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“Virginia eighth-graders show improved science ability,” according to a recent article in the Virginian-Pilot. “Virginia students outperform their peers nationwide in science.” Sounds good. But the article then says, “Only 40% show a solid grasp of the subject.” So 60% are not learning much science. Indeed, only 2% score at an advanced level. Note the pattern here, the mix of good news and bad news so that no clear message comes through. The story basically claims: students have improved but most don’t know much. How are we supposed to react to that? And what is “a solid grasp of the...

Lunch Scholars Video Shows Students Cant Answer History Questions Did you know that “bin Laden” is the vice president of the United States, or that the Civil War led to America’s independence? How about that Canada’s a state? Well, that’s what some local students at (what appears to be) a Washington state high school think. In a video that’s probably a few hours from going viral, a young man decided to question classmates for a video called “Lunch Scholars.” It is anything but scholarly. HuffPo explains: Austin, an intrepid young student-reporter, embarks on the noble mission of answering the question,...

Fake reading theory is the slave trade of our era. Conscience demands that it be opposed. A hundred books, perhaps two hundred, have been written on the reading wars. Finally those millions of words come down to a few dozen. English is a phonetic language and must be learned phonetically. Whole Word, the opposing theory, is a mirage, without merit. The great sophistry of the 20th century was to create the illusion that Whole Word could actually work or, one step lower, that there was a legitimate choice between the two approaches to reading, as there is between fahrenheit and...

(SUMMARY: New test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal that two-thirds of American kids are effectively illiterate. Two-thirds! New policies--and new experts--are needed.) -------------- The new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) figures show that only 35% of our younger students are "proficient" in reading, and only slightly more are "proficient" in math. That word suggests a low standard. In any case, these statistics are screaming the real news: roughly TWO-THIRDS of American 10-year olds are effectively illiterate; and they can't do much in math either. It’s the same story with 14-year-olds. (NAEP tests only fourth-graders and...

Subtitle: Behind The Scenes At Your Local Public School Here are a few quotes about education that reveal a lot. Edutopia, a huge site financed by George Lucas, consists of hundreds of discussion groups. One such group focused on “authentic assessment.” A principal raved about a School of the Future in Manhattan. Needless to say, this school was doing all the latest things. Not convinced, I posted this challenge: “This seems very vacuous to me. What if anything do these kids know? It mainly seems to be administrators and planners bragging, as if by calling something authentic it automatically becomes...

The last two years have been another reminder that education is not equivalent to competence, intelligence or experience, let alone wisdom, as an administration of people who have hardly held actual jobs outside of academia have proven that they are very good at assigning blame and conducting internal rivalries, and absolutely terrible at everything else. William F. Buckley famous opined that he would "sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University". We have spent the last two...

An American government exam taken by all high school students in Maryland would be eliminated next year under the proposed state budget, a surprising shift in policy that comes just three years after the test was made a graduation requirement. Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposal cuts $1.9 million from the Maryland State Department of Education budget that would pay for the test and its grading. However, the legislature could still restore the test if it found the funding. Some educators expressed immediate concern that social studies would get less attention in high schools if the test is eliminated. "I don't understand...

Recently, a retired general wrote an article in the local paper that started this way: "Is our troubled educational system posing a threat to our national security? The Defense Department estimates that a shocking 75 percent of young Americans are not able to join the military --and one of the leading reasons is poor education." His solution was that everyone should support the new Core Standards proposed by the Education Establishment. But isn't it obvious that these are the same people responsible, in the first place, for rendering the majority of young Americans educationally unfit for military service? Why would...

...According to the Associated Press the president "described himself as a "Christian by choice" who arrived at his faith in adulthood because "the precepts of Jesus Christ" helped him envision the kind of life he wanted to lead." Some conservatives and political opponents have questioned Obama's Christian faith... "my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church" "So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want...

Rene Lozano Jr. once lost control of his patrol car while chasing a traffic violator. The vehicle slammed into a utility pole, fatally injuring a rookie officer riding with him. A bullet narrowly missed another officer's head when Lozano's pistol accidentally discharged. He was the passenger in a stolen Mercedes-Benz driven by a friend. The bolt cutters used to steal the car were stashed under the seat. And he once was fired for making false statements about his arrest on charges of driving while intoxicated, a case that ultimately was dismissed because the arresting officer was unable to testify. That...

