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Hundreds of websites still casually assert what is probably the most destructive sophistry in the history of education: The Dolch Sight Words [created in the 1940s] are a list of the 220 most frequently used words in the English language. These sight words make up 50 to 70 percent of any general text….Dolch found that children who can identify a certain core group of words by sight could learn to read and comprehend better. Dolch's sight word lists are still widely used today and highly respected by both teachers and parents. These sight words were designed to be learned and mastered by the third grade....

Noticing how LOCAL news is portraying Donald Trump's words at his campaign launch a couple weeks ago. Trump was speaking about ILLEGAL ALIENS and the criminal element within....The VIOLENT criminal element.... Now, at least one of the Miami TV stations is reporting that Trump says MOST MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS are rapists and murderers...a COMPLETE misrepresentation of his comments. WFOR, WPLG, WSVN and WTVJ are the English speaking stations in Miami.....you would think since Trump owns the Doral golf course, and does lots of business in Florida, they'd make an effort to accurately report his statements.

This is an age when Confederate monuments still stand; when white-privilege denialism is surging on social media;... And that’s looking only at race. Add gender, guns, gays, and God to the mix and the culture war seems to be raging along quite nicely. Yet from another perspective, much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. Not long after his original book came out, Hirsch published the first of several editions of a Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. [T]he Internet has transformed who makes culture and how. [Thus, the] omni-American...

Private school kids can read. Classical academy kids can read. Montessori school kids can read. Homeschooled kids can read. Spot the pattern? It’s only kids in public schools who can’t read. Why is that? You would think our education professors would figure out what the schools are doing wrong. In fact, they have not figured out very much in the last 80 years. Our professors seem mainly concerned with perpetuating the wrong ways to teach reading. And so the crisis continues. Truth is, reading is easy to teach and easy to learn. All the phonics experts agree: reading is no...

At an event in New York City on Monday, President Obama said “reforming our schools for all of our kids” was one of his accomplishments. He also described “public-education institutions” as “pathways for success.” But in the same speech, the president hailed a new private sector effort to teach black and Latino kids to read at grade level by third grade; increase their high school graduation rates; and get more young black and Latino men into higher education or career training, all of them things that a “reformed” education system might be expected to do. …

When states are ranked for their intelligence or lack of it, Georgia usually ends up in the bottom 10. What is the Peach State doing wrong? A lot. We are confronted here by a confusing swirl of lies and scandals, so let’s start with a quick summary. Georgia officials insist on using the worst theories and methods. Predictably their schools get bad results. To cover up the embarrassing results (of course, the officials would not think of adopting better methods), the schools create elaborate cheating mechanisms. This works until the truth leaks out. Scandal ensues. Cheating scandals occur throughout the...

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it...

“The college educated are more likely to own stocks and less prone to use high-cost borrowing.” — Journal of Economic Literature Financial literacy is important, but sadly, only a handful of states require students to take personal finance or an investment course. I earned a Ph. D. in economics and never took a class in accounting, business or personal finance! How bad is financial education in this country? In 2008, two economists came up with three simple questions to test the financial knowledge of citizens 55 years or older. See how well you do: 1. Suppose you had $100 in...

Teens in the United States are only average when it comes to financial literacy; crushed by Chinese teenagers’ remarkable performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment’s (PISA) first-ever financial literacy assessment. pisa study chart PISA typically surveys an average of 65 countries and economies focusing on mathematics with additional reading, science and problem-solving areas of assessment. On July 9, 2014 PISA released the results of a new financial literacy assessment evaluating 15-year-olds from 18 countries and economies. Among those countries the United States ranked somewhere between 8 and 12; China, 1. But that’s not all, while the U.S. struggles...

In the first ever international assessment of financial nous among the young, China’s most populous city leads the field “by a wide margin” compared with teenagers in the US, France, Italy, Australia and elsewhere, informs “Armenpress”, in reference to Financial Times. The study was made by the OECD, the club of mostly rich nations, which tested 15- year-olds on basic financial concepts such as bank accounts, savings rates, managing finances and tax. Shanghai teens clocked a mean score of 603 points, 103 above the OECD average and 62 points ahead of the next best performer, Flemish Belgium. Five other economies...

Martin Luther’s emphasis on literacy helped make modern day journalism possible. Rise of the Corruption Story Unnatural Acts In America, we expect journalists to have some independence from government and other leading power centers. We are not surprised to glance at the morning newspaper or television news show and see exposure of wrongdoing. We assume that the press has a responsibility to print bad news as well as good. And yet, that which seems ordinary to us is unusual in the history of the world, and even in much of the world today. How did the unnatural act of independent...

For the fourth straight year, Washington, D.C. is the most literate city in the United States, according to a recent study on literacy. The study, by Central Connecticut State University (CCSU), examined how well Americans used their literacy skills in the nation’s largest cities. Rounding out the top five were Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Pittsburgh. CCSU ranked the cities based on six categories: bookstores, residents’ educational attainment, newspaper circulation, use of online resources, the library system, and periodical publishing resources. The most literate cities were largely in the Northeast, and they generally had a well-educated and well-paid population.Click here to...

A new development in education is deciding what "literacy" should be in the 21st century. With a swirl of technological breakthroughs all around us, elite educators are gaga at the plethora of excuses for pooh-poohing subjects routinely taught in the dark age known as the 20th century. The National Council of Teachers of English recently announced: "Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy." These people give good sophistry. Presto, literacy can now be defined any way they want. When these Teachers of...

Some may laugh and others may joke about it. Others will blame it on a system that needs more money. But for those (this essayist included) who have been speaking out against America’s steady degradation of education, Rachel Jeantel is the poster child for exactly what we’ve come to expect from public education. Jeantel was advertised as the star prosecution witness in the George Zimmerman trial. You know – the one where “a white Hispanic brutally gunned down an unarmed African-American simply because he was black.” (Excuse me while I throw-up.) At least once every year we witness teacher strikes...

As if more evidence were needed about the tragedy of black education, Rachel Jeantel, a witness for the prosecution in the George Zimmerman murder trial, put a face on it for the nation to see. Some of that evidence unfolded when Zimmerman’s defense attorney asked 19-year-old Jeantel to read a letter she allegedly had written to Trayvon Martin’s mother. She responded that she doesn’t read cursive, and that’s in addition to her poor grammar, syntax and communication skills. Jeantel is a senior at Miami Norland Senior High School. How in the world did she manage to become a 12th-grader without...

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...

EARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma. Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life. Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican...

Update: Two small adjustments to this story were made to clarify the relationship between Common Core and school districts. A parent in upstate New York is claiming there is some disturbing information being taught to his child as a result of a Common Core-aligned lesson on government and human rights. (Common Core is the controversial standardized curriculum program being advocated for by the federal government.) The latest example, he says, is that his daughter and her classmates are being taught a section on the 30 “universal human rights” declared by the United Nations in 1945. Those rights include: • The...

It’s an education bombshell. Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system. The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday. When they graduated from city high schools, students in a special remedial program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn’t make the grade. They had to re-learn basic skills — reading, writing and math — first before they could begin college courses.

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. A Wealth of Words The key to increasing upward mobility is expanding vocabulary. WInter 2013 A number of notable recent books, including Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality and Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence, lay out in disheartening detail the growing inequality of income and opportunity in the United States, along with the decline of the middle class. The aristocracy of family so deplored by Jefferson seems upon us; the counter-aristocracy of merit that long defined America as the land of opportunity has receded. These writers emphasize global, technological, and sociopolitical trends in their analyses. But...