Teaching Reading, The Alphabet, and Literacy

[From article]
Public schools are expert at creating illiteracy. Our K-12 system can usually guarantee that students don't become fluent readers. The system is nearly foolproof. Parents and teachers can make children illiterate or semi-literate simply by following this well-tested seven-step formula:
1) FORGET ABOUT THE ALPHABET.[. . .]
In her strikingly insightful 1970 book Programmed Illiteracy in Our Schools, Mary Johnson noted: "It was frequently stressed that English was 'not a phonetic language' and that children did not need to be told the separate letter sounds. 'Surely we don't have anyone here who is old-fashioned enough to tell children the sounds of the letters!' teased one consultant [from a publisher]."
2) MEMORIZE SIGHT-WORDS.
[. . .]



3) GUESS OR SKIP. The ultimate advice given by Whole Word and Whole Language gurus really came down to two ways to surrender: guess or skip. Frank Smith argued that "the first alternative and preference is to skip over the puzzling word. The second alternative is to guess what the unknown word might be." If you're in a foreign country and trying to make sense of a menu, what are your options? You can guess each word, or you can skip each word. This is what illiteracy looks like. Real readers do not guess or skip.
(4) USE CONTEXT CLUES. The official method says that children can use context (i.e., the nearby words which they often can't read) to read the word they are trying to read. Unless you rig the example, this is typically a useless technique. "The man looked out the window and saw a ____." Even the smartest, best educated people can rarely figure what X is.
[. . .]



5) USE THE ILLITERATE'S MANY HANDY WORKAROUNDS. Pre-read; post read; prediction; picture clues; summarizing the passage; relying on prior experience; and, of course, guessing. If there's a picture of an animal you can identify, assume that the word will be in the passage somewhere. Go ahead and find it. Again, all of these techniques are what any illiterate person does when he doesn't know how to read. None of them is reading. All are floundering.
6) PIT (sic) A GOOD SPIN ON FAILURE. When you experience weird reading problems, view them as "a gift." This is how dyslexia organizations describe the cognitive disorientation that sight-words induce in children. Not to worry. We are told that many of the world's smartest people were dyslexics. This claim is supposed to make you feel better about being abused by education professors.
7) ACCEPT THAT DRUGS WILL BE AN IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR READING PROGRAM. You won't be able to read, but you won't care, thanks to the magic of Ritalin and other chemicals. So don't waste time being fidgety, impatient, and unhappy. This is the brave new world of school-induced acceptance of mediocrity.



As you see, this is a simple, straightforward program. Follow the seven steps, and you can turn anybody into a functional illiterate. If you do it to a high degree, he will simply be illiterate; he won't function at all.
Conversely, if you ignore all these rules and do the opposite – i.e., what all phonics experts tell you to do, your children will become real readers and real students.
NB: Summer is a good time to teach children to read, before the schools can mess them up.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/how_to_create_functional_illiteracy_in_7_easy_lessons.html

June 9, 2016
How to Create Functional Illiteracy in 7 Easy Lessons
By Bruce Deitrick Price

Campaign To Dumb Down All US Education Proceeding As Planned; Cambridge, MA A Leader

[From article]
There is no question that American public schools have been dumbed down. The government's own report in 1983, "A Nation At Risk," said the schools are so bad that they might well be a clever subversive trick by an unfriendly foreign power.
We can go back to the early 1950s, to a book written by a prominent professor of history, Arthur Bestor. His title says it all: "Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in our Public Schools." (This was one of many books with a similar message. Note that Why Johnny Can't Read came along in 1955.)