Starting in 1975, Pol Pot and his Communist revolutionaries killed almost 2,000,000 Cambodians, out of a total population of 5,000,000. Why?? Pol Pot lived in Paris for many years where he became a Marxist intellectual. Sitting in classrooms and cafes, he visualized the perfect Cambodia. He went back to Cambodia to eliminate foreign influences, purge educated people, and thereby create an agrarian workers paradise. Pol Pot was a fanatic, a true believer. The best one-word summary is to say that Pol Pot was an ideologue. He had ideas in his head; he knew they were right; and he was thereby...

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it...

Our Education Establishment tends to describe John Dewey as The Greatest Human Who Ever Lived. I've taken to calling him America's Favorite Quack. Truth is, when the Far-Left finds somebody saying what they want said, they will praise that somebody to the skies. Thus, the apotheosis of John Dewey. An essay called "Phooey on John Dewey" provides some perspective:======= "First off, let it be stated that John Dewey was a phenomenally brainy and productive guy. During a long life, he wrote more articles and books than you could read in a year. Indeed, he wrote so much on so many...

Okay, it took me 3 years but here's what I finally figured out. Not only is Constructivism a mostly useless gimmick but it hurts younger, less educated, and poorer kids the most. Here's a short new article that explains why:------------ "Constructivism versus Minorities and the Poor.... Constructivism is the latest fad burning through American public schools. Here’s a quick definition: children are supposed to invent their own new versions of all knowledge, while teachers (now called facilitators) are supposed to stand back and encourage the process. I’ve been writing for some years about how unrealistic and time-consuming this approach is....

Summary: The Education Commissars have long used TV as a whipping boy, an all-purpose excuse for their own incompetence. Consider the irony. More and more, television is the country's real educator. Public schools get dumber. But the History Channel, etc. know how to teach, and they want to teach. Who could have predicted it? Television rescues us from our Education Establishment! Of course, the point of mentioning this is to shame these fairly shameless people into doing a better job.

"Years ago I wrote a sci-fi story in which disease wiped out the thousands of people living in a huge space station. All the technology continued on autopilot; sensors, missiles, and robots perfectly defended the space station. Humans approaching the station were attacked as enemy invaders.  The station became a type of doomsday machine. All the inhabitants had been killed. New arrivals would be killed. I certainly wasn’t thinking about our public schools at that time but now I see a creepy similarity between what happened to that space station and what happened to this country’s Education Establishment. Both are...

Samuel Blumenfeld is one of the country's few great educators. His book of essays explains just about every aspect of our problems. Highly recommended. ---------------------------------------- "Concerned About Education? Read this! (Review is for "The Victims of Dick and Jane"): --------------- I urge everyone to read at least one book by Samuel Blumenfeld; and this may be the best place to start. There are 18 essays, mostly written in the 1980s and 1990s. You can read them in any order. You will find that this book is an excellent guide to the treacheries and nonsense everywhere evident in education. Blumenfeld is...

The best thing we can do for the country is to make sure all children read by the second grade. The Education Establshment continues to push non-phonetic methods that don’t work. Here’s a graphic video (only 3 minutes) that explains why Kindergarten Sight-Words Are Not A Good Idea. This hoax requires that children memorize words as SHAPES or graphic designs, as we all memorize flags, currency symbols, hieroglyphics, cars, etc. A few hundred is difficult but doable; a few thousand is beyond most people. Even then, it takes a lot of time, so all of education is undercut. Once parents...

Perhaps you saw the exchange on television. One guest said, “The administration’s approach is destructive; they must be trying to hurt the country.” The startled moderator exclaimed: “Do you mean they’re doing it on purpose? Why would you think that?” The guest explained his reasoning: “Because nobody’s that dumb.” Eureka! There you have it, a perfect condensation of everything that I’ve been able to figure out, over the past ten years, about education...

When you make a list of all the stupid ideas enshrined in the public schools, there will be many contenders for Stupidest Idea Of All. It’s tough to pick the absolute worst but let me mention for your consideration the common practice in public schools of teaching children to GUESS what words mean. This is the central gimmick in whole-word or sight-word reading. But here’s the good news. Guessing is a clear signal that a child cannot actually read. It is thus the quickest diagnostic we have. If a child looks at “car” and reads “house,” you see immediately that...

