Bruce Deitrick Price

Bruce Deitrick Price

  • K–12: At Last, Academics Acknowledge the Reading Crisis

    March 12, 2025

    K–12: At Last, Academics Acknowledge the Reading Crisis

    For years, everyone trying to undermine K–12 often had to look the other way.  They didn’t dare discuss Rudolf Flesch’s famous book explaining why Johnny can’t read.  Instead, these resourceful meddlers treated Flesc...

  • From the Lady Who (Literally) Wrote the Book on Ed Schools

    March 1, 2024

    From the Lady Who (Literally) Wrote the Book on Ed Schools

    Circa 1990, journalist and author Rita Kramer (1929–2023) toured the country to study premier schools of education.  She was already an expert on our K–12 schools, having published a highly praised book about Maria Montessori an...

  • September 27, 2023

    The meaning of the Lucy Calkins fiasco

    For 40 years, Lucy Calkins dominated literacy instruction in much of the country and especially New York City.  She built an empire both intellectual and financial. In the past year, Teachers College in Columbia University tossed Lucy an...

  • June 29, 2023

    Self-esteem: good or bad?

    A guy in the gym sported a dark T-shirt that was hard to read. The message was all bold capitals, total of four words, burgundy on blue: NOBODY CARES  WORK HARDER Wow — a radical shot at the self-esteem movement.  That's a ...

  • May 10, 2023

    How Liars Wreck a Country

    Last year, Forbes concluded that "only 16% of adults in the U.S. say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, and just 11% said the same for television news."  Anyone confronting these stats mus...

  • March 13, 2023

    Are You Guilty of Child Abuse?

    If you support a school system that won't teach children to read, do math, learn the simplest events in history, or understand the most ordinary facts about the world we live in, you're guilty of child abuse. Maybe not sexual child abuse, ...

  • December 18, 2022

    Why Are Communists Determined to Destroy the US?

    To fight pornography in the schools, a Texas housewife recently appeared at a school board meeting.  She lectured the officials: "I do not want my children to learn about anal sex in middle school. ... I want you to start focusing...

  • November 24, 2022

    Americans Living under Communism

    Did you ever wonder what it would be like to live under communism?  Well, now you know. The last two years have seen a parade of dumb and dumber policies, the kind you expect in totalitarian dictatorships.  The distinguishing t...

  • October 20, 2022

    Constructivism is Dead. Good Riddance to K–12 Rubbish

    Herewith a quick review of what is arguably one of the most destructive excesses of the past fifty years. Constructivism, a monster fad from the 1980s until quite recently, states that learners must be active in constructing their own me...

  • September 23, 2022

    K–12: The Science of Illiteracy

    Emily Hanford became famous over the last several years for talking constantly about the Science of Reading.  That's where children learn to read in the simplest, most efficient way and go on to enjoy many hundreds of books. ...

  • August 7, 2022

    Karl Marx, Liar and Corruptor

    Throughout the 1800s, the world's dominant philosopher was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1830).  He thought the universe was a logical machine, like a steam engine. Hegel and his contemporaries agreed that Nature contains...

  • July 17, 2022

    How Artificial Intelligence Brings the End of the World

    This vast multi-faceted subject will bewilder almost everyone for years to come. We know this because Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire brainiacs, disagree diametrically.  So how can the rest of us find solid ground?  Mu...

  • June 15, 2022

    K–12: The Knowledge Killers

    It's a run-down former saloon.  Working guys come here for cheap grub.  The evening special is roast pork with apple sauce and mashed potatoes. At about 5:20, two tough, contemptuous men show up to wait for something. ...

  • May 26, 2022

    This woman has done the research and knows exactly what's bedeviling America

    Bruce Deitrick Price: The big problem for all of us is to grasp the entirety of your work.  (Readers can find your book at the link.)  So my first question is, what is the broad concern that ties together all this research? Linda Go...

  • March 27, 2022

    Who Are the Real Haters?

    When Governor Gavin Newsom disappeared for a few weeks after receiving a COVID shot, the public worried: was he alive?  His wife did not like this curiosity.  You might think citizens have a right to know where their leaders are....

  • December 12, 2021

    Letter from the trenches: Parent describes K–12 dystopia

    On a regional Mensa forum, I posted analysis of problems in education.  To my delight, an indignant parent left her assessment of how bad our schools have become.  First-person reports from the trenches are the most reliable intel...

  • September 19, 2021

    K–12: the Clutter is the Message

    Traditionally, education was focused on facts, information, details, content, learning, and knowledge, all of these hopefully leading to wisdom.  Now we've gone to the other extreme. The students learn little, and they cannot connect...

  • July 23, 2021

    How Evil Nurse Ratched Became Little Miss Perfect

    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, both as book (1962) and movie (1975), was a huge commercial and cultural success.  The central dramatic conflict pitted Randall McMurphy, a heroic rebel played in the movie by Jack Nicholson, agains...

  • June 11, 2021

    Normal, Healthy People Don't Want To Be Dictators

    Here's the problem with communism (and sometimes socialism).  If you study these subjects, you will encounter lots of abstract theories about how best to organize society, money, property, and so on.  Some ideas might sound ap...

  • May 3, 2021

    How Do You Like the Thought of Being Deprogrammed?

