Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Norman Mailer and Parade Magazine

Last year, the writer Norman Mailer spoke to Parade Magazine about the deplorable condition of children's reading ability in this country. The magazine asked for readers' responses. I wrote to them as follows:

To the editor of Parade Magazine:

Your lead article for Jan. 23, “One Idea,” asks: 1. Do you agree with Norman Mailer? and 2. What one idea will change America for the better? My reply is as follows:

I disagree. Mailer correctly identifies a huge problem – the poor reading skills of America’s public school children – but he mistakenly blames TV commercials, when the failing school system itself is the true culprit. (If anything, commercials help people to learn English.)

The public schools have the children captive for twenty thousand hours over twelve years or so. Despite that opportunity, they fail to teach millions of children to read or calculate well. The failure is the schools’ – not TV.

Mr. Mailer is among millions of people who think that all the school system needs is a tweak here, or more money there, and it will educate us well. However, he and those others are wrong. In terms of its own goals, the school system is working just as it is designed -- to indoctrinate and to offer only a minimum of learning. Early documents show that the mediocrity of the state-run schools is intentional. If the government wanted high literacy, that is what it would produce, but it wants something else entirely: a workforce – a dumbed-down populace that will be predictable, docile, and dependent on government and other institutions.

What’s going on? The system employs a reading instruction method (whole language) that prevents many children from learning how to read adequately, and it also employs math instruction programs (called "fuzzy math") that ignore the teaching of basic algorithms – the tools for calculating accurately and the steps needed in order to learn more advanced math. One result of such poor methods of instruction are the recent scores on international tests (PISA, TIMSS, et al) that show how poorly American schools rank when compared to those of other industrial countries. (for specific reasons why the US methods are ineffective, go to the website of Fordham Foundation, www.edexcellence.net, and see their piece, “The State of State Standards.”)

The failure of the school system does have a solution, and that is my One Idea for changing America for the better. It is as follows: Education is in the wrong hands. The central fact of the public school system is that it is not owned or run by “the public,” but instead it is owned and run by government. Therefore, despite what we are told about "local control," there is no such thing. Education in America is under federal and state control, and that is its problem.

For education to improve, it must be separated from government control and be allowed to enter a free market of privately owned, privately operated, and privately (parent) funded schools that will offer what parents want for their children and are willing to pay for. For those who cannot afford direct payments for education, the private sector has many ways of providing the needed funds, such as scholarships and tuition grants. When school taxes are no longer collected, the great majority of families will have (retain) that money to spend for the amount and quality of education they want for their children.

The future of education is the free market where the internet and private schooling compete for students. Today, a million or more are homeschooling with great success, and thousands of websites offer learning of all types from many of the world’s best teachers and experts. Meanwhile, the public schools are getting worse every day in comparison, because of their bureaucratic and political entanglements, the teacher unions, their archaic methods, poor programs and culture of corruption.

Education is too important to leave in the hands of a coercive monopoly run by politicians and bureaucrats. We have choice in everything except the most important thing: education. That must change through privatization.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

Ned Vare, Guilford, CT

Friday, May 9, 2008

Homeschool or Unschool?

My wife and I are advocates of homeschooling in all its forms, but for our son we chose Unschooling which might be described as letting the learner choose what, when, where and with whom he learns.

The big advantage our son had, thanks to UNschooling throughout his youth, was that he learned to be in charge of his learning, and really his life to a great degree. In contrast, kids who attend schools learn to wait for others to tell them what to do, what to think. After twelve years of that, they become completely dependent on others for direction. In our son's case, he learned to be in charge of his own life to the degree he was able.

In general, that does not prepare young people for college. Colleges prefer people who have initiative and can motivate themselves, who know what they want to learn, and most important, know how to find information when they need it, and are not afraid to make decisions for themselves. Those characteristics are the opposite of what public schools teach. The government schools have the goal of turning out a "workforce" of dependent predictable people. The government does not want people to be well educated -- just enough, but no more. The "economy" needs lots of sheep, not too many shepherds. Lots of spectators, not many players. Our son, and many homeschooled children we know, learned to be independent and creative thinkers, to do what was right for them, not necessarily for the "economy."

School does not prepare children for life. Each year of school merely prepares them for the next year of school. Our motto is, "Live with your children as though there were no such thing as school." Let your kids know that they are responsible for their lives and for their learning, no one else is.

Our son never did lessons, never looked at a school book. We did not teach him school stuff at home. He learned what he was interested in, which was almost everything. He scored incredibly high on the SATs and got into college easily on his own and breezed through happily graduating Magna Cum Laude. He was well prepared for college without doing any of the school stuff. He was prepared for life, not just college. He is grateful for his experience growing up and we are still his best friends. What more can we ask?

Postscript: Cassidy met a wonderful lady in Seattle and they have moved back to Brooklyn, NY to live. The couple have asked to be married at our house in CT and the fiancee also asked Luz to be their minister and perform the ceremony in June. How sweet it is!

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Letter to a Worried Parent

To a mother of a bright child in New Hampshire:

Ever since its inception (around 1850), the government school system has waged a constant war against both children and parents, and against all communities. The war is between the desires of parents for their children and the opposing needs of the State to produce a docile, predictable (not-too-well educated) "workforce" to serve the economy and the military.

Once a parent places a child in government school, the differences appear, and the longer the child stays, the more apparent they become. Quite simply, the school is not on your side in the war over your child's mind. Homeschooling begins when a parent realizes that the state has goals for children that are opposite to their own. Thus, homeschooling is almost always for positive reasons since it reconciles the child's needs (and interests) with his/her life experience. In homeschooling, the child serves his/her own needs, not primarily those of the state.

Your bad experience with the schools regarding your son is typical of many. The public school system, whatever its employees may tell you, is not interested in individuals and their progress toward their "personal best." That is all hype. The system is designed from the top down to be a "one-size-fits-all" factory style grinder turning out a pre-designed mass of citizens, not individuals inspired to reach their individual potential. Dumbing down is not a catch phrase or an accident; it is the national policy. (You can look it up in John Taylor Gatto's great book, "The Underground History of American Education"). Remember, the employees do not work for you or your children; they all work for the state, and serve the state's needs only.

In general, public schools ignore bright children. Helping high achievers is simply not on the agenda of the public schools. A student who wants or needs special attention must depend on individual employees -- in some cases breaking school/union rules. Luckily, such employees exist and are helping a few children, but it is at the risk of their jobs in many cases. The state wants a middle mass of citizens coming from its schools -- not exceptional, creative independent thinkers.

Start homeschooling now. Have no fear. You do not need a particular motive or reason, they are all good.

All best wishes,
Ned Vare
send for info packet: nedvare@ntplx.net

Friday, May 2, 2008

Six Billion Dollars Later

6 Billion Dollars Later, a Lot of Children Are Left Behind

As if you weren't convinced enough that the public school system is a failed one, a recent study has again proven the flaws in the No Child Left Behind program. According to the U.S. Department of Education (ironically, a champion of NCLB), studies show that schools using the Reading First program performed no better than schools that did not.

Reading First is an early phonics program designed by the government. $1 billion dollars of our taxes have gone to Reading First each year since the 2002 No Child Left Behind law was passed. Classrooms that use Reading First spend about 10 more minutes a day on reading lessons… resulting in no marked improvement as far as reading comprehension is concerned across the board.

One thing did improve in Reading First schools, however… their annual funding. They weren't the only ones who were being rewarded financially, either. According to the 2007 written testimony of John P. Higgins Jr., the Reading First program has been rife with corruption:

Through our work, we found that the Department:
1) appeared to inappropriately influence the use of certain programs and assessments;
2) failed to comply with statutory requirements and its own guidance;
3) obscured the requirements of the statute; and
4) created an environment that allowed real and perceived conflicts of interest.

It seems that the Three Rs now stand for revenue, revenue, revenue.


This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who is an industry critic on the subject of university reviews http://www.universityreviewsonline.com/ . She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

BusRadio

The road to Hell starts with a school bus ride.

Children’s Advocates Ask Companies Not to Advertise on Bus Radio and Channel One
Following is today’s letter from a group of child advocates to the leading national advertisers and ad agencies.

Dear Corporate/Ad Agency Leader:

As you know, advertising is now commonplace in the public schools. Yet, many advertising and marketing professionals have deep misgivings about marketing to school children. According to a 2004 Harris poll of youth advertising and marketing professionals, only 45% “feel that today’s young people can handle advertising in schools.” Not surprisingly, 47% believe that “schools should be a protected area” and that “there should not be advertising to students on school grounds.”

We are writing to ask for your help to turn your industry’s conscience into a reality, and to protect our children and their education from aggressive marketers.
Channel One is a highly controversial in-school marketing company that delivers televised content to nearly 11,500 schools throughout the nation. In exchange for video equipment, these schools now spend one full school week each year watching television, including one full school day just for the ads. According to the Harris poll, 61% of youth marketing professionals believe that it is “inappropriate” for companies like Channel One to “provid[e] instructional material that integrates brand names and products into the lessons.”