I see comments on the Internet, especially on the conservative side, that might be summed up this way: “Public schools are a disaster. They should be shut down. Homeschool your kids, that’s the only way.” It’s not the specifics that bother me. (Some very smart people have proposed privatizing the public schools.) It’s the idea that you can turn away, or that you can turn inward, and thereby avoid all that unpleasantness over there, on the other side of town. Homeschooling seems to me a wonderful option, as are private schools, charter schools, etc. Together they can save about 10%...

Last week I posted background on FreeRepublic about a column published elsewhere titled “Education as Neurotoxin.” This column tries to explain why the US has 50 million functional illiterates and 1 million dyslexics. Were these people born this way? Or had bad education methods produced the impairments? Someone left a half-dozen irate comments insisting I was “delusional,” “illogical,” “irrational,” “nonsensical,” etc. I’m not sure which part offended him most, 1) that sight-words cause mental problems; 2) or that the far-left could knowingly promote the use of destructive educational methods. This commenter embraced the Dolch Dogma that kids must memorize 300...

Article blames Education Establishment for decline in public schools, and says the simple, cheap, and easy fix is to start teaching facts again. That is, foundational knowledge and basic information. If children are taught just one little fact each day, we can turn this country around. So what’s the problem? The Education Establishment is hostile to content and facts. Excerpt: “As surely as 1 + 2 equals 3, foundational knowledge is what we need to return to, immediately. Observe that no new laws are required. No new books. No new funding. No new training. No new schools or facilities. No...

As a teenager, I heard rumors that the Russians put flouride in drinking water, presumably to wreck our minds and make us easier to control. I heard this only a few times; and I never heard of evidence. As I said, rumors. But as I’ve researched and written about education a great deal, those rumors have come back into my thoughts. And here is what I want to report to you today: the Russians had absolutely no need to put flouride or anything else in the water. Ever since 1932, they had look-say in our public schools! As subtle poisons...

"One word. Two different worlds... No wonder so little genuine communication—or progress—occurs in education I had been writing about education for more than 25 years when I finally realized the divide, the scam, the silent sophistry, call it what you will, that renders so many discussions about education close to pointless. When most people say the word “education,” they mean something very specific, and almost everyone knows exactly what it is: reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, to be followed by history, science, literature, and the arts. Now, if everyone in the discussion has this meaning in mind, they can make progress....

Here's a short blog entry I can't improve. It's a tease for a longer article (see link) but almost complete in itself: "21st Century Bull Okay, here's the last century of American education summed up in a sentence: the Education Establishment pretends to care about education, knowledge, basics, all that stuff, even as they undercut them at every opportunity. That's it. A century of disingenuousness. Every single pedagogy and method was a con. New Math and Whole Word, most spectacularly so. The others less blatantly so but just as subversive....It's as if we're dealing with drug addicts here. They say...

Only two choices about the Liberals in power: they’re deliberately undermining the country or they are too dumb to figure out the right things to do. My impression is that Rush just swerved into this harsh either/or menu within the last month. Traitors or fools! Communists or dopes! Subversives or exceedingly clumsy! When you first hear the two poles of the dilemma, you might react, oh, that’s awfully drastic, isn’t it? Surely there are some other choices. And your mind sorts urgently through all the possibilities you can think of... I’ve been fascinated by Rush’s logic because I went through...

Graphic video provides a quick look at most of the bad ideas now undermining public schools. Takes four minutes. The video's main purpose is to clarify the debate and to provide a checklist of what the video calls "the usual suspects." Arresting these bad actors is how we improve the schools. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9kNtdSfCLo Video created by Bruce Deitrick Price / Improve-Education.org

Parents need to know about something called Constructivism. Coming soon to a school near you. Constructivism is the unseen sophistry that is oozing into every corner of every classroom. Bottom line: Constructivism promises a lot, teaches a lot less. Of all the sophistries pushed by modern education, Constructivism may be the champ for pomposity, pretentiousness, and impenetrability. And it's expensive if advocates get their way--they want to "revamp" schools, textbooks, and teacher ed. So here's a little video that lays out the main features.

If liberal politics and good intentions helped all students learn, then Berkeley High School should be an exemplar to all California. Yet, according to its governance council, Berkeley High was identified last year as the high school with "the largest racial equity/achievement gap in the state." The worst part, as far as low-performing students are concerned, is that you can't expect the school district to turn its record underachievement around - not when its governance council, which makes recommendations to the school board on operations, approves a plan with a preamble that quotes Karl Marx: "From each according to his...

