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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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 )