A scholar, but not a professor

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1979-a-scholar-but-not-a-professor?cid=VTEVPMSED1

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/us-education-racket-dahn-shaulis/

Education Is A Racket
Published on October 24, 2016

Dahn Shaulis
Higher Education Analyst at GlobalWonks

‘Without understanding the cutthroat business of education, and all of the financial and political players, it’s difficult to see the enormity of corruption in the system–and how it devalues the nation as a whole.

The more I learn about US education, the more I understand how much of a racket K-12 and higher education have become. If students (and their families) are serious enough about their studies, they can still learn valuable skills in college. But college teaching and learning have become secondary to business, bureaucracy, and dealing with the “savage inequalities” of K-12 that feed into higher education “degrees of inequality.”

In the US, education at all levels increasingly reinforces a social system of “winners” and “losers” based less on potential and hard work and more on family position in the existing class structure.

In my previous articles on the US College Meltdown and America’s Most Endangered Colleges, I mentioned some of the “winners” and “losers” in American higher education. The list on both sides is long and growing as the US College Meltdown becomes more apparent.

Big losers: About 10 million Americans are in deferment, forbearance or default with their student loans

Even Bigger Losers: Young (and even middle-aged) adjuncts may be the biggest losers, if they have large grad school debt and rely financially on dead end teaching jobs. According to Peter Cappelli, 1/4 of all colleges offer a negative rate of return.

The “savage inequalities” we see in K-12 schools are inextricably linked to the “degrees of inequality” we see in America’s colleges. In this analysis, it’s important to examine powerful private, non-profit, and public players as well as for-profit operations.

It’s also important to look at money and favors changing hands at the state, county, and local levels. So who makes big money in US education? The list of participants at BMO Capital Markets gives us a Who’s Who in the business of education.

But there are many more people making money from the US education racket: in K-12 education management, higher education management, online and software services and other forms of outsourcing, publishing and curriculum, real estate, construction, accreditation, advertising and marketing, banking and finance, and political lobbying.

Two-thirds of the officials responsible for policing the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities are employed by schools their agencies oversee, highlighting potential conflicts of interest in a system that faces reform efforts in Washington.

It’s believed that hundreds of billions of dollars are held in college slush funds and endowments, with limited transparency and oversight.

Private Student Loan Lenders include Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo, Discover, and SoFi.

Student Loan Servicers: ECMC, Navient.

Navient makes billions of dollars by buying and selling student loans, and coercing students to repay their student loans.

The big educational spenders on K Street are mostly elite schools, with a few subprime colleges.”

http://canadafreepress.com/article/k-12-education-is-a-crooked-house

By Bruce Deitrick Price —— Bio and Archives—April 25, 2015

“Some sites I write for want a lot of links and the appearance of journalism. Why is that a plus? Journalists lie every day.

In any case, I want this to be a more personal piece. I think it will be more honest than any journalism you’ll read. I’m going to tell you what I believe I’ve figured out from writing about K-12 education for more than 30 years. (Spoiler alert: K-12 education is a huge, well-organized racket that’s gunning for you and your kids.)

My first big essay was titled “English and Education.” It appeared in the Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1983 and got a lot of fan mail. (It’s still on the internet and still a good read.)

The goal of the article was to show that when an entire field, such as education, starts to use jargon and deceitful language, you know the field has lost its way. I tried to prove that education had gone off the rails and was in serious trouble.

Later, however, I realized that I was like a Roman doctor who could study symptoms and predict correctly that a patient was soon to die. But the doctor cannot explain why. The Romans didn’t know about germs.

Decline of American public education

I knew I had to construct a “germ theory” to explain the decline of American public education. Years later, I became comfortable with the conclusion that the germs making us sick are busybody social engineers with bad blueprints. That would be John Dewey and his gang.

Five years ago I was communicating with a very rich and successful man who said, “I agree with a lot of what you say, Bruce. But I can’t accept the conspiracy angle.”

I was surprised. He was engineer-smart. How could he not see the conspiracy? It’s the size of Texas.

If you rule out intention, you have to argue that our Education Establishment has been clumsy for a century. Nobody is that clumsy. It’s more logical to assume the education elite were making exactly the decisions they thought would lead them to the goal they wanted.

That goal is well known. John Dewey and all of his associates were Progressives (or probably the more accurate term is “Fabian Socialists”). They wanted a socialist America (not that different from what Obama seems to want). John Dewey was the chief strategist for how to accomplish this goal without resort to legislation or elections. He came up with the ingenious tactic of taking over the schools of education, brainwashing the young teachers, and sending them out into the countryside to brainwash American kids. Americans for the most part didn’t want any of Dewey’s kool-aid. So Dewey and his cult had to operate in a furtive manner. But operate they did. And still do.

