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Tag Archives: Whole Language

Revealing Uncouth Fraud One-Step at a time among Public Education’s Critics – Part 1/2

25 Sep

I started out looking for a list of countries that use standardized tests as the United States does. Eventually, I found what I wanted and that post will appear another time.

At first, what I found wasn’t what I was looking for but what I learned painted a different picture than the criticism that is often heaped on the public schools by those political/religious groups that want to change the education system in the US to fit their beliefs or achieve their agendas.

Since World War II, America’s public schools have been victimized by so-called expert fanatics that seem to know what is right for the schools. Each time one of these waves has arrived (Whole Language Approach to Learning and the Self-esteem movement are two examples), it resulted in disaster for many public schools.

I’m sure private school choice linked to the voucher initiative will prove the same and will solve nothing.  School Choice and the Voucher initiative that refuses to go away are just another unproven theory that will not achieve the desired results.

From Patty Inglish at Hub Pages, I discovered the TOP 5 REASONS MANY TEACHERS QUIT.  What I did was summarize what Patty Inglish wrote. If you want more details, visit her post at Hub Pages by clicking on the link in this paragraph.

“Many teachers quit because teaching is difficult and, to compound this circumstance, many school and school district administrations practice micromanagement and a lack of support that drives teachers away,” Inglish wrote. “The U.S. Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics Teacher Follow-up Survey shows these major self-reported reasons among 7,000 teachers and former teachers for why they quit or are likely to soon quit.”

The persons interviewed report “a constant battle with the administration”, including submitting weekly lesson plans for examination and approval…

[Note: I had to do this for one principal between 1986 and 1989. During that time, the school I was teaching at experienced a fifty-percent teacher turnover, and I also transferred to another school to escape this brute of a micromanager.]

Inglish says, “According to this recent report on teacher attrition by the National Center for Education Statistics, in teachers who quit and took non-education jobs, 64% did so to have more autonomy at work, without micromanagement.”

Continued on September 26, 2011 in Revealing Uncouth Fraud One-Step at a time among Public Education’s Critics – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by on September 25, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, politics, Teaching

 

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The Finland-Singapore Solution to Public Education in the U.S. – Part 3/3

30 Aug

When it was discovered that the Whole Language approach to teaching reading failed, instead of admitting they were wrong, the idealists behind the theory blamed America’s public school teachers.

To punish those teachers, what followed was a movement for school choice designed to allow parents to select the school their children attends. Although voters have rejected this theory in many states, the fanatics behind this movement refuse to surrender.

The next debacle was when President G. W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law, which ignored reality while blaming teachers again for the failure of a theory that many teachers were against but were forced to implement.

The Singapore element to the solution of this educational fiasco in the United States may be found in Civil Disobedience and No Child Left Behind, which says, “Meritocracy is a basic political ideology and a fundamental principle in Singapore’s education system, which aims to identify and groom bright young students for positions of leadership. The system places a great emphasis on academic performance in grading students and granting their admission to special programmes and universities.

“As for discipline in Singapore’s schools, corporal punishment is legal (for male students only), and fully encouraged by the government in order to maintain strict discipline.”

In addition, Singapore has a law that makes it a criminal offense for parents of children that cut school.

To learn more of the details behind the success of Singapore’s public schools, I suggest you see SG Box.com’s post about Singapore Education.

Unless the United States is willing to trust teachers and implement some of what Finland and Singapore have done, education in the US will continue to flounder regardless of laws such as No Child Left behind or failed theories such as Whole Language.

However, implementing these changes will not be easy, because idealists are often fanatics that refuse to surrender.

One well know example of this type of idealistic movement is Al Qaeda—the fanatical Islamic terrorists responsible for 9/11.

The best way to deal with America’s fanatics is to remove the public schools from the political system and trust the teachers to do whatever it takes to teach America’s youth.

Return to The Finland-Singapore Solution to Public Education in the U.S. – Part 2 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

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Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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Posted by on August 30, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, Parenting, politics, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching

 

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