It's a fact that our secondary schools have been dumbed down for a long time. Let's give credit where it's due. Our Education Establishment has done a bang-up job of undermining traditional education and imposing so-called progressive education on our schools. (I say "so-called" because progressive usually devolves to regressive and/or repressive.)
In practice, dumbing down means that today's high school graduates possess less information and fewer skills than was the case 25 or 50 years ago. They have lower scores on their SATs. They can't write as well, think as well, or study as well. They can't perform academically as well as kids did decades ago.
One immediate result should be no surprise: a great percentage of incoming college students need remedial training, more than half of them at community colleges.
Note that we're paying to educate students in secondary school, then we pay to educate the same students in the same subjects a second time. Wouldn't it be more cost-effective (and certainly more logical) if the K-12 schools were run properly? Of course.
But the bad news is just starting. There are other damages that may be even more costly. Millions of unprepared students will exert downward pressure on every aspect of college life. This is already happening.
Colleges will have a dire choice. Maintain their traditional standards, in which case they would have to flunk out a great percentage of the students and lose all that government funding. Or steadily degrade their standards to accommodate the low quality of incoming freshmen.
One's first hope is that the colleges – "higher education," as they once proudly called it – would resolve to hold the high ground.
[. . .]



The problem is that the Education Establishment in control of K-12 will try, relentlessly and shamelessly, to subvert the colleges, for two separate reasons.
First, the typical student they're graduating is not very good. They can try to improve those graduates, or, the likely option, they can try to silence anyone who might complain. By lowering standards, you guarantee fewer complaints.
[. . .]
K-12 is now overrun by counterproductive sophistries: cooperative learning, project-based learning, constructivism, self-esteem, alternative assessment, and many more. By forcing these methods into the colleges, the methods become securely locked in at the K-12 level. The Education Establishment can then say to the parents and community: We want to do what's done at the college level; you know it's good!
[. . .]
Fundamentally, traditionalists view education as the development of an individual's intellectual skills. Progressives see education as a tool for social and cultural change. Let me reduce this to the bleak reality. If a lot of students have politically correct opinions about global warming and transsexuals, progressives consider this outcome successful, even if students learn little else.
[. . .]



One Ivy League university already boasts about its dedication to "inclusion." The problem is that everything that is "included" as official campus doctrine requires the exclusion of anything in the way of that step. "Inclusion" ends up meaning exclusion. But nobody will be able to think or speak critically about this trade-off because such discussion will not be allowed. Colleges will have more taboos, censorship, speech codes, and safe spaces. Finally, demanding higher standards and better education will be considered unreasonable, if not outright racist and elitist. You may not be legally permitted to ask for higher standards.
[. . .]
This country's Education Establishment soldiers have created 40 million functional illiterates. I think they're proud of it. I think they'd be happy to spread the blight.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/05/now_theyre_dumbing_down_the_colleges.html

May 11, 2016
Now They're Dumbing Down the Colleges
By Bruce Deitrick Price

* * *

Remarkable how feelings drive the education industrial complex, where the Therapeutic State shares power with teachers unions. If students, teachers and politicians worked toward hiring the best teachers, that might increase the number of educated students. But today in Cambridge it is all about identity politicians using feelings to gain more money and power. No wonder US schools are trending down, Trump is so popular, and will be the next President. Most of my teachers were women. I was able to learn from them in spite of feeling uncomfortable in the classes. Are all classes focused on feelings today?

