‘In order to maintain themselves, unions have got to have some ability to strap their members to the mast,’ enjoined Robert Reich, Pres. Clinton’s Secy of Labor.
Keith Geiger, former hardball president of the NEA on the Larry King Show in talking about school vouchers, said, ‘Quit talking about letting kids escapeÉ’
Sam Lambert, NEA’s executive director, in 1967 said, ‘(The) NEA will become a political power second to no other special interest groupÉ(The) NEA will organize this profession from top to bottom into logical operational units that can move swiftly and effectively and with power unmatched by any other organized group in the nation.’ This prediction came true with the help of Uniserv, the NEA’s full-time, unionized, political cadre.
In the 1983-84 Annual Edition of the NEA’s Today’s Education, the union took credit for the introduction of whole language, claiming, ‘The overemphasis on phonics with beginners (is now) ready for the scrap heap.’
‘Transfer of a service from private to government hands doubles the cost of production,’ (The Bureaucratic Rule of Two)
‘The Union intends to control who enters, who stays, and who leaves the (teaching) profession,’ (George Fisher, former NEA president)
You know a lot about the teachers’ labor unions, and you must decide if it’s a good thing, putting aside any friends or relatives you have who may be so employed, especially since they would still have their jobs, whether or not the unions were weakened. These are, of course, good people; it’s simply true that such a bureaucracy employs people to do wrong things. Without union control, schools 8
could go back to pretty much what they were before 1961, but I think much better because a lot of money would be freed up to be put to good use by local school boards and parents. And a school board voted in by the parents could decide curricula and all other school matters. No one but the bureaucrats would miss the Dept of Education: When The American School Board Journal asked its readers who are mostly state and local school board members what should be done with the Dept of Education, the answer was to shut it down and send the money home! Almost ¾ said the Dept of Education should close down. ‘I have not detected any advantage from the U.S. Dept of Education,’ wrote a board president in New Jersey. A board member in Georgia concurred, ‘In any endeavor, the most effective results are achieved when decision-making occurs at the lowest possible level. In education, that would be at the individual schools within local school systems.’ (FRC) Here is another condemnation of federal control: In 1984 under the socialist government of Mitterand, the French government moved to take control of the nation’s 10,000 private schools, most of them Catholic. They had accepted federal subsidies. That is why two colleges in America do not accept any federal money—Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, and Grove City College in Grove City, PA.
I have two quotes from my own experience: Mostly when I entered the teachers’ room, one colleague would pipe up with, ‘Here comes the spelling lady!’ (I was known for having used the spelling book whereas many of the other teachers preferred invented spelling.)
A substitute teacher left a note for me. She said something to the effect, ‘I didn’t give them the homework assignment you left for them because they were exhausted after an afternoon of hiking.’
Dr. Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College in Michigan recently addressed the student body in which he said, ‘The U.S. Constitution does not mention education when enumerating the federal government’s powers because the Founders believed it should be independent of federal control; yet today, education has become one of the primary recipients of federal taxpayer funds, greatly eclipsing what is allocated for national defense.’
Besides escalating property taxes caused by union demands and federal involvement in the schools, college tuition has been rising faster than 10% a year for a number of years now. And with student populations booming, ‘Universities raise tuition because they can.’ (The Week, Oct. 28, 2005) Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, said on September ll, 2006, that student loan rates are the highest in 6 years. This is bad for students because the average college student takes 30-40 years to pay off his student loans. Richard Vedder, Ohio University economist, has demonstrated that every time the feds subsidize college tuition through tuition tax credits, college tuition rises by the precise amount of the tuition tax credit. Another theory is that when students receive federal loans they can then afford college so that the college can raise tuition and not lose customers (students). It becomes a vicious cycle. If federal involvement in education should be declared unconstitutional, this would change.
November 22, 2005: An employer called C-Span. He complained that he has to hire 4-year-college grads who can’t write a simple sentence, and they can’t read well enough to interpret instructions, etc. properly. Personally, my neighbor is an engineer, and he can’t find an engineer to hire who can write a report. Only 70% of college grads can write a very simple business letter. My friend’s son-in-law is an asst prof at Princeton; he said the engineering students are ‘retarded’ in writing. He was educated abroad.
