Episode 120: Support Education Reform — a true story (Wed., October 18, 2023)

Support Education Reform  — a true story

Decline of public school education in America is too extensive to be accidental. It's a plan. Every parent needs to understand the dangers and what to do about them..

Read Bruce Deitrick Price’s Support Education Reform.  Takes about five minutes. You'll find all the information that parents need to fight a misguided Education Establishment.

(NOTE: links to the articles and videos can be found on the TRANSCRIPT.)

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Three all-purpose, highly compact videos that quickly
explain the nonsense encountered in our public schools:

READING IS EASY   /  4 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws&t=157s

GOOD SCHOOL?? BAD SCHOOL?? YOU KNOW.     /   3.5 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuihhEpQETs

AN EDUCATOR ADMITS HER MISTAKES     /   3 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Chjlzn8ByQ&t=60s

Total of 11 minutes. 

These  videos complement what is discussed in "Support Education Reform"
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The best way to understand problems in public schools
is to read this book:  Saving K-12
 
Saving K-12     

Available on Amazon.

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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price

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Graphic: the Mad Hatters of Education

A  theme running through a lot of my work is that the professors at Columbia Teachers College and Harvard's Graduate School of Education are very smart but so far out in their own world that they are effectively cuckoo. Every day they have to concoct some rationale for ideas that they know are borderline at best. But they are very industrious and never take a week off. They have a world to destroy and if they have to destroy your kids, they've accepted the deal. It's nothing personal. Maybe at the end of their career, they'll say they are sorry. But don't bet on it.

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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.

Transcript

LET'S FIX EDUCATION   --    by    --    Bruce Deitrick Price


Episode 120   --    Wed., October 18, 2023


Support Education Reform  — a true story

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Hearing that I write a lot about problems in K-12, people often exclaim: “WHY?” I tell them, “Because I want to save the country.” They think I'm joking. Not that much.    

More specifically, the big attraction for me is high levels of criminality and pathology. I refer to malfeasance, fake research, endless gimmicks and jargon, fraud, deceit, and multitudes of wounded victims. For example, you tell children you will teach them to read but you make sure they never become good readers. Surely that's a crime.

I was fascinated by the challenge of figuring out how professors achieve these bad effects. In general, I noticed a Pavlovian tactic of finding cognitive weak spots, and hitting them hard.

For example, what is the most crucial vulnerability in all of K-12? That would be reading. No literacy, no learning. So there was no surprise when hard-left educators, wanting to weaken our country, focused on ways to sabotage reading instruction. For phonetic languages like English, the weak spot is anything that prevents an understanding of letters and their sounds. Bingo.

So looking back to 1931 (when our education experts announced that phonics must be thrown out of the schools), what sort of replacement do you suppose our experts proposed? Easy. Quack professors told children to ignore the alphabet, focus instead on sight-words, picture clues, context, and guessing. These professors of nihilism created a steady slide into illiteracy that is still the most distinctive feature of American public schools. We have 50 million functional illiterates due to 90 years of pedagogical dishonesty.

Big news recently is that Professor Lucy Calkins, the main purveyor of this vision for more than 20 years, was disowned by Columbia University and Teachers College (see Episode 118.) During that same decades I wrote lots of articles explaining to parents why they must NOT let their children learn sight-words, as this approach often results in illiteracy. Consider my titles, you'll see that I'm not subtle or esoteric:

Sight-words are a Sick Joke https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/k12_sightwords_are_a_sick_joke.html

Dolch Words: DUMB AND DANGEROUS  (YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPTXWo5wZXI&t=146s

WHY READING IS PHONICS  (YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEaEmGTTqxQ

K-12: History of the Conspiracy against Reading
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/k12_history_of_the_conspiracy_against_reading.html

K-12: Illiterate New World https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/03/k12_illiterate_new_world.html

K-12: No Joy In Reading. That's the Plan.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/03/k12_no_joy_in_reading_thats_the_plan.html

K-12: Quagmire: Problems with Sight-Words
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/02/k12_quagmire_problems_with_sightwords.html

How To Teach Reading  (Phonics vs. Sight-Words)  (YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2VcFj4FyAc

Massive K-12 Reading Failure Explained https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/massive_k12_reading_failure_explained.html

How to Create Functional Illiteracy in 7 Easy Lessons https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/how_to_create_functional_illiteracy_in_7_easy_lessons.html

The Strange Truth About Dyslexia (You Tube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeFLLnRWROQ

But Lucy had academic prestige, vast budgets, and elaborate national and international support. The New York Times was on her side until recently.

So the bad ideas won, year after year. Which clearly reveals that the central obstacle for parents is finding reliable information. Lucy would probably tell you to make bad decisions. I tell you the truth.

When an industrial accident destroyed my main site (Improve-Education.org, 100+ pages long), I decided to set up a fundraising page that would also explain my reform work in general. This short presentation is called Support Education Reform. It explains what's wrong with K-12 and how we fix it.

Contributions are of course welcome but the bigger purpose is to make Americans more aware of what has gone wrong in the classroom, and why so many children are damaged. Struggling readers are often erratic students and likely to misbehave. Then they can be pushed into Special Ed and given powerful drugs. Prolonged administration of these chemicals can induce physiological dependence, withdrawal symptoms, and even loss of brain function.

Many experts are worried about the overprescription of these drugs. And this danger runs parallel to one of the worst fates that can happen to a child, drugs or no drugs. The child is maybe seven or eight years old and realizes that he is defective. He cannot do things his friends easily do, i.e., read. The actual problem is that he cannot memorize hundreds and hundreds of sight-words. Another few years of this and he is totally humiliated and crushed.

I once interviewed a reading coach and she told me about her first encounter with a normal 12-year-old boy who informed her, "Just so you know, I’m stupid.”

The coach herself was almost an hysteric from trying to help these kids. Just thinking about the rage in her voice still makes me shudder.

Have you seen any mention in the media about the tragedy of children who have to deal with being total failures early in life? Probably millions of them. Does anybody care about these lost people? Remember that their failure is the result of trying to do what adults told them to do.

The introduction of sight-words in the schools was intended to be like Pearl Harbor. A sneak attack that would take down the whole country. The attack continues. Most parents have no chance of understanding what's done to their children. Then they hear the dread diagnosis: dyslexia.

The only good news is that we can turn the society around quicker than most people realize. We merely have to do the opposite of what Lucy and her experts make children focus on, that is, sight-words and guessing.

Please tell parents about "Support Education Reform.” It's short and entertaining. (http://spot.fund/SupportEducationReform)

First, there's an explanation of why I call K-12 “a crime scene.” 

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Then I sketch the major components of my reform campaign: 

150 articles on American Thinker, 

50 YouTube videos, 

a podcast titled "Let's Fix Education,” 

3000 answers on Quora,

a  thousand articles on various sites and blogs,

and Saving K-12, best book for understanding public schools.

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All this material gives parents the necessary understanding 

for dealing with a corrupted Education Establishment.

http://spot.fund/SupportEducationReform

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Improve-Education.org is a very big site, more than 70 articles, 
and will be difficult to rebuild. 
But there is definitely a lot of good material on the site, 
created over a 20 year period. I anticipate doing it little by little.

IMPROVE-EDUCATION. ORG   ---   FOUNDED 2005