di: Australia calls DI a "Crackdown" 🙄

[Dave Ziffer]

*Dear DI List*: I don't generally post to this list and I've never 
really been active on it, but I do feel compelled to write today.

Here is my education-related web site:

    My Child Will Read <http://mychildwillread.org/>

The site's purpose (should you get through its first five pages) is to 
exhort parents *not to entrust anyone with their child's reading 
instruction*, but rather to ensure their reading success using "/Teach 
Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons/".

My experience with DI is:

  * I ran a private after-school reading program from 1997-2002, as
    described on this page
    <http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml>. Our curriculum was
    Reading Mastery. We took kids that the local public schools had
    deemed unteachable and turned every single one into a success story.

  * During that time I was also an online activist in the "Reading Wars"
    and was a contributor to a web site called Illinois Loop
    <https://www.illinoisloop.org/> that was part of our wasted effort
    to get the public schools to change their ways.

  * My wife and I taught our two daughters to read using /Teach Your
    Child./ More recently I used it to teach my first two grandchildren
    and am now working on the third one; I expect him to "launch" at the
    end of the summer.

I have some "ed" connections on LinkedIn, and because of these I get to 
see some current discussions of current teachers. It seems to me that 
nothing much has changed in the decades since I was active in the 
education-reform movement. Current teachers largely speak in vague 
generalities, they shun "prescriptive" solutions like DI, and they 
imagine themselves as gifted free spirits who can doubtless produce 
better results by improvising daily rather than by sticking to any 
proven methods. Were I to suggest to them that a typical home-schooling 
mom with no teaching experience and no educational credentials 
whatsoever would likely outperform them by mechanically walking her kids 
through /Teach Your Child/, they'd probably block me.

I admire the dogged persistence of the folks on this list, but at some 
point it strikes me that your faith in reforming the public schools is 
your own undoing. With unconditional funding the public schools have no 
incentive to succeed, and in fact their incentive is quite the opposite: 
so long as they provide child-warehousing services that relieve parents 
of the need to raise their own kids, they can count on public support 
for endlessly increasing their staffs and raising their prices. I 
describe this in an article:

    No, we are not going to fix the public schools
    <https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/no-we-are-not-going-to-fix-the-public>

It is not possible to fix a system where all the incentives are to fail. 
It's an uphill battle with no end.

Despite my years of recovery from failed school-reform activism, I still 
found myself enraged by the "Crackdown" article you sent out 
<https://insidestory.org.au/crackdown/>. I don't know why I cannot get 
past this; it is the same self-serving lie that the /International 
Reading Association/ was disseminating in the 1960s and that Ken Goodman 
was mouthing in the 1980s and beyond. Guess what? You can't stop 
self-serving criminals from serving their own interests in a system 
whose incentives are designed to promote fraud.

And so I write to give you some food for thought. It is generally true 
that corrupt systems cannot be reformed; they can only be replaced. That 
is why nations fall and why capitalism works so well 
<https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/a-lesson-in-communism-from-our-two>: 
improvement is usually possible only in environments where it is 
possible to topple corrupt, failed systems. It is my hope that some of 
you will pursue replacing, rather than reforming, our public school system.

Sincerely,

Dave Ziffer
My Child Will Read <http://mychildwillread.org/>
dave at mychildwillread.org <mailto:dave at mychildwillread.org>



On 6/12/2026 10:51 AM, Katalin E Pusztavari wrote:
> Oh for goodness sakes. Australia has some hand-wringing opinion piece 
> writers that conflate stuff. It will take years to see if their 
> implementation of DI will work. I can’t roll my eyes enough at this. 
> https://insidestory.org.au/crackdown/
>
> _______________________________________________
> di mailing list
> di at lists.uoregon.edu
> https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/di
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