinks that the student has given good answers, the student can get an A. The teacher’s opinion becomes the grade. (Even if a student knows a great deal about the project, that’s not the same as knowing a lot about the entire course.)

So keep an eye on the theory that everyone should get a good grade, somehow. This is social engineering, not intellectual engineering.

Meanwhile, the liberal media jump in with unseemly gusto. The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk; August 22) preached: “Without reinvigorating its standards and measures, Virginia is in danger of becoming isolated as other states follow through on commitments to implement national standards. The Commonwealth will not only lose out on federal dollars but could also lose the opportunity to use more sophisticated testing methods, teacher support programs and innovations designed around the new standards.”

Here's my reaction. If other states are embracing ill-advised standards, Virginia ought to be isolated. (Yeah, isolated as in lonely at the top.) And note the fear that Virginia could miss out on using allegedly “more sophisticated methods.” My fear is that Virginia will use these faux-methods.

Every week the Virginian-Pilot lectures the governor: take the money, stop being so stuffy, join the rush with the other lemmings. Question: is your local paper providing more helpful coverage of Race to the Top?

Keep in mind what ed writer Donna Gardner said, in effect: the Obama Administration wants to do to education what it has already done to health care.

(For a sweeping suggestion for what we should do instead of bothering with Race to the Top, see my “38: Saving Public Schools” on Improve-Education.org.)

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Books For Boys; Boys for Books

51% of American babies are male. Only 43% of college students are male. Apparently somebody wants to turn the USA into a matriarchy.

Long tragedy short: public schools do A BAD JOB of teaching reading, especially to boys. This failure has ramifications throughout the society (and throughout the lives of the victims of this malpractice).

QED: parents need to jump into this mess. Now. With both feet.

1) Be certain your son can read. Many boys are on the edge, and just faking it. Later they will be classed as functional illiterates. They will never read for pleasure. (The linked article provides some simple diagnostics so you know what the situation is.)

2) Be certain your son is exposed to the kinds of books and magazines that boys are known to like. Schools tend to push boring, literary or otherwise inappropriate books on boys. Boys like the same stuff that grown men like: adventure, sports, military, machines, heroes, animals....It's a very long list; but it does not include "click flicks," Oprah-type books, and sensitive stories about women and their feelings. The true task is to get boys started, and if comic books or Sports Illustrated for Kids do the job, then hallelujah!!!

Please see "50: Leading Boys To Reading" on Improve-Education.org. It consists of an analysis, a list of books that boys like, and some simple diagnostics.

Improve-Education.org has many other articles about reading. Also see "42; Reading Resources."

This site takes the general position that nobody could be so incompetent as to create 50,000,000 functional illiterates by ACCIDENT. So those crazy old collectivists up at the top of the Education Establishment have been busy. Look-say, introduced country-wide in 1932, was a known failure long before Flesch wrote "Why Johnny Can't Read" in 1955. But the top educators have kept this scam in play for almost 80 years. Kids are made to memorize words as graphic designs. A very hard thing to do. Possibly girls can do this a little more easily. Possibly girls are a little more eager to please, so they try harder. But my sense of it from dozens of anecdotes is that girls are slightly better with verbal things so they can punch through the sight-word bull and start reading with phonics, which is what they should have been doing all along. But many boys don't punch through and by third or fourth grade, THEIR SELF-CONFIDENCE IS DESTROYED AND THEY GIVE UP. AT THIS POINT THEY HAVE PROBABLY BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH A.D.D. AND/OR DYSLEXIA.

Professor Dolch did it in the Classroom with Sight-Words. The perfect crime.

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