Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Savvy, practical insights on where our Education Establishment went wrong and how most schools can be improved.LET'S FIX EDUCATION explains the many dysfunctional theories and methods operating within our schools. This podcast is intended for parents, teachers, and community leaders who want education reform.
Each week, LET'S FIX EDUCATION examines another problem in our public schools, such as: Constructivism. Learning styles. Sight-words. No memorization. Cooperative learning. Prior knowledge. Reform math. The dilution of knowledge. Common Core. Project-based learning. Student-centered, etc. In fact, there are DOZENS of counterproductive learning and teaching theories, all made worse by ideological motives.
Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, and education reformer. He has analyzed the problems in education for more than 30 years. Price is the author of "Saving K-12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" (190 pages) His main education site is Improve-Education.org. For more information about book and author, visit Lit4u.com. Newest novels are "Frankie" (about a harmless robot) and "The Boy Who Saves The World" (about a boy who saves the world).
"Bruce Price’s SAVING K-12 is a MUST read! It is precise, concise and powerful. Action is required…for the sake of our children, our grandchildren and the future of the American Republic!” Robert W. Sweet, Jr., long-time President of The National Right to Read Foundation
Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 112: School Alert #1: Don’t Accept Lies About Reading. Here's The Truth.
School Alert #1: Don’t Accept Lies About Reading. Here's The Truth.
What is the single weakest spot in all of education? What is the Achilles heel?
Simple. Reading. Teach it properly and children will proceed in normal way to writing, geography, history, science, and the arts.
Teach it in a stupid way, and the children are consigned to hell. Culture and civilization atrophy. You'll have a real mess on your hands. Something like the one we have now.
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Good background articles: THE SCIENCE OF ILLITERACY
K-12: Sight-Words are a sick joke
Reading Is Easy (4-minute video)
Support Education Reform
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Podcasts are always available as transcripts.
SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1792553/support
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The best way to understand problems in public schools
is to read this book: Saving K-12
Available on Amazon.
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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
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New novel: Art and Beauty.
Crime fiction. Set in Manhattan.
Dangerously well written.
Published by Web-E-Books.com /// Editor says: “Bruce Deitrick Price puts
a new spin on the all-American, sexy, fast-talking detective story by creating
a truly fresh crime-fighter personality and placing his original P.I. character, Jon Dak, among movers and shakers in the NYC art and fashion world.”
< Enjoy Chapter 1. ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY >
< Enjoy Chapter 2. MISS BABBAGE >
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Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are so bad. The people in charge prefer mediocrity because they are socialists of one kind or another. If people work together to promote real education, we'll have it.
LET'S FIX EDUCATION -- by --- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 112 August 23, 2023:
School Alert #1: Don’t Accept Lies About Reading. Here's The Truth.
Ladies and gentlemen
Ever since I started writing about K-12, I always gave the same advice: start your own crusade or join mine. The bad thing is doing nothing. Public schools are a disgrace; and the media don’t help. The ideologues in charge should not be allowed to get away with so much sabotage. Please get involved.
The far left, the hard left, whatever you want to call them, has a single MO. Undermine everything. If children can't read, can’t count, can't find cities on a map, don't know any history or science, they won't be able to defend themselves or their culture.
Reading is the most important skill a student can learn, and the left understood that from the beginning. The anti-reading war began in 1931, and it's still going strong.
The Education Establishment produces a never-ending tide of bogus ideas and murky jargon. Most parents have no chance of understanding this babble. Nor can they understand what's being done to their children. Most of it bad.
Let me jump ahead here and mention my suspicion that the one best thing I've done is a little four-minute graphic video called Reading Is Easy. Easy to find on YouTube. At one point I was reading all the books by the main phonics experts. They astonished me by using the word “easy” all the time. I collected their quotes and used them to create the video. If everyone looked at this video, the country would be spared a lot of pain.
Now, the reading wars have been going on 90 years. The professors wanted to replace phonics with sight-words, which is the essential problem all along. New aliases were trotted out, so the public never knew what was going on. The new alias around 2000 was Balanced Literacy, which fooled people into thinking something was balanced so it must be better. Reading scores stayed low.
A few years ago there was a flurry of optimism because of something called the Science of Reading (this means a greater emphasis on phonics). But within two years there was yet another counterattack, that is, a surge of unhelpful videos about such pointless mysteries as: phoneme mapping, decoding, shifting the balance, six kinds of syllables, graphemes, cvc words, digraphs, the reading rope, etc. etc.
If you want a teenager to learn to drive, put them behind the wheel and tell them the main rules. There is no need to give a history of the internal combustion engine, the invention of the traffic light, or the mechanics of power steering. The usual ways they teach reading alienate children, as opposed to pulling them in. Whatever the Education Establishment says, my recommendation is, don't trust it.
My major initiative, 20 years ago, was to start a site called Improve-Education.org. A lot of great stuff that attracted more than 1 million visits. But the hosting company lost the index page. The operating system was old and I don't think the company knew how to save it.
So I need to restore Improve-Education.org, a site with 70 pages. I decided to try a fundraiser to finance this big project. I wrote a dual-purpose proposal titled Support Education Reform, which explains all aspects of my writing about education, including almost 1000 articles, blogs, smart videos, short podcasts, comments, etc. I think that everyone would find something useful in this material. It's all free on the Internet.
Finally, everything I do is intended to help parents negotiate our K-12 system. At present only a third of students are reading at the proper level. Clearly the experts are incompetent or subversive.
QED: Do what has always worked. No sight-words. Children learn the alphabet. And then the sounds of the letters, and then the blends. Use nursery rhymes, popular songs, cheers, and the best stories you have to give kids a love of language. They should be reading by Christmas of the first year.
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READING IS EASY / 4-minute video