Institutionalized Child Abuse Life in an American Fourth Grade: Teaching Kids to "Respect Other Views" by Making Them Not Have Any of Their Own By Barry Rubin thelastcrusade.org First came the reading list of four books: one about an African-American, one on an Asian- or Hispanic-American, one on a Native American, and one--amazingly enough--a free choice. Then came the first book read in class on an African-American runner. By the way, it should be understood that all these readings are not about a group of youngsters from all races, religions, and creeds, playing together while getting along but rather...

Why is it that a country that has produced some of the most beloved authors, prolific inventors, and has advanced the fields of science, medicine, and technology, recently found itself at the epicenter of moral and financial decline? Our current president has become the butt of Marxism jokes in the same week that he is appeasing Islam– how sad for America and its people. Yet, I fear it is our people that have become complicit in this deterioration, for more often than naught, we take for granted our freedoms and the responsibilities tied in to those freedoms. One of our...

The "entitled" Generation has taken office! The "entitled to" generation is now in charge and it is being proven by not letting failures fail! It appears to me that the best lessons learned in life are the failures turned into successes. When a child takes a fall, they learn to get back up and walk again. When a newborn calf stumbles and falls, they scramble back to stand again. When a young horses running through a field, take a tumble, they get back up and run again. These are all failures with successes in the learning cycle. In the "entitlement...

"In that miracle at Philadelphia 222 years ago, theFramers gave us a document which they hoped would secure our freedoms," OCPA Vice President Brandon Dutcher said in a statement. "But they knew that only a well-informed citizenry could remain free. If these survey results are any indication, we are very much a nation at risk." OCPA promotes public policies favoring free enterprise and limited government.

"It's had serious repercussions," Swihart said. "These young adults who were raised in the '80s, now in their 20s and in the workplace -- those who received praise, rewards and prizes for everything they did without working very hard -- often are very entitled and self-absorbed

The Scene: A fictitious meeting in the new era of the GOP’s ever-expanding “big tent.” ------------------------------- I had the pleasure of sitting down to dinner with two members of my county Republican Party steering committee this week to discuss the GOP’s options as we move into the 2010 election cycle. I was joined by Dr. Eric von Dersgarten (of the Rhine Valley Dersgartens, of course) and Cecilia Montgomery. Ms. Montgomery chose the venue for our meeting and I have to say it was one of the most unusual ever, nicely setting the tone for what was to come. It was...

Dear Mr. President: Kids Share Hopes for Obama in New Book Thousands of kids detailed their hopes and expectations for President Obama in letters and drawings as part of a worldwide project. AP Sunday, February 15, 2009 NEW YORK -- End war, forever. Make the planet greener. Please help my dad find work. Make it rain candy! Thousands of kids detailed their hopes and expectations for President Barack Obama in letters and drawings as part of a worldwide project, with 150 chosen for a free e-book being released on Presidents Day. Most had tall orders for the new guy in...

Neo-Luddite and Undiagnosed hysterical lunatic Harvard Physics Professor Alex Wissner-Gross has released a study that asserts that Google searches and web browsing cause global warming, presumably using some kind of scientific methodology.

I have often written about the ignorance that has resulted from decades of pathetic, dumbed-down parenting and schooling, and, sadly, there's no shortage of material on this subject. There is often a profound difference between morality and legality, and, if this were a just world, a good percentage of the American Left would be tried for treason. If that seems a radical statement, I ask you: What price should be paid for sowing the seeds of your nation's destruction? What should be the punishment for creating millions of people so ignorant, so effete, so corrupted in judgment that they are...

Thousands of high school seniors are racing this month to complete their applications to the University of California in hopes of becoming freshmen next fall. Meanwhile, UC officials are struggling with the question of how to create more opportunities for low-income and minority students to attend the state's elite public campuses. It's been a tense issue since voters passed Proposition 209 in 1996, banning race and gender preferences in public institutions. Now, the UC president and regents are weighing changes to the admissions process that include dropping the SAT subject tests, loosening course requirements, and lowering the minimum grade point...

One in three teachers believes schoolchildren should be taught that creationism is just as valid as evolution, according to a survey. The poll also disclosed that pupils in almost a third of schools already learn about the controversial divine explanation of the universe, with even science teachers thinking it has a place in classrooms. Almost all of those questioned by Teachers TV, a satellite television channel, agreed that children with strong religious beliefs would feel excluded from science lessons if their views were ignored. The findings support the views of the Rev Professor Michael Reiss, who lost his job as...

