Last time I presented some of the background about why I enjoyed Bruce Deitrick Price’s new book Saving K-12: A Citizens Guide to Improving Public Education. In this post, I will present a few examples.

Giving the background on a topic is easy. Choosing examples on that topic when there are so many within one book, is not easy.

“The Education Establishment has spent 100 years making public schools dumber,” Price writes. Ouch. He explains:

That’s a common impression which, after years of research, I could finally explain. John Dewey and his colleagues were in love with social engineering. In devotion to this passion, they were willing to throw almost everything else overboard.

Price writes that the “two most challenging questions in education are: why do public schools settle for so much mediocrity and inefficiency; and how can we fix the situation?”

Mediocrity? Here’s Price:

Please note, my harsh judgment of the public schools is not something I dreamed up. You hear about it in the media every day. The U.S. has 50 million functional illiterates (an unforgivable failure by self-proclaimed experts).

Our students don’t compete well on international tests. A brainy guy like Bill Gates studied the public schools and said, you know what, the schools are so bad they are a threat to the country’s future! In fact, Gates merely repeated what a huge governmental commission concluded in 1983 (the famous Nation at Risk report).

In part one I noted my weariness with the failure of the national school reform movement. This is from Bruce Deitrick Price:

If you look back, you can find that many smart, sensible people have been writing laments and alarms about public schools for a long time. The decade 1948-1958 witnessed the publication of at least 10 major books with titles such as Retreat from Learning, Quackery in the Public Schools, Educational Wastelands, and Why Johnny Can’t Read.

“So, we can take it as stipulated,” Price writes, “that the nation’s public schools ran wildly off the tracks, starting a long time ago.”

Are you depressed yet?

In the first two chapters, you’ll read:

1) Culture Wars

“American children wander forlornly in an alien landscape they know little about and understand less.”

2) Reading Wars

“The Education Establishment favors the theories and methods that lead to bad results, and this is most blatantly so in reading…. But why? The short answer, I believe, is because John Dewey and his followers were far-left ideologues. They thought leveling was a good plan.”

So much of the school reform movement’s commentary and analysis amounts to a blah blah blah aimed at not overly offending the educational BLOB. Those writers can then still seem friendly to a system that is not friendly to Western Civilization.

In chapter 6, Price brilliantly compares Common Core with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) — both of which, he writes, are “bad to the bone.” “Here are ten descriptions that apply equally to Obamacare and Common Core” (I have only listed the headings):

1. Huge Federal Power Grab
2. Not a Response to Popular Demand
3. Incomprehensible by Design.
4. Public Excluded from Legislative Process
5. Dishonest Marketing
6. Media Complicit
7. Very Expensive and Would Get More So
8. Fundamental Transformation
9. Totalitarian Intent
10. Instant Train Wreck

In chapter 7 Price writes:

Take care of basic skills and basic knowledge, and everything else will fall into place. Unfortunately, our Education Establishment has spent decades building a fact-free school. Kids are kept busy all day but they are not expected to learn a lot.

Math. History. Methods. Common Core. Price covers a lot of ground in 180 pages. In the “About the Author” section at the end of the book, one of the endorsements reads “Bruce Price is one of the 10 people in the country who can explain what’s going on in education.”

Lenin asked his famous question in 1901: “What is to be done?”

Today in education, that question remains as hot and as urgent as an oncoming typhoon.

Oh, if Americans would realize the urgency…every year marks the end of the 12 years another group of kids has spent going from 1st grade through 12th.

Bruce Deitrick Price’s book is worth buying by those who appreciate reading the work of someone who doesn’t pull his punches. Click here for Amazon.com‘s page on Saving K-12.

The Left is working overtime to silence and/or marginalize conservative voices in America
The time to support IFI is now!

Every 12 years another set of children progress through America’s government-run school system. Those that graduated this past spring started twelve years before that as first-graders in 2005.

In 2005 I had the honor of serving as the president of the Family Taxpayers Foundation (FTF), a non-profit focusing chiefly on school reform — both curriculum and finance…a to z, soup to nuts.

Jack Roeser, the founder of FTF and a self-made millionaire, witnessed the disintegration of the public schools both academically and fiscally.

School reform became a passion for him, and it was for me as well. During the years that I headed-up FTF in the mid-2000’s, we tracked and reported the news on the school reform front and conducted an exhaustive study of Chicago suburban area school district spending. That study is worthy of a separate article — suffice it to say that the adults running the “public” schools (teachers and administrators) enjoyed yearly pay raises unheard of in the private sector even as academic performance stagnated or dropped.

What resulted from my tenure at FTF was weariness with the national school reform movement. So many of the experts that I agreed with didn’t seem to grasp the fact that their message was not reaching enough people, or that their progress in bringing reform to the system was relatively miniscule.

After I left FTF, I stopped paying attention to the school reform movement.

Then, in 2013 I read an article by Bruce Deitrick Price. Price’s writings have been posting at what is still one of the best websites, American Thinker, since 2012.

When an individual is weary with a political topic and or political movement, it’s not easy to revive enthusiasm for it. But Price’s writing did that for me. Why? There is a directness, boldness, and thoughtfulness that kept my attention.

Over the years when I have come across articles on American Thinker it is common for me to ignore the author’s name and just begin reading. Without fail, when I found myself in agreement with an article about American public education, and that old spark in me on the topic reignited, I’d scroll up to see who authored the piece…and it was Bruce Deitrick Price.

When I discovered that he had authored a book on the subject of education, it was an easy decision to add it to my reading list.

Saving K-12: A Citizen’s Guide to Improving Public Education.

It doesn’t disappoint. The cover reads: “What happened in Our Public Schools? How Do We Fix Them?”

The following is the summary of the book from the publisher’s page (with emphasis added by me):

Public schools are a vast money pit. Education officials seem to prefer inefficiency and mediocrity. We could have better schools at less cost. This book explains how.

Bruce Deitrick Price is the country’s most prolific and aggressive writer on education. He is good at explaining the root causes, the problems that typically occur, and the ideological obsessions that lead our Education Establishment astray.

This book presents 65 articles divided into 10 themes: Reading; Math; Weird Theories and Methods; Common Core; Historical Background; Guilty as Charged; Where Are Our Leaders; and What to Do Now. You can read the articles in any order and dip in wherever you want. This is pleasant reading about grim topics. If we don’t save the public schools, we’re not going to save very much else.

Here is the author’s short bio:

Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer. He graduated with Honors in English Literature from Princeton and lived for many years in Manhattan where he ran a graphic design business. Along the way he was fascinated by the counterproductive practices so common in public schools. He founded Improve-Education.org in 2005.

In part two I’ll provide examples of Price’s “aggressive” approach as revealed in the book.

The Left is working overtime to silence and/or marginalize conservative voices in America
The time to support IFI is now!