Bruce Deitrick Price

How The Reading War Became A Religious War

The Reading War was a fight over how reading should be taught.

The Efficient Path to Education Reform

We hear the same debates over and over, year after year, leading nowhere. Why is there so little progress? It almost seems that no one analyzing the public schools has grasped the essential problem.

In Reading, One Size Does Fit All

Nothing is more ingrained in modern education theory than the notion that people have different abilities, different types of brains, and different learning styles.

Big Lie Has New Name: High-Frequency Words

Your average criminal has a few aliases. It’s de rigueur in the underworld.

Let Them Eat Sight-Words

Marie Antoinette, on hearing that French peasants had no bread to eat, suggested, “Let them eat cake.”

Is English a Phonetic Language?? Of course. 100%.

Welcome to the Reading Wars. One of the weirder aspects of this conflict is that some so-called experts say a lot of untrue things, for example, that English is not a phonetic language. Sure, and birds do not fly.

Hurray for Mary Johnson—A Great Educator (and a Canadian)

Here’s how I happened to meet Mary Johnston, the very model of what an educator and intellectual should be.

Education: The Conspiracy Question

Education statistics in the United States tell a grim story. The news always seems to be bad. Stats are always falling. Why is that?

How Public School Teachers Can Reverse the Educational Decline

The following plea--written 55 years ago and addressed to all the teachers of America--is still solid gold today:

How American Public Education Became A Doomsday Machine

Years ago I wrote a sci-fi story in which disease wiped out the thousands of people living in a huge space station. All the technology continued on autopilot; sensors, missiles, and robots perfectly defended the space station. Humans approaching the station were attacked as enemy invaders.

Could Educators Be That Dumb??

Perhaps you saw the exchange on television. One guest said, “The administration’s approach is destructive; they must be trying to hurt the country.”

The Educators Are Coming! The Educators Are Coming!

- Satire Ever since history began, there were always bad guys trying to smash through the gates. Sometimes the barbarians had a bigger army or greater cunning; but by common agreement “barbarians” are always the less civilized, the less educated. They were the outsiders, rude and crude, trying to pull down temples of wisdom they did not value or understand.

Our Schools Are Skilled At Making Sure Boys Don’t Read…

Not to worry. Our top educators have pretty well got this thing figured out. It’s a two-punch combination, researched-based, that almost always works. Bingo, you don’t find American boys wasting precious time inside the pages of a book.

What Do YOU Mean When You Say “Education”?

No wonder so little genuine communication--or progress--occurs in education I had been writing about education for more than 25 years when I finally realized the divide, the scam, the silent sophistry, call it what you will, that renders so many discussions about education close to pointless.

Rudolph Flesch Rules the World of Reading

Rudolf Flesch wrote two famous books, "Why Johnny Can’t Read" (1955) and "Why Johnny STILL Can’t Read" (1981). I read both books twice, years apart, and had the sense that Flesch was intelligent, brave, and honorable. (You can find my book reviews on Amazon.)

What do Knowledge, Kids, and the USA have in common?

Here’s the common denominator: the (American) Education Establishment is contemptuous of all three. Do you think I jest or exaggerate? Not at all. The truth is straightforward, and easy to explain.

Big Lies About Reading And Climate

Reading and climate--what could they possibly have in common?! I’ll tell you: lies, lies and more lies. Hold onto your hat. The roller coaster is starting to descend. It seems to me that more millions of lies have been told about these two subjects than about any others. We’re talking about world-class lies, the kind that Hitler would be proud to call his own.

Unique American Education Site Celebrates 4th Birthday

At the start of 2010, Improve-Education.org celebrated its fourth birthday and reached 100,000 words of original content, recently adding such major new pieces as “41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt” and “45: The Crusade Against Knowledge.”

Education Activist Urges Americans: Get Angry About Education

Norfolk, Va.--Most people agree that public schools are not as good as they should be.

Stalinists? Or They Walked That Way?

In 1955 Rudolf Flesch published a blockbuster called “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” In this still-relevant book Flesch lamented that: “The word method is gradually destroying democracy in this country; it returns to the upper middle class the privileges that public education was supposed to distribute evenly among the people.”