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If you happen to care about grammar and spelling, then in these post-literate times you can expect to be considered a pedant by the semi-literate, and a "grammar nazi" by the illiterate. My blood pressure rises when I see misuses of the apostrophe, pluralization with an apostrophe, "impact" as a verb, "pro-active" in all its uses, "there is a lot" and "there is many", "He would have if he would have", among other errors familiar to the readers among whom I don't expect to see makers of such errors. Still, I realize that the battle has been lost now. Here...

If there is one true cancer in the land of education, according to our Education Establishment, it’s the torture known as “drill and kill.”Progressive educators always hated Drill and Kill. It hurts the child, we are told, and is the end of genuine learning.For the last hundred years, our Education Establishment condemned the direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to student. These elite educators are constantly in a rage that students might be forced to prepare for a test in the traditional sense, that is, they know facts. And yet, when it helps their agenda, the commissars will turn on...

In the public schools in Detroit, Mich., according to the U.S. Department of Education, only 7 percent of the eighth graders are grade-level proficient or better in reading. Some public school teachers in the City of Detroit and around the state of Michigan are reportedly taking a vacation or a sick day today to protest right-to-work legislation likely to be approved by the state legislature. Under current law, Michigan public school teachers must pay dues to the teachers’ union. If the right-to-work law is enacted, Michigan public-school teachers will be free to join the union and pay dues to it...

.... From there the regression into abandoning the teaching of reading to children was rapid. Teaching “reading” came to be viewed by many to be the act of repeatedly showing children flash cards in an effort to get them to recognize words by rote memorization as opposed to actually reading the words. Fortunately for my eldest, this had not reached the elementary schools by the mid-90s and she was taught how to read and write. My youngest, though, was met with this like a freight train and the results were comparable with a train wreck. My youngest was a hard-working...

A reading teacher commented on the Internet: “The situation in the local public schools is getting worse. This year they switched to Guided Reading. Take a look at Pinnell & Fountas. This is a perfect example of 'how not to teach reading.'" Curious, I asked a teacher in Chicago what she knew about Guided Reading. Here’s her indignant response: -------------- “HA!!! Fountas and Pinnell!!!!! They created Guided Reading (I think). These are two women who are obvious whole language experts. They publish their stuff at Heinemann. Let me explain how Guided Reading goes. You know, Bruce, in a whole language...

Braking hard ...

Statistics on book sales at Amazon show that conservative titles are out-selling liberal titles by a 56% to 44% margin. Fearing that this may create the impression that conservative ideas are winning, Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod cautioned that “we not leap to unwarranted conclusions based on these numbers.” “Reading is an activity favored by intellectually curious and verbally oriented people,” Axelrod argued. “This is neither a majority of the population nor a strong Democratic demographic. It does not represent the sizable contingent of persons who respond emotively to more pictographic stimuli.” Axelrod pointed out that “since the more viscerally...

<p>The company that persuaded hundreds of thousands of parents to buy Your Baby Can Read products is going out of business, citing the high cost of fighting complaints alleging its ads were false.</p> <p>Your Baby Can LLC announced the decision on its website.</p>

When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, "There's new people you should meet," her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company. "I cringe every time I hear" people misuse "is" for "are," Mr. Silver says. The company's chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with "like." For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. "I am losing the battle," he says. Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many...

[Author's title: "In Reading We Can Read The Contempt of Socialists"] What, if any, is the connection between illiteracy and ideology? George Orwell, our greatest political sociologist, has some ideas. He is the master explainer of governance, power, totalitarianism, education, and the dynamics of class warfare. It's an ugly picture. In his seminal essay, "Ignorance Is Strength," Orwell lays down the iron rule of history: "Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world[:] High, Middle, and Low." Orwell cynically notes that the Middle always campaign for...

For more than 40 years, Mona McNee has been fighting the good fight on behalf of intelligent reading instruction. She is the author of "Step By Step" (a phonics program) and "The Great Reading Disaster" (with Alice Coleman, 2007, 335 pages), which chronicles the incompetence of the UK's Education Establishment. I always think of Mona McNee as the Patron Saint of Reading.Mona has recently prepared a booklet called "Why Billy can't read," which sums up her message in 30 pages. You can find a pdf of this booklet, and as well her free phonics program, on phonics4free.org (link below). Mona...

