Last week, I was looking at "Why Johnny can't read" (Rudolf Flesch, 1955) where Flesch quotes some  professors's advice about what readers  should do when encountering new words.

There is a list of a half-dozen items. The last one is phonics. The student is supposed to use phonics only as a last resort. This is quite nutty but it's the official doctrine of K-12 education for many decades.

 At about the same time, I saw a video where a professor from Minnesota,…

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My sense of the world is that our Education Establishment is doing a crummy job on purpose, and even worse our local media stand silently by, and our local leaders remain relentlessly passive.

Every organization I look at –  the media, elite groups like PEN, Ivy League universities, Chamber of Commerce, religious groups-- all…

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Statisticians say this country has 50,000,000 functional illiterates? How is that possible?  Clearly, you need many educrats willing to push a bad idea for many decades. I say that because the method typically taught in our public schools plainly does not work.

Whole Word (known by at least a dozen…

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Georgia has always had a bad reputation. On top of that, in the last 10 years there have been some major cheating scandals. Ask yourself, why?  Probably because the performance of the students is sinking to an embarrassing low, so the school officials have to cheat in order to protect their own reputations. But why has the situation gotten so bad?

 One of the striking things about Georgia is that most of the public schools have their own websites; and many of these…

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After six years of teaching, Josh Waldron gave up. He was perfectly qualified, an excellent teacher,  smart and sincere, everything we want in the classroom. But he had not anticipated all the hoops he would have to jump through, all the ridiculous paperwork he would have to fill out, all the  trivial requirements he would have to attend to.  He finally had to make a practical decision on how to best serve his family and himself.

 At the time I first heard about Josh…

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Samuel Blumenfeld, the author of more than 10 books about education, has created a long video where he basically concludes that our K-12 education system is a criminal enterprise.



I've done a short article that sums it up, for anyone in a hurry. I hope everyone will look at it.…



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I would submit to you that an elementary school's policy on recess tells you everything you need to know about that school's seriousness.

 Our Education Establishment for decades has flirted with a total lack of seriousness. How do we know this? Because they found many reasons to downplay or eliminate recess. That means you have millions of restless, unhappy kids who are unlikely to learn anything at all. And when these children squirm and complain, they are labeled ADHD and…

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