Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 11: We Can Have Better Schools At Less Cost (Sept. 8)

September 08, 2021 Bruce Deitrick Price
Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 11: We Can Have Better Schools At Less Cost (Sept. 8)
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Show Notes Transcript

Episode 11: We Can Have Better Schools At Less Cost (Sept. 8)

More than most people imagine, the entire education sector is set up as a profit-making enterprise.

Sure, most of these people are socialists and communists wanting to transform this country. But why should they pay for their political agenda? The cute trick is to make you pay for their agenda. Pay and pay.




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Episode 11:

We Can Have Better Schools At Less Cost (Sept. 8)

The Education Establishment has been playing money games for a long time. Their perennial refrain is: give us bigger budgets, and we will give you better schools. Well, budgets get bigger and bigger. But the schools don't improve. In fact they get worse. That is the big story in American education for a long time.

There may very well be an inverse correlation between school budgets, and whatever success the schools have with students. We have to understand what correlation exists and then fight our way to a better deal. That's where you put in reasonable amounts of money and achieve great results. What we do now is spend vast amounts of money in order to get stupid results. 

The waste is pervasive. But it's even more destructive than you might suspect. We have a superabundance of self-appointed experts running the show, people such as administrators, superintendents, consultants, and principals, people who get bigger salaries than they probably could get in the real world. I suspect the high salaries are there to keep the managers in line, to make them loyal to the system, not to the students, parents, or society. For example, there are many superintendents making over $200,000 and my crude assessment is that their main job is telling parents what they cannot have. You want geography? History? Good readers? Forget about it.

 A second mechanism distinct from the salaries is that you use instruction that doesn't work very well, so you have to do everything two, three, and four times. This is particularly true in Reading. Children should be learning to read with phonics in the first grade or you can string it out four, five, or six years by making the children try to memorize sight-words.

A very smart businessman/writer named Albert Lynd all the way back in 1951 wrote a book titled Quackery in the Public Schools and he said a lot of things that are still startling. The education professors set up an elaborate machinery that took good care of themselves. So we have socialists making money like capitalists. Isn't that a pretty irony? Lynd explains that education is the only field where people get a degree or certificate and then they must keep earning more degrees and certificate for the rest of their lives. You should know teachers never fully graduate. There is an elaborate boondoggle to keep all the old professors fully employed providing courses to the next generation of educators. Everyone has to keep coming back in the summer, on weekends, or whenever professional development courses are brought into the schools.  

Here an interesting detail. Lynd was writing  at mid-century, about patterns that were established in the 1930s and 40s. So a clever researcher like Albert Lynd was able to see these patterns and fully explain them. The whole school system is a piggy bank for hack professors pushing bad ideas into the classrooms of America.

We are talking about a jobs program that never ends. Furthermore, all of these things are ways for the professors to maintain their control of schools and teachers. You can't have teachers thinking their own ideas and going off in their own direction. No, they must be part of the program, and subservient to the Party Line.

We would be better off if the school was a lean mean education machine. Instead it is more like Flounder, the hapless college student in Animal House. The Dean tells him that it's not a winning proposition to go through life “fat, drunk and stupid.”

One of my special interests has always been reading and the poor instruction so often found. Here's how that works in practice. Children are told to memorize sight-words in the early grades. The kids can hardly read a paragraph. Their education is in first or second gear for years as the children learn each year what they should have learned already. Naturally you need tutors, counselors, therapists, remediation specialists, a whole slew of expensive experts who test and assess and measure. A single semi-literate kid can absorb a huge  budget. In short, children are artificially impeded, and then expensively saved from their fate. There is nothing subtle here; these children should be taught properly, and then they wouldn't need millions of dollars of extra care. Teach the children well, and save a bundle. And even if you spend the bundle, children improperly taught at the beginning may never recover. Using methods that actually work is a great way to save billions.

I recently read a monograph by a man from Hungary who was surprised to find that people in American schools could move up to second grade without being able to read. This advance was not possible in Hungary. You have to learn to read or repeat the grade. Then there's no big problem and no big expense. Our public schools go the other way. Everything taught slowly, everything taught awkwardly, everything repeated and repeated and repeated as the student rises into middle school. Throughout this fake process, children are not learning the basic information they will need in life. So you have millions of children who are semi-literate, cannot find Alaska on a map, and probably couldn't name the four directions. Their total education in geography, history, and science could be written on a sheet of paper. And this poor performance is accomplished at great expense, both for the functioning of the society, and for the future livelihoods of all the individual students. We are spending billions in order to dumb down our country. 

Administrators are doing well. Professors are doing well. Superintendents are doing very well. The country is not.

The crime here is that everything is done in the least efficient, least economical way. The point of this little article is to say look at the reality in front of us and put a stop to it.

The genius of our professors is to find the most dysfunctional way to do everything. Naturally that will end up being the most expensive way to do everything. Constructivism is very slow, as the students are told to self-educate themselves. Direct Instruction is forbidden, that being the most efficient way. Sight-words are hopelessly inefficient. Common Core is relentlessly inefficient. One common trait is that children are expected to learn two or more ways to do every sort of problem. I'm sure everyone can probably guess that it would take two, probably three, times as long to achieve this foolish goal instead of teaching one best way well.

Think back to the things that traditional parents would say to children. Can you say the alphabet? Can you count to 25? That's because centuries of experience had suggested that this was a good way to start. Then you go from the most basic things to the next most basic things, in a steady systematic way. Common sense, of course. And reasonably priced.

Here's the lesson I'm seeing everywhere in education: ignorance is expensive.