Let’s Save Public Education: A Five Point Plan

(Summary: Bruce Price, founder of Improve Education.org, says that improving public schools is easier than many people think. For one thing, we definitely don’t need more money. Here are five concrete steps for making our schools more successful: ignore the official experts; get rid of their bad ideas; rescue reading; save math; emphasize facts and knowledge.)

The public schools have been in decline for the past century, according to education activist Bruce Price. Worse than that, this decline was by design.

What to do? First, Price recommends, confront this historical record, learn from it. John Dewey and his successors wanted dumb and dumber for ideological reasons, and they got it. Second, discard all the flawed ideas used to create this decline, and force public schools to fulfill their one essential function, which is to educate all children to the limit of each one’s ability.

“One of the tragic aspects of American society,” Price says, “is that our media and universities continue to stand by while the Education Establishment under educates the country. Apparently, we can’t expect leadership from the people who should be providing it. So I urge everyone to jump into this mess, do what you can, argue the issues, make some noise!”

Here, briefly, are five things we can do to fix American education:

1) Dethrone The So Called Experts. The people now in charge of the public schools are fairly described as collectivists. Price suggests: why don’t we just ignore them? Their big idea is to use the schools to create cookie cutter C students who will fit into their socialist schemes. Such ideas might be appropriate for Cuba. They don’t belong in a democracy like ours.

2) Eliminate The Bad Ideas. “Throughout American education,” according to Price,” there are dozens of wonderful sounding methods that invariably turn out to be academic failures for example, Constructivism, Self Esteem, Critical Thinking, Multiculturalism, 21st Century Skills, etc. This pattern of failure is not an accident. My conclusion is that these methods are designed to sound good but not do very much. We’ll be better off without them.”

3) Rescue Reading. The best example of a bad education idea run amok is that children should be taught to read with sight words, not phonics. “An unworkable approach,” Price argues, “that has created 50,000,000 functional illiterates. This is child abuse, pure and simple, and should be stopped.”

4) Save Arithmetic. Math is similarly sabotaged by New Math and Reform Math. The plan seems to be to go through the motions of teaching math but to make sure that children never really master even basic arithmetic. People arrive in college not knowing what 5 times 9 is. Solution: teach mastery.

5) Emphasize Content and Knowledge. “Do this,” Price urges, “from the first grade onward. Every fact taught is a nail in the coffin of Dumbing Down.” Instead of expending time and energy on social engineering, let’s put our resources into intellectual engineering.

“My hope,” Price says, “is that people will realize that what happens in the public schools is NOT a series of random events. If at the age of 25, ordinary citizens don’t know simple things, this has to be because the elite educators agreed not to teach those things. Ideologues with a hidden agenda have been playing games with the schools for a long time. Those hypocrites must be resisted.”

Price is optimistic about the future. “Especially,” he says, “if people will get more involved. Education is way too important to leave to so called experts. Parents ought to study the programs and books used in the local schools, analyze the issues, and evaluate the people running for school boards. As a general rule, be wary of educators bearing bold new innovations, as they usually turn out to be mush. Support traditionalists who dare to praise facts, knowledge, learning and standards.”

(Price’s main site Improve Education.org has become a major voice for reform. On this site visitors can find explanations for why kids can’t read or do math, and learn why so many education fads are mere verbiage, signifying nothing. Here’s a good article to start with: “38: Saving Public Schools.”)