100 articles, fast and fun

 Education For The Fun Of It 

EducationImproved.blogspot.com

Faster by the dozen. 

This blog has more than 100 education articles, 

with all the titles on the screen at one time

 (if you click Flip Card).

Please recommend this to anybody who might enjoy
 a sampling of my work.

Hello, America

 I'd like to make one suggestion. Please learn a little more about what's going on in public schools.

 K-12 is increasingly mediocre because the preferred theories and methods are dysfunctional. They were designed that way; or they turned out that way. Either way, our Education Establishment does not seem interested in making things better. They're more interested in cajoling the public into accepting whatever is offered.

To summarize, you can't teach children to read with Sight- words (or whatever it may be called in your area); you can't teach arithmetic with Reform Math (in any of its many varieties); you can't teach knowledge with Constructivism (under any of its many names).

This stuff is to education what sitting is to running.

--------

What to do? Learn how these various gimmicks work. You will no longer respect them or the people pushing them.

My main education site Improve-Education.org has articles on most of these methods. See "Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education" HERE for the list, and a recommended article on each idea.

 Or search Google for a subject you are interested in plus the name Bruce Deitrick Price; you'll find a selection of articles.

Or obtain a copy of "Saving K-12-- What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" Available on AMAZON.

-------------------------------------------------

Update: "Saving K-12" is available as e-book on Kindle. 

https://www.amazon.com/Saving-K-12-Happened-Public-

Schools-ebook/dp/B079YHYQ87/ref

...

Education’s New Gettysburg Address

    Four score and seven years ago our progressives brought forth in this country a new notion, conceived in socialism, and dedicated to the proposition that all students must be created equal.

        Now we are engaged in a great civil debate, testing rather that notion, or any notion so arbitrary and totalitarian, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that debate. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for the ideologues who here told lies that this infamous notion might live. It is altogether fitting and propitious that we should do this.

       But, in a larger sense, we can not deconstruct -- we can not debunk -- we can not satirize -- these extremists. The brave reformers, living and dead, who struggled here, have exposed them, far above our poor power to add or detract. It is for us the free, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- we here highly resolve that this country, under God, shall have a new birth of enlightenment -- and that education of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
----------------------

“Only the educated are free.” -- Epictetus

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed." -- Thomas Jefferson

“Education makes people...easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.” --  Henry Peter Brougham

“The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.” -- John F. Kennedy

"Deliberate Dumbing Down"....Iserbyt explained

Wade through several hundred discussions about education. You finally realize it all comes down to one question: did all this crazy bad stuff happen by accident, or do the people at the top get up every morning scheming to keep kids semi-literate, unable to do much arithmetic, and ignorant in any direction you look? 

I'm fascinated by this question because, for one thing, the crazy bad stuff seems too vast to be accidental. You can’t take your eyes off it. Watching Rome burn must’ve been a similar experience. The waste, the incompetence, the reckless malice. Whatever the exact cause, finally you’ve got a city on fire. Not just any city. The world’s greatest city. And what have we got today but what should be the world’s greatest education system--and it’s on fire. But not in a good way.

Second, one of the most successful people in America told me years ago, "Bruce, I agree with a lot of what you say but I can't go along with the conspiracy stuff." That puzzled me. "Conspiracy stuff? You mean when John Dewey and his whole gang of socialists went to a conference and schemed to take over the ed schools, infiltrate the public schools, and thereby brainwash all the students?  Why don’t you want to call that a conspiracy? Obviously it is one." For my money, it's a conspiracy the size of Antarctica. QED: we're not going to make progress in our public schools until people start facing the obvious facts. Probably everybody in the Education Establishment for the past 100 years was part of this conspiracy. It was these people who deliberately dumbed-down the public schools.

 Third, once I got used to the idea that all the “crazy bad stuff” was surely the result of clever human activity, then my interest shifted to HOW. Wanting to win a fight, and being willing to do anything to win, is not the same as saying you have found the best strategy. Well, our Education Establishment is brilliant at sophistry. So what they did was to create schools with relentless, manifest activity that never seemed to advance very far. They turned public education into a Potemkin Village. That was the pretty but fake little town that Russian officials created so that Empress Catherine would think she was ruling a prosperous and happy country. Similarly, parents and community leaders are supposed to think that their public schools are doing just fine.

