improveeducation

Visit: Education Improved

Bruce Price — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:49:26 +0000

I like edublogs. It’s probably real good for teachers with students. But it’s not so searchable as it once was.

So I tried to make a new blog on WordPress, and found it somewhat confusing (if you’re not a techie).

So I ended up making yet another blog on Blogger. This is an education blog, with short bits and hits, somewhat more tied to events in the world. Title is: educationimproved.blogspot.com

Lively, sometimes aggressive, holding educator tootsies to the fire. Stop by.

THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education

Bruce Price — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:13:22 +0000

Lots of people, lots of money, lots of promises…but public schools don’t seem to be do a very good job. Why not?

That’s THE EDUCATION ENIGMA.

I have 120+ articles on the net. I took my favorite excerpts and created a powerful little book that is now available on Amazon. It covers a lot of ground and a lot of topics, but the conclusion is that our Educational Establishment is drunk on collectivist theory, and therefore lets bad ideas into the schools.

Want better schools? Get rid of the bad methods, such as Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, No Memorization, Cooperative Learning, and many more.

Here’s a link for more information: www.improve-education.org/id61.html

Hostile to Math & Reading

Bruce Price — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 02:53:23 +0000

Wow! When you really look, our elite educators have been busy-busy-busy. At first glance, you think these people are clumsy, or misguided, or they have very bad judgment. Then you start to see patterns — for example, everything they’re really excited about is usually a bad idea. So bad it takes a kind of genius to concoct it!

In reading, they fell in love with Look-Say, Whole Word, Sight Words, Dolch Words. Call them what you will, they are a lousy way to learn to read. Then, in math, they’ve had a long romance with New Math, New New Math, and Reform Math. The commercial names are TERC, Everyday Math, Connected Math, MathLand, etc. Again, all these things are the worst way to teach math.

See what I mean by patterns? If a bad idea is available, they will find it, take it home, marry it, and make offspring we would rather not deal with. Ah well, you see that I can wax rhapsodic about these people. I am endlessly fascinated by all their craziness. With regard to reading, I’ve just added a comparison chart — see “37: Whole Word versus Phonics — to my site Improve-Education.org. I tried to boil the whole debate down to the essentials. If you’re still confused about why Whole Word doesn’t work, you will find this a useful read. As for math, I added “36: The Assault on Math” to the site. This is a short, sharp critique of what might best be called Anti-Math. Join my crusade.

Why The Public Schools Are A Mess

Bruce Price — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:12:52 +0000

I spend a lot of time trying to solve one of the most interesting crime stories there is.
Why, despite vast sums of money and massive concern by the public, are our educators somehow able to achieve new depths of dumb?
Why?? Because they know what they want and they work at it!
I just put a piece on the web titled “Educators Best Understood as Ignorance Engineers.” It’s not easy these days coming up with an original phrase. But Ignorance Engineers actually seems to be new. And it exactly captures the essence of what I’m more and more confident in saying: these educators are not wayward little waifs lost in the big city; they are cold-hearted ideologues trying to achieve John Dewey’s collectivist dream.
The reason they get away with so much mischief is that people give them the benefit of the doubt: they’re trying; they’re confused; they mean well. Actually, they don’t.
(Please Google: “Educators Best Understood as Ignorance Engineers.“)

Whole Word Wholly Wrong

Bruce Price — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 17:53:38 +0000

If you are interested in the reading wars, please see a review I just put on Amazon.com for Frank Smith’s “Understanding Reading,” one of the most influential books of the last 50 years.

To this day, I never meet anyone who understands what the reading wars are all about. The Whole Word people keep the debate so murky and sophistical, you’re lucky if you escape with your sanity (or your wallet or your children).

In this Amazon review, I came up with a simple way to clarify Whole Word’s nuttiness.

Stop and think about how difficult it is to memorize numbers. Phone numbers, for example. How many could you retain if your life depended on it? Even 100?