Here’s the essential detail: every time John Dewey and friends had a conference, exchanged letters, or chatted at lunch, they were typically plotting to take control of the country via the ed schools. That’s been the fundamental reality since about 1910. The conspirators, of course, believed in their own supreme virtue. But so did Lenin and the Bolsheviks. So did Pol Pot. If they had to lie to the public about their real intentions, that was not a problem.

For people not in education, it’s always a shock when they first realize that something very bizarre and counterintuitive is going on. Suppose you’re walking down a street, glance over a fence and see workers building a crooked house. You are sure this house is going to cause a lot of misery. You try to tell the carpenters that their house is crooked. They answer, “We know what we’re doing. Mind your own business.” At this point you become doubly intrigued. You know these people are engaged in some strange crime, or they have escaped from a lunatic asylum.

Almost all the people who write about saving K-12 education come from outside the field. One day, they see that crooked house; their minds are never the same. My favorite example is Albert Lynd, a Harvard-educated businessman with young children in the schools. He ended up joining the school board. Once inside the K-12 beast, he thought: wow, these people are nuts, I have to tell the world. He wrote a wonderful book in 1951 titled “Quackery in the Public Schools.” More than 60 years ago, society was more polite, from what I hear. Imagine the words he was saying in private.

Planned Illiteracy in our Public Schools

Another great example is a Canadian name Mary Johnson, a housewife in the 1950s and a piano teacher. As it usually happens, there was a tiny incident. A 5th grade student insisted on reading “minuet” for “mimic” and Mary Johnson knew that everything was going to hell. She became a bulldog fighting for real education. All hail Mary Johnson! She wrote a book called “Planned Illiteracy in our Public Schools” in 1970. Note the word “planned.”

Once you see that crooked house, you want to tell people about each flaw. It takes a lot of skill to build a really good crooked house. You have to use gimmicks such as Whole Word reading theory, New Math, Constructivism, Self-esteem, Relevance, Multiculturalism, and literally dozens of flawed theories. The essence of the conspiracy is 1) concoct these cons and 2) force them on students.

Bad education theories function like viruses in a computer: everything slows down. Neither the theories nor the viruses appear by themselves. Somebody has to put them in play. Similarly—and this is the good news—you can take the bad ideas out of the schools just as you can remove viruses from your own computer. That’s what we need to do, clean out the garbage.

What we have in K-12 education is a vast interlocking array of crookedness, both in the sense of a crooked house and crooked people. I think at this point there are few good ideas left in American public schools. Instead there are two dozen viruses, i.e., intellectual sophistries that render progress difficult. Just consider this one example. Self-esteem emphasizes positive reinforcement for all students. Sounds good, right? In practice this turns out to mean that you have to eliminate any material that some students find difficult. There goes your curriculum.

Bad education theories function like viruses in a computer

A lot of very smart sensitive people have written books about their own crooked-house experiences. Charlotte Iserbyt has a book on the Internet you can read for free called “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.” Note the word “deliberate.” More recently, attorney Robin Eubanks published a book called “Credentialed to Destroy: how education became a weapon.” Eubanks saw the homework that children were bringing home from school and thought: are you kidding? All these books end up making the same point: we’re being attacked by a carefully orchestrated plot to take down our country.

This year, Samuel Blumenfeld, our ranking real educator, published his tenth book, “Crimes of the Educators.” He says that K-12 education is a “criminal enterprise from top to bottom.”

The problem with our Education Establishment is that it is steeped in deviousness. I don’t know how they live with themselves. Each year they come back with their warmed-over sophistries and their cute little propaganda ploys. Really, the only way we’ll have any relief is if the public starts to treat them with the contempt they deserve. These are clowns that pop out of a clown car and throw garbage at us. At some point you have to think: I don’t want clowns throwing garbage at me. That’s reasonable.

I’ve put hundreds of education articles and videos on the Internet; they are all trying to explain various nooks and crannies of the conspiracy to dumb down our public schools. In effect, we’ve got doors that won’t close, floor boards that are warped, pipes that leak, and a fireplace that will always spew smoke into the house. It takes a weird kind of genius to build a fireplace like that. I’ve written 30 articles just on reading. That’s how slippery and twisted each sophistry is. Do you think I exaggerate? Rudolf Flesch wrote two whole books (1955, 1981) explaining Why Johnny Can’t Read but millions of people still didn’t get the message. Canadian and American schools have been in an alternative reality for 75 years. In that reality, sight-words are a great way for children to learn to read. That’s the triumph of sophistry over common sense, because almost no one can learn to read with sight-words.

