Progressive educators think that the way you redesign curricula is you throw out all traditional content and introduce dozens of soft skills,  strange new literacies, and 21st century this-and-that.

The people proposing this sort of redesign are the same people who have controlled education for 75 years. Do you believe in your heart that they will now do a better job? You know they won’t. (You probably suspect the truth. They don’t want the schools to do a better job, because  progressive educators are in the business of preparing children to be members of a collective.  The goal is to make good little socialists.)

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that you DO want to make better schools. What is your plan?

I recently came up with a radically simple plan with only two steps. First of all, you completely separate yourself from the Education Establishment and all of its tired thinking.

Second, you bring together all the best ideas now working in the best schools around the country. You merge them into new curricula with such names as American Math, American Reading, and so on.

Never thinking small, I further proposed that the Koch Brothers pay for all this. Somebody has to negotiate with the publishers and creators of the existing content. Licensing arrangements have to be made. But the whole  project can be done for chump change compared to the hundreds of millions that Bill Gates wasted on Common Core.

Admittedly, this proposal was just a bit tongue-in-cheek. Probably I won't hear from the Koch Brothers. Alas. But the underlying concepts are absolutely solid. We've got to stop listening to people who don't have a clue about what they are doing. Why not instead bring together and unify all curricula that are already proven and popular?

"Memo to Koch Brothers -- Re: How you can save K-12 education"

http://www.examiner.com/article/memo-to-koch-brothers-re-how-you-ca...