    Their normal human sympathies have atrophied.  They live in the desert of their own inhuman politics.  They are cold and apparently lack a spiritual life.  Desperate to look down on other people, they take fatuity to a n...

  • April 17, 2021

    K-12: The Comintern Gave Us a Century of Ruthless Meddling

    The Communist International started its worldwide campaign of subversion and sabotage circa 1920.  The goal was always the same: wage a disciplined, low-budget attack on soft targets such as foundations, unions, universities, education, and...

  • March 20, 2021

    Rapper Tom MacDonald Lays Down Common Sense for Blacks and Whites

    This high-voltage rapper, born in Vancouver, now in L.A., possesses a Broadway hit of showbiz skills.  More startling, he mocks political extremists by extolling common sense.  Tom MacDonald is now vaccinating many millions o...

  • February 6, 2021

    As Socialism Becomes More Popular, Its Problems Become More Obvious

    Socialism promises a fairer society.  Many people, regardless of their political labels, respond to this goal.  Even some Christians see socialism and Christianity as converging belief systems.  Both sides say we have a ...

  • January 10, 2021

    The Sabotage of Public Education

    Genuine 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. ...

  • November 19, 2020

    K–12: Why John Saxon Is the Brightest Star in Math Education

    Homeschooling parents unerringly find the most efficient textbooks.  This is only natural if you have to spend all day at a kitchen table teaching children. A decade back, I was startled to find homeschoolers almost unanimous in praising...

  • October 31, 2020

    K–12: The Life and Death of the Mind

    The life of the mind.  This lovely phrase states what education is supposed to be about.  All things bright and cerebral.  Play chess.  Write a story.  Devise a plan for any goal.  Weigh evi...

  • October 8, 2020

    K–12: Sight-Words Are a Sick Joke

    Whole Word (one of almost a dozen aliases) was first introduced into public schools circa 1931.  The official goal required that students memorize at least 500 sight-words each year.  Two insurmountable problems showed u...

  • September 18, 2020

    The Ghost Media

    Rush Limbaugh is tired of a term he used for several years: the Drive-By Media.  He wonders what our feckless, reckless media should be called now. The question is not easy.  The media have become bizarrely the opposite of what...

  • July 13, 2020

    K–12: The Problem with Private Schools

    What's wrong with private schools?  Probably not what you think.  The movers and shakers, the people who run the society, typically went to private schools.  Their children went to private schools, and their grandchild...

  • May 29, 2020

    K–12: Elon Musk Says Take the Red Pill

    Elon Musk is one of the brainiest people on the planet and a fighter.  He invented PayPal on his way to launching SpaceX and Tesla.  Last week, Musk threatened to sue Alameda County because the pols wanted his employees to stay we...

  • May 4, 2020

    K–12: Ten Lies Teachers Tell You

    Hopefully, no one will forget our debt to Rudolf Flesch.  He was a great man with a great mind. Almost forty years ago, Flesch published Why Johnny STILL Can't Read, wherein he continued his crusade against Whole Word (AKA Whole...

  • April 9, 2020

    Lenin's Train Goes Chugging through American Education

    After the October Revolution, propaganda trains toured the Russian countryside with actors and artists on board, officials, a printing press, a mobile movie theater, posters, and leaflets to be thrown from the windows. The...

  • March 11, 2020

    K–12: Media Should Help for A Change

    The Press and the People — this was supposed to be a marriage made in populist heaven. The People don't always know what's going on.  But the Press, they always know!  They have contacts, sources, international ne...

  • February 26, 2020

    K–12: The World According to Orwell's 1984

    Most critics agree that George Orwell's 1984 is a supremely great novel.  But is it suitable for teenagers?  After all, this book is a grim portrayal of a totalitarian dystopia, and for many readers, it is a tra...

  • February 7, 2020

    K–12: Warren Buffett Missed a Big Opportunity

    Warren Buffett, reputed to be one of the smartest men in the world, jumped into the newspaper business eight years ago.  Last week, he jumped back out.  What happened?  He was losing money, that's what. Eight...

  • January 9, 2020

    K-12: The War against Children

    American public schools, by all the usual metrics, have steadily declined for a century.  Was this inevitable?  Or is there an evil plot aimed at our students? The larger pattern is clear.  Each year, traditional educ...

  • December 12, 2019

    K–12: Are Low Test Scores a Problem?

    American results in PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, aren't good.  But education experts responded to the latest bad news with well practiced shrugs.  What, us worry? The Education Writers Association...

  • November 22, 2019

    K–12: Reality Fades to Zero

    David Copperfield is famous for making a whole airplane disappear.  In the video, a Learjet encircled by 30 people, vanishes.  Very impressive. Our Education Establishment wants to surpass Copperfield.  These people hope to make eve...

  • October 25, 2019

    K–12: Phonics Is Winning

    Phonics is winning, finally, at long last, after 85 stupid years, after 50 million functional illiterates, after one of the most stubborn subversive schemes against common sense ever to brutalize a country.  Finally, the one correct way to ...

  • October 8, 2019

    K–12: Fake News, Fake Education

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...  When Yeats wrote his famous lines in 1919, he was describing the chaos in Europe after World War I.  The world had exploded into pieces; communicatio...

  • September 12, 2019

    K–12: The Real Threat is Red Supremacists

    August 2017, Charlottesville: Police disappear even as belligerents advance toward each other, and fighting in the streets begins.  The same tactic had been used successfully in Ferguson and Baltimore.  Who but President Obama and...

