Parents want kids to learn the basics. Why do our schools refuse to teach them?

I heard a very interesting presentation today that included information from a recent poll of parents about what they want to see as schools finally start to reopen in the COVID-19 era.

Guess what – parents want their schools to go back to the basics. Parents know that math and reading and good content knowledge are important.

So, why hasn’t this been happening in our public schools?

A good answer can be found in a just-published article By Bruce Deitrick Price, “The Sabotage of Public Education.” Writes Price:

“Genuine rigorous testing of educational ideas is rare in America.  Why?  Because practical testing usually goes against what the professors want to do.  Their impractical ideas don't perform well in the real world.”

Price goes on to discuss a most interesting set of education studies known collectively as “Project Follow-Through.”

I’ve talked about Project Follow-Through, and the graph that Price mentions, before. This very heavily funded set of studies showed that a basics approach known as Direct Instruction was hands down the best performer for educating children (see the graph below), but Ed School profs just didn’t want to hear about it. They wanted to push their progressive education fad ideas instead.

So, the science got ignored and we wind up today with alarmingly low numbers of our students able to pass muster on things like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (another topic I have discussed at GREAT length in the past such as here, here, here and here, for just a very few examples).

Now, we hear Progressive Education fad ideas all the time about how our kids should be taught things like Social Studies. This includes Kentucky’s state standards for the subject that are loaded with stuff like saying kids will learn “the inquiry practices of questioning, investigating, using evidence and communicating conclusions” without ever mentioning much about important content kids should also learn to use in performing all that questioning, investigating and so forth.

It’s so bad that even Kentucky’s own honored son, Abraham Lincoln is never once mentioned in the standards.

It’s all the bad ideas that Project Follow-Through showed many years ago don’t work well for kids.

Decades later, as Price now points out, the problem of teaching the wrong way still persists.

So, parents, we hear you. You want the basics.

Parents, if you really want to get the basics, you need to let your teachers know. After all, they got a lot of bad notions from those college professors who denied, and continue denying, the findings from Project Follow-Through and lots of other evidence such as from NAEP that education has problems.

Teachers clearly need to hear from someone who really understands your child and his or her needs if things are going to change. And, with COVID-19 changing the landscape on public education, there is no better time than now to start.