Please read this scary article by Laurie Rogers, a well-known education reformer you can trust.

The Network (her word)  is all the people and forces trying to subdue education. Common Core represents the fulfillment of their control over everything K-12. They have to be stopped if you want to save genuine education.

  You know what the only hope is? That all the people in the middle start to take sides.

Presumably some people…

Here's the short version: you're doing a lousy job. You're betraying your own future and letting the country down. You're abandoning the parents in your community to the scams of the Education Establishment. You're making real educational reform almost impossible because you don't explain any of the issues to the community. You and the NEA seem to be engaged in some sort of treacherous deal to make sure that the deliberate dumbing down of the country…

I'm always looking for clearer and more profound ways to explain why phonics is essential and you will destroy children if you make them memorize sight-words.

 Rudolf Flesch thought he had explained it completely in 1955. But he actually did not close the deal, so the International Reading Association was able to go right on pretending that Whole Word makes any sense at all-- for another 60 years.

 This tells you how subtle and slippery the whole thing…

The more I study this thing, the more appalled I am. The fact that it’s in disarray at the moment is a great blessing. I hope people can get their bearings and realize that letting a bunch of left-wing extremists, or any kind of extremists, take over your school system is a big mistake.

 I don’t think people appreciate how similar (or parallel) Common Core is to ObamaCare, i.e., a massive federal intrusion with a rule for everything. And once they got…

 Someone just left this comment on  Facebook: "As far as I know, everywhere is sending sight words home to study, while the kids are tested on how fast they can identify them at school. Seems they're here to stay. Unfortunate indeed."

The whole point of the Reading Wars was that sight-words do not work as well as straight phonics. But look how the Education Establishment has maneuvered to keep sight-words in play. They really do LOVE…

On another site, people were discussing correct grammar, then ebonics, and before you know it, whether black students can learn as well as white students. I assume everybody has heard this debate many times. I suspect that the debate itself is propaganda. There are buried sophistries and hidden agenda. People are missing a very important point. Here it is:

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I want to discuss a perspective that may…

Almost all big crimes are conspiracies. We're supposed to try to solve them, à la Sherlock Holmes. But today if you try to explain a crime, you are called a “conspiracy theorist” as if somehow this is a wrong thing to be.

I can tell you it’s gotten weird. There are definitely a…

 When Whole Word modulated into Whole Language (both being variations on look-say as a matter of fact), there was a great rush to add bells and whistles, lipstick and accessories.

 One of these bells and whistles was called literacy-rich environment. And the theory was that if you surrounded children with thousands of books, they would learn to read more quickly.

This simply is not true. We could all sit in a library in China…

 Bet you didn't know that 1 million homeschoolers use Saxon Math textbooks.

 When people can choose what they want, they choose Saxon Math. 

Eighteen years after he died, John Saxon is still a powerful force in American education. I think he will get much bigger.

The public is so disgusted with Reform Math and Common Core. They want stuff that…

With his new hit video Word Crimes, “Weird Al” is doing a great service for American education.

In particular, he’s attacking the non-teaching of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and everything else. He's got people talking about these important issues.

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He does not mention the slinky sophistry that…

It’s a common feature throughout public school education: methods that not only don’t work but seem designed not to work.

This is so puzzling that when you first encounter the possibility, your mind rejects it. Why would people in education design methods that defeat education?

 I think New Math was a glaring example. Reform Math continues the same tradition. The Internet is full of videos of children crying because they cannot understand the…

One of the things I notice – and it seems to be getting worse – is almost a complete disconnect between the ideas discussed as possible cures in education, and the problems In the public schools that are actually fatal to learning.

In other words, if somebody’s got cancer, it’s fatuous to focus on whether they need new shoes.

Schools have almost stopped trying to…

Okay, you need a break. Something a little funny. How about this riff where I present to Hollywood a pitch for a movie called "Despicable Them-- the Common Core Movie."

 You see, there's this gang that wants to wreck the public schools and make money doing it. In your town. Yeah, there's nothing but laughs in our public schools these days.

 Is this bit of sarcasm…

 Basically, many and perhaps most states are backing away fast. The key term is: moratorium.

That’s where you stick something in a storage shed and wait for conditions to improve.

 In this case,  the states need to extricate themselves from the grabby embrace of the federal government. Meanwhile, the Common Core Cartel hopes that the public will forget how much they hate Common Core.

 Not…

All around the world, teachers, schools of education, and entire school systems are spending their hours and days discussing whether a particular bit of school activity is sufficiently devoted to ANALYSING as opposed to EVALUATING.

 For most people, most of the time, these are indistinguishable. What kind of discussion can anybody possibly have?  A pointless one.

 And at the end of this discussion, not one kid in one classroom will have…

The traditional belief of phonics experts is that you can teach virtually every child to read in the first or second grade. See video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws ;

If you don’t use the right methods, the kids will be dysfunctional in various ways (but it doesn’t mean there’s anything actually wrong with those kids). 

The underlying problem, according to many investigators,…

According to the media, the real story is that Rush is an idiot, no child would want to read anything by him, and the only reason he won the award is because Rush bought all the books himself.

 Some of the outrage is palpable. The mainstream media pay so little attention to anything except itself, a lot of these people didn't…

For aficionados of sophistry and propaganda, Common Core presents a drunken orgy of fun.

 One of the most interesting specimens of strange language is the word Standard. Can anybody say what it means exactly?

Is it a goal? Is it a rule? Is it a law? Is it a means to get somewhere? Is it a norm?  And if nobody knows what it means, how can people have intelligent conversations about it?

 Note in particular, there is a very…

These are all the most important books published over the last 25+ years, the kind of books they should study in schools of education, but many people become teachers without even knowing who Rudolf Flesch is. Etc.

I did this list three years ago and stopped at 40 because it's a nice round number. For years I intended to add my new  reviews to this list. Today I did that!... Only to be informed by Amazon that 40 is the limit. Bummer. (So I added a few and…

You know who you are. You think the most wonderful thing in the world is when kids learn lots and lots of stuff.

But you also know that the whole trend of K-12 education is toward kids learning attitudes, competencies, rhetorical skills, and all kinds of things that are not at all the same as learning what happened in 1492. You think this is sad.

An education without facts is, for many of us, a fraud.

And the irony is that with all the new…