  • July 26, 2019

    K–12: Where is the technological revolution in education?

    During the past several decades, we have heard a lot of excited speculation about the future of education.  Surely, many experts have asserted, digital tools will be a game-changer.  Everything will be improved. But what have w...

  • June 20, 2019

    K–12: Red Ed

    If you want to understand the mystery of why we spend so many billions of dollars and get crummy schools, here are some options.  You can read a hundred books.  You can spend many years earning a Ph.D. in history.  You can try to bribe...

  • May 16, 2019

    K–12: Educrats Are Parasites

    One of the most grisly images in nature is a wasp methodically injecting eggs into a big, soft, helpless caterpillar.  Wasp larvae will eventually eat the drugged caterpillar from the inside, and a new generation of wasps will emerge from d...

  • April 26, 2019

    K-12: Internet vs. Ignorance. Who wins?

    Some big thinkers dare to dream that digital innovations will produce ideal political transformations. In particular, many of our smartest people think participatory democracy will emerge only via the internet. The basic idea is that peo...

  • April 8, 2019

    K-12: What Happened to Bill Gates and Common Core?

    Bill Gates is among the richest, most successful people on the planet. He enjoyed a lot of victories until he ventured into a dangerous part of town called Education.  He squandered a few billion dollars by becoming entangled with a shady c...

  • March 20, 2019

    K–12: Fake, like Adulterated Milk

    In the 1800s, adulterated milk was common.  Milk produced by swill herds, as muckraking journalist Robert Hartley wrote in 1842, was "very thin, and of a pale bluish color," the kind nobody in his right mind would buy.  ...

  • March 6, 2019

    K-12: Comedy Core

    Abbott and Costello, zany comic geniuses, are enjoying a big second act 75 years after their original success.  That's because people need easy ways to describe the pretentious but ultimately silly Common Core.  Abbott and Costello c...

  • February 21, 2019

    K-12: Reformers Needed

    Contemplate public education in America, and you will probably feel depressed.  Despite billion-dollar budgets, an army of employees, and endless promises, K-12 under-performs year after year.  Tens of millions of Americans cannot...

  • February 1, 2019

    K-12: Faking It

    Welcome to Wonderland.  That's the code name for the fake houses and landscapes built to hide California's airplane factories circa 1942.  Japanese bombers were expected at any moment. This anticipation was th...

  • January 12, 2019

    What a Socialist Really Wants

    What exactly is a socialist?  You could spend all day studying encyclopedias and not settle anything.  Using various definitions, you could probably prove that anybody is or isn't a socialist. So let's talk to a sociali...

  • December 1, 2018

    K-12: Meet Sue Dickson, a Hero of American Literacy

    Sue Dickson is best known as the creator of Sing, Spell, Read, and Write, one of the most popular phonics programs. Now in her 80s, she is still active as ever, pushing phonics however possible and refining a new approach. The ups and down...

  • November 19, 2018

    K-12: Six Steps to Reform Education Right Now

    Whenever people gather to discuss problems in education, we hear the same list of issues and solutions. We hear about poverty and the need for bigger budgets at all levels, more self-esteem, professional teacher corps, charter schools, vouche...

  • November 1, 2018

    K-12: Walk Away

    When Brandon Straka founded the WalkAway movement in May, hardly anyone imagined that several hundred thousand longtime Democrats could turn against the party of their family and friends.  Although it's a big, difficult decisi...

  • October 18, 2018

    K-12: Why So Little for the Mind?

    Many critics say our public schools are a train wreck.  In Charlotte Iserbyt's memorable phrase, we are all victims of "the deliberate dumbing down of America."  Is there any escape?  Perhaps, but only if w...

  • October 3, 2018

    K-12: Horrifying yet Fascinating

    Conjoined twins.  Bearded ladies.  Pinheads.  Eight-foot men.  Human skeletons.  Alligator and lobster boys.  A mother with four legs. Few can say they are not irresistibly intr...

  • September 18, 2018

    K-12: The War on STEM

    A parent recently provided insight into what has become of public schools: "The school district administrators are so nice to you in the meetings, while they are sticking a knife into your child's back." More than most people realize...

  • September 11, 2018

    K-12: Beware the talking dead

    The Walking Dead, soon to be in its ninth season, has been one of television's most successful shows.  More than 110 episodes have been produced.  This is especially remarkable because every episode is like the others: zombies...

  • August 16, 2018

    K-12: Creating the 'Ideal' School

    Believe it or not, there was once a time when the ideal purpose was to teach lots of stuff.  Any serious stuff.  The diameter of the Earth.  What's the Amazon?  Why do people still talk about Alexander the ...

  • August 2, 2018

    K-12: Parallels with Venezuela

    Such a marvelous country.  Venezuela is twice the size of California, with a mix of tropical and temperate climates, with 1,500 miles of oceanfront and, guess what, more oil reserves than any other country in the world.  What coul...

  • July 18, 2018

    K-12: An Insidious Inside Job

    Beware the traitor, we are finding out.  History will probably record that high-ranking government officials tried to overturn the election of Donald Trump.  History, I suspect, will use the word coup and will call these...

  • June 20, 2018

    K-12: In Praise of Wow!

