Public School Education –- there is bad news and good news

The bad news is that John Dewey’s “progressives” are winning big. They mobilized every educational front group and every pedagogical gimmick to achieve the goal of controlling what goes on in the schools, as a way of achieving a fundamental transformation of America, to coin a phrase.

The educational front groups include the National Council of Teachers of Math, the Common Core Consortium, National Education Association, International Reading Association, National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and many more. Their favorite pedagogical gimmicks include Whole Language, Reform Math, Balanced Literacy, Constructivism, Project-Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, 21st-Century Skills, and many more.

So it’s clearly a far-flung, intricately coordinated attack, like Hitler’s military roaring into Russia during the summer of 1941. The progressives want total control so they can turn the schools into social engineering experiments. Traditional approaches will be denigrated; knowledge will be disdained. John Dewey gave the marching orders 100 years ago. Our Education Establishment probably feels it is close to total victory, thanks to all the new gimmicks contained in Common Core Standards.

So how can there possibly be any good news? Hitler’s Wehrmacht could tell you. When you advance 100 miles into new territory, overrunning everything in sight, you can easily gobble up too much too fast. Him him

At some point, even the most successful invaders find they have overextended their lines and exposed their flanks to counterattack. There’s the good news.

In education, this has a peculiar form. Quite simply, the public is starting to see the comic bizarreness of it all. Everywhere people look in education they see frantic activity (and frantic spending) but nobody’s learning very much. Millions of kids can’t read well or do simple math. Surely, someone must be playing a prank, and the whole country is being punked.

The public watches the foolishness and rolls their eyes. What, is the circus in town? Who are all these clowns running around with their funny little cars and pratfalls?

We see the garish makeup, the big red noses, and the comedy routines. But we are no longer amused. What does this Clown Corps think it’s doing? How can they squander billions every day, but somehow the children get more ignorant and less literate?

Summing up, public education in America resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption with the Three Stooges operating all the levers. The good news is that the public can no longer take these people seriously, no more than the majority of the public now takes Obama seriously, and for the same reasons. The public sees the Emperor has no clothes, he’s tipsy, and stumbling around in public.

Here’s one way you know the Education Establishment has gone too far. More people talk casually about abolishing the Department of Education. Even a liberal professor of education agrees.

Here’s another way you know. Common Core rolled over the country--altogether 45 states embraced it, thanks to lavish bribes (stimulus money repurposed as Race to the Top grants). But now most of those states are suffering buyer’s remorse. Indiana has pulled out. Other states will follow. Hallelujah. The sooner every state cancels Common Core, the safer the country will be.

Another way you know is that the Internet is full of videos where children are crying because they can’t do their homework, parents are at meetings to denounce the failed methods used in the schools, and employers complain ever more loudly they can’t find educated workers.

In fact, Our Education Establishment has been practicing the art of going too far for decades. But now the public is noticing. The election of Obama may have pushed our education commissars over the edge. Perhaps they were worried they might have only eight years, and they needed to complete their project immediately. Helter-skelter, with a rush of urgency, they had to drive out every traditional approach, terminate every old-fashioned teacher, silence every conservative voice, and banish every administrator who wasn’t a complete toady. Common Core—with its top-down, same answer for every situation—was supposed to finish the job. Recall the famous World War II movie A Bridge Too Far. Our Education Establishment has committed the strategic sin of A Gimmick Too Many.

Siegfried Engelmann explains the main flaw “The system adopts instructional programs and practices that have never been tried out on a small scale—like the Common Core standards. The same is true of many instructional programs. They are adopted, then tried out for the first time. That is completely backward.”

The main effort is to drive content out of the school. They’ve got a dozen pretexts for doing this. After you’ve deleted as much content as possible, you garble whatever is left. Each year, the typical student ends up learning less than the year before. We will hear constantly about “social justice,” which roughly translates “If everyone is mediocre, that’s fairer.”

All this dumbing down makes even the people in charge dumber. In the process, they make a mockery of their claim to be “educators.” Anti-educators is more accurate. It’s time for the circus to leave town.

You really like your own material, huh?

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:brucedeitrickprice/index?tab=articles

Seems like that’s all you find worthy of posting.

Are you maybe just using Free Republic to promote yourself?

In 2010, Barack Obama called for fixing the public education system by giving us the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and “Race to the Top,”

which he said would fix the education system already fixed by the 2001 GW Bush and Ted Kennedy legislation called “No Child Left Behind,”

which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,”

which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,”

which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,

which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter first fixed the nation’s public school system by establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.

They did blow it with Common Core. If you look at the material, it’s really no different than the crap already in the schools.

But there is ONE BIG DIFFERENCE. There is a HUGE TARGET for everyone (conservatives and others) to shoot at now, and they are feeling it.

Yes, that’s the deal. I just read today that Oklahoma canceled Common Core. Many other states are thinking about it.

If you Google these words, common core moratorium, you see there is a huge momentum in favor of putting the whole thing on the back burner until the states can figure out how to disentangle themselves from Arne Duncan and Obama.

My ideas. Of course, I’m doing everything I can to promote my ideas. I feel that if we don’t save the public schools, we won’t be able to save anything else. It’s an urgent matter.

I don’t see anybody else more out front than I am. If you see such a person, please post their articles.

Just roughly I think my combined views/reads/visits are over 2 million (not including any reads I get on Free Republic because there’s no way to count those.)

I work very hard on this material. Naturally, I want people to see the ideas and talk about them. People on Free Republic have strong opinions and make very decisive comments. That’s exciting.

I visit many sites and I’m on many forums. And I can tell you the amount of stupidity and criminality in the education field is vast beyond belief. I’m doing what I can to fight this. I try to encourage everyone to fight this.

“If you Google these words, common core moratorium, you see there is a huge momentum in favor of putting the whole thing on the back burner until the states can figure out how to disentangle themselves from Arne Duncan and Obama.”

Reagan knew that it was NOT GOOD to have the feds involved in education, but only us conservatives believed him.

One of the only benefits from Common Core is that now MANY OTHERS are seeing his point, although they won’t credit him as the visionary he was.

Though you may not know it, “punked” is a prison term. “Punked” means you were raped (in prison) by one or more gang members. Rape is a major problem in the prison system after a federal judge halted the use of saltpeter in prisoner’s food. (Against their “rights”.)

So yes, Americans are being “raped” by the “educational standards” scams.

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