Episode 192: "Why are underperforming schools in American urban neighborhoods difficult to turn around?" (Quora Question) Wed, March 5, 2025

GREAT DOUBLE ARTICLE: a quick look at why we must have phonics. And a quick look at the career of Sue Dickson, who invented one of the best phonics programs. All of this in five minutes.

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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 192.    Wed, March 5, 2025

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 Why are underperforming schools in American urban neighborhoods difficult to turn around? (Quora Question)

                                        ---------l---------

Okay, here's the cynical answer. The ideologues running the show don't want to turn them around.

That is, they want failure and mediocrity any way they can get them. A bad neighborhood is a built-in excuse. Just let things go slowly to hell and then keep repeating the alibi: oh man, this is the ghetto, these kids don't want to learn, the parents won't help, we don't have enough money, et cetera, et cetera.

I think the Education Establishment is cold-blooded and manipulative. Instead of trying to solve the problems and improve everyone's life, they will keep all the bad tendencies on a low boil, treating failure as normal, and always asking for more money.

I think the Education Establishment is particularly cynical when they can use minority problems. This is the worst sort of racism.

Let's look back a hundred years. In New York City there were kids from 10 different countries and some parents couldn't speak English, and neither could the kids. What to do? The schools went to work, trying to take every kid as far as they could be taken. The community wanted this results and everybody chipped in. This was before John Dewey's Progressive mentality had seized control, like some monster from an alien planet.

Do what you can do and get on with it, that was the expectation of all normal people.

Our public schools now don't do what they could do, and invent a dozen excuses for never getting on with anything.

You want to see quick turnaround? Use the traditional ideas that always work, especially phonics. Children should be reading in the first grade. Anything less, fire the superintendent and all the other pretenders.

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(Here's a short complementary article about the legendary Sue Dickson because her career perfectly illustrates what has happened a million times. :

“Sue Dickson (1950-2024) is best known as the creator of Sing, Spell, Read, and Write, one of the most popular phonics programs.

The ups and downs in her career tell us a lot about the sad state of American education.  In her college's pre-teacher program, she was taught nothing about phonics.  Not only that, but when she started to teach first grade, her superiors constantly emphasized their verdict that phonics is useless and even dangerous.

Sue Dickson recalls: "I was told that phonics doesn't work, that the English language is too complicated to be taught that way.  I accepted that reasoning hook, line, and sinker.  So, during my first two years as a teacher, I didn't use any phonics even though I had lots of kids in trouble.”

But years earlier, her mother bought a book by Rudolf Flesch called Why Johnny Can't Read.  Dickson recalls, "At first I rejected his recommendations.  After all, I was the one with the teaching degree.  But my mother wouldn't stop.  She followed me around the house reading from that book!"

"Finally, I decided I had to do something because I was losing whole groups of students through the cracks.  I would give phonics a try.  There was considerable apprehension, as my administrators were adamantly against it.  They put a three-page memo in every teacher's mailbox warning us to stay away from phonics!”

Then came the big shock.  Her class scored so high on the standardized test that these same administrators seemed about to accuse her of cheating.  Instead, they offered her a summer job teaching reading to students who were at least three years below the national norm.  She never went back to teaching "look and say."  She knew that phonics was the answer for all students….” 

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[For entire article, go to:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/k12_meet_sue_dickson_a_hero_of_american_literacy.html

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Also: "NINE REASONS WHY PUBLIC SCHOOLS WALLOW IN MEDIOCRITY." 

You will see a pattern. 
Schools that use sight-words also use all the other bad methods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_pzBo6HCfA