Point is, recalling “Whole Numbers” shows you the difficulty of memorizing “Whole Words.” That’s what Whole Word does—it reduces learning to read to memorizing thousands of number-like designs. For the new reader, English looks like this: sjfgjp tsbfg hthwl xnsk hwhty. For all practical purposes, it also looks like this: 38685 352661 375707 26646 464 8278 664.

For the brain, this is very hard work. And guess what. The same bad thing happens in all cases: REVERSALS. 4581 or 4518? xnsk or xnks? All options look reasonable. Such reversals are quite normal when we struggle to recall a number. But when kids can’t get the letters straight it’s called dysfunction, it’s called dyslexia!

Seems to me, an entire bogus industry has been built on this non-problem. Geniuses invented the alphabet to make memorizing words easier. What kind of people would discard this great advance?

Also see “30: The War Against Reading” on Improve-Education.org.

Helping the non-reader, the dyslexic, the illiterate

Bruce Price — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:15:17 +0000

Please, if you know a non-reader or you are connected to a literacy program, check out what I believe is a very important new article: 33: How To Help A Non-Reader To Read, on Improve-Education.org. The country is said to have 50,000,000 “functional illiterates.” Typically, these are people once trapped in Whole Word classrooms. They mange to memorize 1,000 or 2,000 “sight words.” But they can’t read phonetically, which is to say, they can’t really read. They can’t read a newspaper. Their academic and employment prospects are limited. In addition, they often suffer from a common side-effect of Whole Word—that is, dyslexia. Have you ever tried to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time? Your brain is divided against itself. There’s confusion and anxiety. In the case of dyslexia, the brain has two strategies when it encounters a word: pull up its meaning from memory; OR sound it out.

Public schools are pushing Dolch Words at kids as young as 4 and 5. Once the child learns the strategy of treating words as graphic objects to be memorized by their shapes, that child is basically finished as a fluent reader. Sure, the smarter kids will find their way back to phonics in time; they will see the sounds inside the Sight Words. But the slower, less verbal kids are not that flexible. They try to do what they are told—guess, use context, memorize shapes, don’t sound out. Their reward is a reading disability.The whole thing seems like a sick joke….until you glance back at that number 50,0000,000. Our educators have been busy, haven’t they? This new article provides quick diagnostics for assessing the damage. The idea is that a good reader will guide a poor reader through the article, and together they will begin a journey of discovery and recovery. 33: How To Help A Non-Reader To Read.

Why We Need A “Teacher Liberation Front”

Bruce Price — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:41:01 +0000

I just reviewed an old book for Amazon.com called “The New Illiterates” by Samuel Blumenfeld. Published in 1973, this book is still amazingly fresh. How can that be? Because our elite educators still hang on to all their excuses and sophistries, still refuse to work for genuine academic improvement.

In this book Blumenfeld points out that the locus of our problem is “the teachers of teachers,” the ideologues, that is, who run the ed schools. What has changed in 35 years??

More and more I suspect that progress will come from radicalized teachers. To promote this idea, I’ve just added “31: Teacher Liberation Front” to Improve-Education.org. The starting point for this article is a quote in a new book titled “The Great Reading Disaster” by Mona McNee and Alice Coleman. Writing about the UK experience, they state:

“The real villains were not the victimized teachers who carried out the intellectual child abuse but the training establishments that brainwashed them into doing so.”

I urge teachers to savor every word in that quote…Victimized…Brainwashed…”Training establishments” are, of course, the ed schools in England.

As you’ll see in the next post, my site Improve-Education.org says that Jay Leno is Educator of the Year, that Leno is doing more than anyone else to showcase the failures of our public schools. Isn’t it significant that our educators have managed to make Jay Leno, a stand-up comic, appear to be a major intellectual force? (See video in next post for more analysis.)
Should I apologize for being so tough on educators (i.e., the managers at the top)? I feel they’ve earned it. I’ve been studying this field for many years, and let me tell you, it’s like walking through some bizarre lab. The goal seems to be to create unintelligent life forms. Start with Whole Word, so that most kids cannot become fluent readers. Move on to Fuzzy Math, so they can’t count. Filter out all facts from the real world, the scientific world, the historical world, the scholarly world, the industrial world…
Really, I’d like to suggest that, for teachers, the most radical thing you can do is TEACH MORE. That’s the theme of Teacher Liberation Front. Join today.