While self confident debaters, politicians and other sorts of experts argue over which country in the world actually is the best example of a guiding light to humanity there ever was (GWB would say it is the US of today, Obama would claim it's the UN, while a proud European like my fellow countryman Hans Blix probably would say it is Saddam Hussein), evidence of the rapid decline of Western civilization is everywhere. Yes, there are still parts of the West that function very well and where most people are well educated and well off, but for how long? An...

A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel. They are the leaders of the spelling-reform movement, a passionate but sporadic 800-year-old campaign to simplify English orthography. In its long and failure-ridden history, the movement has tried to convince an indifferent public of the need for a spelling system based on pronunciation. Reformers, including Mark Twain, Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt, argued that phonetic spellings would make it easier for children, foreigners and adults with learning disabilities to read and write. For centuries, few listened, and...

NORFOLK At the end of this semester, Steven Aird will lose his job as an associate professor of biology at Norfolk State University for giving out too many F's. He is not going quietly. Aird says his termination is part of a dumbing-down of academic standards at NSU - a move by administrators to intimidate faculty members into passing undeserving students and rewarding inferior work. Other faculty members in NSU's School of Science and Technology say they, too, have experienced pressure to bend their standards to pass more students, and more than a dozen current and former students in the...

If any recent day typifies life in this crazy modern world, it was probably this past Tuesday. World financial markets were in a meltdown and the Federal Reserve held an emergency meeting to cut the interest rate a massive three quarters of a point in an attempt to stave off a precipitous stock market drop. President Bush was working with congressional leaders on an economic stimulus package to reduce the likelihood of a recession. Meanwhile the U.S. presidential campaign was in full swing with Hillary and Obama having just ripped each other to shreds at a debate, and Fred Thompson...

Okay, okay, a lot of school children aren't gaining basic skills. But many are learning to be culture warriors. What's not to like? The National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME), meeting in Baltimore, helps ensure this. Here are some of NAME'S workshops: • "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Dismantling White Privilege and Supporting Anti-Racist Education in Our Classrooms and Schools." Taught by a professor from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, this session "is designed to help educators identify and deconstruct their own white privilege and in so doing more deeply commit themselves to anti-racist teaching and critical multicultural teaching."...

Have we, as a nation, become completely fascinated with stupid chicks—or what?!? Girls, if you want to have our society’s spotlight shine down on you for no real reason other than you’re an idiotic, drunken narcissistic whore, well then . . . this is your window of opportunity, girlfriend! (*Remember: the opportunity of a lifetime must be seized within the lifetime of the opportunity. You can get more successful loser principles from my new book, 10 Habits of Decidedly Defective People: The Successful Loser’s Guide to Life!) Yes, ladies, if you . . . 1. are a semi-decent looking ditz...

Locke High seeks to leave L.A. Unified Its teachers have signed petitions urging control be given to Green Dot charter schools. The loss would be a blow to the district and union. By Joel Rubin, Times Staff Writer May 10, 2007 Challenging the balance of power in the city's public school system, a leading charter school organization is poised to wrest control of a failing high school from the elected Los Angeles Board of Education. Green Dot Public Schools, which has clashed frequently with the board in its aggressive push to expand, has quietly overseen the collection of signatures of...

This is unashamedly a VANITY post but it is intended to be a SERIOUS one. I have finally reached the point of complete bafflement in wondering what , if anything, is being taught to our young people in school! Here are some of my RECENT experiences as an employer. Am I the only one experiencing this level of idiocy in our country? 1. Two days ago I said the word 'penicillon' in a conversation. A young employee interrupted me and asked, "What is that?" I didnt' know what she was asking until she repeated, "What is that peni...you just said"....

W. Stephen Wilson teaches mathematics at Mayor Bloomberg 's alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. Last fall he conducted an experiment on the students in his Calculus I course. Professor Wilson administered the same final exam to last fall's students that he used for the same course in the fall of 1989. He chose that year because he was able to obtain data for both his exam and the SAT math scores for both cohorts of students. The surprise: the 1989 students did much better than their 2006 counterparts. Everyday much ink is spilled discussing the failure of America's schools. Most...