THE CHARADE OF
EDUCATION REFORM
By
Samuel L. Blumenfeld
NewsWithViews.com
When we saw President George Bush and Senator Ted
Kennedy on television billing and cooing over the new education bill,
fittingly called, No Child Left Behind, we knew that the reform is as
phony as all the previous reforms that were supposed to leave no child
behind. Bush gave the impression that he had to twist arms to get the
Democrats to spend more money on education.
How
do we know that the new reform bill is a sham?
Because the federal government will be giving money to the same
people who have caused the problem. These
are the same people, or their disciples, who implemented the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which was supposed to help the poor
and culturally deprived kids learn
to read through Title One. Thirty-seven
years and $100-billion dollars later, the kids are doing worse today than
they were in 1965.
How
could so much money result in so much failure?
Easy, spend the money on fattening the education establishment and
blame the failure on the kids. Bush,
of course, is making some kind of an effort to change that.
Since he strongly believes that every child can learn, he is
putting more blame on the schools for failure to teach, than on the kids
for failing to learn. He made
that very clear in the speech he gave after signing the bill.
He said:
When we find poor performance, a
school will be given time and incentives and resources to correct their
problems. A school will be
given time to try other methodologies, perhaps other leadership, to make
sure that people can succeed. If,
however, schools don’t perform, if, however, given the new resources,
focused resources, they are unable to solve the problem of not educating
their children, there must be real consequences.
So,
again, children are at the mercy of their schools and not guaranteed a
decent education. They will
be experimented on until the school can actually discover how to teach
reading, writing and arithmetic, as if that were the equivalent of finding
a cure for cancer. What Bush
doesn’t realize is that it’s impossible to deal rationally with a
system that is so irrational. Thus,
while the President may have the best of intentions, his desire to make
public schools more effective by throwing more money at them will
inevitably fail. After all,
he’s only going to be around for seven more years at best.
But the education establishment will still be there doing what it
does best, dumbing down the American people.
The
system is rotten to the core and has to be done away with.
It can’t be saved by more money because the education
establishment will not change its philosophy which is the obstacle to the
needed changes. For example,
the present configuration of the classroom based on “progressive”
ideology, is chaotic and totally non-conducive to intellectual or academic
achievement. But there is no
possibility of going back to the kind of classroom that America’s
greatest generation learned in. And
yet, that is the only way to “save” public education. No
rational human being can accept the present classroom configuration and
expect anything but intellectual confusion and academic failure.
Yet, most parents and teachers accept that classroom as an absolute
given.
Naturally
that classroom is perfect for the progressive curriculum being taught:
whole language, invented spelling, the new math, social studies.
It is said that the new reform bill will get phonics back into the
primary classroom. The
President said, “Every school has a job to do.
And that’s to teach the basics and teach them well.
If we want to make sure no child is left behind, every child must
learn to read.”
Funny,
back in the days when I was going to school, the federal government did
not have to spend billions of dollars to make sure that every child
learned to read. The teachers
knew how to teach children to read. It
was as simple as that. Most
primary teachers today don’t. In
our classrooms the desks were bolted to the floor, there was no speaking
out of turn, the floors were immaculate, the teacher maintained discipline
knowing that she had the backing of the principal.
She taught everyone the same thing, and used the most rational
methods of teaching improved over centuries of experience.
There was no Mickey Mouse, no stupid cartoons papering the walls.
There was a portrait of George Washington.
There
is no chance that the classroom that produced the great results of
yesteryear will be restored. The
present confusion will persist even though it has caused the epidemic of
attention deficit disorder that requires over four million children to be
drugged daily with Ritalin.
What
this latest reform actually does is accelerate the takeover of public
education by the Federal government.
And that is why the liberals just love it.
When George Miller of California, socialist to the core, thinks
it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, you have to wonder what
indeed is in the bill’s one thousand pages.
At this moment I’m trying to get a copy.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Samuel L. Blumenfeld
is the author of eight books on education, including “Is Public
Education Necessary?” and “The Whole Language/OBE Fraud,” published
by The Paradigm Company, 208-322-4440.
His reading instruction program, “Alpha-Phonics,” is available
by writing The Tutoring Company, P.O. Box 540111, Waltham,
MA 02454-0111.
www.alpha-phonics.com
www.howtotutor.com
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