BusRadio is the newest foray of advertisers into public schools. It seeks to install special radio equipment into school buses that will carry that company’s offerings, including eight minutes of ads per hour. In its contract with school districts, BusRadio does not rule out advertising any particular type of products. If Channel One is any guide, we might expect BusRadio to advertise junk food, soda pop, violent and sexualized entertainment, and movies that encourage school children to smoke tobacco.

Whatever BusRadio advertises, children as young as six will have no choice as to whether to listen or not. Nor will their parents be able to exercise any control over their children’s exposure. The sales pitches will fill the bus and interfere with those children who want to read, study, talk, pray, or do almost anything else other than listen to the programming. According to the Harris poll, 69% of youth advertising and marketing professionals believe that “advertising on school buses” is “inappropriate.”

We agree with these professionals. We believe it is wrong for a company to use compulsory school attendance laws to force a captive audience of children to listen to advertising. As most practitioners in the field recognize, successful advertising depends on the willing participation of both advertiser and consumer. BusRadio and Channel One violate this fundamental principle.

We are asking your [company/agency] to pledge by October 15 not to buy advertising on Bus Radio or Channel One. We hope you will join with us and affirm that school children should not be compelled to listen to or watch advertising.

We will follow up with you in the next two weeks about whether your [company/agency] will make this pledge. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss at your convenience the issues in this letter. Please feel free to call Jim Metrock of Obligation, Inc. at (205) 822-0080, Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert at (503) 235-8012, or Monique Tilford of the Center for a New American Dream at (301) 891-3683. We look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

[various orgs]

The letters were endorsed by 40 organizations and 64 children’s advocates. Endorsers include the American Family Association, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumers Union, Eagle Forum, Global Exchange and the National PTA, as well as the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education and Literacy and the Presbyterian Church (USA) Office of Child Advocacy.

The letters are the first step in a new campaign to remove BusRadio and Channel One from every school in the United States. The campaign is organized by Commercial Alert, the Center for a New American Dream and Obligation, Inc.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Meanwhile....in California,

Does anyone know what happened to this idea?


Students ordered to wear tracking tags
Parents protest school mandate on RFID badges
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6942751/

Dawn and Mike Cantrall's daughter, a seventh-grader at Brittan Elementary School, poses at her Sutter, Calif., home, wearing the RFID tag mandated by her school.
By Lisa Leff

Updated: 8:02 p.m. ET Feb. 9, 2005
SUTTER, Calif. - The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.

The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory.

While similar devices are being tested at several schools in Japan so parents can know when their children arrive and leave, Brittan appears to be the first U.S. school district to embrace such a monitoring system.

Civil libertarians hope to keep it that way.
"If this school doesn't stand up, then other schools might adopt it," Nicole Ozer, a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, warned school board members at a meeting Tuesday night. "You might be a small community, but you are one of the first communities to use this technology."

The system was imposed, without parental input, by the school as a way to simplify attendance-taking and potentially reduce vandalism and improve student safety. Principal Earnie Graham hopes to eventually add bar codes to the existing ID's so that students can use them to pay for cafeteria meals and check out library books.
But some parents see a system that can monitor their children's movements on campus as something straight out of Orwell.

"There is a way to make kids safer without making them feel like a piece of inventory," said Michael Cantrall, one of several angry parents who complained. "Are we trying to bring them up with respect and trust, or tell them that you can't trust anyone, you are always going to be monitored and someone is always going to be watching you?"

Cantrall said he told his children, in the 5th and 7th grades, not to wear the badges. He also filed a protest letter with the board and alerted the ACLU.
CONTINUED:

Saturday, April 26, 2008

A Letter to a Skeptic

The most common description of school today is "Boring." Ask anyone -- kids, parents, even teachers. There are many articles, even whole books, telling the sad tale of how school is not merely a waste of time, but is actually damaging.

While public schools are required to "offer instruction" in a few basic subjects, there is no legal requirement for children to be forced to attend classes in which they are bored silly and where they are not even given the basic skills. For example, reading instruction has been changed from learning how to read using phonics, to guessing at words using a farce called Whole Language, resulting in massive reading failure. The same is true in Math. The schools use "Fuzzy math" instead of teaching how to calculate for correct answers. The business world and the professions are appalled at the massive failure.

Some people still believe that the government schools are offering real education. They have not been paying attention to those schools for a long time. Their primary purpose is no longer (if it ever was) academic learning; it has become indoctrination with a generous helping of psycho-therapy. All you need to do is observe them in action. Today's state-run schools are still, as ever, the training ground for the military, factory work and other repetitive jobs requiring blind obedience. They are not the places to learn independent thought or creative action. Dumbing Down is not just a catchy phrase, it's the national policy.

Teachers majored in "education," a content-free course that attracts mostly those who have not been academically successful in either school or college. Thus, the staffs of public schools are crowded with people who are neither of high academic ability, but are not even academically oriented.

A study by the Thomas Fordham Foundation (and others) provides a key to why so many people are choosing alternatives such as homeschooling for their children. It is that the Standards of teaching in the public schools of America have long been poor and are steadily getting worse. What that means is that the quality of the teaching and the teachers has been falling for fifty years and continues today. (Microsoft is forced to hire 200,000 people from overseas because American high school grads cannot read or write English adequately or do simple math)

Ask Arthur Levine, head of Columbia Teachers College, the "leading" teacher and administrator mill, about the quality of the teacher colleges across the country. In his four-year study of those colleges (that did not include Columbia) he described them as "between unacceptable and embarrassing, with low standards and irrelevant curricula." Thus, we are left with mostly inferior instruction, low academic standards and inadequate administrators at best.

When parents discover those problems for themselves and are interested in their own children's education, they are voting with their feet, by looking for private schools or homeschooling. That group has always been professional people. In years past, doctors were the most likely group to send their kids to private schools. Today, they have been replaced by public school teachers as the occupation with the largest percentage of children in private schools. A recent report, also by the Fordham Foundation claimed that 21% of public school teachers send their own children to private schools. They should know why....ask them. Some are homeschooling.

The average college graduate is both more intelligent and better educated than the average public school teacher. Parents who choose to homeschool their children -- and I mean all but a negligible percent -- are, in my considerable experience with them, not only the most knowledgable about their own children's needs, but are far more dedicated to their children than the strangers that public schools employ. My wife and I were teachers; she in public school and I in private schools. She calls her certification a joke. We both saw the mediocrity and waste.

One thing we learned from our years of involvement in our own son's self-education (we call it unschooling -- no schooling at all unless requested by the learner) and with families is that whatever schools offer is available to everyone -- more easily, more quickly, with better quality, and on our own schedule -- in many other places. Yes, homeschooling is a form of protection of children -- from stupidity and mediocrity, bullying and coercion, boredom and time-wasting. Life is a good teacher; homeschoolers learn from real life, not in artificial, synthetic second-hand teaching environments.

We have also learned that the public schools are huge government jobs programs for adults at taxpayer expense. Their true (social and economic) purposes have little to do with either education or children. They are run today for the benefit and convenience of their employees, not for the community, not for the students who trustingly show up but who are, in droves, left behind. They are driven by political agendas, silly teaching fads, and controlled by teacher union rules.

Next time you knock homeschooling, spend some time in a public school first. Judge the secrecy, deception and corruption for yourself and then consider whether you would put your own children in there. Just don't look too close or ask too many questions -- they'll throw you out. And to your question about whether or not the schools would change "if we just hang in there and work for reform," life is simply not long enough. Sadly, the schools are working perfectly for their employees and show no signs of improvement, or even listening.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The Ideal VS the Reality

Not so long ago, when towns reached a population with fifty children and its people wanted to start a school, they got together and hired a teacher. A teacher would be expected to teach up to about fifty children of different ages and abilities. In those days (until the early 1800s), America's literacy rate was the highest the world had ever seen.

But a strange thing happened. The federal government, in about 1840, started its push to bring universal schooling to the entire population. It was begun with forcing the people of Massachusetts to send their children to government-run schools. There was much protest there and in many other places that lasted well into the 20th century, but the feds finally gained control over the great majority of our children. The goal was never education, but it was uniformity and docility in the creation of a dependent "workforce" to serve industry and the military. Plain and simple: the government wanted slaves. It still does.

Today, in government schooling, the schools hire approximately ten employees for every fifty students, and the literacy rate is far below earlier levels, even though the children attend the school for more hours a day and more days per year than in earlier times. What is going on?

Not only is public school designed as an indoctrination program, primarily teaching children to be obedient to authority, but it is also serving as an employment scheme, hiring millions of not-well-educated people in dozens of capacities, only a few of which are educational. In the process, the academic part of schooling has been all but eliminated, resulting in what today is called "dumbing down."

Thus, public school has taken on its true purposes: baby sitting, social engineering, job training, and a hiring kingdom, with its goal: an entire society working toward government control over society. Yes, that is the dream of Socialist planners in the last century. It is coming true. And the truly remarkable part is that the planners have, all along, sent the bill to us. The tab is now over ten thousand dollars per year per child.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Kids Are Smart; School Is Stupid

Luz and I subscribe to Life Learning Magazine, edited by Wendy Priesnitz. In her article, Challenging Assumptions In Education, she gives many reasons why public school is bad. In the Introduction, she tells us, "Schooling impedes learning and enslaves children." (how's that for starters...?)

