The Blumenfeld Education Letter October_1993

8/7/2019 The Blumenfeld Education Letter October_1993

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Education Letter, Pg. 2 , October 1993

disproportionately at the bottom. Half werewhite.An additiona150 million adults fared alittle better but were still considered to haveinadequate reading and writing skills. Theycould not, for instance, use a calculator forbasic addition.O n l y 20% H i g h l y L i t e r a te

One-third of all adults performed atmiddle level (scoring 276 to 325). Only about20 percent-34 to 40 million-scored high,handling challenging tasks that involvedcomplex documents and background infor-mation."Ican't stress enough the importance ofthesefindings," said Riley,who urged schoolsto improve, business to increase efforts atworkplace training, and "parents to slowdown in their lives to give their children'seducation more attention."For years, business executives have saidthe low level of literacy among tens of mil-lions of Americans was a direct threat to theU.S. economy. Secretary Riley and Labor

Secretary Robert Reich have been warning ofa further divided society, one where theeducated get well-paying jobs and the resthave a hard time eking out a living.American business has been payingdearly for the nation's literacy problems,said Keith Poston, spokesman for the Na-tional Alliance of Business, a group dedi-cated to public-education reform. It is notunusual for employers to "reject three out offour applications because they cannot reador wri te well enough to hold entry-level jobs.Half the applications are thrown inthe trash."''We are not talking about assembly-line jobs any more," said Poston, who saidtoday's jobs require workers to read manu-als, write, and interpret. The results of thesurvey, he said, "translate into low wagesand lost jobs."

Businesses estimate they lose between$2S-billion to $30-billion a year nationwidein lost productivity, errors and accidentsattributable to poor literacy. ''We have esti-mated that only about 25percent of the adultpopulation is highly literate," said BrendaBell, vice president of marketing for theNational Alliance of Business.Irwin S.Kirsch, a principal author of thenew report, said those scoring lowes t in liter-acywere a diverse group of people and "thatimmigrant patterns do not account for this."They were less likely to vote and to readnewspapers, and more likely to be unem-ployed. Their median pay was around $245a week.

At no time in American history have somany people earned high school and collegedegrees-leading many to describe the coun-try as better educated than ever. However,according to this study, a diploma does notmean a person is functionally literate. Morethan half of high-school graduates werefound to have restricted abilities in math andreading. Yet, the overwhelming majority ofall Americans believe that they read andwrite "well" or "very well. II (Boston Globe,9/9/93; USA Today, 9/9/93;NY Times, 9/9/93;Detroit News, 9/9/93)C o m m e n t :

At last, our own fat-headed governmenthas provided the hard, irrefutable evidencethat almost half of America's 191 millionadults read and write so poorly that they areunable to function effectively in our high-tech economy. Yet, these functional illiter-ates were all ed uca ted at grea texpense in ourgovernment schools, spent more time inclassrooms than any previous generation,and emerged from the process with virtuallyno employable skills. Secretary Riley's ad-vice that they go back to school for a "tune-up" is tantamount to advising a malpracticevictim to go back to the same doctor thatbotched the job to begin with.

L.....- The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box 45161- Boise, Idaho 83711 -'


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Education Letter, Pg. 3r October 1993

Of course, we have been telling the publicfor years now, in print and on radio talkshows, that the cause of our literacy declineis the whole-word teaching method used inour primary grades. Rudolf Flesch, in 1955,wrote an incisi ve book about the subject withthe unforgettable title W hy Johnny C an't R ead.In 19671 Professor Jeanne Chall also pro-duced a book about the battle over readinginstruction methods aptly entitled Learningto R ead: The G reat D ebate. And in 1973, myown book, T he N e w Illite ra te s, was publishedin which I said that the methods of teachingreading in most schools were causing wide-spread reading disability, often referred toas "dyslexia." Finally, in 1981, Flesch carneout with Why Jo hn ny Still C an 't R ead , a devas-tating analysis of the look-say method andits harmful effects on the children in Amer-ica. So there have been no lack of books, nolack of alarms, to warn the American people,and particularly American educators, of theliteracy disaster that lay ahead if the schoolscontinued to use faulty teaching methods.The question iSIwhy hasn't our govern-ment done anything about it? The answer isthat the government is too heavily influ-enced by the very same people who havebrought about the disaster.There is no precedent in history of anentire nation being dumbed down by itsown government education system. Noteven the communist countries did that. Infact, academic training in the communistcountries was so good that it provided thecitizens with the literacy that made it pos-sible for them to break the chains of theoppressive totalitarian system itself.C rip pling a N ation

