Should we teach more knowledge and less process? Why has knowledge become a bad word? Racket catches up with K-12 expert Natalie Wexler, author of "The Knowledge Gap"
I hate this disdain for tracking. As a mom whose child could read the newspaper in kindergarten and solve math problems it was cruel for him to sit in a classroom where other kids were learning that "f" makes a fff sound. My other child did fine in regular class but when you force a child born with those qualifications it is like putting a special needs child in an accelerated program. This is the same victim/ oppressor ideaology that resents success of any sort that is not shared equally. Accomodating children with different needs rather than one size fits all is necessary and overlooked in todays world.
When my son was in fourth grade I was dismayed when his teacher at he beginning of the year sent home math homework in addition. Fourth grade math should be division. I spoke to the teacher about this and was assured that they were just doing a review. A month later he is still bringing home addition homework. Then the teacher admitted to me that she was compelled to teach to the lowest common denominator (no pun intended) and that addition was all the dumb kids and English as a Second Language students could handle. I pulled my son out of that crappy public school and home schooled that year and his math and reading scores increased by two grade levels by the end of the year. All this while working a full time job myself.
If you love your kids, get them the hell out of the public school system and into anything else, whether a charter school, home school teaching pods, anything. And read the Underground History of Education. The original is out of print by can be downloaded free at: https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758
I homeschooled as well. Read, read, read - quality books, not twaddle, and above their reading level. Well written books help children expand their vocabulary and will help them learn to write well. And for Pete’s sake teach them spelling and grammar and good sentence structure (diagramming). It’s not difficult. I don’t even have a bachelors degree but my kids can read and write and speak well. Both got perfect scores on the English and Reading sections of the ACT. It was a big financial hit (though I was able to work PT) but worth the years we had to live frugally. A lot of people “after school,” supplementing their kids’ public education, if they can’t homeschool.
Many people just can't let go of the "blank slate" view of human capabilities. Some people are simply smarter than others, just like some kids are better athletes or musicians. Shaker Heights proved that, but she doesn't want to see it.
Check out Aporia on Substack for a thoughtful discussion of how gifted kids get the shaft in this country.
I never understood the blank slate hypothesis. Ordinary people can look at elite professional athletes and instinctively know that no matter how much they practice and how hard they train, most people cannot achieve that level. The brain is part of the body, and similarly differs between people, but somehow because you can’t physically see the differences it means there are no differences? It would be laughable even if we didn’t know about autism, personality disorders, synesthesia and so on. But even if you didn’t accept that brains differ because bodies differ it is obvious to anyone who pays attention that not all brains are the same. All of which goes to show, people just believe what they want to believe, and then make up the justification later.
I suppose it's just too lucrative. If you're earning a living as a run-of-the-mill vocal coach, the last thing you want to discuss is students' vocal cords, or the ability of students to discern pitch changes.
On top of that there are entire industries addressing the fictions created in order to prop up the blank slate theory.
I think her point about tracking is that if you haven't first given children with gaps in their knowledge some specific information to help them understand what they're reading, tracking will channel those smart (but less informed about that topic) children into a lower-level group that is really not right for them. She specifically says that tracking is okay once knowledge gaps have been addressed.
Exactly. She even notes that it's wrong-headed to consider everything an honors class then dumb down the honors class so everyone can take it. The point is that we start the tracking so early that we aren't fairly evaluating the cognitive abilities and interests of the children involved because we haven't given all children the basic skills and abilities to express them on the appropriate level.
I can't stand it either, I was that kid and in Canada, it's even worse. Everyone is dragged down to the lowest level and the most gifted are in the same class rooms as the retarded.
The way adults treat the most intelligent kids is absolutely tyrannical. It's interesting that it's actually a learned behaviour and kids themselves have no inherent biases against their most intelligent peers, but ultimately learn to see and treat them differently from the adults—something Hans Asperger observed, although most of what he observed is not well liked and widely misunderstood or mistranslated on purpose (i.e "little professor" is a mistranslation of "little aristocrat").
