Broken Promises in American K-12

(Speech delivered by the writer to Pensare Oltre in Milan on Oct, 21, Details at end.)

The Education Establishment promises to teach X, Y, and Z but, clearly to everyone, the children don’t learn much X, Y, and Z. The goal is to give the appearance of education, the illusion. Wheels turn, motors hum, children lurch about with 60 pounds of books on their backs. But finally it seems to be make-believe. If we count up all the knowledge and facts that children learn, schools are doing a poor job.

I have to interject something here. Looking at my notes a few days ago, I realized that “broken promises” is not strong enough. I was thinking about empty promises. In other words, something that is never going to happen. The Education Establishment claims they will make children “lifelong readers.” Less and less likely. The Education Establishment promises that high school graduates will be “college and career-ready.” We will be lucky if, graduating from high school, they are high-school ready!

Here is the perpetual trick in American K-12: eliminate something proven and worthwhile, and substitute something inferior. That’s exactly what has happened many times, but most dramatically in reading, which is the essential skill.

In 1931, education officials eliminated traditional ways of teaching children to read, known as phonics. Instead, the children are burdened with rote memorization of sight-words. Many children end up functionally illiterate. Parents are told that this method is an improvement, but it’s a disaster. If parents keep demanding phonics, the schools often say, “We do teach phonics,” but they typically don’t. The Education Establishment has even created fake phonics, such as Analytic Phonics. Long experience has shown that systematic phonics outperforms sight-words, but the education bosses refuse to abandon this clunker.

Something similar happened in math instruction. Traditional ways of teaching arithmetic were dismissed so the schools could use New Math (1962), Reform Math (circa 1985), or Common Core Math (circa 2010). All of these should be called Deform Math. They use a very interesting gimmick. Instead of teaching simple things first, they teach difficult things first. New Math explicitly bragged that second graders would now be learning techniques that had once been taught only to high school and college students. Gee, why was that? Because centuries of experience had shown the younger children were not ready for algebra, matrices, base eight, or any of the other advanced material.

Constructivism has been a raging fad for almost 30 years. The basic gimmick is that teachers are no longer allowed to teach. Information taught directly is not considered authentic. Children must find or create their own new knowledge. That can certainly happen sometimes. But how would a child learn the American Revolution by this method? Slowly, very slowly. And if I ask where a bank is and you tell me and I find the bank, why is that not authentic? Why would it be preferable for me to wander around for an hour? By the way, Constructivism is now used in every grade from K to 12, and in every subject. All by itself, it terminates much of what used to happen in public schools. Teachers are reduced to minor appendages known as facilitators.

The Education Establishment is almost never creative when it comes to teaching children MORE. All the creativity goes into devising reasons why children must be taught LESS. For example, Multiculturalism dictates that children must study other times and places, so they don’t learn anything about their own country.

Or the schools go the other way for a few years and emphasize Relevance. Children study only the local and the immediate, so they don’t end up with a balanced perspective on the world.

Then you have Self-esteem which dictates that children should not be asked to learn anything that some of them won’t be able to get. Their self-esteem would suffer. This one little sophistry can destroy real education. How? Because there will always be some children who can’t master the simpler things. Those kids are used to undermine the other kids.

Another gimmick, which I’ve recently become aware of, is called thematic instruction. You divide the course material into themes. For example, American History could be taught as Damaging The Landscape; Exploiting The Natives; Abusing Slaves; How Industrialism Caused Global Warming, the AIDS Epidemic. and so on. Note that there is little mention of dates, relationships, or sequences. Each theme is a standalone subject. At the end of this process, the students might not know even the simplest things that children once learned. That’s why there are now students in college who don’t know which side won the Civil War or when it happened.

Sometimes a course is organized in an incoherent way, as opposed to finding the optimal sequence for the material. It is as if they looked at the traditional sequence – let’s say 26 items A-to-Z— and they toss out B, H, P, and T. Letters are flipped and moved from one place to another. Children cannot see the structure because there is no structure, no coherence. And remember, one of the basic ideas they got rid of years ago was memorization. You aren’t expected to know dates, names, places. For most children, this is a bad dream, one of those dreams you can’t reconstruct because the whole thing was so surreal. Second, the parent see lots of activity and naively think that education is taking place.

Let us suppose for a moment that the material in a course is perfectly organized. The people who concocted Reform Math found an easy way to sabotage this. The technique called “spiraling” requires that teachers change from topic to topic, arbitrarily and abruptly, every few days. Each day’s work may seem reasonable. But imagine the student’s confusion at the end of each week as he tries to make sense of what he has studied.