[More about Sight-Words...] Your average criminal has a few aliases. It’s de rigueur in the underworld. But only real swashbucklers pass the half-dozen mark. Think about the confusion keeping your identities straight. Down South you’re Jackson Jones, but in New York you answer to Maxie Smith, however, guys in Atlantic City call you Lefty,” as in, “Yo, Lefty, still doing hits?” Which has to remind us of Whole Word, one of the greatest swashbucklers since Charles Ponzi’s business plan. This wise guy--I mean Whole Word-- came into the world as Look-say, with a few early aliases such as Word Method...

The sign went up late Friday, when the kids were out of school. Black letters on a white board perched over the parking lot at Lakewood High. Patricia Schley, the school's literacy coach, was trying to promote a training session for parents. She wanted to show them how to help their teens become better readers. She had scheduled the evening event for more than a month before the FCATs. Wednesday night — the extra day of the leap year — would be literacy night. Lakewood High, on the southeastern end of St. Petersburg, is home to about 1,400 students. Almost...

The Florida Board of Education backed off Tuesday from a controversial proposal that could have turned many schools around the state into "F" schools... After discussing the issue, the board revised the proposed rule so that a school’s grade would drop one letter grade, rather than go straight to “F,” if it failed to meet the 25 percent benchmark, and it also stipulated that it wouldn’t take effect for one year.

Marie Antoinette, on hearing that French peasants had no bread to eat, suggested, “Let them eat cake.” This quip perfectly captured the haughty indifference which many people attributed to the French monarchy. A few years later, she was punished for her hauteur: execution by guillotine. The famous quote was probably never uttered. Real or not, it’s a handy symbol for an arrogant elite, indifferent to the suffering of the people. When you read in the newspaper that the US has 50 million functional illiterates, the disdainful queen should flash into your mind.During the 1920’s, the American population was moving toward...

There are already many Bills of Rights for Students. Most emphasize how schools or teachers should treat students. Typically, that would be gently. Heaven forbid we should place any burden on these delicate minds. Here is the problem from an educational point of view. At the end of the day, if all these rights are accommodated, the children could still end up as ignorant as they were a year earlier. A Bill of Rights for Students 2012 emphasizes skills and knowledge that the students are ENTITLED to learn, and that schools must teach. A Bill of Rights for Students 2012...

[MORE ABOUT READING, SPECIFICALLY, THAT SO-CALLED BALANCED LITERACY IS ANOTHER CHAPTER IN THE LONG-RUNNING HOAX:] So here’s the deal. The same people who lied to us about reading for 70 years now want us to believe they are finally telling the truth. They said that English isn’t phonetic, that children don’t need the alphabet and the sounds, that children need only to look at words and memorize the shapes. All this was utter nonsense. They further said that if children didn’t recognize a word (which they typically didn’t as it’s hard work to memorize a word by its shape), they...

Gov. Scott Walker and the state schools superintendent unveiled a task force's recommendations Wednesday for how Wisconsin might ensure that every child can read by the end of the third grade, including testing incoming kindergarteners' reading proficiency, providing teachers with more training opportunities and holding teachers to higher standards. Walker formed the Read to Lead task force in March after reading tests showed Wisconsin students were falling behind students in other states. He and state Superintendent Tony Evers unveiled the recommendations at a public school in the Milwaukee suburb of Greendale. They called the recommendations an "aggressive plan to improve...

Hey everyone I've been away awhile working on my youtube channel and trying to get my personal life in order not to mention raising my newborn son who is now coming along and growing nicely. And my wife has been trying to find new work as well and I've been helping her out there too. I decided to kick off my blog again with an article I've been meaning to write about literacy and reading and how the Christian faith influenced this growth. My interest in the article peaked after being referred to a book about the Byzantine Romans and...

OUTSTANDING (& FUNNY) POST FROM BLOG YOU MIGHT NOT RUN INTO:: ---------- Curse you, "Sing, Spell, Read, & Write!" I've had a revelation. It dawned on me exactly when I lost control around here. It was when I taught my kids to read. See, it doesn't take long, once a kid can read, that he gets twice as smart as his parents. One day he's working his way through The Cat In The Hat, and a week later, he's making subversive messages with those plastic letter refrigerator magnets: "DOWN WITH OPPRESSIVE BEDTIMES! STOP THE TYRANNY!" And then they learn to...