Almost everything this Natalie Wexler says is foolish and the type of thought contributing to the decline of our species and intelligence as a collective whole. Rather than try to reward the most intelligent children regardless of class and ensure they have the chance to succeed in spite of being almost guaranteed to be bored to death by school, she wastes her time on the children who do not have a major impact on society, the public utility, and common good. Civilisation is moved forward by a small percentage of the most intelligent, not by the mediocre or unintelligent.
To provide evidence of what a waste of time her work is (to be clear, I'm not actually an elitist and think helping more people succeed is a worthwhile goal, but that it's become pathological) and prove as such for the interested reader:
Intelligence is strongly heritable and much better understood genetically than people think, although in some populations better than others (the genes can vary by race and ethnicity). The alleles associated with educational attainment can be added up over the genome to get someone's "polygenic score."
Overwhelmingly, what studies suggest is that intelligence is actually very rarely selected for, obviously in nature in general that's true but also in our own species; mostly it's only selected for in societies that have in the past had an emphasis on trade which then required mental arithmetic and language acquisition, for example people around the Niger river and North Sea regions, Punjabis, and Ashkenazis. Btw, evolution has sped up in the past 10k years from gene-culture co-evolution, not slowed down like people assume.
Research tells us intelligence is actually selected *against* today. To name two examples off of the top of my head, there is an Icelandic study (Kong et al. 2017) showing a decline in the genes associated with educational attainment and intelligence since a cohort studied in 2010, and Soviet Estonian research showing cranial size being selected against in an otherwise homogenous population where no explanation but selection can suffice (Valge 2020).
A molecular biologist and paleogenomics researcher, Beth Shapiro (unrelated to the homo erectus member sharing her last name and whose feelings don't care about facts), found when she was a research assistant that intelligence is neither selected for among humans today nor does it even originate in homo sapiens, a finding which was suppressed by her department chair:
"There's a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession–compulsion and Asperger's syndrome. That cluster correlates very strongly. I can trace some genes back to the interglacial around 450,000 years ago, and others back to another burst of evolutionary innovation during the Eemian interglacial about 130,000 years ago. ... The hybridization was successful in the Stone Age, but the environment has changed. I found that modern culture selects for socialization but against the Neanderthal traits for mathematics and intelligence ... I don't know how you'll survive when our genes are gone.” (Hecht 2008)
Yes, what will those like Natalie Wexler do? All they care about is their socialisation and egaliatarian social ideals that aren't based on reason.
Relatedly, most plants were domesticated not by homo sapiens but by an as of yet third unidentified species. This one I don't recall off the top of my head to cite, but is easy to look up. My personal non-scientific speculation is they could be ancestors of Native Americans since they were the undisputed masters of cultivation and agriculture to the point Europeans didn't recognise it; aquaculture too, there were forms of aquaculture in ancient South America more advanced than ours today. If so, it'd explain why they end up being last to be identified due to their destruction by savages.
Agreed. One thought I had about tracking is how it is used today in Europe, specifically the UK. I know from reading biographies that some form of tracking was common in England in the past. Is that still the case today?
The correlation between test scores (of any kind), K-12 educational outcomes and the number of parents in the students home is about .9. Minority kids from two parent households do about as well as white kids from two parent households in most educational outcome measures.. The reason that Asian students as a cohort have the highest SAT scores is because they have the lowest single parent household percentage.
Knowing people whose families are Asian-American, and whose children have excelled in school. I can tell you that, at least for the people I know, there is a lot more at play than having two parents. There is a culture around learning and discipline that I haven’t seen in other families. One friend has a daughter going to PhD medical school. His other daughter gets up at 4AM to do school work so she can make time for extracurricular activities. Another family has two children who are now concert-level pianists in addition to excellent students. One of my coworkers plays violin and was a competitive swimmer in addition to going to school for pre-med and then switching to computer science. I can’t say if this kind of thing is overall good for the kids, but they are going to have more opportunities because of how hard their parents pushed them.