I believe that finding the optimal sequence is one of the highest priorities in education. I call this ideal arrangement Ergonomic Education. The smartest people should be working on this problem in each area. Instead, our smartest people work at making sure children must contend with the least optimal sequences.

The Deliberate Dumbing Down Of America (the title of a well-known book) has been accomplished by dumbing down each individual part of the curriculum. One of the favorite excuses is this silly assertion spoken with great pomposity: Our kids don’t need that. So that, whatever it is, is thrown in the trash.

Prof. E. D. Hirsch, one of the really smart people in American education, has been waging his own personal war on behalf of Cultural Literacy, as he calls it. That phrase refers to all the basic information that every citizen should have. Who was Washington? Where is Kansas? When was Lincoln assassinated? Which ocean is to the east of the original colonies? Note that all this basic information is some of the simplest stuff there is. Anybody can learn it, even six-year-olds. Traditionally schools understood that you start with simple basic stuff and you keep teaching week after week. In a few years you have an educated person. That seems to be the result that our Education Establishment is most eager to avoid.

The main thing that amazes me in all of this is the redundancy and overkill. Our Education Establishment wants to take no chances. Hardly a smidgen of knowledge will get through if they have their way. You can do your own analysis, in each example given, of how it will affect the school, when taken to its logical extreme. Teachers can’t teach?? There goes half of traditional education. Students must not memorize facts?? Again, there goes half of traditional education.

The fundamental problem in American K-12 is a genuine distaste for knowledge. The whole reason for schools is now largely ignored. The Education Establishment is devoted to social engineering. Facts and knowledge are reluctantly tolerated.

ADDENDA: Pensare Oltre, or Thinking Beyond, is a unique education reform group based in Milan. They are upscale professional people distinguished by their hostility to the psychologist’s tendency to claim that children have mental illnesses such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and ADHD. They believe these children suffer from dysteachia (i.e, counterproductive pedagogy). This tendency--to label kids and treat them with drugs--is epidemic in the US and Italy.

Four years ago, Pensare Oltre decided they needed someone to advise them on how to fight sight-words in Italy’s public schools. They found my articles on the Internet and invited me to assist them. At first I thought it was a mistake. Our so-called experts constantly insist that if only English were phonetic—like Italian!—we would not need sight-words.

This article might be helpful in quickly listing the main problems in K-12. These are the reasons our schools are very inefficient. These are the culprits I campaign against in Saving K-12.

("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., President, The National Right to Read Foundation)

Bruce,
Your article on this crucial issue couldn’t be more spot.
I fought idiotic curriculum directors, gullible teachers and principals twenty years ago when they brought in Goals 2000 “World Class Education” initiatives featuring: Whole language - creative spelling, look n guess reading, Mimosa thematic math, gradeless student portfolio assessment.

Our school system and others that fell for the Outcome based education found our student’s state test scores plummeted.

Eff’ing liberal head school bd told me to “just worry about your own kids. Do what you need to do to provide your kids with supplemental material to successfully learn.”

American education is terrible compared with other nations that do well on the International Math & Science studies, such as lower spending Asian nations.
Asian countries do not recklessly experiment on their student ‘s academic lessons, largely because they do not have the economic resources to risk and they do not fall for High Scope education hucksters making Pied Piper vacuous promises about the latest educational fad.

Please keep up the Essential work and add me to your Ping list.

I grew up in SoCal and went to school from 65 to 78, we NEVER were taught with the “New Math”, but we were told about it and YES we learned to read and write using Phonics.

So how did this happen if these programs were replaced in 1962 and 1931 respectively??

Not All school districts complied, especially before we had Unions.

“The Education Establishment is devoted to social engineering.”

It’s what they’ve learned in college themselves.

The leftists work with Germanic thoroughness. Karl Marx would approve.

“In 1931, education officials eliminated traditional ways of teaching children to read, known as phonics. Instead, the children are burdened with rote memorization of sight-words.”

I’m trying to learn French. While French has systematic rules with regard to pronunciation, it’s quite helpful to hear the words pronounced.

A mixture of the two methods is required, but phonics should be the base.

“The smartest people should be working on this problem”

The smartest people will want to teach the things they had to learn rather than what is most useful to most people.

Junior high students here in Florida are often tutored on topics only 1% of college students would really need to know.

Imagine having to learn both Greek and Latin before getting into college.

“In 1931, education officials eliminated traditional ways of teaching children to read, known as phonics. Instead, the children are burdened with rote memorization of sight-words.”

That was NOT so in the Boston Public Schools——I attended and later taught there(1954-1956)———It was 100% phonics.

When my kids started school,mid 60s,it was sight words———(a different public school system).

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