[From article]
student Julia Lowfleury said she has never had a teacher of color or one who looks like her. Because of this, she said she often feels uncomfortable in class. According to the Educators of Color Group at CRLS, Lowfleury’s situation is not uncommon or new.
“I need to know there’s going to be someone there who has maybe been in the same situations I have, who has been raised in the same background or has the same religious views and can understand the same problems I face. I might not find that in teachers who are from a white, upper-middle-class family,” Lowfleury said at a School Committee meeting Tuesday night.
[. . .]
The issue was not an agenda item, so the committee did not discuss it further at the meeting. Although it is not permitted to address non-agenda items during public comment, the committee allowed an exception for the group.
[. . .]
Kim Parker, of the Educators of Color Group and an English teacher at CRLS, said there is a revolving door within CPSD and CRLS that does not retain faculty of color. She said this is due to a lack of administrative support in confronting systematic issues of race and racism, as well as evaluations and evaluators that are not culturally responsive.
[. . .]
The Cambridge School Committee set a goal of having 30 percent of faculty and administration be of color at Cambridge Public Schools. While CRLS meets the 30 percent standard, Parker said her group would like the percentage to be filled by core faculty, not including administration.
[. . .]
[School Committee Member Harding said] we need to keep our eye on the ball and that diversity matters.”
[. . .]
Michelle Li, a 10th-grade English teacher at CRLS who also spoke out in support of hiring more faculty of color, said parents have told her on several occasions how thrilled they are for their children to have an Asian English teacher.
“The unspoken message here is two-fold. First, that their child has gone through many years of CPS and is just now having their first experience with an Asian teacher, and second, that Miss Li teaches English, not math, science or Chinese, but English,” she said.
As a personal anecdote, Li spoke of a time she bonded with an Asian student who used chopsticks to eat fruit in class. Moments like those, Li said, validate the richness of the students’ varied backgrounds and interests.
“It builds bridges between cultures, and signals to our students that teachers appreciate who they are and strive to deliver lessons that are culturally relevant,” she said.
CRLS student Mary Gashaw said she would be more likely to feel comfortable in classrooms if she had teachers of color, and that the current situation in schools is not ideal.
As far as demands, the Educators of Color Group is asking the School Committee for a comprehensive external evaluation of procedures used by CRLS evaluators by the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights and Economic Justice to evaluate trends and their impact on retention of teachers of color. The group is also asking for “leveled-up” classrooms, bringing the current faculty of color percentage up to 30 percent and maintaining that annually, and support for educational professionals to pursue certification while providing certification prep paid for by the district to aid with passing the Massachusetts Test for Education Licensure.
Members are also are asking for district-wide cultural competency training to make all educators and administrators proficient,
[. . .]
“I feel like a diverse faculty improves every child’s education,” Parker said.

http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/article/20160518/NEWS/160515932

Cambridge teachers, students call for more educators of color at Rindge
By Natalie Handy
nhandy@wickedlocal.com
Posted May 18, 2016 at 10:16 AM
Updated at 6:58 PM
CAMBRIDGE Chronicle

Speaking Correct Grammar is White Privilege

[From article]
Consider Mona Chalabi, an editor of the iconic leftwing British newspaper, The Guardian, who believes that having good grammar and correcting others is racist, an expression of “white privilege.”
The notion that nonwhites cannot command good grammar is racist to the core. And the idea that grammar rules are simply optional based on race is a recipe for imprecise communication, aka misunderstanding.
That an editor should voice these opinions is astonishing. I suppose we can look forward to the Guardian sliding even further into incoherence.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/04/frontiers_of_white_privilege_good_grammar_is_now_racist.html

April 24, 2016
Frontiers of 'white privilege': good grammar is now ‘racist’
By Thomas Lifson

How To Stop Dumbing Down of American Students

[From article]
The next generation of Americans is being indoctrinated by Islamic supremacists who are in positions of power and influence over school curricula. They are stealing our children’s minds and setting the United States up to sink even further into a morass of ignorance.
[. . .]



It appears that 1500 errors have been found by textbook reviewers so far and of those, over 60% of the material was either removed or changed. Ultimately, 50 concerned citizens impacted the education of 5 million children, helping to ensure they received “more factually correct and less politically biased textbooks for the next 10 years.” Examples of errors include:
McGraw Hill World History textbook, 2014 edition: “In the conquered territories of Asia and North Africa there were peaceful interactions among Muslim, Christian, and Jewish societies.”
Houghton Mifflin World History textbook, 2014 edition: “Sharia law requires Muslim leaders to extend religious tolerance to Christians and Jews.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/01/help_save_our_children_one_textbook_at_a_time.html

January 20, 2016
Help save our children one textbook at a time
By Carol Brown

Citizen Action More Effective At State And Local Levels Fighting Dumbing Down Policies And Propaganda