But the American public school systemis slowly crippling the country by destroy-ing the brains of its youngest citizens, and bythe time the American people wake up to

what is being done to them by their psycho-educators, it may be too late. America willlook more like Brazil than the America wehave known. As the survey revealed, thosewith the lowest scores earned a medianweekly salary of $230 to $245 while thosewith the highest scores had incomes of $620to $ 6 8 0 . In other words, we are creating asociety in which the gap between the haves-the educated-and the have nots-the un-educated-is growing wider and widerexact!ywhat public education was supposecto prevent.Of course, the ruling elite believe that asubmissive, dumbed-down population, keptamused and titillated by sexual license andTVsitcoms is just fine. Just as the communistrulers of the former Soviet Union didn't carehow miserable and impoverished were thelives of the masses, so the new Americanruling class made up of the universitarianelite look down on everyone else as beinghopelessly inferior and only worthy of thelives the elite has planned for them. Itwasliteracy "expert" T. G. Sticht, now workingfor Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who wrotein 1987:

Many companies have moved operations toplaces with cheap, relatively poorly educated labor.Whatmaybecrudal, they say, is the dependability ofa labor force and how well it can be managed andtrained-not its general educational level, although asmall cadre of highly educated creative people isessential to innovation and growth. Ending discrimi-nation and changing values are probably more im-portant than reading and moving low-income fami-lies into the middle class.

That's what Outcome-Based Educationis all about: the end of the American dream,the end of upward mobility. Infact, Prof.AnthonyG. Oettinger, chairman of theCenterfor Information Policy Research at HarvardUniversity and member of the elitist Councilon Foreign Relations, told an audience ofcommunications executives in 1981:

,-- The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box 45161- Boise, Idaho 83711 --,


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Education Letter, Pg. 4 ,Odober 1993

Our idea of literacy, I am afraid, is obsoletebecause it rests on a frozen and classical definition.Literacy, as we know it today, is the product of theconditions of the industrial revolution, of urbaniza-tion, of the need for a work force that could, in effect,"write in a fine round hand." ...But as much as we might think it is, literacy isnot an eternal phenomenon. Today's literacy is aphenomenon that has its roots in the nineteenth cen-tury, and one does not have to reach much fartherback to think of civilizations with different conceptsof literacy based, for example, on oral, rather thanwritten, traditions.The present "traditional" concept ofliteracy hasto do with the ability to read and write. But the realquestion that confronts us today is: How do we helpcitizens function well in their society? How can theyacquire the skills necessary to solve their problems?Do we, for example, really want to teach peopleto do a lot of sums or write in "a fine round hand"when they have a five-dollar hand-held calculator ora word processor to work with? Or, do we really haveto have everybody literate---writing and reading inthe traditional sense-when we have the meansthrough our technology to achieve a new flowering oforal communication?What is speech recognition and speech synthe-sis all about if itdoes not lead to ways of reducing theburden on the individual of the imposed notions ofliteracy that were a product of nineteenth centuryeconomics and technology?Complexity-everybodyismoaning about tasksbecoming too complex for people to do. A congress-man who visited one of my classes recently said, "Wehave such low-grade soldiers in the U.S. that we haveto train them with comic books." And an armycaptain in my class shot back: ''What's wrong withcomic books? My people function."

It is the traditional idea that says certain formsof communication, such as comic books, are "bad."But in the modem context of functionalism they maynot be all that bad.We have the potential for using the cathode raytube to transmit pictorial information and for devel-oping it to a much greater extent than we have as adynamic fonn of communication, whose implica-tions for training and schooling and so on are quitedifferent from linear print or "frozen" literacy.

Wi th views like those expressed by Prof.Oettinger, no wonder the schools no longerview literacy as anything but a very limitedworkaday "function." Indeed, Oettinger

represents the worst of pragmatic educa-tional philosophy in which the grand pur-pose of education is merely to produce a"functioning" citizen. The love ofpure learn-ing, the striving for wisdom has no place inOettinger's idea of education. Functionalliteracy means being able to read comic booksbut not Dickens or Shakespeare or the Bible.Itmeans having just enough literacy to beable to get by, or function in our society.Gone is the notion of reading to developone's intellect, satisfy one's curiosity aboutthe world, enjoy good poetry, know the wordof God. Gone is the notion that literacyopens the entire world of the wri tten word tothe individual and thereby becomes an inex-haustible source of pleasure and knowledgethroughout one's life. Gone is the notion ofbooks being a treasure trove for the mind, apriceless inheritance from all of those whocame before us. Man is now to be reduced toa passive viewer of the cathode ray tube,responding to carefully selected stimuli likePavlov's salivating dogs. C.s. Lewis, in hisS cr ew ta pe L ette rs, describes the dumbingdown process that all tyrants impose on theirpeople. Screwtape says:

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast,over-all movement towards the discrediting, andfinally the elimination, of every kind of human excel-lence---moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And isit not pretty to notice how Democracy (in the incanta-tory sense) is now doing for us the work that was oncedone by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by thesame methods? You remember how one of the GreekDictators


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Education Letter, Pg. 5, October 1993

go through the field with a cane. The little stalks willnow of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. Thebig ones are beginning to bite off their own in theirdesire to Be Like Stalks. (p, 63)

Undoubtedly the universitarian elite isdelighted at how well they've succeeded indumbing down America. The survey provesthat their plan has worked better than anyone of them could have imagined. Think ofit, destroying the literacy of the most power-ful nation on earth, and with the help of itsown intelligent, freedom-loving citizens toboot. And the plan continues to work likemagic. Each September, the Americanpeop Ie.like submissive sheep, willing}yplacetheir children in the government's schoolswhere nonsurgical prefrontal lobotomies areperformed on the brains of these childrenwith virtually no resistance. And there isevery indication that the process will bespeeded up with whole language and OBE.Dumbed-Down Educators

Of course, the new young psycho-edu-cators coming out of the universities have noidea of how far we have fallen in literacy inthis country, In fact, they are not even awareof how inferior their own literacy skills arecompared with those of the teachers of pre-vious generations. But it is important thatwenot forget the past, for that is the only waywe can measure the effect of the dumbingdown process. Simply compare these twostatistics: the first from S ch oo l a nd S ocie ty ofJanuary 30,1915 in which the U'S. Bureau ofEducation reported that in 1910 only 22 outof 1,000 children between the ages of 10 and14 in the U.S. were illiterate, a percentagerate of 2.2; the second from the B osto n G lo beof September 9, 1993 reporting that 90 mil-lion Americans can barely read and write.The report also tells us that minorities-blacks and Hispanics-were disproportion-ately at the bottom of the literacy scale. Yet,

literacy statistics from 1890 to 1930 show asteady improvement in literacy amongblacks. For example, in 1890, the illiteracyrate among blacks was 57.1 percent, in 1900itwas 44.5 percent, in 1910 itwas 30.4 per-cent, in 1920 it was 22.9 percent, and in 1930itwas 16.3percent. We have no doubt that ifchildren had continued to be taught to readby intensive, systematic phonics, the illiter-acy rate among blacks today would be closeto zero. But with look-say, the statisticsbegan to gain the the other direction. Today,black functional illiteracy now stands closeto 50 percent, close to what itwas in 1900!( Sc hoo l and Socie ty , 11/19/21, p. 466;4/9/32,p.489)The most reliable source of statistics onilliteracy in America prior to the introduc-tion of look-say in the schools is S ch oo l a ndSociety of April 9, 1932. It states:

Illiteracy of the white population in 1930 inurban territory was 2.5 [percent]; in rural-farm terri-tory 3.4;and in rural non-farm territory, 2.9 per cent.Illiteracy among Negroes in the urban popula-tion was 9.2 per cent; in the rural population 23.2 percent; in the rural non-farm population 20.5 per cent.The high degree of literacy to be found in theNorth Central states issuggested by the fact that Iowaregistered an illiteracy ofbutO.8 percent. That figureis striking when one considers the fact that the aver-age for the coun try in 1930 was 4.3 per cent. ...In the North and West the percentage of illiter-acy for the total population ten years old and overwas2.7; in the South, 8.2. Of the native white populationsix tenths of 1percent were illiterate both in the Northand in the West, and 3.7 in the South; of the foreign-born whites 10.5 per cent in the North, 9.8 per cent inthe South and 5.1 per cent in the West. In the North4.7 per cent of the Negroes were illiterate; in theSouth, 19.7 per cent; in the West, 3.3 per cent.

How far we have fallen! There is onlyone solution to our illiteracy problem: amassive exodus from the public schools.That's the fastest, most effective way to de-stroy the monster before itdestroys us.

L..-- The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box 45161- Boise, Idaho 83711 ......1


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Engler's ChoiceOnAugust 19,1992,Republican Gover-

nor John Engler of Michigan signed a billeliminating all local property taxes fromsupport ofpublic education. This amountedto the largest tax cut in Michigan's history.Property taxes have contributed about $6-billion a year to the public schools, or two-thirds of total school funding, and propertytax relief was high on the agenda of the statelegislature. But then something totally un-expected happened.