    A scientist inadvertently found a cure for colorblindness.  The result is what appear to be ordinary sunglasses, but they sell for about $400. There is now on YouTube a plethora of videos recording the big moment when victims of col...

  • May 24, 2018

    K-12: History of the Conspiracy against Reading

    In his 1984 book about American education, Samuel Blumenfeld pointed out that "[n]othing has mystified Americans more than the massive decline of literacy in the United States.  Children spend more time at school and the gove...

  • May 4, 2018

    K-12: Let the Peasants Eat Popcorn

    Andrew Carnegie made billions in steel, sold his business, and switched to philanthropy.  He built 2,500 libraries, at least.  In his 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth, he said that "the rich have a moral obligat...

  • April 17, 2018

    K-12: How Our Schools Make Monsters

    Lots of people who study K-12 education end up looking for a metaphor, a parallel, to explain the unnecessary stupidity of our public schools.  Don't bother.  Ayn Rand has run ahead and done the job. In 1970, Rand...

  • March 30, 2018

    K-12: Illiterate New World

    Aldous Huxley's Brave New World appeared in 1932.  Everyone at that time was dazzled by the technocratic skills of the Ford Motor Company, able to turn out identical cars by the millions on highly efficient assembly lines. ...

  • March 15, 2018

    K-12: The War on Boys and Men

    Fox News just announced an upcoming series about the plight of Men in America. "Men seem to be becoming less male," Tucker Carlson said.  "Something ominous is happening[.] ... Men are taught there is something wrong ...

  • February 7, 2018

    'Customized Learning' Means Every Student Learns Something Different

    According to the people controlling our public schools, this country has been blessed by an endless stream of brilliant innovations. For examples, we had Sight-word instruction, which creates dyslexia and illiteracy, we had New Math, which ...

  • January 24, 2018

    K-12: Patterns of Deception

    Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, both famous literary left-wingers, had a famous feud.  McCarthy dared to proclaim that Hellman was a Truly Big Liar. When Dick Cavett asked (in 1979) what was so "dishonest" about Hellman, McC...

  • January 3, 2018

    K-12: Killing Democracy

    Rudolf Flesch, in his 1955 book, noted that "things have changed in the last 10, 20 years.  For the first time in history, American parents see their children getting less education than they got themselves.  Their sons and daught...

  • December 9, 2017

    K-12: Does Anyone Care That Kids Cry?

    In the late winter of 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered in a residential part of Queens, New York.  Newspapers claimed that 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack but wouldn't help.  Had people become so indifferent, so cold? ...

  • November 10, 2017

    K-12: The Math You Need Is Not the Math You Get

    Learning school subjects should be like learning anything else in life.  You start at the beginning, proceed step by step, master more difficult aspects, and become skilled.  Isn't that how we learn to drive a car, build a doghouse...

  • October 23, 2017

    K-12: Character Assassins

    Once upon a time, schools tried to improve the character of their students.  Be neat.  Be punctual.  Be accurate.  Do your homework.  Don't copy anyone else's work.  Dot your is and cross your ts.  Remember,...

  • October 4, 2017

    K-12: Central Planning and Participation Trophies

    Obama said the goal of public schools is to make everyone "college- and career-ready."  Sadly, many of the people graduating from high school are not even high school-ready. We know this bad news from remediation rates during freshm...

  • September 18, 2017

    K-16: Land of Lies

    Many college kids can hardly write a proper English sentence, never mind a proper essay.  Meanwhile, the essay-writing industry is huge, churning out tens of thousands of illegal documents.  Naturally, all participants in the scam pret...

  • August 16, 2017

    K-12: Your – or Is It You're? – Tax Dollars at Work

    Yes, of course, it's the former.  Millions of Americans can't tell, thanks to the public schools and their waste of your money. So here's where we end up.  Many allegedly educated Americans cannot avoid the simplest grammatic...

  • July 17, 2017

    K-12: Why Millennials Are Going Bald

    Early in 2017, ABC breathlessly reported, "Hair loss and balding are something we associate with aging, not a younger population, yet more and more millennials say they're experiencing hair loss." Theories include diet and ...

  • May 16, 2017

    K-12: Knowledge Containment Protocols

    Schools have always been devoted to passing knowledge forward to the next generation.  Not now. The Education Establishment treats knowledge as if it were a toxic spill that must be kept away from students.  Board up the windows; tape th...

  • May 3, 2017

    K-12: 'Alien Covenant'

    If you watch TV, you are seeing ads for a new Alien movie (i.e., Alien Covenant).  All hail Ridley Scott.  This will be the sixth in the franchise.  One thing all of the entries have in common is that a ghastly alien emerges, ofte...

  • April 19, 2017

    K-12: Quacks Rule

    In 1950 Harvard-educated businessman Albert Lynd published an attack on our Education Establishment.  His book was aggressively titled Quackery in the Public Schools. That title resonates with contempt.  Quackery?!  I suspect t...

  • April 5, 2017

    K-12: Fog and Fuzziness

    K-12 should be a boot camp.  Students become knowledgeable, resourceful, independent, able to navigate successfully through life. Instead, our public schools prepare children to be incompetent or, even worse, frightened snowflakes. ...

  • March 24, 2017

    K-12: No Joy In Reading. That's the Plan.

    Newspapers in my state reported a particularly sadistic murder.  The victim was shot, strangled, beaten with a hammer, stabbed, punched, and set on fire.  The killers were thorough and then some. If you look at how reading is taught in t...

