To teach children how to play the piano, you have to teach them the basics of music — keys, notes, chords, melody, and harmony. With these tools learned, your kids can experience the joy and sense of accomplishment from playing their favorite songs on the piano.

To most of us, driving a car seems effortlessness. Our eyes, hands, and feet work together seamlessly, automatically, without conscious thought. But we first had to learn the basics of driving when we were young. Remember back to your father’s driving lessons? He taught you how to turn the steering wheel, where the gas and brake pedal was, how to stay in your lane, turn signals and stop signs, use of mirrors, keeping to speed limits, looking ahead. All these basics took time and practice to learn. Now, those of us who have been driving for many years, take these basics for granted. We drive “automatically” and with skill.

The same process applies to another skill—reading. Read a book or a newspaper and it seems effortless. Yet such skill comes from constant use, from constant practice of basic skills learned at an early age.

What are these skills? To read, you have to recognize words on a printed page, yet there are millions of them. Enter the wonder of the alphabet and phonics. It is by recognizing letters and their sounds that a child puts letter-sounds together to form words. Since all words are built from only twenty-six letters, the huge task becomes greatly simplified. The child need not memorize the word, only sound it out, read it, and find its meaning in a dictionary.

As in driving a car, reading is difficult at first. But, once learned, the skill becomes automatic, unconscious, effortless, and we read quickly without sounding-out every letter of every word. In the end, with practice, we read effortlessly, and all the knowledge of the world is open to us. Without learning the basic skills, however, reading is not possible.

Enter educrat “experts” who think otherwise. “Don’t adults read without sounding out every letter of every word,” they ask? “So why teach children phonics? Why put children through the boredom, drudgery, and hard work of phonics and spelling drills? How can reading be “joyful” if literature becomes drills?,” they say. “Why wound children’s self-esteem and self-expression with tests and standards and high expectations?”

“If we have children memorize whole words instead of drilling on the alphabet and letter sounds, all this pain is gone,” they chime. “Do not teach them to sound out M-O-T-H-E-R. Have them memorize what the whole word looks like—teach them word-pictures, teach them hieroglyphics, so they “recognize” the word in a book. Have the child read “Dick and Jane” learning books that repeat each word a hundred times, so the child comes to “recognize” it. Do this for each word.”

“If the child can’t grasp a new word because he cannot sound it out, teach him “pre-reading” strategies,” they expound. “These “strategies” will help him “guess” what the word is. Have him look at the title of the story. Have the child look at pictures, look for “clues,” look for “patterns” in the story that make sense. Or skip the word and come back to it. Or ask a friend who also cannot read it. Or finally, when all else fails, ask the teacher. Anything,” say the learned educrats, “except actually sounding out and reading the word.”

This, the educrats say, is the “centered,” “self-esteem-enhancing” way to teach reading. Meaning and context—not basics. Group discussions—not letters, sounds, drills, and independence.

This is your whole-language method (now called “balanced literacy” or some other deceptive name). This is the hieroglyphics of Egypt transported to your children’s classroom.

This is our educrats’ pet “reading” theory, foisted on 45 million public-school children-victims across the country.

The results were inevitable—half the nation’s high-school grads cannot read a bus schedule. Businesses lose $40 billion a year for remedial reading classes for new employees fresh from high school. Thirty percent of Americans functionally illiterate. The child who is taught phonics is able to read thousands of words in a few semesters. The “whole-word” child-victim is able to “recognize” only a few hundred words. Thus we have the crash in reading skills, the dumbing-down of our kids, the millions of frustrated teens who drop out of school, turn to crime, and end up in prison because they can’t get a decent job.

Yet, in the face of such failure, such disaster for our children, the educrats turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. In the face of reality — massive denial and rationalization.

Buy why? What do they gain? There is always a reason for irrational behavior, and the educrats have many.

Educrats think phonics believers are extremist Christian Rightists or educational simpletons unable to understand the “complexity” of the educrats’ so-called learning theories. Yet, let reality be the judge. The children who learn phonics read far quicker and better than the “whole-word” readers. And the “complexity” educrats proclaim is a self-serving fantasy of their making, designed to ward off competition. Educrats think they are gurus with special skills no parent can possess. Rather, they are education buffoons who don’t know how to teach phonics to your kids any longer, or don’t want to bother.

