Good grief. Not this SHIT again. My youngest, 21 year old twins, suffered through what our school district called “creative spelling”. Spelling was deemed not as important as the thoughts the children were trying to express. It took years for them to recover from this nonsense.
We had a similar experience in our small CT town school system.
School administrators, teachers and board members completely bought into the Outcome based education fad in the early mid-90’s.
Piped piper “facilitator” came to town offering up OBE whole language - creative / inventive spelling, and Mimosa math program.
Nine teachers voted in favor, without any reference checks to see if the $20,000 crap curriculum actually worked anywhere it was adopted.
Teachers were told to cease phonetic lessons, halt drill n kill math table memorization.
Multi-age classrooms were put into place to help kids and teachers better socialize / contain the teaching methodology.
$80,000 / yr curriculum director encouraged elimination of grades, in favor of a portfolio student assessment.
Teachers opposing the experiment were told to keep silent.
We augmented our kid’s education with Saxon homeschool traditional math and reading lessons at home.
Within one year of the school system adopting OBE, 4, 6, and 8th grade reading and math State academic standard competency test results plummeted to 60% passing.
School system then adopted “new” language arts program called “Reading Recovery” which incorporated some phonetics and spelling instruction.
The town school education experiment went so bad, science and social studies were cut 50% in order to accomodate all of the remedial core reading and math instruction.
Bottom line:
I had the education of a life time, witnessing firsthand what absolute irresponsible fools many “educators” are, and have poor critical thinking skills.
They suffer no consequence for their negiligence, injuring students and taxpayers alike, escaping nicely off in to fat retirement sunset.