  • March 8, 2017

    K-12: Constructivism Is a Big Fat Con

    Public schools are so jam-packed with fake pedagogies, it's hard to pick a champion.  Certainly, Sight-words would seem to be the poison pill without equal.  But that program's greatest impact occurs in the first few years...

  • February 23, 2017

    K-12 Quagmire: Problems with Sight-Words

    Why do we have millions of children who never become fluent readers?  Easy.  Our Education Establishment prefers methods that don't work. Every language is either a sound-language such as English or a picture-language such as Chinese...

  • February 10, 2017

    K-12: Unequal resources? No, unequal reading.

    The big noise in education centers is on this claim: if only we had equal funding, we could have equal results. Change agents, social justice warriors, and the Education Establishment complain endlessly about the injustice of some schools and neig...

  • January 27, 2017

    K-12: Drain This Swamp

    Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp in Washington.  This task is especially urgent in that large, malodorous part of the swamp known as Education. The Education Establishment makes everything murky and unproductive by an endless spew of ...

  • January 11, 2017

    K-12: Defining Education Down

    In 1993, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a famous article titled "Defining Deviancy Down," where he argued that behavior once considered indefensible is now mainstream. His subtitle was "How We've Become Accustomed To Ala...

  • December 23, 2016

    Why the Education Establishment Hates Cursive

    Modern educators are dismissive of cursive.  Indeed, many are hostile to such a degree that you should immediately suspect that they are up to something. Here is an education journalist providing the Party Line: "Cursive writing is an an...

  • December 5, 2016

    K-12: Occupied Territory

    The U.S. government published the dark truth about K-12 schools in the famous "A Nation at Risk" report of 1983.  Here is that truth: if a foreign country created the schools we have now, we would conclude that they were ...

  • November 17, 2016

    K-12: The Land of Bad Science

      I love WIRED magazine. I read it cover-to-cover every month.  If you want to know about a complex digital phenomenon such as Stuxnet, for example, read the story in WIRED. That's where Israeli and American brainiacs pl...

  • November 5, 2016

    K-12: Like Taking Candy from Babies

    This cliché usually carries a double message: something is easy to do but shameful.  No decent person would do it.  You know, like the emotional and intellectual abuses all too common in our public schools.  (To designate the fu...

  • October 13, 2016

    K-12: Sauve Qui Peut

    When a ship starts to sink, people broadcast, "Mayday! Mayday!"  ("M'aidez" is French for "Help me.")  Frightened passengers will hear "Man the lifeboats!" and "Women and children first!...

  • September 27, 2016

    K-12: Teaching Knowledge vs. Teaching Ideology

    In 1974, Jaime Escalante took a job at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, California.  He found himself in a challenging situation: teaching math to Hispanic students at a rundown school known for violence and drugs.  While...

  • September 15, 2016

    K-12: Parent X Takes On Principal Zero

    As you study the decline of our public schools and see the tsunami of sophistry and deceit, you start to wonder: who promotes all this stuff?  Who defends it?  No normal person would want our public schools to be increasingly mediocre. ...

  • September 3, 2016

    K-12 and the Other RINO

    In politics, when liberals pretend to be conservatives, these phonies are often labeled RINOs –  Republicans In Name Only. In our public schools, we have a similar phenomenon – namely, the phony literacy instruction that teaches...

  • August 15, 2016

    K-12 and the New York Times: Forget the Rules

    Donald Trump is a big problem for the New York Times.  These elite journalists are in a dither.  Trump is such a threat that the Times feels morally obligated to destroy him, even if its staff have to violate traditional jour...

  • July 25, 2016

    K-12: Criminal Minds at Work

    The date is 1900.  Professor John Dewey and his cadre of "Progressives" launch an ambitious scheme to transform the country.  They want a more collectivist society.  For convenience, let's call their goal Europe...

  • June 25, 2016

    Massive K-12 Reading Failure Explained

    Herewith, a simple way to understand the destructive failure of most reading instruction in the United States. Consider our eyes.  Their purpose is to grasp quickly what objects are: food or predator, useful or irrelevant?  This is often...

  • June 9, 2016

    How to Create Functional Illiteracy in 7 Easy Lessons

    Public schools are expert at creating illiteracy.  Our K-12 system can usually guarantee that students don't become fluent readers.  The system is nearly foolproof.  Parents and teachers can make children illiterate or semi-li...

  • May 11, 2016

    Now They're Dumbing Down the Colleges

    There is no question that American public schools have been dumbed down.  The government's own report in 1983, "A Nation At Risk," said the schools are so bad that they might well be a clever subversive trick by an unfrie...

  • April 20, 2016

    A Liberal Magazine Just Spilled the Beans about K-12 Education

    This upscale progressive magazine ran a super-long, super-detailed article titled "The Math Revolution."  It basically wanted to proclaim the happy news that extraordinary things are  taking place in American education. Th...

  • April 1, 2016

    Killing Knowledge in K-12

    The first schools, the first great universities, were focused on knowledge: figuring out what it is, collecting and verifying it, and passing it on from teachers to students. Our K-12 schools have drifted far away from this ideal.  Knowledge ...

  • February 26, 2016

    Is Reading about 'Getting Meaning from Print'?

