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. 

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

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.

A column I have in several places on the internet starts like this: “Most major American newspapers are scoring a painful trifecta: losing readers, waving goodbye to advertisers, and firing journalists. Why is this happening?” I discuss two causes. The first (in brief) is the papers are too busy pushing their political agenda. The article continues:
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“A second reason for the newspapers’ decline is that the liberal media unthinkingly support the education establishment, on the mistaken assumption that this group represents some sort of progressive or liberal high ground. In fact, the educational establishment is often better described as regressive, for keeping students uninformed, giving future workers few tools for success. and favoring oddball reading theories that cause dyslexia and functional illiteracy.

There is in fact no necessary link between the politics of our education establishment and anyone’s progressive values. Antonio Gramsci, a real Communist, advocated giving poor children lots of basic academic skills, so they can escape poverty. What, pray tell, is “progressive” about schools that allow children to graduate without being able to read or write properly? No, the only sure link is the one between the media’s support of intellectually flabby educators and the continuing decline of the media themselves. Why don’t they see it: the schools are killing off their customer base!

Experts say this country has more than 40,000,000 functional illiterates. People are ignorant about even the most basic stuff. Where’s New York? Which way is the Pacific Ocean? What is France?…How can people who don’t have any background information enjoy reading a newspaper?

If our newspapers had better judgment, they would demand more achievement in the public schools.”
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This link between the ed establishment and our media is much on my mind. As I’ve studied the reading wars and concluded that Whole Word was always a dubious proposition, the thing that haunts me is that the media and academia stood silently by. Hardly a peep out of the best people and brightest minds. Please, if anyone knows of a professor at Harvard, Princeton, etc., who jumped into the fight along side Rudolph Flesch, I’d love to hear the name.