What Really Happened to Education in USA???

Bruce Price — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:57:31 +0000

I’ve just finished a long historical piece called “The War Against Reading” (#30 on Improve-Education.org.) The main focus is on Whole Word and why it can’t possibly work. If you are confused about any of this, please check it out. The article mentions a second, complementary war against arithmetic. This war was waged under the banner of New Math, then New New Math, which is a derisive term for Everyday Math, TERC, etc. Some of the same rhetoric is used in both wars: fuzziness is fine; guesses are good; students should bring their own meanings to the page; and precision is no big deal.

In thinking over this piece, I realized that there was a third front to the war, which was almost as important as the other two. Namely, the war against memorization and facts. Educators for 100 years have criticized requiring students to know—i.e. actually be able to recall—anything! I tell you, if you are idealistic and assume other people are, you are going to be in for a shock as you peer into this swamp. Left to their theories and tendencies, our educators would guarantee that students could hardly read; could do simple arithmetic only with a calculator; and be utterly ignorant of even the most basic information. Which is why there’s a TV program called Are You As Smart As A Fifth Grader? Imagine that being asked 50 years ago! Late News: And there is Jay Leo and Jaywalking. I believe Leno is doing more than anyone else to make the country aware of our educational decline. Accordingly, my site Improve-Education.org named him Educator of the Year for 2008. If you are not familiar with Jaywalking, you can check this short video: Educator of the Year—Jay Leno

Dyslexia: Whole Word’s second shadow (with video)

Bruce Price — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:35:56 +0000

One of the big unreported stories in this country is that a whole industry has grown up around dyslexia—to excuse it, blame it on any cause but the real one, and find reasons why it’s not really so bad. Dip into any of this and your head will spin. The following comment (left by a reader in response to one of my articles) contains every premise and platitude now popular in that industry….

”To say that “Whole Word” language learning causes dyslexia is completely absurd! Dyslexia is a brain function style – is not actually a disorder since it also comes with a whole host of positives and giftings. Not to mention the fact that most dyslexics learn to read much more effectively with “whole word” than with phonics as they are global “whole concept” learners. Phonics with it’s disjointed teaching of sounds only increases their confusion.”

But what if Whole Word can’t teach anyone to read?? What if Whole Word causes the dyslexia and will make it worse?? The following is my response to the reader’s comment….

“Rudolph Flesch and Samuel Blumenfeld, both extraordinary minds, concluded that dyslexia, in the vast majority of cases, is an artificially induced disability. Totally, tragically unnecessary. Caused by the unworkable reading pedagogy called Whole Word. All of this is bad enough. But our educators, in a desperate bid to buttress Whole Word, have allowed a second twilight zone, a second mythology, to grow up around dyslexia. All the way back in 1928 Dr. Samuel Orton, one of the first to investigate the harm caused by Whole Word, anticipated what we are still dealing with today: “…faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life.” It’s sad to see a positive spin attached to such damage. A lot of my work is aimed at helping people to grapple with the dark side of Whole Word. Once people see that it cannot possibly work and should never have been used, then they can migrate toward seeing that dyslexia is, for the most part, the affliction that should not be. Flesch concluded that a cure is possible. The victim must learn to read from scratch, and learn to read phonetically, as a two-finger typist -must start over to learn proper typing.”

———-I made a great little video for YouTube that looks at some of these issues; the title is Phonics vs. Whole Word.

My Educational Videos on YouTube.com

Bruce Price — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:42:27 +0000

New software lets me create some very useful videos (actually they’re more like animated slideshows). Here are some of the titles you can find on YouTube:

Phonics vs. Whole Word

The Truth About Robots

John Dewey and the Burden of Ideology

How To Teach Latin, Etc.

World’s Easiest Test

Total is now about 20. Enter any of these phrases in their search window. Once you find one, you’ve found them all! Many of the themes discussed in my posts on this blog are dealt with in these videos. The longest is less than 7 minutes.