    Nowadays, if you want to be promoted to the upper echelons of the Education Establishment, there is one big claim you have to repeat with endless enthusiasm: "Reading is about getting meaning from print."  This phrase (and variations o...

  • February 7, 2016

    Dyslexia Is a Myth

    Samuel Blumenfeld (1927-2015) is one of the few really great educators that this country has had.  He wrote twelve books and hundreds of articles explaining the country's educational decline. He was an expert on reading and phonics. If Bl...

  • January 16, 2016

    Education Reform: Italian Group Shows Americans How It's Done

    Here are two harsh realities about American education.  K-12 schools are mired in mediocrity.  Second, the Education Establishment and the high-level people who should be improving the schools seem indifferent to academic improvem...

  • December 16, 2015

    Only You Can Prevent Bad Public Schools

    Perhaps you are an eternal optimist, hoping the Education Establishment will reform itself.  I have bad news: the top people in education like what they're doing just fine. John Dewey and his successors were/are socialists first, e...

  • November 25, 2015

    Why Kids Can't Read

    In all reading theories, there is a fundamental concept known as automaticity.  This means you know or can do something instantly, automatically.  Reading happens fast.  If you don't know something with automaticity, you might as w...

  • November 11, 2015

    'Department of Education! You raise 'em! We raze 'em!'

    I used to know a hippie who always answered the phone: "City morgue.  You stab 'em!  We slab 'em!"  That's the artistic inspiration for the title. The factual inspiration is the steady decline of public schools...

  • October 17, 2015

    What the Heck Are 'Word Attack Skills'?

    According to our literacy experts, if children are to become expert readers, they have to learn "word attack skills."  Okay, that's jargon we don't really need.  But let's go with it.  What are these word attack s...

  • August 24, 2015

    Why We Have More Than 40 Million Functional Illiterates

    Hundreds of websites still casually assert what is probably the most destructive sophistry in the history of education: The Dolch Sight Words [created in the 1940s] are a list of the 220 most frequently used words in the...

  • June 11, 2015

    'NYC is lost. Totally.'

    The following letter (sent via iPhone) is from Marilyn T., a teacher.  She has worked in the greater New York City area for many years and wants everyone to know how debased and crazy our classrooms have become.  She sums it up th...

  • June 3, 2015

    The War against Black Children

    There is a statistic out there that almost half the adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate.  They can't fill out job applications.  They can't read the instructions on a pill bottle. So when we talk about a war a...

  • May 16, 2015

    In Praise of the Lecture

    A great war is being waged in the schools of America.  To teach or not to teach – that is the question. Lots of knowledge or hardly any knowledge at all?  Teach directly or hardly teach at all?  Constructivism is the contempor...

  • April 16, 2015

    How to Bring Back Traditional Education

    Traditional education has taken a real beating the last 75 years.  The entire Education Establishment lined up to demonize everything that teachers and schools had done for many thousands of years.  The result is the vastly dumbed down...

  • March 27, 2015

    Education: Hacks Praise Anything and Always with Enthusiasm

    When you look back at American K-12 education for the past century, you first notice a preposterous parade of gimmicks and sophistries.  Junk food for the mind, or worse. Look again, and you see something even more disturbing: an endless supp...

  • March 9, 2015

    Is Georgia the dumbest state?

    When states are ranked for their intelligence or lack of it, Georgia  usually ends up in the bottom 10.  What is the Peach State doing wrong?  A lot.  We are confronted here by a confusing swirl of malpractice and scandal, so l...

  • February 17, 2015

    Education: Playing Games with Recess

    Education in America will make you crazy. There is hardly a part of it that is not corrupted by ideology and contaminated by sophistical thinking. What could be simpler to understand than recess? When you’re talking about little ch...

  • January 24, 2015

    Whatever Happened to Phonics?

    One of the most important books in America’s intellectual history, Why Johnny Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch, was published 60 years ago in 1955. This book sold 8 million copies, was the talk of the country, and explained why children ne...

  • January 14, 2015

    K-12 Education settles for Empty Curriculum

    Throughout most of the past century, the big shift in education has always been away from traditional academic subjects and toward faux-subjects and PC attitudes. Circa 1800, Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Academy offered: Readin...

  • December 17, 2014

    Education as a Cause of Mental Health Issues

    It’s one of the most bizarre and destructive events in American history.  Circa 1931, public schools started using Whole Word to teach reading.  (This method has many other names, such as Look-say, Whole Language, Dolch Words, and Sig...

  • November 24, 2014

    Descriptive versus Prescriptive: Another Left-Wing Scam

    Everywhere we look, we’ve got pompous professors telling us they don’t dare prescribe what’s right in language.  No, no, no, no.  It’s not their role.  Nor yours either, that’s for sure.  People ...

  • November 12, 2014

    American Public Schools Chew Up Teachers and Spit Them Out

    The stats leave no doubt: there is huge dissatisfaction among teachers.  The turnover rate is very high.  We need to answer the obvious question: why don’t principals and administrators take better care of their teachers?  The...

  • October 21, 2014

    Math is on life support. Can we save it?

    When is the wrong answer the right answer?  Now.  Today. Reality alert: we have entered an alternative universe, thanks to Common Core.  As people once scorned wrong answers, we will now learn to scorn right answers.  Answer-ge...