She then lists several false assumptions that are made about government schools.
The main false assumptions she lists are these five:
1. Education is something that's done to you.
2. Knowledge belongs to a cult of experts (teachers); therefore, schools teach us to be emotionally and intellectually dependent, not independent or self-assured.
3. Others know best what children should learn. (Here, Priesnitz quotes Einstein: "It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.")
She adds another false assumption schools teach: Others know better than we do how we should spend our time. She recommends this: education must be organized around learning rather than around teaching.
4. Schools provide effective training. Simply not true; the experience is totally synthetic/artificial.
5. Schools have a noble purpose...such as, social justice, tolerance, democracy, equal opportunity, etc.

Priesnitz states: "The chief function of state-run education has never been to empower citizens...the purpose of schools has been, at its most benign, to imprint a social script or, at it worst, to achieve mass social control."

I have a few more ideas for the list:
* Public schools operate for the benefit of their employees, not the children or their families or society. The rules are made by the teacher unions; therefore, the schools need children; not the reverse.
* School does not prepare us for life, but only for more school. It is a culture unto itself.
* Schools operate on the principle that says, children's experiences, opinions, interests, and thoughts are of no value.
* Schools also try to convince us that parents are not capable of providing adequate instruction for their own children, even in basic skills.
* A resident of my town, Armand Fusco, a former superintendent of two districts, is author of the book, "School Corruption, Betrayal of Children and the Public Trust". In it, he says, "...Public school is a culture of corruption and deceit." The more I learn, the more I agree with him.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

The Makers and the Takers

When the government established its school system -- gradually, state by state in the 1800s -- its goal was to provide a minimum of academic learning while training children to be obedient to authority and predictable as consumers in a "mass market." Government wanted soldiers and factory workers. It also wanted a market for the products of the industrial revolution and political support from the masses for its policies and candidates. The school system provided both.

Nothing has changed, except that academics have been dumbed down while the indoctrination has expanded by new techniques of psychology and new goals of social engineering.

The schools now believe they can get away with almost any outrage, because, as we discover every year at budget time, they have the votes. The people who work in real world jobs -- producing goods and services that society needs and wants -- earn the money and produce wealth. They are called the Makers. Those who work inside the government system produce nothing, and (together with their families) are called the Takers. The number of Takers has now reached critical mass whereby they can vote for whatever they want, and get it.

The big trick was that, long ago, the public were convinced that it was our duty to pay for this system of education.

"Private enterprise maintains and expands itself by continually offering people things they want. Government maintains and expands itself by depriving people of things they want, by means of seizing their goods (taxation) and preventing them from trading and living as they choose (regulation). Thus, private enterprise continually increases the prosperity and well-being of its customers, while government continually decreases the prosperity and well-being of its citizens." *

*from the book, The Market for Liberty, by Morris and Linda Tannehill

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Freedom Is Not Free

note: this post is taken from our book, Smarting Us Up (see sidebar)

There are only two ways that people can interact. One is voluntarily; the other is by force. Either we are free, or we are someone's slaves. In our relations with “authorities,” we are either free to interact with them and associate with them, or we are not. If they create laws that force us to educate our children by their methods and/or rules, then to the degree they do that, we are their slaves.

Granted, homeschooling is merely a part of our lives, and therefore, we are not true slaves, and homeschooling regulations do not comprise total slavery. But the distinction is only a matter of degree. The regulations are backed by force, and it's the force that we need to acknowledge. Force is what takes away our freedom and our choice and our sovereignty as individuals.

If we are forced to homeschool our kids according to the dictates of anyone else, then to that degree, we are their slaves. On the other hand, if a friend persuades us to UNschool or to use another method, that is our voluntary and free choice.

The word ‘slavery’ naturally brings to mind the most drastic deprivations of freedom, so it makes people uneasy when we refer to certain state homeschooling regulations as slavery. But that is what it is -- the opposite of freedom to live as we choose.

Freedom is not free. If we are not vigilant and ready to stand against tyranny -- no matter how small or how ‘reasonable’ its demands may seem, we will move further down the slippery slope to slavery. In order to be a truly free people, we need to eliminate all the little rules of enslavement (rules backed by force) that control our lives.

Luz and I are libertarians -- yes, members of the Libertarian Party (www.lp.org). That means that we believe in liberty: Unless we harm someone or take advantage of someone or use force against others, then the foundations of this country declare that we are free to choose how we live our lives. We need to keep it that way. Nobody said it would be easy.

Monday, March 31, 2008

If the Children Don't Learn, the Schools Didn't Teach

Today, public schools merely go through the motions instead of actually transferring knowledge from one generation to the next. Yes, there are exceptions -- mostly because of individual teachers' efforts -- but what matters is the general failure. It is allowed because of how the school system describes itself at the state level. The schools are not responsible for learning. All that the government schools are asked to do is, "offer instructional experiences." There is no requirement for learning; no specific expectations upon the students. Thus, there is no accountability in the system.

The law says that parents are responsible for their children's education, and that applies whether or not they send them to a school. Therefore, in the eyes of the public schools, if the child does not learn, the schools blame the child or the parents or "society" or TV or something else. Thus, to the schools, failure is always the child's fault, never the schools, even though it is often the case that the schools did not provide proper instruction.

When a business does not achieve its mission, it loses its customers, lays off its employees and goes out of existence. In short, it fails. It must pay off its creditors and dissolve. But when a government agency -- say the school system -- fails to provide the service that it is expected and even claims to provide, what happens? Nothing.

In fact, failure to achieve their mission is the easiest route for public schools to increase their revenues. All they need to do is say, "We are failing because we don't have enough money." It works every time. Never mind that America spends more per pupil than virtually all other countries and in recent decades has among the worst performing schools.

According to international and US Dept of Ed reports, the school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only do none of its schools go out of business, but they are rewarded more and more each year for their failure.

We are forced to wonder why this happens, and the answer might just be that the business of the school system is not education, but other things entirely. We are hearing more and more that public school has the purpose of turning out a "workforce." Well, a workforce is best if it is well schooled in basic knowledge, and yet the schools have all but eliminated the teaching of skills and knowledge that former generations were taught -- basic arithmetic facts and phonetic skill for reading. Therefore, the schools are failing in their fundamendal purpose.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Schools Teach Sex, but not Math and Reading

How schools merely go through the motions instead of actually transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. Yes, there are exceptions, but .... what matters is the general failure. It is allowed because of how the school system describes itself at the state level. It is not responsible for learning. All that the government schools are asked to do is, "offer instructional experiences." There is no requirement for learning; no requirements for learning; no specific expectations upon the students. There is no accountability in the system.

The law says that parents are responsible for their children's education, and that applies whether or not they send them to a school. Therefore, in the eyes of the public schools, if the child does not learn, the schools blame the child or the parents or "society" or TV or something else. Thus, to the schools, failure is always the child's fault, never the school's, even though it is often the case that the schools did not provide proper instruction.

When a business does not achieve its mission, it loses its customers, lays off its employees and goes out of existence. In short, it fails. It must pay off its creditors and dissolve. But when a government agency -- say the school system -- fails to provide the service that it is expected and even claims to provide, what happens? Nothing.

In fact, failure to achieve their mission is the easiest route for public schools to increase their revenues. All they need to do is say, "We are failing because we don't have enough money." It works every time. Never mind that America spends more per pupil than virtually all other countries and in recent decades has among the worst performing schools.

According to international and US Dept of Ed reports, the school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only do none of its schools go out of business, but they are rewarded more and more each year of failure.

We are forced to wonder why this happens, and the answer might just be that the business of the school system is not education, but other things entirely. We are hearing more and more that public school has the purpose of turning out a "workforce." Well, a workforce is best if it is well schooled in basic knowledge, and yet the schools have all but eliminated the teaching of skills and knowledge that former generations were taught -- basic arithmetic facts and phonetic skills for reading. Therefore, the schools are failing in their fundamendal purpose.

Monday, March 24, 2008

"Standards" -- What Standards?

Below, I'm using information about my state, Connecticut (CT). If you live somewhere else, your schools probably have similarly bad "standards."

School administrators often mention their school's "Standards," but no one in the public knows what they are talking about. Here's why: The administrators don't know either, because, in CT and other states, there really are no standards. "Standards" is just a word they like to use.

My dictionary defines "standard" as follows: "A degree or level of requirement, excellence or attainment."

There is an organization, Thomas B. Fordham Institute, that looks into all the states' standards for English and Math. Its findings are on its website www.edexcellence.com . Every five years, they report on the standards for every state. The Connecticut Standards for both of those subjects are rated F (the worst).