Educrats claim that phonics and rules will turn kids off to the joy of reading. Just the opposite is true — when a “whole-language” victim-child tries to read the many words he was not taught to “recognize,” he will give up in frustration. His frustration will end his reading and his ‘joy” in reading. The phonics-trained child can read any word and any book, and the joy of reading follows from his skills

This learning of basic skills need not be a struggle. What turns kids off? The insufferable boredom, the mediocrity of the educrats’ teaching methods, unchanged for 50 years.
Children learn the alphabet and letter sounds with delight at home. Sesame Street, “Hooked on Phonics,” the Internet, learning channels on cable TV, creative reading books especially made for kids by learning entrepreneurs can make learning letters and sounds a delight.

Phonics and drills are a drudge in government schools because educrats don’t have the time, skill, desire, or imagination to make them otherwise. Rather than blame themselves or their government-run system for failure, they blame everyone else. They now claim it is the child’s fault (he has attention-deficit disorder!), the parents’ fault (they don’t get “involved!”), or “society’s” fault (racism or “not enough money for the schools!”).

Educrats also say that drills and basics, tests and standards, are “unfair” to kids, cause them stress, and threaten their self-esteem. Just the opposite is true—real self-esteem comes from achievement, not from a teacher’s hot-air, feel-good compliments. Achievement needs tasks, content, ever-increasing complex skills children learn with guided effort. Joy, not stress, is the result of achievement. And what is more important than for children to learn that rewards come from effort and perseverence? Educrats hate phonics and true reading skills because their teacher colleges don’t train them in the phonics method. Teachers who are not taught the phonics method will naturally feel inadequate to teach phonics to children. It is not the teachers’ fault. Rather, the fault lies with educrats, teacher colleges, and educational theorists who have contempt for phonics.

Phonics and drills requires a “teacher-centered” approach in the classroom. This approach requires greater effort and responsibility on teachers and schools to create lesson plans that show real progress in reading skills. The teacher-centered approach requires teachers and educrats to constantly test and evaluate both students and themselves.

The “whole-language” reading method, in contrast, is allegedly “student-centered,” meaning that kids get to sit around in circles and talk about their feelings rather than learn to actually read. With “whole-language” reading, educrats can claim there are no standards, no way to test reading skills and achievement. There are few rigorous tests, low standards, and no failing grades.

“Whole-language” reading therefore achieves the educrats’ ultimate goal — if there are no standards or objectivity, no one can blame them, no one can question them, no one can hold them accountable for their failure to teach our children to read. The educrats don’t want to grade their students’ performance because it allegedly hurts the kids “self-esteem.” I believe this attitude is merely a projection of the educrat’s primal fears—they do not want parents judging their performance and holding them accountable for teaching their kids to read. The educrats don’t want their fragile self-esteem threatened by angry parents who expect public schools to do one simple thing—teach their kids to read.

Government schools are designed to assuage the educrats’ terror at being judged by parents, and being forced to compete in a free-market education system. Government (public) schools’ ultimate purpose is to be a full-employment program for educrats—to give them guaranteed jobs without accountability to parents. It is to placate these fearful educrats that our government schools dumb-down our children and turn them into illiterates with bleak futures.

So what can you, as a concerned parent, do to protect your child? As long as public schools are run by government and their educrats, they will never change. In my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I tell parents about wonderful new education alternatives to public schools, such as accredited, low-cost internet private schools. Parents, I urge you to look into these alternatives, before your children are irreparably harmed by public-school whole-language, anti-phonics, “reading” instruction.

Tweet This Post

If the U.S. Department of Education wants to give real choice to parents, they should not be tinkering with a failed government-controlled school system that, by its very nature, strangles free choice and competition.

Americans have been blessed with a system that gives them almost unlimited choices in their daily lives for almost four hundred years-it’s called the free market. If parents could pay for their kids’ education in a totally unregulated, fiercely competitive education free market, free from government controls, parents would have all the school choice in the world. This education free market would also give their kids a superb, low-cost education.

Yet too often, government officials with their bureaucratic mentality, distrust the free market, the same free market that brings them their cars, clothes, computers, electricity, and fresh food. The No Child Left Behind Act adds yet another layer of federal regulations to the already strangling layers of local and state government regulations on education.

If Congress Really Wants To Help, They Should Get Government Out of the Education Business

If the federal government truly wants to give parents more school choice, they should be working to remove local and state controls over education, not adding to those controls with the No Child Left Behind law and other regulations. That is like trying to cure a person dying of arsenic poisoning by giving him more arsenic. Naturally, government education officials can’t understand the fact that government control of education is not the solution, it is the problem.

Over the past fifty years, federal, state, and city governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to “fix” the public schools. They have failed, time and again. For example, in July, 2005, the Congress-mandated National Assessment of Education Progress showed that high-school students’ dismal reading skills have not improved since 1999.