My 1st grader was "falling behind" in reading. So much so that the school has organized a team of five individual experts to create a "plan." They started sending home flash cards so he could memorize "sight words." Sight words?? That's not reading. So after he does his flash cards we get out a real book and work through it. He gets extremely frustrated, because that's not whatever they do at school. But for the benefit of my tax dollars, I have the responsibility to teach my child how to read. Maybe it's better that way, but our 1st grade teacher is making $105K a year...
There is a list of high frequency words—the Dolch list—and learning these does expedite reading. You can make it more fun by playing games with them—such as concentration: https://sightwords.com/sight-words/games/. As you say correctly, it isn’t reading, but they are helpful to know. Reading aloud to your child, learning, rhyming songs, and watching educational TV will all help your child learn more quickly. Starfall and phonics books like this help also: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3270692-i-can-read-it.
Once your child knows their letter sounds and at they’ll be able to read this. Have them read it over and over daily until they can read it well. This boosts confidence because they will know they are reading and even though the story is ridiculous they will understand it. The author is right about both phonics, sight words, and prior knowledge all being important. Children’s rhyming songs help with phonics and educational children’s TV helps with prior knowledge—Computer games like Starfall and story time—listening to a picture book are fun ways to learn.
All you need is books, reading to them and teaching to read them, although rhymes and music aren't bad and every family should play. Stay away from the TV and computer games, those sorts of things will like Internet usage damage your kids' brain and impair development. Playtime should be active, not passive, and outdoor and physical when possible. A life well started to create a strong child is one spent licking the compost heap and getting dirty out in nature whenever possible.
Studies show that kids, who learn nursery rhymes read earlier—there is a correlation. The rhyming helps with language development. Studies also show that kids, who watch educational programs are more advanced at school. This is most likely due to prior knowledge aiding comprehension. Kids with more recess and breaks outdoors also do better at school. There is a mind body connection, and our minds can only focus for so long before we need a break. Curiosity, discovery, and beauty are important yo learning as well.
The problem needs to be solved at school and at home. Schools need to be using better practices and homes need to help their children build foundational knowledge and push accountability for their children.
Therein lies the problem. The government is fueling the destruction of the home/family so as to fill the vacuum created said entity. It is the ideological divide in this country. Look to the individual or look to the state (collective). The solution should be a natural rise in the power of the states.
I had one brother. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. His outcome was, to say the least, not as good as mine. He had the same firm, honest, dutiful, loving and devoted parents I did. May he rest in peace.
Unequal outcomes, especially between this group and that group, are something over which we have no control. We should have figured this out after two generations of expensive, failed programs trying to address it. Why not just admit it and move on? A good first step would be removing the most disruptive students so the rest can learn.
True, my two grandchildren, one, has reading comprehension skills off the chart. The other struggles, yet has lots of common sense. She can size up most situations & function, whereas the other gets flustered if there is change. Everyone is different. But I tell them both all the time, they must be able to read & do math, or they will be cheated in life.
If the parents don't value education, you won't get an equal outcome. Same if it's abusive or neglectful. The kids that read at home, sing, do nursery rhymes, etc will just have more practice than those in homes that don't, and it will show.
What really gets me is that what is billed as "reading comprehension" is more like inferring the definition of something. It is not encouraged to look up words in a dictionary, or even how to do that, or find the right definition for context. We don't need scads of new textbooks. The old McGuffey readers give a great start for students (you can find old copies on eBay). Kids should also be self-paced, with the teacher being more of a supervisor.
Fun fact, we didn't even have a Dept of Education in the govt before 1979. We've been throwing tons of money at a problem, creating great sinecures, but getting worse results. "No child left behind" turned into "no child getting ahead".
I learned to read on my own, reading the back of cereal boxes at breakfast and the back of baseball cards for hours. The "science" of education is like the "science" of life. The goal is not some notion of equity, it is learning to do what is necessary to live and thrive. The notion of equity is itself the enemy, we are not all the same, we just need the opportunity to thrive.