Fordham: >>Two-thirds of school children in America attend class in states with mediocre (or worse) expectations for what their students should learn. <<

also Fordham: >>The Unfortunate Influence of 1990s-era National Standards. The standards developed by professional associations such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics continue to create havoc, as states embrace their faulty fads and anti-knowledge orientation. << Got that? "anti-knowledge orientation."

The following is what Fordham says about CT's English curriculum standards:
"The standards suffer from systemic vagueness. For example, one suggests that students "maintain a multimedia portfolio that provides opportunities for reflection and dialogue regarding creative processes." These are empty words, unwelcome anywhere, but are particularly insufferable in English standards. Vocabulary development is ignored, and the state fails to outline a core literature for its high school students. Connecticut recently updated its English standards and, from our perspective, managed to make them worse.

"Despite having updated their standards since 2000, Connecticut's overall grade has gone from C to F. Many features are not clear, specific, or measurable, while the language is also pretentious and vague. Meanwhile, there is little on vocabulary development through the grades.
"Language Art, as taught in CT schools, is undefined and unteachable and content-free. Therefore, if districts do not have their own standards, they are merely passing along a poor program.

Math
>>CT gets an F for its math standards, which are a mishmash of trendiness and vacuity. CT places on its students the burden of "constructing" the number system, eschewing memorization and mathematical reasoning for a reliance on technology, manipulatives, and "real life experiences." When the standards do get to the task of defining skills to be learned, such as the K-4 directive to "develop proficiency with basic addition," the state gives teachers and students little guidance as to how this amorphous goal is to be realized, and relies on calculator use throughout the grades as a crutch.<<

2005 State Report Card
Connecticut
Clarity: 0.67
F
Content: 0.33
F
Reason: 0.00
F
Negative Qualities: 1.00
F
Weighted Score: 1.37
Final Grade:
F
2000 Grade: D
1998 Grade: D
Connecticut’s standards are marked by vagueness and ambiguity. For example, the Common Core goals and standards, which are also repeated in the Framework, are no more than broad aspirations for all of the grades K-12, as in this example: 'Students will use mathematical skills and concepts with proficiency and confidence, and appreciate the power and utility of mathematics as a discipline and as a tool for solving problems.'Laudable, surely, but this is not a standard, strictly speaking. To be fair, the Framework does include more specific performance standards, but they mostly serve to highlight Connecticut’s constructivist approach to mathematics education:>> Connecticut students are not expected to have automatic recall of basic number facts, nor are they required to master computational algorithms.
The standard says: "Instructional activities and opportunities need to focus on developing an understanding of mathematics as opposed to the memorization of rules and mechanical application of algorithms.


>> . . . Technology plays an important role in developing number sense. Students should have opportunities to use the calculator as a teaching and exploration tool. Young children can use the constant feature of most calculators to count, forward or backward, or to skip count, forward or backward. . . . At the 5-8 grade level, students continue to need experiences that involve the regular and consistent use of concrete models. Ambiguity Abounds Still, the Framework is not completely devoid of arithmetic and computation requirements. In K-4, for example, students “develop proficiency with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts through the use of a variety of strategies and contexts,” while in grades 5-8, they “develop, use, and explain procedures for performing calculations with whole numbers, decimals, fractions, and integers.” A promising start, but in keeping with the amorphous nature of Connecticut’s standards, no procedures or strategies are identified.

>>The ambiguity of these standards works against the careful development of fractions and credible preparation for algebra. The Pythagorean Theorem is mentioned only once, in a convoluted standard for grades 5-8: Describe and use fundamental concepts and properties of, and relationships among, points, lines, planes, angles and shapes, including incidence, parallelism, perpendicularity, congruence, similarity, and the Pythagorean Theorem. Quadratic polynomials and the quadratic equation receive no mention in these standards. Finally, the Goals 2000 sample activities do little to clarify the mathematical content of the standards and are at best suitable as classroom enrichment activities.

Surely, CT has enough academic talent to do better. a local group -- perhaps the school board itself -- could come up with standards that a) are true standards, b) make sense, c) include specific requirements for learning, and d) demand accountability from employees.

Monday, March 17, 2008

School Corruption: Here and Now

The words School and Corruption are seldom, if ever, seen together. Why? Because most people simply refuse to believe that something so sacrosanct as school can be connected with illegal and immoral acts. We just do not expect those who are responsible for the education of our children to be capable of being irresponsible, let alone guilty of corruption. However, that is exactly what is going on.

It is time to address this huge problem. School budgets have reached the point where too many people have their hands in the pies, and when people mix with other people’s money, we should always expect problems.

Armand Fusco, former superintendent and author of “SCHOOL CORRUPTION,” writes, “School corruption takes many forms, but it falls into three main categories: I: cheating and deceit, II: waste and mismanagement, and III: fraud and stealing.” He should know. Many people sense that the schools are dishonest, but few will admit it about the schools in their community. Take a look at ours.

Category I: cheating and deceit. Let me count the ways:
About 60% of my town’s tenth graders fail the state test of basic skills based on information taught up to eighth grade, but the employees tell us that they are delivering “excellence in education.” The terrible results tell us that the school system has the children for ten years to provide an eighth grade level schooling, and still only 40% can pass according to the state. Are we being deceived about the quality of the schooling offered? Is 60% failure a high quality result?

Next, who benefits when 75% of middle schoolers are placed on the honor roll? If we know that only about 40% are at their grade level, then we know that a large portion of the kids on the honor roll are below their grade level. What’s going on? It’s called cheating by the schools, just like the times when teachers change the students’ tests in order to show a higher percent of achievement. I’ll get back to this a little later.

Are we justified in calling it cheating by the employees? You bet. It deceives the children; it deceives the parents; it deceives the community. This practice of putting failing students on honor rolls is fraud, and fraud is a form of corruption. The same goes for all the occasions when courses are dumbed down and children who do little are given passing grades. Maybe the worst example: the brightest students are ignored. They are cheated and used by the employees. Is that corrupt? You bet.

“Edspeak” is the language of school employees. It is a language designed to deceive.

There is another big category of school corruption. It is the corrupting of the very purpose of school-- that is, the education of our children. The government has never been interested in truly educating our children. Its schools’ original purpose, back in 1840 was to turn out the millions of factory workers for the industrial revolution, plus a good supply of soldiers. Government officials were clear in their requirement that the masses should not be too well educated…their goal was to train obedient workers and predictable consumers. That has not changed, in fact, academic instruction has been steadily watered down over the years while psychological conditioning has emerged as a main goal today, training our children to have certain government-approved attitudes and opinions, but not to have the creative intelligence to become leaders or innovators.

The result is a total corruption of the very idea of education. Conditioning to certain ideology is the opposite of education. Education is training children how to think; while the methods our state-run schools use are therapy, or mind-changing methods.

I'll get to catagories II and III later.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

The Big Betrayal

"For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program."
-- Main's Law

From the "Mission" statement of the public school district in my town, we read that "excellence" is now the reason for the existence of the school system. But, excellence at what? They don’t say. Let me simply say, excellence, by itself, is not a mission. It could be called a standard, however, if we look closely, the public school system has no standards or even goals.
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What Is the mission of the school system?

Under the schools’ multi-page Strategic Plan, there is no mention of schooling. Nowhere is there any hint that people are expected to teach basic skills and/or knowledge that children might need in their lives. Nowhere is any mention of what those skills or knowledge might be. No subjects, no teaching methods, no goals, no expected results are offered. How can a forty-million-dollar-a-year agency get away with having no aims, no desired outcomes, and no stated purpose?

The plan includes this: “There will be a “challenging academic environment.” How strange, when the curriculum and books are dumbed down. In both the Mission and Guiding Statements, there is the claim of a “respectful environment.” Again we wonder, respect for what? The school environment is one of distrust, coercion and fear, with a good dose of bullying. We also know that some teachers degrade people’s traditions, religions and parenting practices. To me, it looks as though they want respect for themselves, even though they neglect their educational duties and often disrespect the students and parents. Let them show respect, before demanding it from others.

Why don’t the schoolers simply say that they intend to run the schools as well as they can, teaching the 3Rs and the few other subjects that the state requires, and leave it at that? Why don’t they say that they will try to run the schools honestly with well-trained employees and will do so with the least possible waste of taxpayers’ money? Why is it, that instead of running the schools with transparency and openness, they seek to keep them closed and secret?

And besides, isn’t teaching respect the domain of families and the mission of the churches that set the moral and ethical tone for society, those who actually guide our civilization, our common culture, our civic institutions, our traditions, our way of living? Isn’t it the job of the school employees to demonstrate respect rather than to preach it? Why can’t they do that?

Government educationists claim parents have abdicated their duties to the government schools. How self-serving of them, to blame parents for an alleged lack of moral training. Of course, no matter how inept they are, the school employees are all too happy to take on the role of surrogate parents since it allows them to increase their control over the community’s time, energy and resources. For them, the system is about empire-building. While enrollment has been flat for years, employment has ballooned and spending has doubled, and doubled again. Has it helped achievement? Not a bit.