The Republicans proposed a 20percentcut which the Democrats called "just pea-nuts." The Democrats decided to go onebetter. Senator Debbie Stabenow, leadingDemocratic candidate tochallenge Engler in1994,introduced a bill eliminating propertytaxes entirely for school funding. TheDemocrats gambled that if the bill passed,Engler would have toveto it,making Demo-crats look like the true friend of the propertyowner.

Infact, when Engler heard ofthe Demo-crats' plan he told state Senator Dan De-Grow, "They won't do it." But DeGrowasked, "Butwhat if theydo?" Engler replied,"They won't ... but if they do ... we take it."Thus the stage was set for the biggest schoolfunding upset in Michigan history. Appar-ently, theDemocrats had forgotten that whenit comes to political poker, Engler is an ace.

The measure's direct impact will be anaverage cut in property taxes of 60-65 per-cent, beginning with the summer 1994 taxbills. Naturally, the educators were stupe-fied. Robert Laundroche, finance directorfor Livonia Public Schools, predicted the af-tershocks out ofLansing would be devastat-ing to public education statewide. "The airaround here is like people are getting up,dusting themselves off after an earthquake,"he said. "There was no warning. There isutter disbelief that this could happen, and

real fear about the future." Trini Johan-nesen, vice president of the 123,OOO-memberMichigan Education Association, remarked,"This is leading right to the dissolution ofpublic education."

Meanwhile, powerful lobbies haveconverged onLansing to influence the legis-lators who must find new ways of fundingpublic education. What ismaking itdifficultfor the educators to get what they want is thefact that the state legislature is now con-trolled by Republicans who hold a majorityin the state Senate, share equal power in theHouse, and own the Governor's mansion.

A major battle is going on between pri-vate sector lobbyists and the Michigan Edu-cation Association. Rich Studley of theMichigan Chamber of Commerce told re-porters, "We support repeal of the teachertenure act, they [theMEA]supportthestatusquo. We support parental choice in schools,they're opposed. We support privatization,they're opposed. There are some clearpolicydifferences. "

So far, the legislators have not come upwith a plan to replace the lost $6-billion forthe schools. But Governor Engler sees thesituation asanhistoricopportunity tochangeeducation. In fact, he has his own teamwriting his education plan, and educationgroups are scrambling to head him off.(L an Sin g S ta te J ou rn al, 9/7/93; D etroit F reePress, 7/22-23/93; A m eric an S pe cta to r, Oct.93)Comment:

No question about it,Gov. Engler has aonce-in-a-lifetime opportunity to makeeducational historynot only inMichigan butthroughout the country. Indeed, instead oftrying to find ways to "improve" publiceducation or find other sources of funding,he ought to propose privatizing the systementirely, thus relieving taxpayers of thisunnecessary, debilitating and unjust mill-stone around their necks .

......_ The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box 45161-Boise, Idaho 83711 .....I


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The arguments for privatization arequite compelling. In the first place, privati-zation can easily be implemented by simplyhaving theschool committees appoin tboardsof trustees torun each school in the district asa private institution. As private institutionsthe schools would be accountable to theconsumers: parents and children. Educationwould have to become much more realisticand efficient. The trustees would decide onthe school's philosophy ofeducation, decideon the curriculum, hire the teachers, andcharge a realistic tuition. Children frompoor homes would be given scholarships bycommunity funds set up for that purpose.Thus, every child in Michigan would haveaccess to a good private education.

Privatization would eliminate the needfor that large state bureaucracy that nowruns the public schools, and it would elimi-nate much of the top-heavy, costly a.dmini-stration that presently runs the highly ineffi-cient state system. The privatized schoolswould be free to raise revenues through allofthe techniques now used by private schools:fund drives, founda tiongran ts,alumni asso-ciations, bake sales, auctions, raffles, andwhatever other ingenious ways they canthink of.

The future of education in America canbe radically changed by what Gov. Englerdoes inMichigan. Ifhe decides to do the un-expected and unthinkable-privatize--hewill become a national hero overnight, atleast in the eyes of most Republicans, andthat will insure his nomination for the Presi-dency in 1996. If he does less, he will havemissed that rare, once-in-a-lifetime momenttomake history. Technology has brough tusto the point where the public schools havebecome largely obsolete, a virtual hindranceto the further progress of this country. Ithascreated an underc1ass which has destroyedthe inner city of Detroi t and turned childreninto hardened, senseless criminals. The state

monopoly education system is the mostsocialistic sector ofMichigan's economy. Itought to be done away with.