There’s more about this. Because entering college freshmen, for the most part, have had a poor K-12 education, they need remediation. Therefore, with all the needed remediation it takes 5 or 6 years to complete college. This means more loans. To get an idea how bad their pre-college education was, hear this: 75% couldn’t find Israel on a map. I practiced this every day with my fourth graders. We went over the main news in the newspaper, and I had various students go to a large map with a pointer to locate ‘hot spots.’ This can easily be worked into the day’s activities, and the children always enjoyed it. I had the students bring in news articles which they could read to the class and lead a little discussion, calling on various ones to come up to the map, etc.
In 1994, the Dept of Defense’s language coordinator said to me, ‘Since the kids do so bad in spelling we’re eliminating the spelling portion of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills.’ Please note her mistakes, and she was the coordinator for all of Germany.
Before about 1993, there were very, very few children in Special Education in the Dept of Defense school where I was employed. It was a regular American public school, just overseas. Thereafter it started to change rapidly. I would then have at least one Special Ed pupil. In New Jersey, in the late 1970s only 9% of pupils 3-21 were in Special Ed. By the mid-1990s, 16% of students were in the program. One reason that there are more youngsters in New Jersey in Special Ed is that school districts can qualify for more state and local financial aid if they have more students in Special Ed. The lure of Special Ed money is so great that Senator Jim Jeffords quit the Republican Party when Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat minority leader at the time, promised him more Special Ed money for Jefford’s state of Vermont. In 1994 children were swallowing nine million tons of Ritalin a year. There was so much of it, then and now, that the pupils began selling it to one another. New Jersey began defining s pupil by his deficits not his strengths just to get services. (SKY), Sept. 1996, ‘Department of Education’ by Timothy Harper.) In the United States of America which country is spending $929.6 billion annually on K-12 education, we are not able to teach reading adequately. Researchers, seeking the causes of reading disability which just keeps getting worse, began to develop an entirely new dictionary of exotic terms to deal with this previously unknown problem: binocular imbalance, congenital word blindness, word deafness, congenital alexia, congenital aphasia, dyslexia (which did not exist in 1940, not in Webster’s dictionary in circulation at the time), strephosymbolia, ocular blocks, dyslexaphoria, ocular-manual laterality, minimal brain damage, and developmental alexia. With one little girl having an IQ of 118, the treatment was removal of her tonsils and adenoids, thyroid treatments, and exercises to 9
strengthen her eye muscles. (The Victims of ‘Dick and Jane’ by Samuel Blumenfeld) When girls are not receiving the best education, change the schools. When boys are not receiving the best education, give them Ritalin. For girls, ‘Take Your Daughter to Work Day’ with nothing similar for boys. (Fostered by the feminists in the Dept of Education, prevalent in the mid 1990s)
Since all learning depends, in large part, on the ability to read, I’d like to impart more facts of this overwhelming problem we’re facing. The paragraphs below are based on Samuel L. Blumenfeld’s book, The New Illiterates (Arlington House).
Juvenile delinquency, serious crime, and drug use have all risen sharply during the last three decades. There is no question that they have in part been brought on by wrong teaching methods. Dr. George Reisman of the Jefferson School writes: ‘I believe that the decline in education is probably responsible for the widespread use of drugs.’ My heart goes out to those young people, normal in every way, who had to by the fourth grade finally give up in their quest to read because their visual memories just weren’t capable of handling any more. Teachers in the schools of education need to learn how to teach intensive phonics and then do it. Any form of whole language does not do the job. We don’t need any more proof! Some of these poor readers actually make it through college but then become a problem for industry. In 1952 General Motors had to organize a Reading Improvement Program for its management personnel.
At a meeting of the California Library Assn in 1970, Karl Shapiro, eminent professor, said, ‘We are experiencing a literary breakdown which is unlike anything I know of in the history of letters.’
Going back to ‘visual memories,’ the term to be used is serial memory, in which the child is supposed to remember what individual letters look like in the order they appear in a word without being told that they are letters that stand for certain sounds. To the child, the letters are simply odd shapes strung together to make a whole word. To do that with thousands of words would simply tax a child’s mind beyond its capacity.