  • October 16, 2014

    Education and the Cannon Fodder 2014

    The vision of soldiers as nothing more than "food" to be consumed by battle dates back to at least the 1500s.  The first attested use of the expression "cannon fodder" belongs to a French writer, François-René d...

  • September 27, 2014

    Princeton's President Praises Genuine Teaching

    Princeton, my college, distresses me by constantly seeming to drift leftward.  So I was quite charmed and indeed overjoyed when I read that President Christopher Eisgruber, at the commencement ceremony in June, had praised traditional ...

  • September 19, 2014

    Where Are the Newspapers on Education?

    Most Americans have heard the news: public schools are wallowing in mediocrity.  Millions of kids can’t read, not in any real sense, nor can they do basic arithmetic.  They don’t learn the most essential knowledge.  (Ask on...

  • September 8, 2014

    The Education Establishment vs. Maslow's Self-Actualization

    Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was an American psychologist who created a theory of psychological health based on fulfilling inborn human needs, from the most basic to the most sophisticated, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow’s...

  • August 3, 2014

    Princeton Professor Makes Dubious Declaration

    Professor Danielle Allen, at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, has proposed a closer reading of the Declaration of Independence in order to prove that the country was intended to be socialist all along.  Yes, that’...

  • July 23, 2014

    Education: Schools for Sabotage

    It’s a common scene in World War II movies: a captain maneuvers in close to a big ship and fires a spread of torpedoes.  None of them detonate.  Some submarine officers lost the will to fight and had nervous breakdowns. In fact, Ge...

  • July 16, 2014

    The K-12 Conspiracy

    John Dewey is often blamed (by me and many others) for being the cause of the long, relentless decline in American public education.  In fairness, he is only the famous face of a bigger story. In the early years of the 20th century, as the Vi...

  • June 20, 2014

    Reading: The Con Continues

    Not much is certain in life, but here are two things you can take to the bank.  If you want a child to learn to read, phonics is the way that works.  Second, you can be sure that our Education Establishment will try to keep phonics at a min...

  • June 9, 2014

    Reform Math Must Be Destroyed Root and Branch

    The Education Establishment went way too far, and this has presented the country with a unique opportunity for real improvement of the public schools. As never before, parents across the United States will tell you emphatically that they hate Comm...

  • May 16, 2014

    Education That You Know Is Sick

    A headline at the Daily Caller complains: “Principals say Common Core tests make little kids vomit, pee their pants.”   Top comedian Louis C.K. shook the educational world with this tweet: “My kids used to ...

  • April 27, 2014

    ObamaCare and Common Core: Two Fronts of the Same Coup

    Medical insurance and public education might seem to be two different worlds with different problems.  But the proposed solutions were essentially the same.  Here are ten descriptions that apply equally to ObamaCare and Common Core: 1) H...

  • April 26, 2014

    ObamaCare and Common Core - both are bad to the bone

    Medical insurance and public education might seem to be two different worlds with different problems. But the proposed solutions by the left were essentially the same. Here are ten descriptions that apply equally to ObamaCare and Common Core: ...

  • April 16, 2014

    Common Core's Dirtiest Trick: Dividing Parents and Children

    When you look back at New Math (ca. 1965) and Reform Math (ca. 1990), one of the most striking and persistent features was that parents could not understand the homework their children brought home. Mystified parents were trying to advise mystifie...

  • March 30, 2014

    Common Core: Anatomy of a Failure

    When Bill and Melinda Gates go to Africa and see healthy people and sick people, they presumably have a single thought: what can we do to make everyone healthy?  The problems are easily understood; goals can be clearly stated.  Given a big ...

  • March 21, 2014

    The Most Obvious Conspiracy in the History of the World

    Duh!  Do you think?  Oh, really?  You don’t say! People use these snarky expressions when they want to suggest that something is so totally obvious that ten out of ten people will see it instantly. In a sane world, a good e...

  • March 9, 2014

    9 Reasons Why Public Schools Wallow In Mediocrity

    The nine main problems and a relevant link for each:  1)  Bad Reading Methods.  Whole word (also known as sight-words, Dolch words, and many other aliases) is an 85-year flop that never worked.  Children are told to memorize wo...

  • February 5, 2014

    A Cruel Obama Hoax: "Improve Education at All Levels"

    A recent AP story about Obama and education appeared in scores of American newspapers. According to the report, "President Barack Obama is promising to improve American education from preschool to college." The story appears in the mids...

  • January 26, 2014

    Public Schools vs. Christianity

    Our Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. The government can't interfere with how people practice religion, nor favor one religion over another. Furthermore, there is nothing in the Constitution about education or government involvement in it...

  • January 8, 2014

    Education Establishment: Giving Their All for Gold, Glory, and Gospel of Progressivism

    During the 1500s, the Spanish came to America (we were told in history classes) for "gold, glory, and gospel."  Merchants made money; soldiers distinguished themselves in war; Catholic priests spread religion.  The three Gs were a...

  • December 5, 2013

    Common Core Standards: Throwing Gasoline on a Fire

    Common Core was sold to the public as a way to improve public schools.  Arguably, it's the opposite. First of all, the people in charge have been in charge for 85 years.  They have proved themselves to be architects of medi...

  • November 25, 2013

    The Progressive Myth of Creativity

    Creativity has been a big theme in progressive education for more than 75 years: We are constantly lectured that kids need music, art, theater, etc. This theme is now metastasizing into an oppressive dogma. But, why? Ken Robinson, the guru...

