Occupy Harvard's Graduate School of Education

In a recent Times column entitled “Occupy the Classroom,” Nicholas Kristof went to bat for the idea of “early childhood education.”

He quotes the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, as she forcefully states what we already know: there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students; and those gaps widen in later years.

Question is, what does our Education Establishment intend to do about these gaps? Nicholas Kristof is sure that we should do something. And that something, apparently, is to do more and more of what we are already doing but force it on younger and younger kids. This proposal may be very dishonest.

First of all, I’m suspicious that this is merely a funding ploy. If the economy forces communities to cancel jobs in higher grades, the Education Establishment will simply create thousands of new jobs in Pre-K.  The same number of teachers will remain employed. How ingenious.

Second, if the Big Plan is to extrapolate from the anti-intellectual, anti-cognitive, anti-knowledge, anti-academic, distinctly lightweight approach to education that we now find in far too many kindergarten and elementary schools, then we should just save the money.

If the Big Plan is to do unto three and four-year-olds what we now do to six, seven, and eight-year olds, then we need a better plan.

Here’s the crucial question. What is it precisely that defines those gaps between rich and poor students?

It’s nothing nebulous, murky, theoretical, abstract, or hard to pin down. It’s precisely all the easy, ordinary, fundamental knowledge everybody should know. Middle-class parents are teaching this stuff from an early age. Poor parents don’t know the stuff themselves, they forget to teach it, or they’re too busy surviving.

Here’s what we’re talking about: the alphabet, how to count to 50, the names of colors, animals, seasons, days, holidays, basic science, history, geography, maps, etc., etc., etc.

Head Start or any other program that purports to help poor children has got to immediately address the knowledge gap. Everything that children in a richer home might automatically know must be taught, AS A CRASH COURSE, to the children from poor families. This is how you create the equality that liberals always say they want; but then they refuse to create it.

I think Occupy the Classroom is an unhelpful name. What we need to do is to Occupy the Education Establishment and try to make it support helpful, practical ideas, for a change.

Ever since the time of John Dewey, our top educators have been hostile to basic knowledge. That's the big problem. How to spell correctly, the multiplication table, where Spain is--all the stuff that is just second nature to families further up the social scale tends to be neglected in poor families. Ergo, the public schools have to start confronting this problem immediately, for a change.

So the real enemy here is the kind of empty, so-called education that is basically a low-cal confection made from a stew of slick sophistries, with names like Whole Language, Reform Math, Relevance, Constructivism, Self-Esteem, Cooperative Learning, 21st Century Skills, Critical Thinking, Learning Styles, Prior Knowledge, Multiculturalism, and another two dozen. Harvard, in fact, is one of the main culprits in perpetrating this stuff.

Well, here’s my vote. Get rid of all the folderol and start teaching facts and more facts, basic skills, and mastery.

GIVE POOR KIDS PRECISELY THE EDUCATION THAT RICH FAMILIES PAY FOR AT PRIVATE SCHOOLS.

Here is our mantra, provided by none other than John Dewey himself: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.”


(For more on slick sophistries, see “56: Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.”)

Education: A Walk On The Dark Side

Feeling brave? Got a cast-iron stomach? Not offended by decadence? Well, come with me and we’ll go for a stroll in the dangerous part of town, where society’s bad boys hang out. Yes, I’m talking about education.

One metaphor works best for this whole disturbing field, and that’s CSI. Imagine a really big crime scene, chaotic and messy, filled with walking wounded, people who can’t read or count, their brains empty, their thoughts incoherent. 

What happened here? We need to figure out whodunit and why? A wife stages the death of her husband for the insurance; that’s an easy one. Public education, the crime scene we are entering, has hundreds of major suspects, their deeds spread over many decades, the evidence murky, mostly hidden from view. All we know for dead certain is that millions of Americans have been victims of a crime wave.

In 1955 Rudolf Flesch wrote a bestseller titled “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” To a large degree, Flesch triggered the reading wars and homeschooling. Good reading is so basic, so necessary for even the most elementary education. And it’s so easy to test; you put a newspaper in front of a child and say, read this. Then you know everything, possibly much more than you want to know. One of the most common scenes in America since 1935 is the illiteracy epiphany. Oh my God, our kid can’t read! Is he brain-damaged? What was our sin?