The lengths to which whole-word advocates go to avoid mentioning the letters must have deleterious effects on a child’s mind. I remember observing a kindergarten several years ago in Cranberry Township, PA, where letters were not brought into the whole afternoon’s lesson. When I asked the teacher why, she replied that they were not allowed to.
With this method, the child looks at the beginning, the middle, and the end of words to differentiate between them. The Guidebook suggests a game to strengthen this idea: Place three toys in a row, and after the class has studied them, they are to close their eyes and be able to identify them. This is sheer nonsense and teaches nothing. The child then learns groups of phonetically related words which have the same spelling pattern like ‘jump, bump; duck, cluck’; but he encounters difficulty with irregular groups like ‘play, they; one, fun.’ When a word such as ‘Mother’is read by noting the beginning, middle, and the end, the child loses the significance of its two-syllable construction. It’s all so unnecessarily complicated. The method has undoubtedly changed somewhat now.
A child diagnosed with dyslexia is someone with a weak memory, but it’s a normal memory. Mr. Blumenfeld’s contention is that only a child with an exceptionally good memory can learn to read well with the sight-word method.
In trying to create the disability, dyslexia, the ‘experts’ knew symptoms not causes. They needed to find fault with the child, not with their system.
The teachers liked the look-say method better because initially it’s easier—an initial sight vocabulary can be taught more quickly than the alphabet with letter sounds. However, this initial success is deceptive because it doesn’t build a foundation for learning thousands of additional words. That’s why whole-language reading is an abject failure especially for below average and often just average pupils. Statistics tell us they’re good up to 2nd grade. Read this carefully: ‘In 1930 the word ‘see’ was repeated 27 times, in 1956 it was repeated 176 times because some children were already not learning with the Dick and Jane Pre-Primers. I failed one boy when I taught first grade in 1958 using this reading system. That still haunts me because I always thought it was my fault when a pupil couldn’t learn. Even with this failure, entire public school systems converted to the sight-vocabulary method.
In 1994 a Life magazine article went to incredible lengths to try to prove that not learning to read was the child’s fault; therefore he has dyslexia. The article starts out with, ‘Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexiaÉIt is responsible for about 70% of the school failuresÉ’ This is an abject lie! The sight-vocabulary system is to blame.
A parent today who’s halfway aware of what’s going on has only one alternative—home school her child because even private schools are being regulated, and their teachers have graduated from the teachers’ colleges which are regulated by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education which is run by the teachers’ unions. But many mothers have to work, and poor people can’t get vouchers for at least a better school because politicians vote vouchers down. One of Pres. Obama’s first acts was to veto vouchers for poor children in Washington D.C. (loyalty to unions rather than his own people) The schools say they teach phonics. They DON’T. It must be intensive phonics (drilled but it can be fun if put to music or rhythms occasionally). The right teacher can make children excited about anything in learning! I’ll defend the child every time.
Phonics was taught exclusively and successfully for over 3,000 years. The 85 odd years of the sight-vocabulary or look-say system have produced the greatest epidemic of reading disability the world has ever known, especially when one factors in the $929.6 billion spent yearly!
Phonics is so easy when started early; I recommend 5 years old or younger. Each letter is introduced by name,only several at a time. In 10
the 1990s, I always did the consonants first. Put B on the board and say this is ‘buh,’ and our word for it is ‘boat’ or whatever word is given in the book. It goes on from there, and it’s not difficult. A Primer for Beginning Readers by Samuel L. Blumenfeld, publisher Paradigm, is only one of many excellent phonics instruction books.
I’ve tried to make the case for getting the federal government out of education (‘Fed out of Ed’). You must believe me that it’s the ONLY way to start turning this around, of course not forgetting the very negative influence of the teachers’ unions. One should not hesitate; federal involvement is unconstitutional. Please email your name and location to patty.degen@yahoo.com AND call your state and federal representatives and senators and ask them to get the ball rolling on ‘Fed out of ED.’ Afterall you can lower YOUR
PROPERTY TAXES and COLLEGE TUITION, at least your children’s and grandchildren’s. Remember when George Miller, D.-CA, put through a bill to require home schooling parents to be certified, it was dropped only AFTER 800,000 calls jammed the switchboard! Please do this TODAY for America’s children and for America’s future. It costs not one penny for you to insure our future, and eventually a lot of money will be coming your way. ACT NOW!