NAEP Tes ts Reveal S tudents 'Poor Reading Sk illsMore than two-thirds of the nation's

4th,8th, and 12thgrade students-includingone-quarter of high school seniors-are notproficient readers, according to the latestresults from the National Assessment ofEducational Progress. The data also con-tained some particularly disturbing newsabout black students. The percentage ofblack high school seniors who scored at theproficient level was less than half that forwhite students.

"The results of this study are extremelytroubling," said Secretary ofEduca tionRich-ard W. Riley. "As a nation, America willcertainly go from great to second-rate ifourchildren cannot read well enough."

The Congressionally mandated assess-mentwas given in 1992to 140,000public andprivate schools across the country. Also, infindings that are sure to heighten the al-ready-bitter debate over thebestway toteachreading, the study suggests some possiblelinksbetween students' reading achievementand the type of reading instruction they aregetting. In grade 4, for example, studentswhose teachers said they had heavily em-phasized literature-based approaches toteaching reading tended to do better on theassessment than students in classroomswhere there was little or no attention paid tothat approach.

Likewise, students who were poorerreaders tended to get more phonics instruc-tion in the classroom. However, "you can'tdraw a cause-and-effect relationship," cau-tioned Alan E.Farstrup, the executive direc-tor of the International Reading Association.

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Education Letter, Pg. 8 .October 1993

"It may be that phonics instruction is anartifact of how schools are organized or afeature of school remedial programs."Moreover, he added, poorer readers may begetting more phonics because their teachersbelieve they need additional instruction inthat area.The findings do, however, show thatmore teachers are using literature in theirclassrooms, integrating the teaching of read-ing and writing, and focusing on "wholelanguage" strategies for teaching reading.More than 80 percent of 4th-grade teacherssaid they had put at least moderate emphasison those strategies. In comparison, only 61percent of teachers said they had givenphonics a similar emphasis.One surprise in the study was the lowperformance of schoolchildren in California.That state in 1987adopted a new frameworkfor language arts instruction that called for asignificant shift from traditional approachesto teaching reading tonewer .litera ture-basedapproaches. And 87 percent of Californiateachers said they had heavily emphasizedthe new approaches. Yet, the average read-ing-proficiency scores of California's 4thgraders were near the bottom on the assess-ment. Only the District of Columbia, Guam,Hawaii, Louisiana, and Mississippi had loweraverage scores.Concerning the poor performance ofblack students, Michael D.Nettles, a Univer-sity of Michigan education professor saidthat more information is needed to explainwhy black students read so poorly. Only 16percent of black students were judged to beproficient readers, compared with 43 per-cent of white students, 39 percent of Asianstudents, and21 percent of Hispanics. In theDistrict of Columbia, black students hadscores that were among the lowest in thenation, while its white students scored at thetop nationally.The NAEP report "indicates that we are

producing yet another generation of poorreaders who will not be prepared to enter theworkforce," said William H. Kolberg, thepresident of the National Alliance of Busi-ness, which has long contended that Ameri-can workers lack adequate literacy skills.(Education Week,9/22/93)Comment:

Finally, there seems to be some recogni-tion that teaching methods may have some-thing to do with how well children learn toread. Better late than never. But there is somuch confusion and uncertainty amongeducators over instruction methods, that wehave no confidence in their ability to do theright thing in time to save this generation ofchildren in the public schools. That is whyour advice to parents is: get your childrenout of the public schools NOW.

V ita l V ideosDuring our recent trip to Michigan, wewere shown two extraordinary videos. Thefirst was about the Waco atrocity, the most

chilling video I have ever seen about ourrunaway government agencies and their partin perpetrating this Nazi-like assaul t againstAmerican citizens.We hope that a million Americans seethis video and demand an investigation asthorough as the one recently conducted onthe Iran-Contra affair. The video, 'Waco:The Untold Story," can be obtained from:American Justice Federation, 3850 S. Emer-son Ave., Indianapolis, Indiana 46203.Phone:317-780-5204. Price: $20.The second video, "The Guiding Hand,"is about Gov. Clinton's famous Governor'sSchool, in which the best and brightest stu-dents in Arkansas were selected for human-istic brainwashing over a six-week period. Itcan be obtained by calling 1-800-886-8852.

.___ The Blumenfeld Education Letter - Post Office Box 45161- Boise, Idaho 83711 -'

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The Blumenfeld Education Letter October_1993