Flesch explained the whole thing. Nothing complicated. The public schools had stopped using phonics (kids learn the alphabet and the sounds that the letters stand for). Public school officials were forcing children to memorize words as graphic designs, as we memorize the Nike logo, currency symbols, or UN flags. Disciplined children with exceptional memories can possibly read with sight-words. Ordinary kids are destroyed. By fourth grade they might learn only a few hundred sight-words. But not with automaticity. Mostly, such kids just fumble and guess. 

All right, so the top educators (i.e., professors of education and superintendents) really goofed. They launched an untested, unproven method, first called Look-say (and many other aliases). At the time you might have concluded all this was an innocent mistake. They meant well. But after Flesch explained the misadventure in 150 lucid pages and everyone knew the score, an odd thing happened. The Education Establishment went to the mattresses for Whole Word. According to them, Flesch was a crazed malcontent. Our elite educators (at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and such places) were going to make kids learn to read sight-words or die trying. Not the educators. It was the kids who would die trying.

The main method for teaching children to read in the United States from 1935 until quite recently has been sight-words. Even now, many educators pretend to embrace phonics, but children in the first and second grades are forced to memorize so-called Dolch words. This process guarantees that children are slowed down and confused. Does all this seem quaint and academic to you? Quite the opposite. It’s raw and ruthless. 

This country has 50 million functional illiterates. These people should be reading books for fun. They can’t do this; and what makes it so poignant is that they have no idea what was done to them or how to escape from the hit. Meanwhile, the experts who did it to them give each other awards, grants, professorships, and million-dollar publishing contracts. Crime does pay. 

Some might call the Education Establishment a RICO enterprise. For ideological reasons, they decided they didn’t want children to be individualistic or competitive. They wanted to make them all more or less the same. Our Education Establishment bought into leveling; and that meant a furtive undercutting of achievement, knowledge, and even reading. Kids who know too much will advance beyond the other kids and feel superior. You might think that reading is always a good thing; these progressive educators did not agree with you. A book published in 1958 mentions: “Public school administrators have gone so far as to assert that they look hopefully for the day when learning to read will not be considered more important than learning to sew or skate."

I told you, this is a bad part of town. Quacks and swindlers lurk everywhere. Ah, look, there is New Math, which did for arithmetic what Look-say did for reading. The boys in the back room must have been proud. But this gimmick, which flourished for a few years around 1964, was so obviously unworkable (and vicious), that the whole country laughed it off the stage. Kids couldn’t learn. Parents hated it. Teachers were bewildered. New Math vanished so quickly it’s easy to miss the main element of this story. Some of the smartest people in education (probably all with PhD’s) spent 15 years preparing this con. They went too far. Point is, they tried. Museums should be built to New Math. It serves to remind everyone that the Education Establishment has a predilection for shady products that damage children. 

New Math morphed some years later into Reform Math. Kids couldn’t learn. Parents hated it. Teachers were bewildered. See a pattern?

There, in the shadows, more bad actors: Open Classroom, Life Adjustment,Self-Esteem, Multiculturalism, Relevance, No Memorization, Bilingual Education, the list goes on and on. Arguably, every method the top educators really love invariably ends up being a Ponzi scheme. 

The one thing these people are good at is marketing. Bad ideas with sweet-sounding names are forced into every classroom. Appreciate the genius in all these slick phrases: Constructivism, Cooperative Learning, Discovery Method, Whole Language, 21st-Century Skills, Common Core Standards, and many more. We don’t know what they mean but they sure do sound good.

In a short space, I can’t explain the inner machinery that renders each idea destructive. The important fact is that these gimmicks don’t work very well (and are routinely replaced by other fads) but they are pushed for a time with brutal abandon. In all other parts of life, if bosses come up with stuff that doesn’t work, they go out of business, they are fired, or voted out of office. But in education they are promoted. This is a gang or cult (more like a religion than most people realize). You can’t be successful unless you embrace the creed that your mentors embraced. And in this way education is locked in dumb.

The media don’t explain the cartel’s long and reckless history, and its far-left DNA. Typically, the explanations we see are shallow; and you may be left wondering why we have so many problems. So let’s cut to the chase. The cheap and easy way to improve education is simply to root out the disingenuous ideas that the top educators have pushed for the past century.  

Almost every article written on education, for more than 60 years, mentions in passing that one-third of fourth graders can’t read at grade level. One-third! So that’s this year’s batch of functional illiterates that the schools are churning out. There’s no excuse. Really think about it, and you’ll be angry. Good, now we can start taking back the neighborhood.

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For related analysis, see “56: Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education” on Improve-Education.org. LINK

Do You Believe In Man-Made Educational Harming???