High-school drop-out rates in inner-city, low-income minority areas range from 30 percent to over 50 percent. High-school dropouts are far more likely to end up in prison during their lifetimes. A U.S. Bureau of Justice report estimates that approximately 47 percent of drug offenders and 75 percent of state prison inmates are high-school dropouts. Dropouts are also about three times more likely than high-school graduates to end up on welfare.

These are not just appalling statistics. These numbers represent millions of bright, eager chidren whose lives can be ruined by public schools that fail them.

Trying to repair the public-school system is futile, precisely because it is a compulsory, government-controlled monopoly. Trying to fix this system with vouchers, charter schools, or the No Child Left Behind Law is like trying to cure cancer with a band-aid.

Parents should not pin their hopes on any government-sponsored school-choice alternative. Vouchers, charter schools, and the No Child Left Behind Act are simply too little, too late. Also, powerful, entrenched special-interest groups in the public-school establishment fight school choice because they benefit from parents’ and children’s subservience to the system.

Parents should not expect the public schools in their neighborhoods to improve. If you want to give your children a decent education and a chance at life, you must take their future into your own hands, now. It is useless to hope that the public-school system has the will or ability to reform itself. It is a waste of your time, and your children’s precious time, to deal with, plead with, or complain to public-school authorities or employees who benefit by the system.

Instead, do as the citizen-slaves of communist East Berlin did when they fled to freedom in West Berlin-vote with your feet. Consider writing-off the public-school system. Consider taking your children out of these schools, permanently. You and your children remain victims of the public-school system only by your own consent. The power to withdraw your consent is a power that public-school authorities can’t stop. Withdraw your consent and refuse to be a victim any longer.

There are many other education resources that parents can use right now to give their kids a quality, low-cost education. These resources include the new Internet private schools, Internet tutors, low-cost, learn-to-read and learn-math books in libraries and bookstores, computer learning software, and home-schooling. I discuss all these great new education options in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”

Tweet This Post

Holding schools and teachers accountable, and expecting students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, sounds like a good idea. But this Act means that badly-taught students, victims of dumbed-down texts and bad teaching methods like new math and whole-language instruction, now have to pass difficult standardized tests they are not ready for. As a result, millions of students may fail these tests, not because they are dumb, but because the schools never taught them to read properly or solve a math problem without a calculator. Millions of high school students with low reading and math skills now risk not graduating from high school until they pass these tests.

It is important that parents know the unvarnished truth about their children’s real academic abilities, but many parents are now frantic because they see their children’s failing grades on these new tests. As a result, they complain to school boards that they do not want their children taking these tests or not graduating from high school because of low test scores. To protect their children, many parents are now demanding dumbed-down tests to make sure that their kids graduate from high school and go to college.

The No Child Left Behind Act is now forcing many parents to condone schools that dumb-down their tests and standards, instead of blaming these schools for their children’s failure to learn. This is a typical unintended consequence of more government laws that try to fix problems that a government-controlled school system created in the first place.

State lawmakers in New York, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and other states have yielded to parent pressure. They have scrapped or watered-down high-stakes graduation tests that proved too tough even for students in the so-called better schools in the suburbs.

In Wisconsin, state legislators backed off plans to require high school graduation tests because of strong opposition by parents from affluent suburbs. One parent group calling itself “Advocates for Education” argued that high-stakes testing would not be fair to children and would hurt educational quality in the schools. Critics of the graduation tests were worried that the tests would put too much pressure on the children. Suburban parents lobbied parent-teacher organizations, and state legislators eventually scrapped the graduation test before a single high-school student had taken it.

Similarly, New York and Massachusetts officials yielded to pressure by parents to set low passing grades for their new graduation tests. In Virginia and Arizona, state boards of education have backed away from graduation tests that were too tough for even the so-called better schools. Only 7 percent of schools in Virginia met new achievement standards, and 9 out of 10 sophomores in Arizona schools failed a new math test.

In New York City, school authorities estimated that over 30 percent of the city’s 11th-graders would not be eligible to graduate if the English language standard that will take effect next year was being applied today. Diane Ravitch of the Brookings Institute in Washington is a longtime analyst of New York’s public-school system She estimated that in some neighborhoods, less than 5 percent of high-school seniors would qualify to graduate under the new standards.

Parents, particularly those with younger children, should take heed. You don’t want to end up with high-school kids who may not graduate because they can’t pass the new tests. In Chapters 8, 9, and the Resource section of “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I explore how you can circumvent these serious problems by finding real education alternatives outside the public schools.

Tweet This Post