Bruce Deitrick Price

Saving K-12 What Happened to our Public Schools: How Do We Fix Them?
By Bruce Deitrick Price

Ellin Pollachek, Reviewer

Fourteen percent or 32 million American adults cannot read beyond the fifth grade level. Twenty percent of high school graduates do not have basic reading skills and according to the National Center of Educational Statistics (NCES) Austria, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden are the only countries who spend more on education than the U.S. yet we rank 16th in the world in adult reading skills.
Illiteracy begins early. The American Educational Research Association has found that the time to evaluate future illiteracy is in the 3rd grade. If a child is not reading up to grade level by the 3rd grade s/he is 4X less likely to graduate high school and if the child is poor that number rises to 13X.
The research on how to solve this problem is without end but in his new book Saving K-12 What Happened to our Public Schools: How Do We Fix Them?, Bruce Deitrick Price says he has the answers. Price claims that it's a conspiracy by schools, evil teachers and the left's attempt to create mental eunuchs (p. 11) . And how do they do that? They teach sight- reading rather than phonetics.
To the degree the Education Establishment can pull it off, children remain knowledge virgins.... Unfortunately, the people who control public education and shape the debate have another meaning in their minds, and they know exactly what it is: social engineering, indoctrination, political correctness, and left-wing politics. (p. 11).
The debate between sight-reading and phonetics is not new but what is new is Price's conspiracy theory with no facts to back it up.
If you believe Price, it's all John Dewey's fault.
Price writes that John Dewey wanted to “toss” as much content out the window as possible and keep students from excelling in order to keep everyone at the same stage of learning. (p. 53) Price also writes that “He [Dewey] wanted to kill off American individualism." To the contrary, what Dewey wanted was transactional learning where students actually understood what was being taught so that they could offer opinions that were not handed down from the teacher.
Price's flip manner is not just evident in his lack of scholarly background, it is most evident and offensive in his mocking. He may not agree with John Dewey but Dewey deserves the respect of educators. Instead the reader is confronted with statements like:
Okay, folks, place your bets. Was it clueless incompetence on a cosmic scale? Or, was it John Dewey’s collectivist wet dream turned Clockwork Orange? (p. 20)
I don’t know about John Dewey's wet dreams, nor do I wish to, but I do know that Dewey believed "sentences and words, considered in isolation, do not disclose intent. ... Meanings may be inferred or 'adjudged only by means of context.' (The Problem of Logical Subject Matter,” in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry 1938.)
Statistics prove Dewey's theoretical research correct. They confirm that educated parents can communicate meaning to their children as well help them with study skills. Children of poor, uneducated parents can't benefit from parental schooling.
In 2015 the National Council for Educational Statistics (NCES) released a report that considers a parent's ethnicity, income and educational background as contributing factors to the current educational dilemma. There is also a relationship between ethnicity and poverty and how they contribute to illiteracy.
The NCES study looks at children under the age of 18 from the following ethnic groups: White, Asian, Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, Native American, and takes into account the number of parents in a home.
The study concludes that the most educated parents are Whites and Asians. Sixty-six percent of Asian-Americans earned Bachelor's degrees or higher and only 11% of Asian-American children under the age of 18 live in poverty. Fifty percent of whites had a college degree or higher and 12% of white children live in poverty. In contrast twenty-four percent of blacks have a college degree or higher and 36% of black children live in poverty. Correspondingly only 18% of Hispanic parents graduated from college and 30% of Hispanic children live in poverty. Parents in two-parent households are better educated than parents in single parent households.
There is a direct correlation between the level of education of parents and the literacy and success of a child.
Bruce Deitrick Price doesn’t see it that way. He claims that illiteracy and “unlearned information” is a plot by schools, evil teachers and the left's attempt to create mental eunuchs. How they succeed with this plot is by teaching their students to sight-read.
To the degree the Education Establishment can pull it off, children remain knowledge virgins.... Unfortunately, the people who control public education and shape the debate have another meaning in their minds, and they know exactly what it is: social engineering, indoctrination, political correctness, and left-wing politics. (p. 11)
Price then goes on to write that schools are nothing more than indoctrination centers.
They know that slowly memorizing hundreds of Sight-Words is a horribly difficult task, which typically leads nowhere. So we have eight decades of bad faith in the field of reading. [Beginning with Dewey] progressive educators ... want to outwit nature and make everybody end up with similar IQs. Predictably, our schools will be a bust as schools. As indoctrination centers, they are successful.
But the educators are not calling the schools indoctrination centers; they are calling them places of education. And there is all the bad faith you need to kill a civilization. (p.19-20).
Price attempts to make another point by creating his own Lewis Black skit. (p.111-113) He is as successful as a stand-up as he is as a scholar and writer. He’d be booed off the stage but the greater question is why is using an imaginary Lewis Black routine to prove his point?
Saving K-12 What Happened to our Public Schools: How Do We Fix Them? wasn't written to further our knowledge about the failures of public education. It was written as blatant propaganda.

Ellin Pollachek has a PhD. from New York University in Culture and Communications. Some of her writings can be found on http://members.authorsguild.net/epollachek/. Her award-winning photography can be found on http://www.ellinpollachek.com/ & https://www.saatchiart.com/ellinpollachek… (mehr)

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest and open review.