[From article]
We need a revolution if we are to survive as a people and as a nation. While the changes in federal policy needed to undo the damage of leftism are high-profile presidential election issues, the real revolution needs to come at a different level of government and with a different purpose.
What we are fighting, really, is fifty years of leftist indoctrination from education, information, and entertainment. Until we fight back and win the battles at this level, we will continue with the drearily familiar mind control of the left over our lives.
[. . .]
We can win that battle, and we can begin the fight today – right now, if we want – through state governments. Republican muscle in state governments is overwhelming. Only eight states have Democrats controlling state government completely, while Republicans control a whopping twenty-three with 47% of the American population. These governments control education, run public television and radio, and fund research projects through university systems.
[. . .]
What if research studies from several respected colleges (or research centers created by states to study global warming) determined that man-made global warming is not "settled science," that there is a pernicious groupthink in academia about global warming, that data has been altered, and that there may be global cooling or global warming uncaused by man? The impact would be felt around the world.
Here is another example. David Horowitz has been waging for years a lonely battle to have state legislatures enact an Academic Bill of Rights, which would have the effect of granting harried and persecuted conservative students protections against thuggish and bullying leftist professors. Why hasn't every state run by Republicans passed this law?
[. . .]
The impact of winning – heck, the impact of just fighting – on a hundred different areas left today by default to the left could change American society and begin to open the eyes of those Orwellian slaves of leftist indoctrination who, today, have simply never been exposed to anything but the dull, predictable glop of leftism.
This is the peaceful, orderly, necessary revolution that is the linchpin of every other political reform. It is the key to unraveling the madness that controls many Americans, especially the young raised on the bitter milk of state education. If this is the battle to be won, why are we waiting? Begin the revolution now.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/the_revolution_we_need.html

December 21, 2015
The Revolution We Need
By Bruce Walker

Yale Students Eagerly Sign Petition To Repeal First Amendment. Is Dumbing Down Complete Yet?

[From article]
Looking to understand just how controversial the debate over free speech on our college campuses really is, filmmaker and satirist Ami Horowitz recently traveled to Yale University, one of our nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, to speak directly to students.
“I decided to take this campus free speech debate to its logical conclusion,” said Horowitz, who asked students if they’d sign a petition calling for an outright repeal of the First Amendment. “The result was this unbelievable display of total stupidity.”
In fact, Horowitz discovered a solid majority of the students asked willingly signed the petition, with several expressing their enthusiastic approval for his anti-First Amendment efforts.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/16/yale-fail-ivy-leaguers-caught-on-video-clamoring-to-kill-first-amendment/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fmost-popular+%28Internal+-+Most+Popular+Content%29

Yale fail: Ivy leaguers sign 'petition' to repeal First Amendment
Published December 16, 2015

FoxNews.com

* * *

Horowitz says in another exchange with a different student: ''Cause you shouldn't be exposed to things you don't want to hear. You know, that's not right.' 'Yeah,' the female student he's speaking with says.

[From article]

Fox News, which featured the video on its website, described Horowitz as a 'filmmaker and satirist.'
In voice-over narration, Horowitz explains 'Just as a reminder, the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press -- and oh yeah, freedom of petition.'
A male student tells Horowitz in the video 'I think this is fantastic. I absolutely agree.'
'Excellent. Love it,' another woman says in the clip.
In one exchange with a student, Horowitz says ''Cause I think it's a living, breathing document, the Constitution, it was literally not made in stone.
'And the guys who wrote it - they were slave owners.
'What do they know about how we live today?
'So we want to change it.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3363482/Video-shows-Yale-University-students-signing-petition-calling-Amendment-Constitution-repealed.html

America's brightest? Comedian gets Yale University students to sign petition for the First Amendment to be repealed
Ami Horowitz appears in the footage, speaking with students on campus and asking for their signatures
The students' faces have been blurred out
Horowitz claims in the video to have gotten more than 50 signatures in under one hour for the measure
By ZOE SZATHMARY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 22:25 EST, 16 December 2015 | UPDATED: 01:01 EST, 17 December 2015