You should. It’s all around you.

A few years ago, I interviewed a reading coach, and she talked about trying to help a 12-year-old boy, an ordinary boy with ordinary intelligence. The first thing the boy said to her was, “Just so you know, I can’t read. I’m really stupid.”

The reading coach determined that, in fact, this boy knew only a dozen so-called sight-words. He was in the sixth grade.

Even if the boy knew several hundred sight-words (a more typical attainment), he would still be functionally illiterate, unable to read a newspaper or the names on a map, never mind a middle school text book. Literacy-wise, he was a mess. He was also a mess in every other respect.

Alan, as we’ll call him, is the poster boy for man-made educational harming. There are millions just like him, thanks to the instructional methods used in our schools. Let’s review what happened to Alan.

 In his first years of school, there was little attention given to the alphabet.  Instead, teachers pointed at whole words and said, “Memorize the shapes.”

Highly industrious children with retentive memories may seem to make acceptable progress. But even the few “success stories” will tend to think of reading as hard work; they will never read for pleasure. The more ordinary kids are the real victims. Reading even the simplest prose is a struggle. And some kids, like Alan, can’t memorize enough sight-words to read at all.

Naturally, his self-respect and confidence plunge at avalanche speeds. You can imagine the endless conferences between parents and school officials as everyone tries to determine what could possibly have happened to make this boy so backward and slow. You can imagine the embarrassment of the parents, which the boy picks up instantly.

By the third and fourth grade, boys like Alan know they are cursed,  damaged, hopeless. Their ability to do the simplest school task clearly isn’t there. How can they learn any geography, history, science, literature,  or current events if they can’t read? How can they even learn arithmetic as the schools are obsessed with “word problems”?

Boys like Alan will defend themselves by acting up or being belligerent. They become the class clown, bully, or juvenile delinquent. Or they are overwhelmed by their shame, give up, and become passive. In any case, they are anxious, unhappy children. Soon, experts are labeling these boys “cognitively impaired,” “ADHD,” or “dyslexic,” and prescribing tranquilizers.

This boy can’t learn, and he knows it. He can’t do anything academic or scholarly,  That’s why the first thing he tells you is, “I’m really stupid.” No, he’s not. But he is educationally harmed.

The adults in his world are too dumb (or ideologically corrupted) to help this twelve-year-old boy. How could you expect him to help himself?

His anxiety and unhappiness evolve and rage. He’s entering puberty, but feels useless and deeply ashamed. Often, all that a boy has going for him is his cockiness that he is capable and can take care of himself. Alan doesn’t have that. All he can dream of is dropping out and hiding out so none will know of his deficiencies.

Until that time, the school’s psychiatrists keep him sedated. Ritalin, the drug prescribed for so many millions, does the job in many cases but its effects on the developing brain can be powerful. It’s like taking cocaine; even a fully developed adult, after five years of cocaine, is not the same person. So what do we think happens to the boy when he is put on Ritalin from the ages of 9 to 16, for example? He could end up harmed in multiple ways.

Meanwhile, kids taught with phonics routinely learn to read in the early grades. Soon they have speaking, reading, and recognition vocabularies well over 30,000 words. They have good self-esteem.

Whole Word, sight-words, Dolch words, guessing, context clues--the whole bag and baggage is a cruel hoax. But it tells us a lot about the Education Establishment. Experts who have so little concern for what actually works are not likely to adopt sensible methods throughout the school. Quite the opposite. That’s what we find: systemic failure to teach basic skills and basic information. Kids who can’t read are manifestly damaged. The only plus is that they provide an early warning signal that an entire school system may be dysfunctional and not serving its students. We can safely predict that nearly all the kids in such schools are being under-educated. They are all products of man-made educational harming.

We often see the stat in the media that a third of fourth-graders can’t read at grade level. A third! This is a perennial stat for more than 50 years, because the Education Establishment seems incapable of teaching even the most essential skills. once called the Three R’s. Clearly, we need new methods in the classroom, and new people at the top.

It’s time for educators at all levels to embrace the wisdom so long cherished by the medical profession: FIRST, DO NO HARM.

(For more about the war on reading, see "42: Reading Resources." LINK )

Why Can't Americans Do Math????

Kids aren't taught to read. They aren't taught to master basic math. No wonder the military says 3/4 of young people are not eligible for military service.

I understand this part. What I can't understand is that the military isn't able to fix what's broken.

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.

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