I really wanted to finish this book, and I would have had it been half as long. Interestingly, it could also have been at least half as long and still made the points that it wanted to make. Instead it felt like one of those television shows that are only twenty minutes long and spend ten minutes recapping the story so far.

If what is being claimed by the book is true, it's a pretty damning assessment of the US education system. But there's so much conspiracy theory junk and subjective emphasis that it's hard to work out how concerned Americans should actually be.

The book becomes rapidly repetitive, alarmist and unnecessarily wordy. A punchier argument style would have strengthened the author's contentions.… (mehr)

This book is excessively alarmist. Persuading others to act on improving our public schools requires well-reasoned arguments, not Chicken Little scare tactics. And, no, the public education establishment is not entirely leftist nor are they entirely evil. This type of thinking is at best a distraction, a means to avoid addressing the real issues. I suspect the author's main goal is to sell books to an easily-frightened niche readership who likely long to be reminded that things are worse than they seem.… (mehr)

Saving K-12 What Happened to our Public Schools: How Do We Fix Them?
By Bruce Deitrick Price

There are many factors which contribute to a child's education. Without question, one of them is the school s/he attends and, within that realm, there are the good, the bad and the indifferent. If a child is unfortunate enough not to attend a good school, the chances of her picking up the skills she missed are slim to none.

According to Saving K-12 What Happened to our Public Schools: How Do We Fix Them?, Bruce Deitrick Price claims that illiteracy and unlearned information is a plot by schools, evil teachers and the left's attempt to create mental eunuchs. Claiming to know the reason (note the singular) behind America's 32 million illiterates (50 million if you add in functional illiterates) Price has found a one-trick pony as the cause: sight- reading.

To the degree the Education Establishment can pull it off, children remain knowledge virgins.... Unfortunately, the people who control public education and shape the debate have another meaning in their minds, and they know exactly what it is: social engineering, indoctrination, political correctness, and left-wing politics. (p. 11)

Offering no statistics or research to back up his claims, I decided to do a little research on my own.

The National Council for Educational Statistics (NCES) 2015 report, updated for 2017, considers a parents' ethnicity, income and educational background as contributing factors to the current educational dilemma.

There is also a relationship between ethnicity and poverty and how they contribute to illiteracy.

The NCES study looks at children under the age of 18 from the following ethnic groups: White, Asian, Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, Native American, and also considers the number of parents in a home. According to the NCES study the most educated parents are Whites and Asians. Sixty-six percent of Asian-Americans earned Bachelor's degrees or higher and only 11% of Asian-American children under the age of 18 live in poverty. Fifty percent of whites had a college degree or higher and 12% of white children live in poverty. In contrast twenty-four percent of blacks have a college degree or higher and 36% of black children live in poverty. Correspondingly only 18% of Hispanic parents graduated from college and 30% of Hispanic children live in poverty. Parents in two-parent households are better educated than parents in single parent households.

Given the ease with which these statistics are available it seems odd that Price doesn't include any of these statisics.

The point is that at two distinct points, everyone at the top of American education knew that Sight-Words didn’t work, and in both cases, they went right on [teaching that method].
.....
They know that slowly memorizing hundreds of Sight-Words is a horribly difficult task, which typically leads nowhere. So we have eight decades of bad faith in the field of reading. [Beginning with Dewey] progressive educators ... want to outwit nature and make everybody end up with similar IQs. Predictably, our schools will be a bust as schools. As indoctrination centers, they are successful.

But the educators are not calling the schools indoctrination centers; they are calling them places of education. And there is all the bad faith you need to kill a civilization. (p.19-20)

Price sees it all starting with John Dewey who "mugged public education and left it bleeding in a ditch." (p. 63)

What Dewey really believed in was democracy; not just political democracy but democracy in education. In Dewey's opinion, a democratic way of learning was the only route to individuality. Dewey was not interested in cookie-cutter children who sustained the rigors of core subjects. He wanted to integrate humanity with a core curriculum because he saw humanity as the currency to success. Humanity could be learned, Dewey believed, by giving meaning to words that might be lost if learned out of context. Learning to read phonetically provided no context. "In other words," wrote Dewey, "sentences and words, considered in isolation, do not disclose intent. ... Meanings may be inferred or 'adjudged only by means of context.' (The Problem of Logical Subject Matter", in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry 1938.)

Where are Price's sources to back up the notion that public schools want to indoctrinate its students? The only one that which sounded remotely similar to Price's claims was an article written by Sam Blumenfeld in 2012 for the New American, a magazine published by the far right John Birch Society. That might explain Price's comment that "many of these so-called educators [of the 1950's]were doubtless motivated by wanting to help Russia win the Cold War" (p. 140).

Saving K-12 What Happened to our Public Schools: How Do We Fix Them? wasn't written to further our knowledge about the failures of public education. It was written as blatant propaganda.

Price is preaching to the choir and they, undoubtedly, will take it as gospel.

Some of Ellin Pollachek's writings can be found on http://members.authorsguild.net/epollachek/. Her award-winning photography can be found on http://www.ellinpollachek.com/ & https://www.saatchiart.com/ellinpollachek… (mehr)