The schools have reduced their emphasis on academic instruction while adopting psychological and political correctness agendas. The schools no longer offer knowledge of facts and basic skills. They now offer “moral guidance,” but in the form of psycho-therapy. The schools no longer are interested in what our children know; they are now primarily concerned with what they “are like.” I remember a former superintendent saying, “I don’t care about test scores, I just care how the kids feel about themselves.” He wasn’t kidding. We are being conned into believing that the government knows – better than we do -- how to raise our children.

And what does the government want? Soldiers and a docile workforce, not thinking, educated individuals. The training begins in K, now pre-k. It consists of “sit down, be quiet, do what you are told, your interests are not important, your questions do not matter. You belong to the state.” They want our children for twelve or more years, because that is how long it takes the government to thoroughly dumb down a once-intelligent child.

Here’s Thomas Sowell, author of Inside American Education: “They have taken our money, betrayed our trust, failed our children, and then lied about the failures with inflated grades and pretty words.” Or this: “They have used our children as guinea pigs for experiments…or just to be warehoused until labor unions are willing to let them enter the job market.” He calls the education establishment, “Morally and intellectually bankrupt.” Considering all their lies and adulteration of values and their inability to state their own purpose, who can disagree?

War Against Intelligence

“According to a 1993 national survey by the Educational Testing Service
of 26,000 adults with an average of 12.4 years of schooling, only 3.5% of the sample had the literacy skills to do traditional college level work.”
-- Bruce N. Shortt, The Harsh Truth About Public Schools

Are your children bright? Most kids are. Chances are that you see their intelligence and strengths. You are aware of their interests and inclinations. You sent them off to school at a young age with the hope that the school would inform them of needed facts and knowledge as well as encourage their strengths and feed their interests. However, the public schools no longer do what parents expect, and that fact is the reason for the school wars.

Today’s schools have reduced the content of all instruction by about four grade levels, compared to fifty years ago. Teachers are now “facilitators” while the children reach “consensus” about their subjects. The CAPT test, Connecticut’s high school “exit exam,” is based on material offered only up to eighth grade. The courses, textbooks and tests have been dumbed down to that level. International testing shows that, compared to students in other advance countries, “The longer our students are in school, the lower their comparative performance,” says Gordon Ambach, former head of the Council of Chief State School Officers. He should know.

It gets worse: The schools have changed in purpose from education to political and social indoctrination, with “equality” as the goal. Schools don’t care how much children learn, they are primarily interested in what kids “are like.” The school’s goal is to transform children’s varied attitudes, values and opinions from those of traditional families to those desired by the government. The government seeks to turn a population of diverse children into a mass of predictable citizens who know the same things and believe the same things, with no one ahead or behind too far. That is why today’s public schools spend lots of our money trying to raise the bottom children up to the middle mass, but nothing to help high-achievers. In fact, they are designed to prevent the brightest kids from reaching their full potential. Now you know why “one-size-fits-all” and “dumbing down” are the major policies of public schools. The only way they can achieve “equality” of outcomes is by lowering their standards.

Today, the schools have a far different agenda for our children from the one we expect of them. They are failing to provide the children with the needed basic skills, knowledge and information, but, worse, they are interested in finding children’s weaknesses and psychological “needs” instead of their strengths and interests. The school system makes the basic assumption that all children have “disabilities” and need the school to provide “treatments” for them. The result is that school has become therapeutic and psychological even to the point of requiring many children to take mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin, in order to control their behavior.

The school system has several reasons to do this – all of which work directly against most parents’ hopes and wishes for their children. The government is seeking to mould the citizens of our country into a docile, easily controlled mass that can be employed or will become soldiers who do exactly what they are told to do, and nothing else. What does this all mean? It means that government school is no longer for the benefit of children. It is for the benefit of a government that seeks to control, instead of being controlled by, the people.

Unfortunately for America, our country needs well-educated people now, not dumbed-down people. There lies the School Wars, pitting the government school establishment against the rest of us. Government school offers Artificial Stupidity – turning bright kids into ignorant robots; our children need the exact opposite. The schools are turning intelligent children into stupid adults by the millions simply by not offering them what they need, while offering them large quantities of what they do not need, or want. I believe the situation is well described by Thomas Sowell: “In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools are producing artificial stupidity.”

Monday, March 10, 2008

Letter to a Worried Parent

My wife, Luz, and I get emails and calls from parents who are anxious about their children. The kids are miserable in school, but the parents often do not know how to offer an alternative. We try to calm them while encouraging them to try homeschooling. One such letter last year was the following:

Dear Martha,

The big advantage our son had, thanks to unschooling throughout his youth, was that he learned to be in charge of his learning and, really, his life to a great degree. In contrast, kids who attend schools learn to wait for others to tell them what to do, what to think. After twelve years of that, they become completely dependent on others for direction.

In general, that does not prepare young people for real life or college. Colleges prefer people who have initiative and can motivate themselves, who know what they want to learn, and most important, know how to find information when they need it, and are not afraid to make decisions for themselves. Those characteristics are the opposite of what public schools teach. The government schools have the goal of turning out a "workforce" of dependent predictable people. The government does not want people to be well educated -- just enough, but no more. The "economy" needs lots of sheep, not too many shepherds, lots of spectators, but not many players. Our son, and many homeschooled children we know, learned to be independent and creative thinkers, to do what was right for them, not necessarily for the "economy."

School does not prepare children for life. Each year of school merely prepares them for the next year of school. Our motto is, "Live with your children as though there were no such thing as school." Let your kids know that they are responsible for their lives and for their learning, no one else is.

Our son never did lessons, never looked at a school book. We did not teach him school stuff at home. He learned what he was interested in, which was almost everything. He scored 1390 on the SATs and got into college easily on his own and breezed through happily and graduated Magna Cum Laude (top one percent). He was well prepared for college without doing any of the school stuff. He was prepared for life, not just college. He is grateful for his experience growing up and we are still his best friends. What more can we ask?

Suggestion: If your daughter is unhappy in school, take her out for a while at first, say, for the rest of this school year. See if she is happier with you. Make sure she has a friend her age to talk to sometimes, if she wants. Your job will be to give her access to the world...to see where her interests lie. Do things with her. Give her responsibilities, real work. The idea is to let her have a real life as much as possible, to share your real life, not have an artificial life such as schools create.

Best wishes,
Ned

I heard back, as follows:
I asked my daughter at dinner why she doesn't like school. Not surprisingly she doesn't like talking about the subject very often! She replied with all of the wisdom that only a six year old has, "Because all we do is work...for hours." When I told her that I plan to teach her at home she said, "But what will we do?" I replied, "Paint, grow a garden, plan your birthday party, swim, cook, and anything else you would like to do." She looked at me with wide eyes of excited disbelief and said, "You mean, That is learning?"

Friday, March 7, 2008

Evelyn Russo is above average !

Evelyn Russo (see my previous post) is above average ! She was given a doctorate in instruction even though she had no idea how to teach reading, didn’t know how, and obviously did not teach the children how to read. We have the kids’ results. To call it failure is being kind. She and those thousands of others who are doing what she was doing are creating the disaster that has been going on for decades in the public schools of our state, and our town.

We can’t allow ourselves to think that because we live in a relatively affluent town, the teachers here are better trained than those who work anywhere else. They are all trained exactly the same ways, and they are teaching in the schools of their affluent towns without a clue how to teach children to read.

The reading problem is just a symptom of what is happening in all the other areas of instruction. We know that the Math program (Everyday Math) is just as much a failure as the reading program is. How can we expect any of the programs to be effective when the two most important ones are such documented failures? There is no way.

About MATH, here’s columnist Laura Maniglia who writes a bi-weekly apology for the public schools. On Nov. 23, 05, she wrote about what she calls the Math Debate, admitting that US students rank 29th out of 34 nations – ahead of only four Mediterranean countries and Mexico while China, Japan and Korea rank at the top.

She describes the debate between proponents of “traditional” math and the new “constructionist” math, including Connected Math and Everyday Math used in Guilford. She says that traditional math would teach the foundations of computation and number facts (you know: adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing) which provides them with the skills needed in more advanced math and problem solving. No surprise there. It’s what everyone needs. It’s what we all use in our lives.

On equal footing, she puts something called the “constructionist approach” -- “it emplasizes an enquiry program for pupils to construct their own knowledge through ‘reasoning.’ This approach,” she continues, “often intruduces calculators as early as first grade with the HOPE that the students will learn math in the process.”

There you are: just like in the Whole Language reading instruction in which they HOPE the children will learn to read even though they do not teach them how to do it. The new new math program – Connected Math or Everyday Math flies on the HOPE that the children will learn actual math even though the teachers do not teach it.

And we wonder why American jobs are being exported by the millions…
Here is your answer: the American public schools are not teaching American children even the basic skills they need in order to survive in the world today.

It’s another part of the national crisis. The schools refuse to hire people who are well educated in the fields they are supposed to teach. It’s true of reading; it’s true of mathematics; it’s true of all the subjects. Dumbing down starts at the top. What can you expect at the bottom?