US Education Bureaucracy Intentionally Dumbs Down Students

[From article]
Perhaps you are an eternal optimist, hoping the Education Establishment will reform itself. I have bad news: the top people in education like what they're doing just fine.
[. . .]
G. Stanley Hall [, John] Dewey's mentor said: "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading."
[. . .]
Professor Hall would be proud of our dumbed down K-12 schools. So please don't expect the Education Establishment to fix things. It's up to you.
[. . .]
The Education Establishment has a largely hidden ideological agenda intended to transform every aspect of the school. Their first concern is not academics or learning, no matter what they say. The real emphasis is on creating cooperative children. In this way, children become accustomed to being on the same level, as socialism requires. Additionally, cooperative children are docile, controllable children. Let's be realistic: our ideologues will not be able to create their brave new world if students learn to think for themselves. For concerned citizens, the first order of business is resisting this political agenda whenever possible.
[. . .]
the Education Establishment doesn't leave much to chance. They have created an interlocking array of bureaucracies, unions, foundations, think-tanks, political parties, publishers, media, and agents of influence. So you can expect a continuous bombardment of wrong-headed answers. Everybody needs to dig in his heels. Stay focused on some simple points: if these people were sincerely trying to improve education, would we have 40 million functional illiterates? Would our schools be mired in widely acknowledged mediocrity? Would more than one third of the students entering college need remedial education?
[. . .]
A hundred years ago, Frank Norris wrote a famous book called The Octopus. It was about the interlocking, all-powerful railroad company. Today's Octopus is the Education Establishment. There seem to be more than 100 separate entities that exist to make public schools conform to liberal/progressive templates.
[. . .]
multicultural means that your kids are supposed to learn as much about foreign cultures as about their own country. American third-graders know the names of rivers in China but don't know the word Mississippi. That's just quackery, and sneaky as well. There is nothing accidental about it.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/only_you_can_prevent_bad_public_schools.html

December 16, 2015
Only You Can Prevent Bad Public Schools
By Bruce Deitrick Price

Journalists Follow Politicians Dumbing Down Voters and Taxpayers, Sending History Down the Memory Hole

[From article]
This handy chart helps journalists frame the narrative of each crime, “not to tell the audience what happened, but to expand the event into an indictment of Western culture.” For example, if the attacker is a non-white shooter and the victim is white the narrative is about gun control. If the attacker is non-white and the victim is also “run story about the Kardashians instead.”
[. . .]

 

Much the same preference for make-believe narrative over fact can be said of the political reporting this year where the increasingly careless New York Times which in Cathy Fasano’s telling confused “37 inches from 37 acres” to deny the existence of King Solomon’s Temple.
Simply put, corporate media simply doesn’t understand the public disdain for the political class and is trying frame the foreign policy ineptness of the administration (and the former secretary of state) and the paltry offerings for the Democratic presidential race into a fairytale of a Republican civil war in which conservatives are destroying their party.
[. . .]

 

They didn’t just omit the fact that the CIA has been arming, training and funding [Syrian] rebels since 2012, they heavily implied they had never done so.



[T]he Central Intelligence Agency set up a secret program of arming, funding and training anti-Assad forces. This has been reported by major outlets, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and, most recently, the Washington Post, which -- partly thanks to the Snowden revelations -- detailed a program that trained approximately 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year, or roughly 1/15th of the CIA’s official annual budget.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/10/the_journalists_handbook_how_to_write_any_story_without_working_at_it.html

October 11, 2015
The Journalists' Handbook: How to Write any Story Without Working At It
By Clarice Feldman

Low and No Information Voters Encouraged By Media Manipulators

[From article]
Dinner conversations took the term “low-info-voter” to an entirely new level. While a few friends and relatives were politically well informed, the majority were shockingly clueless.
Our family and friends are well aware that my wife Mary and I are political activists and members of the Tea Party. When asked who they should vote for president, I recommended Ted Cruz, of whom they never heard. Someone said, “Isn't there a black doctor running?” They know Trump from his TV shows. They know a woman and a Bush are running. That was the extent of my family and friends knowledge of the GOP primary. They knew nothing about the Iran Nuke Deal or the Planned Parenthood scandal.
[. . .]
This is why GOP presidential contenders must stop taking the bait and apologizing every time the MSM lays a trap while demanding an apology.
[. . .]
I would have loved to hear Trump say, “Why are you asking me such stupid questions? Planned Parenthood is black marketing dead baby body parts. Why are you complicit in hiding this horrific evil scandal from the public?”
[. . .]



