In my never-ending quest for boiling everything down to a few paragraphs, I put up a short article called "Memo to mothers: how public schools damage your child."

 The four ways are: reading, arithmetic, knowledge, and attitudes. Make a mess of those four and you've pretty well  messed up another generation.

http://www.examiner.com/article/memo-to-mothers-how-public-schools-...

 There is also a short video made by a schoolteacher in Brooklyn. She uses Sing, Spell, Read, Write, and shows that children should routinely learn to read  before they are seven years old.

 Please think about this. We have a billion-dollar industry in this country devoted to making sure children don't learn until they're 9, 10, or 11, if ever. This industry goes by the names of Whole Word, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, Sight-Words, and such. I call these people the reading bandits.  Apparently, they are as entrenched in K-12 education as the Mafia in Manhattan.

 Now, if you have some professional or economic reason for having to go along with these people, I understand. But if you're actually conflicted and perplexed about reading, then please just remember what this Brooklyn schoolteacher does routinely. She teaches these kids phonics when they're five or six years old. And before they are seven they are reading little books that they have not seen before. Our public schools are NOT routinely doing this. So you know the people in charge of the schools are charlatans of some kind. And you know that you should not trust most of what they say.

Bruce Deitrick Price

Improve-Education.org

(for more about reading, see #42 on this site)