It’s your money. They’re your children.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

“Experts” Without a Clue

Americans are gradually becoming aware of how poorly our students are doing compared to those in the rest of the world. In reading English, we are at or near the bottom in every international test. Same for math and science.

For some insight into the problem, let me quote from a recent article: “She studied to be an elementary teacher, taught in New Haven, CT public schools for 10 years and got a doctorate in curriculum and instruction, but Evelyn Russo says she was missing one crucial skill. She didn’t know how to teach children to read.”

That is the first paragraph of the lead article in the Hartford Courant on May 1, 2006. Ms. Russo says, “I had no clue how to teach them to lift words off a page, to increase their vocabulary…I didn’t know anything about fluency.”

This person taught elementary grades in CT public schools for ten years and had no clue how to teach children to read. Why? Because she went to a college where people like her “study” something called “education” but do not learn how to teach children to read. In fact, they don’t learn much of anything. They come out of those places believing they are experts and professional educators, but they have very little knowledge and do not have a clue about learning. Ms. Russo must have had at least 250children in her classes over those ten years and she did not know how to teach them to read.

It gets worse. During that period, she got a doctorate degree in something called “curriculum and instruction,” and yet she still had no clue how to teach the most fundamental skill in all of schooling – how to read.

I hope you understand what this means. It is this: None of the people who teach in public elementary schools in CT know how to teach children to read. Ms Russo is just one out of thousands of CT elementary teachers who have no clue how to teach children how to read.

The State department of education doesn’t know how to teach a child to read, and if someone told them, they would not pay any attention. Some of the world’s most knowledgeable reading specialists – even Sally Shaywitz, Yale’s noted brain researcher on reading skills -- have been telling them for years, but they stick to the methods that have always failed. The same is true for math, science and history.

Do you smell the crisis now, and do you sense that this astonishing fact is at the root of the crisis? I hope so. The problem has finally floated to the top of the first page of the state’s biggest newspaper. The people in charge of our children's education do not want to know. The horror for our country is that CT pretends to have “the best” school system in the nation. Is it possible that most other states can be worse? Yes.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Dumbing Down in Seven Lessons

Dumbing down has been the major public school policy for a few decades now, and from all indications, it is working well. Local, State, National and International test results all show that while our kids are still as intelligent as ever, their essential knowledge and skills are on a steep downward incline with no change in sight.

So we must assume that the schools are operating as they are intended, and that their purpose is not to turn out well informed citizens, but people that the government calls "human resources" who will be obedient, docile, and dependent. How does the government do that? The process is described in John Taylor Gatto's classic book, "Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden Curriculum" While the schools claim to be educating, the seven lessons teach quite the opposite. They are as follows:

1. Confusion. Everything is out of context, disconnected and unrelated to real life. Confusion is thrust upon kids by strange adults, each working alone, pretending to an expertise they do not possess. All information is fragmented -- the opposite of cohesion. It's like TV programming. Gatto says, "I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny."

2. Class Position. Children learn their place in the grand pyramid. School teaches children to accept being numbered; not to imagine themselves somewhere else; to fear the better classes and to have contempt for the dumb classes; to stay where you are put.

3. Indifference. This is taught by the bells and buzzers and other distractions. Nothing is so important that it can't be interrupted or stopped. Years of bells condition children to know that no work is worth finishing. They, "innoculate each undertaking with indifference."

4. Emotional Dependency. Kids must surrender their will to others. They learn they have no rights in school, unless school authorities say they do. There is no individuality in the classification system. They become dependent on gold stars, prizes, "honors," smiles, frowns and even disgraces. They are hostages.

5. Intellectual Dependency. Children must wait for others to tell them what to do, and to make meaning of their lives. Teachers and other school employees decide what children study, regardless of the child’s interests or desires. Whether or not they “learn” it, means their “success” or “failure.” Curiosity has no place; only conformity.

6. Provisional Self-Esteem. This lesson is that a kid’s self-respect should depend on the opinion of others. Children must be evaluated and judged, and found wanting, imperfect, “learning disabled,” ADHD or some other fictitious abnormality. Self-evaluation is never accepted. Gatto: “The lesson of report cards, grades and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should rely on the evaluation of ‘certified’ officials.”

7. You Can’t Hide. Students learn that they must always be under surveillance by teachers and other staff. The lesson here is that children are not trusted and their privacy is not legitimate. The purpose is to maintain constant central control over society. The State cannot allow too many citizens to listen to any drummer other than its uniformed marching band.

Middle class parents, having been through the school mill, seldom believe that their child’s school is one of the bad ones. They learned all seven lessons, most important of which is waiting to be told what to think and do. Our society is made up today largely of what Gatto calls, “psychic invalids” who must be fed, clothed, entertained, medicated, educated and otherwise served by “others.” In fact, the economy would probably fall apart if a large portion of us suddenly did not feel helpless but became more self-sufficient.

Gatto concludes, “The seven lessons are prime training for people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”

Thursday, February 28, 2008

The Disability Racket

How schools cash in on false diagnoses and a bounty system.

“Thousands of children are suffering from being placed in LD classes, and the labeling of children at an early age becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The children learn to see themselves as disabled in some way and they act out the part.” – Terry Endsley, The Myth of Learning Disabilities

I have several blind spots. I had them in school and still have them. For example: Algebra, Latin, History, Chemistry, Physics, Literature. In some cases, it was the teachers who made the information seem uninteresting. My response was to create minor disturbances like fidgeting in my seat or throwing spitballs. In others, I simply was bored and not learning anything except how to avoid doing the work, and that was most of the time.

Today, a child's disinterest in school subjects is viewed by the schools as a "disability" --a kind of disease. And, sure enough, the schoolers have all sorts of ways to "prove" that a child has a disability -- even a brain disorder -- when s/he is merely bored or unhappy or rebellious at being cooped up in an ugly classroom.

Parents who are not well informed can easily be frightened by the "diagnoses" that come from teachers and school psychologists. They are often intimidated by the school "experts" who claim that their child is "learning disabled" or "mentally disordered," when no such problem exists. Many children are labeled and stigmatized for life by “diagnoses” that are often wrongly made to benefit only the school, not the children.

Yet, this is how schools take the focus off their programs and place it upon the child's alleged "disability." How convenient for the schools. It provides the excuse to never examine themselves or their own activities to see if those might be causing the symptoms of unhappiness (boredom, stress, fear) and rebellion among the children.

Making matters worse is an incentive for the schools to make such a huge mistake. It's called the "Bounty System." For every child who is "diagnosed" with a so-called Learning Disorder, there is a large cash reward from the state (around $4K in CT). Thus, every diagnosis of a disability means more money for the school employees. It is no wonder that the schoolers have invented a multitude of "diagnoses" that enable them to collect the bounty. The second stage of this racket is that the children are then placed in "special" classes that pretend to help the children with their false diagnoses of disabilities. It's no surprise that along with the many spurious diagnoses has come a huge increase in school employment in this new area. It has been major cause of higher school budgets, but it has little, if any, success to show.

Why don't the schools look to their own instruction methods or programs for the source of children's problems? Because they would then probably have to admit that they use bad methods of instruction and would need to change, but mostly it is because there is no financial incentive. The bounty system only pays for diagnoses of children's disabilities (true or not); it doesn't pay for finding fault in the schools themselves.

Schools have been turned into psychological clinics where amateur psychiatrists roam the halls in search of children they might be able to garner as "clients" for their "therapies.” Teachers are supposed to teach; playing amateur psychologist is against the law. Besides, education is a separate field from therapy. School students should never be treated as "patients," and yet, that what the disability racket is all about.

If a school has diagnosed your child, be sure to get a second opinion from an independent source because chances are good that the school wants to use your child to gain a financial bounty while increasing its payroll at taxpayers’ expense.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Real Education Is Free; Public School is Expensive

Want to learn something? It’s free!
Education is free, except when it’s run by government.

Here are a few expert opinions:
"The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as 'free education' is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control." -- Frank Chodorov, Why Free Schools Are Not Free

“A common reason for the creation of a government school system is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on.” -- Marshall Fritz, Founder of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State

"Schools will become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists." -- National Education Association, "Education for the '70s," Today's Education, January 1969

Public school is free in only one limited sense: the families who use it do not pay directly for it. In that sense, it is socialized schooling which, in fact, is incredibly expensive and the cost burdens everyone. The trick is that it spends "other people's money."

Instead, I refer to the fact that true education -- learning of all sorts -- is available to all of us without cost, all the time. That has always been so. It means that anyone who charges others for teaching basic skills and knowledge is a fraud, simply because the knowledge is all around us and free for the asking.

Consider how most of us like to share our opinions with others. It’s a sign of how we wish to share our knowledge.

We come to think of public schools as places that offer basic instruction to all children at no cost to their families. How nice, how noble, that schools have been arranged that do not charge for what they offer. Indeed, today we know that they charge the maximum possible amount – far more than needed – and often do not even offer what we expect them to provide.

