Free Republic

If you want to create an illiteracy crisis such as the one we are living through, you have to do two things. First of all, adopt ideas that do not work. Second, you have to brainwash young teachers into thinking these ideas actually do work. In this way, you can manipulate your teachers into doing a bad job but they never know it. They remain gung-ho on the side of illiteracy. A public school teacher sent me this brief history of her decades in the classroom: 'I began to notice students in the intermediate grades intermixing sight words. They would...

When was the last time you read a book? For almost 1 in 4 of us, it was more than a year ago, according to Pew Research. That's three times the number who didn't read a book in 1978. In America, we have a literacy problem. But more concerning to me, we have a biblical literacy problem. Americans, including churchgoers, aren't reading much of any book, including the Good Book. Christians claim to believe the Bible is God's Word. We claim it's God's divinely inspired, inerrant message to us. Yet despite this, we aren't reading it. A recent LifeWay Research...

This short graphic video explains why phonics is what matters, and almost everything else they add in the public schools is a waste of time. When possible, the Education Establishment will banish phonics on the grounds that it is irrelevant and doesn't work. But even when they admit some phonics into the schools, these malevolent ideologues will try to encumber the whole learning process to such a degree that children learn at half-speed, if they learn at all. All the phonics experts say they can teach almost all children to read in the first grade. That should be the gold...

Do you agree? Good, then please pass this little summary to everyone you know. Or were you thinking, that’s crazy talk. Afraid not. It’s quite accurate, comparable to saying, “The sky is blue.” Reading instruction in our country has been insane and/or a criminal conspiracy for 80 years. The resulting illiteracy is a giant hemorrhaging wound. We cannot have a successful school system or a successful civilization unless children typically learn to read in the first grade or two. This is the 60th year since Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous book explaining why Johnny cannot read. Everything Flesch said in...

<p>A California Democrat has proposed a bill that would raise the state’s minimum smoking age from 18 to 21 in an effort to keep cigarettes out of the hands of teenagers.</p> <p>State Sen. Ed Hernandez introduced Senate Bill 151, which would make California the first state in the country to raise the minimum smoking age to 21. Similar proposals have previously failed in New Jersey, Utah, Colorado and Maryland.</p>

A funny thing happened in school today. Not funny ha-ha but funny as in bizarre and unexpected. Funny as in funny money. And not just today. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Every day. Every time a school teaches reading in a way that doesn't work. That's funny, right? You teach reading but somehow nobody learns to read? How funny can you get? And not just in any one school. No, this epic lack of progress is happening everywhere. Point to a school and you're probably looking at a dead zone literacy-wise. That's funny, right? A school's first job is to teach kids to...

Another school year is about to start. Let’s cut to the chase: if your kid comes home with list of sight-words to memorize, you better get involved right away. Reading is the single most important skill a kid needs to have. Our Education Establishment seems to have a cruel tendency to use the wrong methods, thereby guaranteeing that millions of children remain semiliterate. Don’t let your kid be one of them. There are hundreds of books on this tricky subject, but I’m going to boil it down to a few words: English is a phonetic language and it must be...

...So, while my Journal of Ohio Archaeology paper concludes rather pessimistically that there are no documented early American Indian traditions that speak reliably to the original purpose and meaning of the ancient earthworks, there is no reason to believe that traditional stories of contemporary tribes with historic roots in the eastern Woodlands could not include themes and elements that echo, if faintly, traditions of the Hopewell culture. And if that’s conceivable, and I think it is, then it would be worthwhile to look for them... One reason why it’s important to take seriously what American Indians have had to say...

The Education Establishment went way too far, and this has presented the country with a unique opportunity for real improvement of the public schools. As never before, parents across the United States will tell you emphatically that they hate Common Core, and they especially hate Common Core Math. The Education Establishment will try to maneuver around this revulsion. Compromises will be offered. The same dumb ideas will be repackaged as something new and wonderful. The challenge is to refuse to compromise. Sometimes a good thing, compromise is now the biggest threat to genuine reform. Our Education Establishment has been selling...

For the past 15 years that Kenneth Berding has been teaching the New Testament, he admits that his students have always had little knowledge about the Bible. But today, he says, biblical illiteracy has reached a crisis point. "All the research indicates that biblical literacy in America is at an all-time low," Berding, professor of New Testament at Biola's Talbot School of Theology, told The Christian Post. "My own experience teaching a class of new college freshman every year for the past 15 years suggests to me that although students 15 years ago knew little about the Bible upon entering...

