WhatFinger


Bruce Deitrick Price

Bruce Deitrick Price has been writing about education for 30 years. He is the founder of Improve-Education.org. His eighth book is "Saving K-12 --What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" More aggressively than most, Price argues that America's elite educators have deliberately aimed for mediocrity--low standards in public schools prove this. Support this writer on Patreon.

Most Recent Articles by Bruce Deitrick Price:

K-12: Quackery Kneecaps Reading

K-12: Quackery Kneecaps ReadingIn the early 1950s, when Rudolf Flesch started work on his famous book Why Johnny Can't Read, he visited the New York Public Library to find research on the big question, what's better, phonics or sight-words? In Chapter 1 of this historic book, Flesch reported that there were a dozen academic studies, going back to the early 1900s. All favored phonics.
- Monday, July 5, 2021

K-12: The Sabotage of Public Education

K-12: The Sabotage of Public EducationGenuine rigorous testing of educational ideas is rare in America. Why? Because practical testing usually goes against what the professors want to do. Their impractical ideas don't perform well in the real world. For example, Operation Follow-Through was the biggest, most systematic testing in American education, continuing for 10 years 1967 to 1977. This research showed absolutely that common sense, often called Direct Instruction, works best. Quite simply, that's where a teacher teaches, and students learn. Honest educators would say, okay, that's what works best, let's use it.
- Wednesday, February 10, 2021


K-12: The Most Appalling Things About Today's Students 

Our schools claim to teach sophisticated topics such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, the meaning of math, social emotional learning, and dozens of other buzzwords. Truth is, the schools hardly bother to teach even basic skills and foundational knowledge. Simultaneously, children are indulged and excused, which encourage the least desirable personal traits.
- Monday, March 23, 2020

A Bill of Rights for Students 2020

A Bill of Rights for Students 2020Search the Internet for anything related to "student rights" and you'll find lots of standard left-wing agitprop. The ACLU trolls for new plaintiffs with this pitch: "While the Constitution protects the rights of students at school, many school officials are unaware of students' legal protections, or simply ignore them. When heading back to school this year, make sure to know your rights and ensure that your school treats every student fairly and equally." K-12 students seem to be a new proletariat, a peasant population, that needs to be radicalized. Here in effect is the Party line: children are entitled to everything they want and all too often they are not getting it. They must be taught anger and indignation, and encouraged to riot and rebel.
- Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Why so much depression in our public schools?

Why so much depression in our public schools?

Someone asked this question on Quora: Is there a flaw to the American school system? Why do so many teens have depression? Why don't people do anything about it?

My answer: Okay, let's suppose you're a ninth-grade student in the school system. What are some reasons you might feel anxious and depressed?

- Wednesday, November 6, 2019

K-12: How Constructivism constructs confusion

K-12: How Constructivism constructs confusionConstructivism is not just another educational gimmick. It can be used in every class, for every subject, and with students of all ages. It is multifaceted, ubiquitous, and grandiose. In fact, the Education Establishment wants you to believe that Constructivism is the King Kong of instructional theories. The educrats want you to take it home for dinner, marry it, and live happily ever after.
- Thursday, September 12, 2019

Fixing K-12: How We Can Do It

Fixing K-12: How We Can Do ItMany practical people say the situation is hopeless. The Education Establishment controls the country's public schools with an unyielding grip. Unfortunately, these educrats seem to be socialist ideologues. (That's not surprising as their Godfather--that is, John Dewey--was a socialist ideologue.) They are obsessed with social engineering, not academic gains. The school is for them a laboratory where they can design the brave new child that will populate their Brave New World. Whether these new children can read, write, or do arithmetic does not seem to be a major concern.
- Thursday, August 8, 2019

K-12: Marked for Extinction

K-12: Marked for ExtinctionStudy education for any amount of time, you will be struck by the disappearance of many things once thought essential and permanent. Such useful features as direct instruction, maps and geography, cursive writing, multiplication tables, phonics, important dates and events, in short, basic skills and foundational knowledge taught in an orderly classroom. Where did they all go? Why did they go?
- Thursday, May 23, 2019

Do Social Justice Warriors Fight for the Right to Read?

Do Social Justice Warriors Fight for the Right to Read?Here's irony for you. Many who claim moral superiority for themselves are guilty of aiding and abetting educational inferiority for everyone else. When they assign themselves a fancy title—Social Justice Warrior, no less--are they then excused from further concern for fairness and justice?
- Thursday, March 28, 2019


A high-tech way of explaining bad schools

A high-tech way of explaining bad schools A logic bomb is code designed to destroy data in a computer. Imagine you programmed someone to ask people on the street, "Are you from Jupiter?” If people don’t say, “Yes, of course,” you knock them down. Thus they are bombed one by one, as you work your way across the city, until no one is left standing. All very logical.
- Thursday, November 8, 2018

French Class As the Perfect Way to Teach Everything

French Class As the Perfect Way to Teach Everything There is one constant throughout the past 100 years. Professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes and nomenclatures for how education should be organized, even as these schemes confused students and destroyed achievement.
- Sunday, September 9, 2018

K-12: Dear Abby, Here Are The Two Big Reasons Why Kids Lack Motivation

Kids Lack Motivation A mother in Chicago wrote for help: "Dear Abby: All of my grown children are underachievers. When contemporaries talk about their children getting jobs, getting married, having kids, going on vacation, buying a house/car, I have nothing to contribute. My children do not have lives; they work low-paying jobs and scrape by. Worse, they have no ambition to do better."
- Sunday, July 29, 2018

Socialism versus Education

To understand the failures of public education, we have to understand the dreams of socialism. It has always had three main targets it hopes to destroy: family, religion, and private property.
- Sunday, June 17, 2018


Literacy Experts: Are They Ready To Apologize Yet?

Berys Dixon is the Education Establishment's worst nightmare The people in charge of literacy in most English-speaking countries are literacy’s worst enemies. This counterintuitive turn-about has to be one of the planet’s more bizarre stories.
- Wednesday, March 14, 2018

K-12: Sight-Words vs. Vocabulary Words

K-12: Sight-Words vs. Vocabulary Words Many people use the phrases “sight-word” and “vocabulary word” interchangeably, when they are quite different. This confusion, I believe, serves a sinister purpose for our Education Establishment.
- Thursday, January 4, 2018


K-12 is Worse Than You Think

Problems in K-12, that’s my beat. I write a lot of articles and see a lot of comments. Many are depressing. Last week I saw the saddest yet: “The kids have given up.”
- Saturday, October 7, 2017

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