But that’s not the case. According to Charlotte Iserbyt’s famous phrase “the deliberate dumbing down of America,” our public schools are engaged in a deception. The key word, of course, is “deliberate.” The con, as I would term it, was carried out by the simple device of finding inferior methods, and using them whenever possible, to whatever extent was possible. For example, the Education Establishment might say that Whole Word was superior and phonics was obsolete. Well, not everyone accepted this nonsense. So the Education Establishment didn’t always win all the time. On the other hand, they never stopped trying to win. When one of their bad ideas was rejected, they came up with two or three more bad ideas. The public schools are now encumbered by dozens of bad ideas. Have you ever seen a caterpillar weighed down by parasitic wasp larvae? It was this sad sight that made Charles Darwin doubt his religion.

 For a quick rundown of the bad ideas, see "Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education" LINK 

Warning to parents: teach your children to read before school starts

Many public schools still teach sight-words. Take precautions.

School starts in a few months. Take steps now to make sure your kids understand the basics of reading. The basics are simple. You can teach them in a few minutes.

Problems occur if children are made to memorize sight-words without ever hearing about the basics. So here are the basics 1-2-3:

1) Children must learn to say, and then to print, the alphabet (the ABC's). They can identify any letter they see. 

2) Then they learn that the letters stand for certain sounds, A is for aaa. (Some experts say, skip the names of letters and just teach the sounds.)

3) Then children learn the blends; that’s when you say the T-sound (tuh-) and an A-sound quickly....and you get "taa."

That’s phonics!

That’s the basis of everything that goes on in a phonetic language. Most children will figure it out for themselves given enough time. The problem is that less-verbal kids need direct instruction the most.

If the child ends up at a school that still teaches sight-words (also known as high-frequency words, Dolch words, whole words and other names), that child can be slowed down drastically.

Here are some resources you can use. They all deal with the same problem from different directions. So pick one and start:

---------------------------------------------
"54: Preemptive Reading" 
provides quick intro to phonics concept.
LINK 

--------------------------------------
Best video on reading.  
If too small, view on YouTube.

Bruce Price, Criminologist

I usually call myself an education crusader, education activist, or education reformer. The basic idea is the same: things aren’t ideal and I want to improve them.

But these terms are misleading. They do not tell what I actually do all day, which turns out to be much more like what police investigators do. Or what, I like to think, Sherlock Holmes is doing right now in his stories.

There’s a crime. The police, detectives, investigators, and forensics people arrive at the crime scene and try to reconstruct what happened and who is guilty. That’s what I’m doing all day.

Truly, American public schools are the biggest crime scene in the history of the country and probably the world. All day, weird counterintuitive things are going on. Things that give the opposite results from what is claimed. Victims, suffering and dying, are scattered everywhere.

All the while, the Education Establishment lays down a barrage of false clues and tainted evidence. Every bad idea is praised as an upstanding citizen. Every bad result is concealed by jargon and disingenuous alibis. The Education Establishment blames parents, TV, drugs, sex, the kids, the Internet, sports, popular culture--in short, everything but themselves.

The criminals in the story are presented as heroes. The crimes are treated as victories or, at worse, momentary setbacks, innocent mistakes, and in any case the work of somebody else. 

So if we want to solve a crime we have to ignore all the BS. Be cop-cool and lab-clinical. First, start with a description of the crime. For example: we have 50 million functional  illiterates. Now, that’s a crime. How could it happen? The game is on, as Sherlock would say.

Our public schools created this result by using a lethal, unworkable method called Whole Word. Rudolf Flesch solved the crime in 1955. But the Education Establishment went right on. It’s like watching a criminal at a trial, continuing to lie. Whole Word was what cops call an MO or method of operation. Still going on in schools today. You say, how could they get away with it? Well, how could  O. J. Simpson kill two people and walk?

I think it’s what we call a corrupted jury. The Education Establishment is a billion-dollar syndicate, and protects the members of the gang and pays them well.

And what would be the motive, which is the main thing to deduce in criminal behavior. All of our educators are progressives, collectivists, socialists of some kind, and this has been true since the time of John Dewey 100 years ago. Their big goal is social engineering, creating a Brave New World, making a new kind of kid. Once you start thinking like that, you really don’t care if  children know  where Japan is on a map or what 6 x 7 is. And that’s the collateral damage we get.

 I remember when I found Sherlock Holmes and how much I enjoyed all the stories. I’ve enjoyed trying to solve educational crimes just as much. For an interim report from police lab, see “Top 10 Biggest Crimes in Education.” (aka Top 10 Worst Ideas) www.improve-education.org/id83.html 

To save the country, first save the schools

Here's a theme I've been talking about for a few years. The country's intellectual and financial decline is partly due to the mediocrity of the public schools. This decline can be reversed by adopting proven theories and methods. That's a doable project:  

Free The Schools --  a simple four-step plan  

 Our Education Establishment has an 80-year record of praising and protecting bad pedagogies. Enough.