Common Core is a repackaging of all the bad ideas from the last 75 years but now locked-in by federal regulation

Five or six years ago a Canadian woman contacted me on the Internet. She was really angry. I would ask a question and she would write back two anguished pages. She had a daughter in the third grade and the school officials had announced: “Your daughter has dyslexia and will never learn to read so we recommend tape recorders and various adaptive technologies.” This woman basically screamed back, “My child is fine. You have messed her up because you won’t teach her to read with phonics.” Only nine, and this kid was already written off. Heartbreaking.

Multiply her story times many millions and you know what the Education Establishment in Canada did to the children there. All of this is contained in the phrase “planned illiteracy.” Keep a child from reading and you create a tragedy that spreads out in all directions. I’m sure the mother’s health was affected. As I say, she was really angry.

This ruthless game is continuing in the United States where Common Core is a repackaging of all the bad ideas from the last 75 years but now locked-in by federal regulation. The whole thing is wonderful if you like totalitarianism. The sales pitch is sophisticated but all the ideas are the same old instructions for building a crooked house.

My hope is that you’ll share this article with friends, discuss the ideas, and then find more information on the Internet. The people in charge of your schools probably do not deserve your support. Quite the opposite. Get informed. Get involved. Knock down the crooked house. Then we’ll start over and build it right.”

1.  Don’t scare the children.  Too much reality is a bad thing.
2. Be emotionally gentle.

Private schools first, public schools last in Gallup poll
https://www.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/news/latest-news/2017/08/private-schools-first-public-schools-last-in.html

Melissa Wylie, Bizwomen reporter
Aug 22, 2017, 10:31am EDT

A new Gallup survey showed seven out of 10 U.S. adults believe private schools provide excellent education, receiving far more support than public schools.

Public schools ranked last among participants, falling behind home schools, charter schools, church-affiliated schools and private schools in terms of providing excellent K-12 education. Only 44 percent in the survey thought public schools provided a good or excellent job of educating; 71 percent thought the same of private schools.

Both Democrats and Republicans ranked private schooling as most effective. Church-affiliated schools also ranked second for both parties. But Republicans ranked public schools last, while Democrats ranked them third, per Gallup.

“Americans as a whole believe private and parochial schools do a better job of educating students than public schools do, something that might be remedied with the right federal or state public school education policies,” Gallup’s Lydia Saad told United Press International. “Another remedy may be expanding charter schools so that parents of children in failing public schools who can’t afford private school have other options for their children.”

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is a proponent of charter schools as an alternative to public schools, UPI reported.

Gallup reported this year’s overall ranking of educational institutions is the same as it was in a similar survey in 2012. However, in the past five years, Democrats’ support of charter schools has fallen from 61 percent to 48 percent. Republicans’ support of charter schools has remained steady at 62 percent, per Gallup.

“To enable their joy!”

Every action I take as a teacher is directed toward the above statement.  Without attempting to overreach or go “over-the-top”, I hold this statement as fundamentally true and vital.  To the best of my knowledge, ability, skill, and experience, every aspect of encounter with me is my attempt to enable a student’s joy, now and in the future, no matter the subject, nor the task.

Students may even dispute that this is what is happening.  That is the absence of experience and wisdom talking, but I am patient.  How could anyone contemplate teaching, in reality, without patience.  Impossible.  Whether recognized or not now, and I am willing to try and explain where beneficial, how what I am able to do now comports to the above maxim.

I want to be able to take part in the development and enrichment of students’ lives as they prepare for their futures, encouraging them to excel in all that they do.

An important motivator for student learning is for me to build a clear expectation of success, encourage the students in all that they do and provide fair and beneficial assessment. I need to ensure that the curriculum directly links to the learning outcomes/essential learnings of each key learning area while recognizing and acknowledging achievement.

As a professional I respect my peers and will teach students to respect others by being a good example. Respect is vital, especially because there are many social and cultural differences in schools.

I believe that as a teacher I play a huge role, not only in the development of students for their future but also to build their confidence, purpose and personal sense of responsibility. Therefore I need to continually reflect on what I have said and done in the classroom to correct any errors and to learn from successes.

Teaching and learning online is more difficult, in my experience, both for student and for teacher. It is a “limited bandwidth”, in terms of human emotion and pathos, method, and therefore can be more easily frustrating to the student. It requires an additional level of maturity for a student to be successful learning online. I will not be physically present to any student, by definition, to encourage, cajole, ensure, motivate, etc. Students must assume greater responsibility, while more convenient, for engaging actively in the pedagogical exercise, and reaping the recognition of performance thereof.

I provide exercises and pedagogy, upon experience, I find appropriate for the student in front of me. I grade accordingly, fairly, and impartially. To earn an “A”, it must be earned. To earn an “F”, it must be earned, etc. I try to provide very timely feedback and encouragement and precise direction to students, so that, of their own volition, they may correct course in a timely way to most benefit their studies and the results thereof.

Matthew P. McCormick, 1/16/18