Ignore Common Core, the NEA, and Bill Gates. Here are some good ideas

To save this civilization, schools must return to the facts-and-knowledge business. The people now in charge don’t want to do that. They appear to be “useful idiots” or inept. We probably can’t count on them for minimal common sense. This column is addressed to all the people in business, community leaders, opinion leaders, all parents, and everyone concerned with the future of the country. The whole point of sending kids to schools is that they learn to read, write, and count. This has to happen. Then they learn geography, history, science, and the arts. This has to happen. Education is not rocket science. It’s not some flash of lightning. On the contrary, it is a steady, step-by-step accumulation of skills and knowledge. In other words, first the students crawl, then they walk, then they can run smiling through fields of learning. If you want to build a machine or a house, you first have to collect all the parts in one place. You can’t construct something out of hypothetical missing parts, such as literacy or basic knowledge.

You build a brick wall one brick at a time. Do you think there is some way you can throw up a dozen bricks at once, or put up no bricks at all? That’s silly to the Nth degree but this is the voodoo our public schools claim to believe in. They will do a little hocus-pocus here, and a little mumbo-jumbo there, and your offspring will be valedictorian-ready. They have become so infantilized, or they think we have become so infantilized, that we will believe anything. I often have the sense that President Obama believes this. Whatever he says, we will believe. For sure, our Education Establishment operates on that principle. That’s why the field of education seems to be somebody’s bad drug dream. The dominant sensibility is surrealism with a happy face. We continually hear that our children are learning to be college-ready and career-ready. But many millions of them cannot even read (in any real sense of that word) or do basic arithmetic. You can’t send children out into the world knowing nothing, all the while claiming they have received a 21st century education. All of these reflections are prompted by a piece I recently wrote called “California, Hawaii, and Alaska are neighboring states.” Did you know that millions of Americans believe this? Why? Because they saw the little inset maps that appear in many books. You know, where Alaska is a small shape off the coast of San Diego. Apparently that’s the grand total of geography taught in some schools. This common confusion shows the depths that we are sinking to. The Nation At Risk report of 1983 said that our public schools could well be an enemy attack. Bill Gates in 2007 was involved in a report that said that public schools were a threat to our economic survival. Nothing has gotten better. The people in control seem to be on automatic pilot. They can't reform themselves. Is someone missing the gravity of the situation? Ideally, we would fire the top thousand people and start over with people that know something about education. If we can’t fire the top thousand people, then let’s eliminate the top 25 most popular theories and methods. It is precisely these dysfunctional approaches, created by crafty minds in graduate education departments, that have rendered public schools ineffective. Here’s a short list:

• You can’t teach reading with Whole Word.
• You can’t teach arithmetic with Reform Math.
• You can’t teach history, science or anything else with Constructivism. See a pattern?
• You can’t afford to waste time and energy with Prior Knowledge, Learning Styles, and all the other gimmicks used to fracture a class and slow it down.

I know that anyone reading this is a busy person so let me just jump to the summation: there is not one idea in the public schools that works as promised. Something else you can’t do is let the same people who have brought us to this point grab even more power. Which is precisely what will happen with Common Core Curriculum. I hope more states will pull back from Common Core. Education should be controlled locally. We want experimentation, diversity, and choice. You want world-class 21st century standards? Find out what kids were learning in 1930. That should be instructive. I’m confident they were learning much more than the meager amounts now taught. So, what would a good school look like? Not like the schools described in Common Core. They’re full of fussy prescriptions and formulations that seem weirdly detached from reality. They also seem weirdly like dishonesty. Here’s just one example. There is a big new gimmick in public education called “close reading.” Kids are supposed to read text at a really deep level. Problem is, many of these kids can’t read at a shallow level. Instead of focusing on making sure that every kid, especially the ordinary kids, can read quickly and fluently, we are now adding a new layer of competence that few will possess. That’s what our Education Establishment calls a Standard. It’s as if they announce that next year everyone in America will have an IQ over 110. The Education Establishment likes to substitute its quite brilliant marketing skills for its almost nonexistent educational skills. In other words, these people are good at putting out brochures describing the wonderful new School of the Future. When we start to notice that the graduates are not well-educated and a bit shellshocked to boot, our experts will put out new brochures describing the Next-Generation School of the Future. Seriously, if our public schools had shown any ability for education over the last many decades, I’d be happy to grant them more power. But given their track record, they should be issued a restraining order. Not allowed within 500 yards of a school. Let’s look at some people who actually know how to run a school. Everything Maria Montessori proposed a century ago is still quite appropriate. Everything the Classical Academies are trying to bring back is quite appropriate. Everything E. D. Hirsch proposes in his Core Knowledge is quite appropriate. Just look at the 100 best private schools and do exactly what they’re doing–-that’s quite appropriate. It’s important not to get bogged down in details. There are many wonderful palaces and mansions in this world, each with its distinctive charm. We can have many great schools that might appear different. It’s only control freaks like our Education Establishment who would describe every detail of what a school should be...but omit the soul. Have you read some of the stuff in the Common Core Standards? There are pages of details describing what kids will learn about arithmetic. The verbiage just goes on and on. It seems to be about Mars. For example, first-grade students “develop strategies for adding and subtracting whole numbers based on their prior work with small numbers. They use a variety of models, including discrete objects and length-based models (e.g., cubes connected to form lengths), to model add-to, take-from, put-together, take-apart, and compare situations to develop meaning for the operations of addition and subtraction, and to develop strategies to solve arithmetic problems with these operations. Students understand connections between counting and addition and subtraction (e.g., adding two is the same as counting on two). They use properties of addition to add whole numbers and to create and use increasingly sophisticated strategies based on these properties (e.g., “making tens”) to solve addition and subtraction problems within 20. By comparing a variety of solution strategies, children build their understanding of the relationship between addition and subtraction...” Properties of addition? Is there a parent in America who knows what that means? I say this kind of writing is a fool in motley. I say this has scam written all over it. Everything a first grader needs to know you could probably teach with a dollar bill and a handful of coins. Kids don’t need to “develop meaning for the operation of addition and subtraction.” They need to be able to know they got the correct change in a store. Finally, my own frustration with public schools may not impress you that much. What should impress you is the relentlessly mediocre stats generated by these schools. Students cannot multiply and divide. They can’t find their own state on a map. We have 50 million functional literates. Is somebody still able to pretend that these are acceptable results?