The public schools are called “Free and Compulsory” and yet who takes responsibility for the results? No one. To whom can a parent complain when his child fails to learn or even be instructed in basic skills? How “free” is that? In the public schools, no one is responsible for any child’s learning – not teachers, not administrators, not the school board, nobody. And if a child fails, they blame the child, not themselves.

MIT has just announced that all of its courses are now available on the internet. Yale has made many of its lecture courses available on tape and those are now distributed at no charge. The largest University in the US (in terms of number of students) is the U of Phoenix. The on line registration is huge, and the cost is relatively low. Go to “College Degrees on Line” and you will find 63 million links with information.

No frills, real degrees, useful info, at your own pace, start any time. Convenient, no hassles. no intrusive questions, cheap.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Public Schools Have No Accountability

Today's public schools merely go through the motions instead of actually transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. Yes, there are exceptions, but what matters is the general failure. It is allowed because of how the school system describes itself at the state level. It is not responsible for learning. All that the government schools are asked to do is, "offer instructional experiences." There is no requirement for learning; no specific expectations upon the students. There is no accountability in the system.

The law (in CT) says that parents are responsible for their children's education, and that applies whether or not they send them to a school. Therefore, in the eyes of the public schools, if the child does not learn, it's the child's fault, never the school's, even though it is often the case that the school did not provide proper instruction.

In the real world of competition and free trade, both sides -- sellers and buyers -- benefit from all transactions. With each purchase, both parties increase their worth. When a business does not serve its customers by offering high quality products or services at reasonable prices, it loses patronage, lays off its employees and goes out of business. In short, it fails. It must pay off its creditors and dissolve.

But when a government agency -- say, the public school system -- fails to provide the service that it is expected to provide, what happens? Nothing. In fact, it often is given more money without penalty. The school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only does it not go out of business, it is rewarded more and more each year for its failure.

Failure to achieve their mission is the easiest route for public schools to increase their revenues. All they need to do is say, loudly, "We are not achieving our goals because we don't have enough money." It works every time. Never mind that America spends more per pupil than virtually all other countries and in recent decades has among the worst performing schools. In fact, public schools spend about twice the amount that successful private schools charge per student.

According to international and US Dept of Ed. reports, the school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only do none of its schools go out of business, but they are rewarded more and more each year for their failure.

We are forced to wonder why this happens, and the answer might just be that the business of the school system is not education, but other things entirely. Years ago, John Holt wrote that the purposes of public school are, 1. Custody (babysitting), 2. Labeling children for employment (meatstamping), and 3. Jobs for adults (an employment empire at public expense).

Maybe those reasons are what the schools like to call "socialization."

Monday, February 18, 2008

The Freedom Connection

To me, the most beautiful thing in the world is the US Declaration of Independence. Just reading the title makes me shiver. I believe that Thomas Jefferson's document is meaningful to all Americans, even if they are not aware of it, because it is what makes our country unique and so truly great. It distinguishes this country from all those that ever existed before, by acknowledging that freedom is the birthright of every person. To be an American is to believe in what it says.

No country before had ever acknowledged to individuals the dignity and respect that ours does -- sovereignty over their own lives, the natural right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." No country had ever dedicated itself to the idea of protecting all its citizens, instead of exploiting them.

We Americans have the right to do anything we want. There is only one condition: that we do not interfere with the same right of ALL others. That statement is a political Golden Rule. It humbles me to remember that I was lucky to be born here, where freedom and liberty are not just the privilege of a few but a right guaranteed to all.

With little knowledge of politics, I was elected to the City Council of Aspen, Colorado in 1970. I served one term. That experience combined with the social and political turmoil of the Vietnam War era made me realize that our government, despite our constitutional protections, dominates the personal lives of citizens in many ways -- too many. I did not like being manipulated by "big brother" Therefore, I became a member of the Libertarian Party, a supporter of freedom and limited government, and am no longer politically homeless.

From the libertarian perspective, it is easy to see that the government uses its schools to control citizens' lives to a startling degree. In his book, Is Public Education Necessary?, Samuel Blumenfeld wrote, "The American public educator is quite willing to do whatever the government bids him or her to do -- today in favor of racial integration, tomorrow in favor of something else. This does not bode well for American freedom, but we ought not be surprised, since totalitarian governments have long considered public education as their most important tool for indoctrinating and controlling the young." In the same vein, Cathy Duffy writes in her book, Government Nannies, "My concern and purpose...is to stimulate more people to value their freedom and autonomy enough to stand against the encroachment of benevolent government-nanny programs that would keep us all as perpetual children."

While our government seems to be doing everything it can to deny us our natural right to freedom, privacy and property, I still believe in our founding principles and as long as those documents exist. I know we can, and should, continue to seek and defend a life of self-determination with individual liberty and personal responsibility.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

My Son, the Homeschooler

In 1979, soon after my youngest son was born at our ranch in Colorado, my wife, Luz, informed me that she wanted to try homeschooling. What? Hold on! I had been a private school teacher; she was a certified public school teacher. I was disturbed, even shocked by her intentions. I had never heard of homeschooling and, like many people, I could not imagine a child growing up without going to school. She knew better.

Luz handed me two books by John Holt, and I soon learned that she was right. Holt showed me that if there is one thing that holds children back as they mature and often turns them against learning, it's schooling -- sitting in unfriendly, often uncaring schools where children’s intelligence and interests are ignored.

For their first several years, children do not need schooling, but nurturing -- the natural care and feeding that most parents provide. As Cass reached “school-age” we remained inspired by Holt's words: “Children do not need to be made to learn, or shown how. They want to and they know how.” We decided that Cassidy would determine what, when, where, how much and with whom he would learn. We never used school books or taught lessons. We answered his questions when he asked and helped him gain access to the real world when he wanted it. We called it unschooling -- no school books, no curriculum, no teaching (unless he asked for it), no testing, none of it. Today, unschooling is surprisingly popular, with magazines and egroups devoted to it.

Unschooling did not mean un-education. It simply meant that we would be aware and supportive of our son's interests and would be paying close attention to his desires for information as well as his gains in essential knowledge. I carried Cass on my shoulders around our town, reading the signs, talking to the shopkeepers, bank clerks and others. He soon was speaking in long sentences and, at four, he could read virtually any book. He proved Holt right; he did not need urging in order to learn. He once told a librarian, "I'm interested in everything."

We did not believe, as schools claim, that it is more important to "feel good about yourself" than to know how to read, write and calculate. The reason is simple: if you can do those things well, you will feel good about yourself, no matter what others tell you.


All through his growing years, people observed that Cass was bright, confident and capable. They remarked, "He must be incredibly smart to have learned so much so young." I could only answer, "Children are born smart. It's just that nobody is dumbing him down." I truly believed that because we didn’t send him to school, he was able to easily acquire all the essentials while he avoided the many negative lessons that schools teach. Our job was to encourage his curiosity and to help him gain access to the world. His life was the polar opposite of sitting in boring classes and being told that his interests are not important.

Cassidy liked responsibility. He earned his own money with jobs he found. He became an expert in dinosaurs and fossils, so much so that the Peabody Museum used him as its Information Officer in the Great Hall of Dinosaurs when he was eleven. He also became a teacher at the Eli Whitney Museum, once giving an “enrichment” class to public school teachers when he was fourteen. He became world class at origami. He took the SAT, and scored higher than half the valedictorians in the state of CT, without ever looking at a school book.

Cass got himself into the college he chose, Hunter College, because it was in the middle of his favorite place, NYC. He lived in his own apartment downtown and took the subway to school. His friends told Luz and me that he always seemed to know the right thing to do. That was when we knew that our experiment was a success, because he had always chosen his own path, instead of being directed by others.

He breezed through – always in the top one percent of his class. He held jobs both in and out of the college; was president of the film society, and graduated Magna Cum Laude. For this one young man, school was not just unnecessary, but irrelevant and, we believe, would have been damaging to his mind and spirit.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Who's to Blame? Teacher Unions

It is ironic that the biggest obstacle in the path to better schools is the teachers' unions. How outrageous of them to work their diabolical magic against the very people whom they should benefit: the students and the community. But no, the unions have created a situation that has now reached a point at which the schools cannot be fixed.

Before about the year 1960, the NEA was an association of teachers who worked in the public schools. But that year, it became a labor union instead. Its purpose changed from trying to do a good job to trying to take the maximum money from the community. Since then, while teachers' pay has risen sharply, the biggest winners have been the negotiators and union staff who work behind the scenes, jacking up the price of everything the schools do, while having zero interest in the quality of education that results. Unions want one thing: more money for less work. In public schools, they are performing flawlessly.

For example: the unions have arranged for the inability of schools to fire the worst teachers while preventing the creation of incentives for decent teachers to improve their skills and knowledge, and thus their pay. The result of those twin measures is that the schools are moving steadily in what has been called, "The race to the bottom." The bad teachers stay while the best ones routinely quit, resulting in the steady decline in the quality of the public schools.