  • November 9, 2013

    Education's Intellectual Machinery Is Broken

    When we contemplate public schools, two things are certain.  Almost everyone agrees that the schools are not as good as they should be, given the huge effort and expenditure.  Second, everyone has a theory. You can hardly read a...

  • October 26, 2013

    Sages on Stages Desperately Needed

    It was the first premise of all schools throughout history: students would be educated by people who were themselves already educated.  A biology teacher had to be an expert in biology; a history teacher must know history to teach history....

  • October 5, 2013

    Is your child suffering from schoolitis?

    Observe your child carefully. Does he have trouble reading even simple materials?  Does he struggle with elementary arithmetic?  Does your child seem to be learning very little basic knowledge?  Is your child anxious and unhappy? ...

  • September 13, 2013

    Close Reading Is Close to a Con

    A key component of the blitzkrieg known as Common Core Standards is something called "close reading." This is an educational activity that children are supposed to engage in.  They will not merely read; they will read deeply and profoundly, li...

  • August 23, 2013

    Educational Collapse Metastasizes

    No school is an island; each school, each sector of education, is connected to the others.  Influences flow among them.  It's reasonable to think a nation's educational institutions will rise and fall together. College professors may hope...

  • August 14, 2013

    What is Literacy in the 21st Century?

    A new development in education is deciding what "literacy" should be in the 21st century. With a swirl of technological breakthroughs all around us, elite educators are gaga at the plethora of excuses for pooh-poohing subjects routinely taught in th...

  • May 18, 2013

    You Don't Know Shakespeare: Seven Sexy Scenes

    Shakespeare does everything at once: tells a story, develops characters, writes beautifully, teaches history, and -- oh yeah -- startles us with randy humor.  Elizabethan England was a raunchier time.  If you were witty, there were no lim...

  • May 9, 2013

    How to Read (and How to Fail at Reading)

    For the sake of this discussion, let us suppose you know nothing about reading, so we can start with the absolute basics. In phonetic language, letters stand for sounds.  B is always a buh-sound.  A is always an ahh-sound (or close). So...

  • April 28, 2013

    What really happened to boys?

    Four years ago, psychologist Leonard Sax (M.D., Ph.D.) wrote a well-received book titled Boys Adrift.  The doctor tried to answer the question, why have so many young males fallen into passivity and indifference? Dr. Sax had heard more and mor...

  • April 13, 2013

    Bill Gates Is Too Trusting

    A few years ago, Bill Gates, with his business success, super-brain, and billion-dollar checkbook, jumped into education.  We expected spectacular results.  In fact, Gates had the same effect on our public education system that everyone els...

  • April 6, 2013

    Let Us Now Praise Knowing Stuff

    A reporter asked me, "Would you prefer that students know information, or how to find information?" Clearly she thought that knowing where to find information was best.  Actually knowing facts was, in her mind, not important.  That was th...

  • January 12, 2013

    Education Enters the Twilight Zone

    Disingenuous. Paradox. Counterintuitive. Sophistry. Counterproductive. These five words always fascinated me.  They suggest unexpected warps in a common-sense grasp of the world. Something is out of kilter, weird, defective, or whacko. American...

  • December 21, 2012

    Extra! Extra! American Newspapers Don't Care about Reading

    Newspapers need readers.  If children aren't learning to read, newspapers will struggle to survive.  What could be more obvious? You might think that newspapers -- as a simple matter of survival -- would do anything possible to promote li...

  • December 11, 2012

    Education Has Been Battered by Bad Faith

    The easiest way to understand the field of education is to consider a legal concept: bad faith.  It's been around for thousands of years; in Latin, the phrase was mala fides.  Any time there's a split between what is claimed and what is fac...

  • November 3, 2012

    How Ideology Is Killing Education (and So Much Else)

    A teacher in Florida called me up to rant about the educational situation in her state.  "There is an obsession," she said, "with the worse-off students." She said the school officials there proclaim in response: "But what about the people with ...

  • October 1, 2012

    John Dewey Is a Fraud

    It is generally agreed that John Dewey (1859-1952) is the Father of American Education and the Greatest American Educator Ever. The problem with the labels is that John Dewey, albeit a genius, was not an educator in the sense that most people use thi...

  • August 4, 2012

    Women Beat Men on IQ Tests for First Time. Why?

    American media are excitedly reporting that women are smarter than men, according to IQ tests.  Not equal to men -- supposedly the goal of feminism -- but superior to men. That is quite a jump, and all in a matter of decades.  How could suc...

  • June 3, 2012

    Progressive Education's War On Knowledge

    An educational futurist, in a video on Edutopia, objects to the teaching of data and information. That's the sort of thing, he sniffs, that Google can find. The futurist wants a high-tech classroom where students work only on sophisticated ...

  • May 6, 2012

    Reading the Contempt of Socialists

    What, if any, is the connection between illiteracy and ideology? George Orwell, our greatest political sociologist, has some ideas.  He is the master explainer of governance, power, totalitarianism, education, and the dynamics of class warfare. ...

  • April 14, 2012

    Education: Speaking in Forked Tongues

    "Why Bilinguals Are Smarter," a recent column in the New York Times, suggests that children raised in two-language homes tend to have higher IQs, because their brains are forced to be more nimble. Let's stipulate that this is true.  Still, I thi...

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