Here is what we need instead, starting now:

---------------------------------

1. REAL READING. That means systematic phonics for several months until children learn to read. That means no Whole Word, no sight-words, no Dolch words, no high-frequency words. These gimmicks are all the same thing and the reason we have 50 million functional illiterates.

2. REAL ARITHMETIC. Schools use sensible, coherent programs such as Saxon Math, Singapore Math, or the like. (They do not use Reform Math in any of its forms-- Everyday Math, Connected Math, TERC.) Children master basic skills, know the multiplication tables, and can find answers. No more spiraling, fuzziness, or dependence on calculators. 

3. REAL LEARNING. It’s knowledge-based and fact-filled. Children learn basic information in the fields of Geography, History, Science, Literature, etc. Students advance in a logical way from the simple to the complex--which leads to genuine critical thinking. 

4. REAL EDUCATION. It’s academically correct (as opposed to politically correct). The emphasis is on building study skills and scholarly character. Students know a great deal, and know how to learn more. They can do independent work. They understand that precision, rigor, and honesty are the same things.

-----------------------------------------

FREE THE SCHOOLS 

is simply what all good schools have done throughout history and are now doing around the world.  

Good education is not rocket science. 

Get the asinine theories and methods out of the way. Real education will thrive.

We especially need this in the early grades, 

where lots of children have to play catch-up.

-------------------------------------------------

If you can use or advance this campaign, please do so. If there are people or groups we should contact, 

leave info at: Word-Wise, 757-455-5020.

 ----------------------------------------------------

A short article on what NOT to do: 

56: Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.

A short article on what schools SCHOULD do: 

“A Bill of Rights for Students 2013”

[both on Improve-Education.org]

YouTube video version of FREE THE SCHOOLS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaT2S4Vep-w

The last straw: my paper in Norfolk just ran an article praising local schools for adopting all the recycled bad ideas from New Math, Reform Math, Constructivism, Cooperative Learning and all the rest. There is nothing new, not one good idea. But this newspaper is all aglow. 

How can parents defend themselves against this nonsense if the media always aid and abet the Education Establishment? The short answer is that parents should not expect much help from the school system or local media. Parents need to familiarize themselves with the bogus theories and methods, understand why they don’t work, and know that we can easily do better.

MILITARY AND BUSINESS LEADERS NOT FORCEFUL ENOUGH ON EDUCATION

The pattern is clear. Millions of graduates of American public schools turn out to be remarkably unsuited, untrained, and unqualified to work for large industrial companies or the military.

Consider how remarkable this pattern is. Throughout history the military took everybody who could walk. Factories put every able-bodied person to work. 

But somehow the country’s public schools can force children to attend school for 12 years, and teach them virtually nothing. 

Another remarkable aspect of this pattern is that the military and business communities have been squealing and squawking about educational failure for more than half a century. But they have not actually improved the situation.

There are studies, commissions, laws, investigations, and dramatic press conferences, where generals  with five stars and CEOs of major companies announce a new initiative, a new policy, a new program, a new approach.

Nothing changes.

You would think that at some point people smart enough to be generals and CEOs would realize that the Education Establishment is living in an alternative universe. They like their little collectivist schemes. They believe in social engineering. They don’t give a damn what the military or business leaders think.  

Just recently a general announced that 75% of young people are not fit to serve in the military. So what was his answer? He wanted everyone to rally behind the new Core Standards. If you go to corestandards.org, you will find the worst kind of professorese. Horrible verbiage that will not help parents, teachers or community leaders monitor what is going on in the schools. 

When the Gates Foundation turns its attention to education, it seems to focus on peripheral matters. How big are the schools? How crowded is the classroom? How effective are the teachers? Admittedly, effective teachers are helpful. But if the teachers are forced to use unworkable methods, even the best teachers will fail.

The essential problem in the public schools is that they are infected with many bad ideas. Think of these things as intellectual viruses. They make all progress impossible. The main one is Whole Word in reading. If a school uses sight-words, children will be retarded in learning to read. Similarly, Reform Math is almost a guarantee that children will advance slowly in arithmetic. The list of bad ideas is VERY LONG.

Bottom line: military and business leaders must intervene more forcefully in the educational crisis we face. The Nation at Risk report is already more than 25 years old. Everything that could be said was said in that report. Nothing changed. Three years ago Bill Gates and Norman Augustine issued their own report and said that the public schools were pulling down the economy and indeed the entire society. Nothing changed.

This column is basically an appeal to the smart, practical and perhaps visionary leaders in the military and business worlds. You have to acknowledge that somebody is running rings around you. You have to be more aggressive.

---------------------