di: Elite Universities Call for Change in Reading Education

[Dave Ziffer]

*Dear List*: After eight (not four) decades of failure, I wouldn't get 
my hopes up.

I'm pretty sure that public school reading instruction is wholly 
operated by the curriculum publishers. They control the whole thing:

  * the education departments where radical new ed philosophies are
    hatched and future teachers are taught what curricula to buy,

  * and the school administrators who are promised post-retirement sales
    jobs
    <http://web.archive.org/web/20221201001858/https:/www.aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=15102>,
    so long as they've been buying the "right" stuff.

You don't make money selling effective curricula that teachers and 
parents love and keep for years. You get rich convincing administrators 
that the crap you're selling this year will fix the problems caused by 
the crap you sold them last year. For more on this process, read: The 
Schools Are The Problem - My Child Will Read 
<http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml>

Socialist systems are unreformable. They have captive audiences that 
have already paid for the product or service via taxation, who must then 
pay the whole price all over again if they want alternatives. There is 
nothing to stop monopoly government providers (and their vendors) from 
operating purely for their own narcissistic benefit, leaving them free 
to fail their customers forever. Until our "public" schools are replaced 
by competing vendors who must control their costs and please their 
customers to survive, there is no reason to expect anything different.

The idea that the entire education industry has for decades been somehow 
mistaken about what succeeds in the classroom is preposterous. All these 
years we've been mindlessly following Lucy Calkins, who "/may not have 
taken into account cognitive science research for decades/"? Really? How 
much more idiotic can it get?

We've been fighting this fight ever since Rudolf Flesch wrote /Why 
Johnny Can't Read/. There's a reason that nothing has changed.

Cheers!

Dave Ziffer
Parent Veteran of the Reading Wars
Former contributor to The Illinois Loop <https://www.illinoisloop.org/>
Currently advising parents to do it themselves at My Child Will Read 
<http://mychildwillread.org/>


On 9/21/2023 2:57 PM, Patricia Walsh-Coughlan wrote:
> Thanks, Jerry for sharing this. It offers hope!
> Tricia
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Sep 21, 2023, at 12:00 PM, Jerry Silbert <jsilb24034 at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>>
>> Elite Universities Call for Change in Reading Education
>>
>> Two world-class universities abandon four decades of flawed reading 
>> instruction.
>>
>>
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