improveeducation » phonics

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.“)

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.

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.

The Big Silence—How Phonics Was Disappeared

Bruce Price — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 20:19:58 +0000

As I’ve written about the reading wars—Whole Word vs. phonics—and argued that Whole Word was never anything but a sophistry, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by a collateral question: how were our educators able to get away with their scam?? (If that sounds harsh, please Google: “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch,” which is on Improve-Education.org.)

Here’s the answer that is haunting me. Whole Word could be pushed upon the country, and phonics driven out of the schools, because our media and academics stood silently by and let it happen.

Remember, Flesch wrote his first Johnny-can’t-read book all the way back in 1955. Everything you need to know is in the first chapter. But educators mobilized against him. Who came to his defense? The media, who should be reporting the truth and the news? NO, not that I can discover. Academics, who should be protecting standards and literacy? NO, not that I can discover. A shameful silence spread across the land.

Please, if you know of examples where media or academics did rally to Flesch’s side, I’d like to know. Any year, any publication, any college. Leave a comment.

The Emerging Era of Ergonomic Education

Bruce Price — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 21:14:33 +0000

****announcing an important new article****

Here’s a summary of my school years: all my schools were highly-rated, but not one class was taught as well as it could have been. Why?! I’ve been totally intrigued by this question for a long time.

Here’s my suggestion: we need to look at classrooms the way an engineer looks at problems. How, in short, do we teach the most info in the fastest time with the least effort? That’s the ergonomic question.

I’ve finally condensed all my notes into an article titled “How to Teach History, Etc.” (#26 on Improve-Education.org). Here’s the main points:

1. School and teacher must commit to subject.
2. Use every teaching aid, every trick or technique that will make classes more memorable and effective.
3. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And then say it again some other way.
4. Every course is ideally a gigantic mnemonic device, a cluster of interconnected facts, a mind molecule, a matrix.

If you search “ergonomic teaching” or “ergonomic education” in Google, virtually everything you find will deal with the physical world–chairs, lighting and computer screens. That’s physical ergonomics….The educational establishment has been ruinously sidetracked by a second kind–social engineering…. My own fascination is with the third kind: intellectual engineering. The Greeks and Romans were equally fascinated. You’d think all my ideas would be old hat. In fact, it seems that nobody is bothering with this vital frontier. Well, surely somebody must be! But until I know for sure I’m dubbing myself the Father of Ergonomic Education, and inviting all of you to join me in a crusade to make our schools more efficient.

“Why Our Public Schools Do A Poor Job”

Bruce Price — Wed, 23 May 2007 18:58:04 +0000

Goods News! Princeton Alumni Weekly ran my letter–the one below. My faith in Princeton is partially restored. I think it’s a smart letter, and written in a fairly low key. So why not run it? Well, I’ve noticed more and more how the liberal media help the educators by the simple device of standing silently aside. Enough silence. We will not fix the problems in the schools until more people say, “Hey, you know what, these problems did NOT fall down out of the sky. So-called educators did the dirty work. Now, those same people can fix the problems–not likely–or they can get out of the way and let a new generation of real educators improve education.” Here’s the letter:
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“I want to compliment Norman Augustine ‘57 *59 for his article on American education and productivity. I agree with all his points. So, why are we having these problems?

This article echoes many of the points made in the famous 1983 report titled “A Nation at Risk.” No progress in almost 25 years? Can that be by accident?

Antonio Gramsci, a Communist theoretician, said that if you wish to help poor children, make sure they got a good basic education. Unfortunately, our ed establishment became enamoured with an ideology that emphasizes social engineering over learning and literacy.

There’s a hundred policies and promises I could point to. But the emblematic program for the 20th century will always, I believe, be Whole Word (sight reading). Said to be the best way to teach reading, it is in fact unworkable. Let’s do the numbers. The goal ls that children will memorize 800 words each year, which evidently guarantees semi-literacy through high school. Futhermore, only people with exceptional memories can memorize 10,000 of anything–faces, phone numbers, antiques, houses, or sight-words. But you really need to memorize 25,000 or even 50,000 sight-words to be literate in English (which has a huge vocabulary).

The more you study Whole Word, the more you’ll probably conclude with me it was never anything but a sophistry. I find it especially troubling that the media and academia appear to have stood aside and let educators have their way.

I say it’s time for an Education Revolution (I have a blog by that name). The first step might be to politely suggest that our top educators are not likely to fix problems they have created.

We need lots of new ideas and new blood–people from the arts, business, the military, and the professions. Put Norman Augustine and Bill Gates in charge of the schools. Ah, there would be a fine start.”

Bruce Deitrick Price
Norfolk, Va.
Improve-Education.org

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NOTE: Bruce Price’s EDUCATON REVOLUTION (just Google those 4 words) is on Squidoo.com

NEWSPAPERS COMMIT SUICIDE BY SIDING WITH EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT

Bruce Price — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 22:29:21 +0000

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.

Why Are Teachers Losing Respect??

Bruce Price — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 19:58:56 +0000

WHY ARE TEACHERS LOSING RESPECT ??

a letter sent to the Princeton Alumni Weekly:

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In “The Road Back to School” (Oct. 11, ’06), Caroline Horowitz ‘04 is quoted as saying that teaching has lost much of its prestige. Sad if true; but I don’t think it is. People still respect teachers.

What the public is figuring out is that educators can’t be trusted. (By educators, I mean the people with PhD’s who control the educational establishment.) The perception is that these people always want bigger budgets to pay for ideas that invariably turn out to be counterproductive. Whole-word and New Math are two familiar examples.

For an essay titled “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch” (easily found in Google), I studied education back to the 1880’s. It’s a shocking story and a sad one: educators conspiring against education. John Dewey and his colleagues decided that, if they were going to turn America toward collectivism, they needed to dumb down the citizenry. This foolish scheme is still hurting us a century later.

My sense of it is that our educators are much too invested in social engineering. Unless they reform, they’ll become one of the least trusted groups in the country, and they’ll drag teachers down with them.
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signed: Bruce Deitrick Price