David: I'm not a current public schools advocate — but I do believe that they can be fixed. Until you read an understand my prior reply (above), most of your energy is being wasted in the wrong direction.
David: I'm not a current public schools advocate — but I do believe that they can be fixed. Until you read an understand my prior reply (above), most of your energy is being wasted in the wrong direction.
Well if you have some time please read about my odyssey with the public schools and see if, afterwards, I haven't changed your mind: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
OK, I did read it — and will include it in my next Newsletter. To me the most important section is "WHO MAKES CURRICULUM DECISIONS?" I didn't really see the correct answer, which is "Your State Board of Education" — and that applies to ALL schools, pubic and private.
Thanks for taking the time. Sure, your state board of education makes the decisions, but who is on the state board? A more local analogy is to believe that your school board controls your local district. Right, but who is on the school board? Mostly, school boards are filled with union- and administration- selected toadies who easily win low-turnout elections where preoccupied parents have other things to do besides show up to vote for something whose significance they do not understand. Curriculum publishers have far more incentive and money than you do to control who is on the state board, and if the public can convince the board to do something the publishers don't like, their solution is to replace board members until the "correct" decisions are being made. The point of my diatribe is this: almost 70 years ago the public was massively awakened to the travesty in public school reading instruction. The term "Why Johnny Can't Read" is widely known, but today almost nobody knows its significance; in my talks I haven't found a single person yet, including people my age and older, who knows that it's the title of a book, much less that the book sold millions of copies. Nobody has fixed this thing in all that time, despite relatively simple solutions having been widely known all along. I think it's wildly presumptious to believe that we're going to fix it now.
David: I'm not a current public schools advocate — but I do believe that they can be fixed. Until you read an understand my prior reply (above), most of your energy is being wasted in the wrong direction.
Well if you have some time please read about my odyssey with the public schools and see if, afterwards, I haven't changed your mind: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
OK, I did read it — and will include it in my next Newsletter. To me the most important section is "WHO MAKES CURRICULUM DECISIONS?" I didn't really see the correct answer, which is "Your State Board of Education" — and that applies to ALL schools, pubic and private.
Thanks for taking the time. Sure, your state board of education makes the decisions, but who is on the state board? A more local analogy is to believe that your school board controls your local district. Right, but who is on the school board? Mostly, school boards are filled with union- and administration- selected toadies who easily win low-turnout elections where preoccupied parents have other things to do besides show up to vote for something whose significance they do not understand. Curriculum publishers have far more incentive and money than you do to control who is on the state board, and if the public can convince the board to do something the publishers don't like, their solution is to replace board members until the "correct" decisions are being made. The point of my diatribe is this: almost 70 years ago the public was massively awakened to the travesty in public school reading instruction. The term "Why Johnny Can't Read" is widely known, but today almost nobody knows its significance; in my talks I haven't found a single person yet, including people my age and older, who knows that it's the title of a book, much less that the book sold millions of copies. Nobody has fixed this thing in all that time, despite relatively simple solutions having been widely known all along. I think it's wildly presumptious to believe that we're going to fix it now.
David: The State Board of Education peope are either appointed by the Gov, or directly elected. In NC only four out of 17 are Conservatives — yet that was enough to get a MAJOR win <https://criticallythinking.substack.com/p/education-game-changer>.