Parents, teachers, and children are equally victims of the K-12 educational system. Let's not blame them for very much. Let's blame the people at the top, the dangerous desperados which I call the Education Establishment.
The United States spends vastly more per capita than any other country. But our public schools end up in 20th place or worse in almost every category.
When large businesses or athletic teams have a losing season year after year, the top people are fired. It's the smart, professional thing to do.
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Background article: Letter from the trenches. Parent describes K-12 dystopia.
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Episodes Are Not In Any Order. Start Reading Anywhere. Everything remains current because the Education Establishment effectively prohibits change.
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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
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Best way to understand problems in public schools: Saving K-12
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New novel: Frankie
(logline: She's harmless. Chaos ensues.)
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 84: Replace top educators. Fire the Education Establishment
(Wed., Feb.8, 2023)
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Ladies and Gentlemen...
The only thing most Americans agree on is that the public schools are mediocre at best.
But here's the bizarre thing: people don't want to blame the obvious culprits, that is, the people in charge. In every other field of human endeavor, when things don't work out, bosses are fired; then new people with new ideas are brought in. That's a universal formula for dealing with failure. But in education, the public ties itself into pretzels to avoid blaming the ones creating all the problems in the first place.
Has anyone in the Education Establishment ever been fired? For anything less than a major felony? No, they are permitted to drone arrogantly on, even as the country gets more ignorant by the year. These pretenders are promoted. They are given grants. They receive awards. They are hailed as Educators of the Year.
I should explain that by "Education Establishment" I mean only the people at the very top – 500 people at most. The astonishing thing is how successfully this tiny clique dumbs us down, deflects blame, squanders billions, cons the media, and encourages people to fight among themselves over whether parents, kids, unions, drugs, television, computers, etc., etc. are the real villains.
Maybe each of these things causes some damage, but wouldn't you always want to go to the very top and find the primary cause of large, systemic failure? The point of this little tirade is to say: stop blaming the victims (mainly, that's kids, parents, and also teachers). Blame the guilty. They're called educators, even though their main activity is social engineering. Here's the new mantra: punish the perpetrators.
One comical aspect of this whole thing is that the Education Establishment seems to encourage even kindergarten teachers to call themselves "educators." In this way, there's no word left over for the people actually in charge. So they become invisible. Who? It was a fad for a while to call these people educationists; we also saw the term educrats. Some people talk about educational establishment in lower case. I consistently use the term Education Establishment to mean specifically the top people. The bosses. The ruling elite. The commissars. The guilty.
Please, people, let's not waste time criticizing 40+ million parents, 25+ million students, and 3+ million teachers. These are vast unwieldy groups. You can't make any generalizations about them. Let's talk about the real problem, i.e., the bosses giving the orders and dictating the world-view at the elite ed schools. If you could change their minds, or just replace them, you would see real change quickly.
When a corporation is failing, you fire the chief operating officers. You fire the board. You fire the top five or ten people. That's what we need to do here. Get rid of the top decision-makers at Teachers College, Harvard Graduate School of Education, University of Chicago School of Education and other similar dens of dumbing-down.
I've always thought that kids, parents, and teachers are equally victims of the social engineering that John Dewey and his bunch introduced a century ago. Reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, foundational knowledge – Dewey actually dismissed them all. His nonsense is now part of the DNA that guides the Education Establishment. Their souls reek of socialist theory and strange Communist sophistries. They have a death-grip on everything that goes on in the public schools.
QED: When children are not learning, it's obviously the fault of the people at the top. Let's replace them.