School Daze

What a monumental task it is, making New York City's public school system worse, but worry not, it's well underway.

Diana Lam, Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning, and her boss, former Microsoft antitrust prosecutor, Joel Klein, Chancellor, have already installed a reading-writing program based on a "child-centered" Progressive education theory exposed as preposterous more than seventy years ago. It is a program that utterly and proudly ignores all scientific evidence of the past four decades concerning the process of representing--encoding and decoding--the sound units, phonemes, of language.

Scientists in a number of disciplines now know quite well how children learn to read, that is, "...the critical environmental, experiential, cognitive, linguistic, genetic, neurobiological, and instructional conditions that foster reading development ... and the ... specific cognitive, linguistic, environmental, and instructional factors [that] impede the development of accurate and fluent reading skills..."

It's impossible to know whether Diana Lam is even dimly aware of the wealth of scientific evidence, including the results of functional MRI's of the brain, that demonstrates the falsity of her Progressive approach. (It's certain that Chancellor Joel Klein is clueless.) It would apparently make no difference to her if she knew. Her attachment to utopian-socialist fantasies concerning education and the world, together with her lack of intellectual rigor lead her into gross error.

Consequently, she has become an enemy of school success. In her two previous appointments to lead public school systems (in San Antonio, TX and Providence, RI) she never exhibited anything more than an ability to wring personal profit–-high pay and high contract settlements when fired–-out of her labors.

One can almost sympathize with the politicos who have responsibility for urban school systems and yearn desperately for non-white school administrators. So, yearning, they tend to hire the likes of Peru-born Diana Lam regardless of her actual record as educator. That way, the blame for the continuing academic failure of black and Hispanic kids will, they hope, not be attributed to white racism and certainly not to themselves-–haven't they done their best to see that no child, white, brown, striped, or spotted, is left behind?

That way, when a memo written in egregiously illiterate, quasi-Ebonic English emanates from Lam's office, white pols can snicker and carry on as usual.

Alas, the stink of racism is pervasive. Diana Lam and a complaisant city administration, Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, particularly, are insuring the academic failure of at-risk kids. And now, Lam has decreed that kids who can achieve, who can flourish in spite of her, gifted kids at public schools for the gifted, chiefly the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School will be closed as soon as she can get around to it.

In this it is clear that Diana Lam is following a socialist agenda requiring wilful blindness to individual differences and a fierce desire to level not the playing field but the players.

Kids are admitted to Bronx Science and Stuyvesant in Manhattan about a mile north of Ground Zero only if they pass an entrance examination. It shouldn't surprise anyone that there are few blacks and Latinos in those schools, since members of those groups are typically about 4 grades behind whites and Asians. (Yin Li, 17, who arrived here with his parents from Shanghai nine years ago and yesterday won the $100,000 Siemens scholarship prize for science, is a senior at Stuyvesant.) Is this "de facto segregation" sufficient reason for closing them? One has to wonder why a school may be reserved for homosexuals and the gender-confused and not for kids who have evidenced ability to perform at a high academic level?

Since the modern introduction by John Dewey in the second decade of the last century of the notion, there has not been one scintilla of empirical proof that there are academic benefits to heterogeneous ability grouping. There's no reason to believe that any benefit will ever be adduced. Clearly, heterogeneity makes instruction harder Nor is it fair because equal, any more than fitting an entire class with one shoe size would be fair. It's a rotten idea any way you look at it.

Diana Lam likes the idea, though. She tried, when she was employed in Providence to close Classical High. She failed. There are too many Bronx Science alumni–-I am one–-and Stuyvesant alumni–-Tom Sowell is one–-and there are a substantial number of sensible people resident in this city who will effectively protest this inane action. Diana Lam will get her walking papers soon, and the lamentable Mr. Klein will follow her. Then maybe, under rational adult guidance we'll take a crack at No Excuses public education. When you reach rock bottom, there's nowhere to go but up.

Superintendents such as this one make a career out of going from state to state, bamboozling school boards and developing curriculum that doesn't work, and when test scores plunge, getting bought out of their contracts (big bucks) and moving on to the next sucker school district. It's a racket, folks. I heard this one being interviewed on TV, and she's real good dodging the issues and going round and round.

Here is a link to Annapolis High School which just got a new superintendent (who refuses to meet with parents) and the principal he hired (who got run out of the Prince Georges school district)and who constantly plays the race card. She communicates to students either by screeching at them and physically assaulting them or posting anonomously on this parent/student website:

http://www.saveannapolishigh.com/

Some people realize that progressive education isn't helpful to their children and are starting up more traditional schools, both public and private:

http://www.ridgeviewclassical.com/

Diana Lam would close this school down in a New York minute.

When will people learn?

Some people do learn. You did, evidently or you wouldn't be asking the question. I agree with you, so I must have learned, too.

I think Lam has learned, knows that what she professes is purest hogwash. The people who never learn are suckers like Joel Klein and his boss, the Mayor of the biggest assemblage of hicks in the Western world.

O. Eye duzn't no dat may be diz kina lanwish iz jis wot wee needz in yourz shulez. I eems. Not everun kin unndertan al dat Engush rolez an stuufs so may be it be a mo bettuh thang ta teech soz we kin lern an git a gude job instid uv havin ta reed abowt stuffz dat doant mattuh in da firzt playce.

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