Donning a white cap and gown, Rachel Jeantel came through on a promise to her late friend, Trayvon Martin, this Friday. She graduated from high school. Jeantel was the last to speak to 17-year-old Martin, moments before the unarmed teenager was shot dead by George Zimmerman in 2012. Jeantel later served as a key witness for the prosecution. Unlike those that mocked Jeantel’s speech and mannerisms during the trial, Martin allegedly never judged Jeantel for her personality or the way she spoke. According to Jeantel, Martin “cared about you. That’s a good human.” Miami defense and civil rights attorney...

The single most important aspect of education is reading.   If children are not reading, their entire education comes to a halt. That’s what has happened in millions of lives.  All the statistics for many decades reveal a curious surprise: our public schools don’t actually know how to teach reading or, more likely, they pretend not to know.  This is a bizarre scandal, especially given that children have been learning to read for thousands of years, and 100 years ago this country was thought to be moving toward universal literacy.   An odd thing happened circa 1931. The Education Establishment pushed look-say (or...

(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) says that the newly launched Congressional Full Employment Caucus will “give President Obama a number of executive orders that he can sign.” Jackson Lee made the statement while gathered with Democrats on January 29th to announce the establishment of the Full Employment Caucus. “We will be answering the call of all of America because people need work and we’re not doing right by them by creating work,” Jackson Lee said. “I believe this caucus will put us on the right path and we’ll give President Obama a number of executive orders that he...

(CNN) -- Early in her career as a learning specialist, Mary Willingham was in her office when a basketball player at the University of North Carolina walked in looking for help with his classwork. He couldn't read or write. "And I kind of panicked. What do you do with that?" she said, recalling the meeting. Willingham's job was to help athletes who weren't quite ready academically for the work required at UNC at Chapel Hill, one of the country's top public universities. But she was shocked that one couldn't read. And then she found he was not an anomaly. Soon,...

Four score and seven years ago our progressives brought forth in this country a new notion, conceived in socialism, and dedicated to the proposition that all students must be created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil debate, testing rather that notion, or any notion so arbitrary and totalitarian, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that debate. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for the ideologues who here told lies that this infamous notion might live. It is altogether fitting and propitious that we...

[Summary: easy way to understand sight-words.] Hey, wait a minute, you're thinking. There's no such thing as English hieroglyphics. There are Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian hieroglyphics, maybe some others. But English? No way. Yeah, you know that. But does a six-year-old kid know that? Not hardly. You know what this means? The school system can pull a fast one. Teachers point to a word-– "house" -– and say, "This design is pronounced 'house.' Memorize it." Presto, that English phonetic word is now English hieroglyphics, simply by saying it is. That's what American public schools did circa 1930; they changed all English...

Thirty years ago, a panel of distinguished experts concluded that US public schools were so bad they could be an enemy attack. The famous Nation at Risk Report stated: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Thirty years later, nothing has improved. Probably the opposite. (“Nation is at Greater Risk. But everyone pretends not to know why." A new Examiner article explains why our schools don't improve. Link below.) We are celebrating the 30th anniversary of one of...

Keeping with its mission to deepen the community’s understanding of adult illiteracy in the region, the San Diego Council on Literacy (SDCOL) today released Voices and Faces: Literacy in San Diego. This dramatic new documentary tells the story of 13 adults, whose inability to read kept them from meeting their personal and professional needs and achieving their life goals. These 13 people represent the hundreds of thousands of adults in San Diego County and the countless more in America who go through life facing unimaginable obstacles. Often times, they are too embarrassed to tell anyone and live with a painful...

Hey folks, We’re trying something different for today’s mid-day update. Rather than write a bunch of text, I’ve imbedded below some of the more key tweets I’ve made over the course of the morning. (This has the benefit of giving me a few minutes to each some lunch.) Hopefully, the tweets below will give you a sense for how West’s cross-examination of Rachel Jeantel has gone so far this morning. We’ll have a detailed analysis, of course, in this evening’s end-of-day wrap-up post. Enjoy, and be sure to check back in to our live coverage page at 1:14PM (EST), here:...

The Education Establishment continues a weird charade. They maintain that dyslexia is entirely caused by inborn genetic problems. On the other hand, phonics experts have always found that if you teach children to read with sight-words, the children will get dyslexia. If you change the pedagogy from sight-words to phonics, the children will usually recover. Isn’t that fairly clear-cut? Just recently on Edutopia a self-appointed expert left a perfect statement of the Party Line, which inspired an article on Examiner. (link below) The expert’s key assertion is this: dyslexia “is not the result of ‘sight words’ or anything other than...