Free Republic

The High Rate Of High School Graduate Failure (July 9, 2003)Who Really Failed: Students Or The System? by Phyllis Schlafly All over the country, students, their parents and teachers are in an uproar about the tens of thousands who flunked the test designated as the requirement for high school graduation. Threats of withholding diplomas have brought out accusations, recriminations, and even angry mobs. States have devised various ways to deal with this crisis. Award the diplomas anyway, stonewall the complainers, keep the students in school an extra year, postpone the deadline to 2004 or even 2006, lower the standards, lower...

Who to Blame when Students Fail, the Scholar or the System? by Phyllis Schlafly Posted Jul 9, 2003 All over the United States, students, parents and teachers are in an uproar about new high school graduation tests and the tens of thousands of students who have flunked them. Threats of withholding diplomas has brought out accusations, recriminations and even angry mobs. States have devised various ways to deal with this crisis. Award the diplomas anyway, stonewall the complainers, keep the students in school an extra year, postpone the deadline to 2004 or even 2006, lower the standards, lower the cutoff...

Old-fashioned phonics a winner 32 state schools part of 'Washington Reads' By GREGORY ROBERTS SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER "O-O-O-O. E-E-E-E. A-A-A-A." It's a reading lesson, heavy on phonics, with the kindergarten students in Reading Group 3 clustered around teacher Julia Matthews in her classroom at Seattle's African American Academy. "Get ready to read the words on the page without making a mistake," Matthews says. "Get ready. Sound it out. What word? "Barked!" "Yes, sound it out. Sound it out, get ready." "Barking!" "Get ready. Sound it out. What word?" "Better!" "Horse!" "Funny!" "Books!" "OK, everybody, touch the title of the story...

Nothing about The Phonics Phactory is ordinary, starting with its name. The school holds classes Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with parents expected to pick up the slack Mondays and Fridays. Everybody brings a sack lunch. There are no buses, no P.E., and parent volunteers monitor recess. Field trips are held on off days. It's a private, Christian school but doesn't teach the Bible, figuring that's up to parents, too. Tuition is cheap, by private school standards: ranging from $130 to $245 a month for preschool through eighth grade -- less than half of what some schools charge. The curriculum is...

Bush Adviser Casts Doubt on the Benefits of Phonics Program The New York Times By Abby Goodnough January 24, 2003 resident Bush's top adviser on reading said yesterday that the citywide phonics program unveiled this week by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein had no proven track record, suggesting that its adoption could cost the city millions of dollars in federal aid. The adviser, G. Reid Lyon, a researcher at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said there is no scientific evidence that the curriculum, called Month by Month Phonics, is effective with students who struggle academically. "We...

The other day, I received an e-mail from a lady in California who asked, "What on earth is the whole-language system?" She had read my article on the making of the black underclass in which I had identified whole language as the primary cause of reading failure among so many black students. Fortunately, the answer is easy to give, because whole-language professors have been quite open in defining what they mean by their pedagogic philosophy. So I shall quote some salient passages from their writings. In a book entitled "Whole Language, What's the Difference?" written by three whole-language professors in...

The only effective group of citizens today in open opposition to big government are the home schoolers. They are the only Americans willing to take on the public education system that props up the entire statist enterprise of big, intrusive government. Forget about conservative politicians. They are more concerned about conserving their legislative privileges than rolling back increasingly intrusive government. Although President Bush has said nice things about home schoolers, he is doing more to expand federal control over education than any previous Republican president. His call for nationwide standardized testing is in reality a call for a federal curriculum,...

<p>THE FORCES that want to dumb down public schools never rest. Failure never cows them; success never hinders them.</p> <p>After years of producing poor readers, California has returned to recommending phonics-rich reading programs. As more new schools adopt the program each year, reading test scores have risen modestly as a result.</p>