The micromanaging of teachers' days, the insistence on "certification," the constant pressing for more and more counter-productive rules, stonewalling all reforms, and more drive up the costs of public schooling. To prove my point, the CT NEA printed its list of one hundred seventy-four demands that its negotiators had ready as they went into teacher-pay negotiations with local school districts. The local school boards have literally no chance in negotiations with union pros when their meager requests (such as "will the teachers accept a little accountability for their work, please?") are met with such force.

Julia Steiny, a columnist for the Providence Journal (RI), shed much light on the problem this week. She noted that the roots of the problem go back to the early days when teacher unions asked the advice of automotive industry unions. She wrote, "In an unfortunate accident of history, the labor contracts that won decent pay for teachers also cemented into place a factory-model design for schooling. Blue-collar labor contracts spell out and limit a worker's obligations on the factory floor, or in this case a classroom, as if teachers were as interchangeable as die-press operators."

Little has changed. Steiny quotes a former superintendent in RI: "The unions...are running the whole country into the ground because they can't get it through their heads that the reason for our financial problems is at least in part due to us trying to keep up with their demands." She concludes, "The whole negotiating process, using a model designed for blue-collar jobs, is painfully obsolete, seriously impeding academic improvement and, most important, stealing resources from the kids."

It just might be time to start over in education.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The ADD Connection

What follows is from EducationRevolutionNews: www. www.educationrevolution.org Used with permission. I am a friend of the owner, Jerry Mintz.

I remember when one of our children was not doing well in school and he was 12, 13 years old, something like it. First year of middle school as I recall. And the teachers were all freaking out, and all, you know, all, you know how it goes. And it was that ADD thing, right? Put him on medication! And we actually tried that for a short while. Didn't seem to do much good.

And so we decided to go looking for a school for him, a better school, you know, a better educational environment. Let's find a place where he can flourish and there are a bunch of schools in Atlanta in the phone book advertising that they specialize in kids with Attention Deficit Disorder or learning disabilities, and so Louise and I went shopping. And what we found was that most people were of the opinion that because these kids were impulsive and distractible and not particularly well structured and organized, they "needed lots of discipline and structure. Let's just slap it into 'em." The schools that were purporting to be good places for ADHD kids were like variations on military academies.

So we finally had given up on all the ADD specialty schools, and we found this school in downtown Atlanta called the Horizon School which was a leftover remnant of the Summerhill experiment in some ways. Part of the alternative school movement. "Summerhill" was a book by A. S. Neill published back in the 1960s as I recall in which they created a school where the kids ran the school. And this school was actually run by the student council in everything except academics. The teachers had final say in academics but the kids had a student council and they ran the school, and they made all kinds of rules for themselves, it was quite remarkable.

So then I went out and walked around the school and I remember walking into a classroom. This was seventh graders as I recall, seventh or eighth graders. And it looked like absolute chaos. Kids were not sitting at their desk. They were standing up, they were walking around, one kid was sitting on his desk. There was a kid sitting on the teacher's desk. Kids were running up and marking things on the blackboard. The teacher was having a knock down drag out argument with the kids. And I'm standing at the back of the room and you know, keep in mind, a decade earlier, I'd been the executive director of a program for abused kids that had a school! And I'm standing in the back of the room, you know, with my arms folded across my chest, thinking, "This is a classroom out of control." This would never happen in a school I ran.

And you know how sometimes when you just listen for a few minutes more, all of a sudden you hear something that completely turns your world upside down, that completely changes the way that you view things. And as I stood there, in this very kind of critical, judging posture, I started listening to what the kids and the teacher were arguing about.

What these kids were arguing with this teacher about was that Einstein had suggested in his theory of relativity e=mc2 that you can't exceed the speed of light. That if you exceed the speed of light, you can get to .999% of the speed of light, but if the value of the speed of light becomes one or one point anything, once you hit or exceed the speed of light, then time becomes infinite and mass collapses to zero. Or is it the other way around? Time collapses to zero and mass becomes infinite. I forget which it was. I used to have memorized the time and mass dilation theories but that was when I was a teenager. Anyway, and therefore it's impossible in the physical universe to exceed the speed of light. You can approach it but you can't exceed it. And if that's the case, these kids were saying, then why is it that Einstein in his own theory of relativity, his oh most famous theory, said e (energy) equals mass times the speed of light squared? e=mc2 (c is the speed of light). How can you square something that can't even have as a value of one? How is that possible? How can you square something you can't exceed? They are pulling out Einstein's General and Specific theory of relativity and they're talking about his story about being in the train going away from the clock tower in downtown Austria and as the train approaches the speed of light the hands start to slow down and all this stuff.

And all of a sudden, I got it. That all my life, I had thought that education was about pouring things into kids. Yeats's quote. The filling of a bucket. And that what they understood at that school was that education was about lighting a fire. And so we put our son in that school and not only did he do well, but he was doing work two grade levels above his grade level. He was getting As in senior physics as a freshman or a sophomore. He all of a sudden just caught on fire, he fell in love with learning, and all of this with no drugs, which leads us to the question.

You got a person who has a psychiatric illness in a public school that requires medication from a multibillion-dollar industry, but when you put him into an alternative school environment, not only does he not require the medication, but the disease seems to vanish and he does very well. The question is, then, where is the disease? And I have firmly, solidly come to the conclusion that the disease is in our schools. It's not in our kids. END OF ARTICLE

Homeschooling has seen similar results from kids diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, "learning disability" and the rest of the excuses that public schools use to cover their own incompetence and insensitivity.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Galloway breaks Down, Part 2

Tony Galloway's outburst was a defining moment in the thirteen years I spent at that college prep day school in the comfortable shaded suburbs of Philadelphia. There were other similar eruptions -- crying fits, corridor fights, swearing and throwing tantrums, but this threat of suicide in a blind rage was the topper. And yet, it made complete sense. During the several minutes Bergstrom was out of the room collaring our classmate, we children decided that while Tony's reaction was overcooked, it was justified. We all knew what he meant and we all felt some of his outrage at our situation and treatment. We agreed that Bergstrom should have been more sensitive to the boy's limits, and should never have pushed them.

No one else in that class would have threatened to kill himself over one more incomplete homework assignment or reprimand or insulting comment by a teacher. Tony was, we agreed, strung a little tighter than the rest of us. He was odd, eccentric, focused on things we couldn't know about. He was not self-absorbed, but preoccupied and content with another set of ideas that he could not share easily with us.
Galloway had been chased into the office for a tense conference and the inevitable phone call and silent ride home. We never saw him again, but heard that he might have been sent to a military school for further torture.

We were all repressed children. Our school was not enlightened about children or learning beyond the neanderthal techniques of government schools. After all, they get their rationales from the same sources. We were trained to obey, to believe in an established order, not to question authority, not to think for ourselves, not to make our own decisions. In fact, our school did all the things to us boys that its literature would say it did not do, that it would never do or even intend. Its founders and leaders were blind to the contrast between what the school said and what it did. This, despite its motto: ESSE QUAM VIDERE - Be rather than seem to be.

Moral: Most, if not all, of what fifth grade children do in school and what teachers do in order to coerce them to do it, is a boring waste of everyone's time, if not intentional cruelty.

Back to the future:
Nothing has changed. School is as hellish now as then. All the children feel its torture in varying degrees, but only a few boil over in rage. Today, the reactions are more forceful. Kids have weapons.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Galloway Breaks Down

(I wrote the following eleven years ago while rambling around in my memory)

Starting in fifth grade, the inhumanity and pointless tedium of school began to show. As I think back, most of us kids felt it, but we couldn't define it, and even if we had recognized it for what it was, we were powerless.

It was a private school. We were good boys from middle class two-parent homes where managerial and professional careers were common and where much was provided for, and expected from, the children. I collected cans, bottle tops and tin foil for the war effort. Many families, including ours, had "victory gardens." We didn't know about rebellion. That our parents were well-off, privileged, influential and often arrogant and bigoted was not our business. Our job was school.

On a Friday in February, Tony Galloway broke. He had shown cracks and signs of discontent for months, but on this day, when our home-room teacher called him down for one small infraction -- one more deviation from an imaginary norm -- Tony blew. He got up from his desk, flailing his arms and yelling, "I hate this place and I hate you," and added the equivalent of today's, "I'm up to here with your shit, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!"

Tony ran up to Mr. Bergstrom's big oak desk and kicked it hard on his way over to one of the large windows. Still bellowing his objections to the whole school experience, he flung up the sash and prepared to throw himself out.

Our classroom was on the second story of a tall-ceilinged converted victorian mansion. The ground was far below, maybe twenty feet. Tony, still complaining, was alternately crouching inside and lunging his body halfway out the open window, as if practicing for the final suicidal head-first leap.

We were all dumbstruck, and for most of this display, so was Bergstrom. Outbursts like this were simply unheard of in private day schools full of "proper" boys from socially prominent families. We were all relieved when Bergstrom at last had the presence to move quickly on our classmate, grab him wih one hand and close the window with the other. In a moment though, Tony squirmed away and, still yelling, threw the door open, ran out into the hall and down the creaking wooden staircase with Bergstrom running and calling after him.

That's all for today. I'll finish the story tomorrow or when I can, after dental surgery.