Stephanopoulos and his ilk are disgusting.
GOP presidential contenders need to wake up and realize they are not going to get a fair shot from the MSM. Nor will the MSM tell the American people (voters) the truth about any issue.
[. . .]
Playing nice with the MSM and not attacking Obama's record is not going to get it done in our current political environment. Two great governors dropped out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination, Rick Perry and Scott Walker.
[. . .]
Patriots campaigned, funded, and voted for conservatives with little or no results. There is a sense of desperation and urgency in the air. Americans instinctively know we are losing our country, despite the MSM's spin. Voters are favoring “outsiders” in hope that they will keep their word and deliver real change.
[. . .]
The American people are fed up with PC, liars, and betrayers.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/09/how_the_sleazy_msm_manipulates_gop_contenders_.html

September 24, 2015
How the Sleazy MSM Manipulates GOP Contenders
By Lloyd Marcus

MA Politicians Love Teachers Union Campaign Contributions

Two Massachusetts state senators advocate for teachers unions. They do not advocate for educating students. They fail to mention the role of teachers unions making education policy. The unions have a role in the dumbed down students turned out by public schools across the nation. Unless and until that ends and their stranglehold on education policy is broken, the dumbing down will continue. See e.g., John Taylor Gatto's book, Dumbing Us Down. Or see how determined the unions are to thwart educating students, by their multi-year battle, which they lost, in Wisconsin when a Governor with a spine, Republican Scott Walker, stood up to them. MA politicians are famous for their lack of spines.


Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker

[From article]
In 1993 when the Massachusetts Legislature voted to create charter schools, the intent was that charters would experiment with new practices for educating our children. Originally, it was intended to take the successful practices developed by charter schools and use them in the district public schools. Today, charter schools are promoted not as collaborators with public schools, but as competitors in a marketplace where test scores take the place of profits. In this market, there are rewards for schools that can avoid students who are likely to score low. That was never the intent.

http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/article/20140810/NEWS/140819882
Guest column: Implications of a dual public education system

By Sens. Patricia Jehlen and Ken Donnelly
Posted Aug. 10, 2014 @ 8:37 am
CAMBRIDGE Chronicle

Television Network News Indicates Misguided Priorities

[From article]
NBC’s Today show didn’t find time to talk about the Lerner contempt vote but did bring on their chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd to talk about a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that finds there is a greater acceptance of tattoos. Total Today show tattoo time? 4 minutes, 30 seconds.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffrey-dickens/2014/05/08/networks-spend-275-minutes-climate-change-just-15-seconds-lois-ler

Networks Spend 27 Minutes on Climate Change, Just 15 Seconds on Lois Lerner Contempt Vote
By Geoffrey Dickens

May 8, 2014 | 12:19

Dumbed Down Population Clueless

[From article]
Mark Twain and Will Rogers both examined and excoriated politicians of their day in some of the most amusing descriptions imaginable, to the point where their humorous characterizations of politicians have become trite but accurate to this day.
Our decades of cultural laughter over their famous words and routines has unfortunately helped to camouflage the growth and danger of a dominating political class in this nation. This domination, aided and abetted by print, network and movie media enablers, has duped the citizens of this country into thinking our government is the source and dispenser of citizen rights and authority.
Our Constitution has been shape-shifted into a small c word, by virtue of the arrogance of politicians and their powerful bureaucracies controlling an ever-meek citizenry dumbed-downed enough to not know they have the legal authority and control the politicians do not.

http://www.oregonmag.com/anarchy-or-not-for-christmas/

Anarchy (or not) for Christmas
By Art Hyland
December 16, 2013

Nikita Khruschev's Speech At UN 1959

Genius Of US Inhibited By Dunces

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2011/12/07/a_confederacy_of_dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces
TownHall.com
John Ransom
December 7, 2011