Same here. Nobody taught me how to read. Although I wish somebody had taught me arithmatic. I was good at geometry, so-so at algebra, and completely flummoxed by calculus.
I have been a teacher for 35 years, over 20 of them in schools in inner-city / south LA. I also taught for 6 years in a small rural school in Nebraska, where i also moonlighted as a remedial writing instructor at a local junior college. I am certified and have taught English, art, and social studies classes. From what I've read, it seems that some of the previous commenters haven't grasped the main idea here, so perhaps they're suffering from the same deficits in reading that are described. Anyway, Wexler's points are solid, and, from what I've seen, beyond question at this point. Descriptions of 'the science' aside, one way to sum up her main thrust is that motivation and pre-existing knowledge are crucial factors in learning to read. A clear-eyed appreciation of student needs and experience goes a long way toward confirming this for any teacher. The powers-that-be, however - school administrators with direct control over school or district-level activity - are usually slow on the uptake about good instructional practices, and this can reliably be attributed to their own lack of teaching experience and/or lack of content knowledge. Most are careerists and, if they participate in teacher evaluation programs, also lack a strong background in the subjects being taught by those they evaluate. Their overall, group-level awareness of content is thin at best. They aren't really qualified to supply instructional leadership because they don't know what they're talking about. This weakness is pervasive. I think adoption of Wexler's priorities would provide a strong counterweight and show results, though people of extreme political attitudes would certainly remain unsatisfied. It's much more gratifying to bemoan cultural imperialism or insufficient parenting.
Exactly right. Administrators have meetings where they go around the table, creating more questions and problems, giving side eyes and dry snitching. All in order to complicate things to justify creating another administrative job. There's a little more to it, but schools are for administrators moreso than the students.
Here in Akron, property tax went up a lot last year, while the cost per student is $3000 more than the Ohio average. Akron Public School district is lousy, it should be less not more.
Traditional tracking can lead to social inequities—especially when it is clearly racial segregation. Flexible grouping, which includes flexible achievement grouping, can enable teachers to scaffold appropriately while keeping the whole group in their zone of proximal development. In early reading instruction, students may be years apart in development on the first day. Grouping students by achievement with regular reassessments for reading groups, allows a teacher to focus on all students learning. Kindergarten teachers have such a wide range of abilities-from kids, who don’t know the alphabet, to kids reading novels and writing free responses. Her comment that while phonics is important—having prior knowledge is also important to comprehension— This is 100% true.
1. My son taught 8th grade English for a couple of years. He said he could tell you within 6 weeks who would succeed and who wouldn't based on what their household was like and what their parents expected (not of the teacher, but of the child) with about 90% accuracy.
2. No matter what we do, we have to stop making rules based on the lowest common denominators in classrooms. It is unfair to those who are bored out of their minds, who do not enjoy the chaos, and who are there to learn.
3. One thing they taught at one of the very good schools my kids attended was root words. If you can teach root meanings, it will help them to forever get an idea.
4. Phonics is king and I'm so glad that's how I was taught.
Phonics. Also how I was taught by a teacher in charge of 9 grades in a one-room parochial school. Best. Education. Ever. But the fact is, my parents expected me to learn, too.
I was a product of the IQ standard in high school in early 50’s. Engineers were in demand and I was put into the college program because I had an IQ of 149. I learned to read early and my favorite reading genre was the “Hardy Boy” mysteries. Very little comprehension was needed there and I, to this day, still have comprehension difficulties. Made it out of college with a barely C average. Ended up eventually in construction where I thrived being a problem solver. My education did help me in learning how to search for knowledge when needed.
On another note, Tony, a widowed black father of 6 moved to our village in eastern OH in the late 40’s. Worked in the steel mill where he made decent money. Built a small house. The four boys were good athletes but education was foremost for Tony for his kids. All went to college on scholarships, both athletic and academic. The oldest died young at 27 before he could achieve his goals. One became a ‘go-to’ expert in child education, one an engineer at Catapillar, one a dentist and one an HR head of a large school district. The grandchildren of Tony have become dentists , lawyers all because of Tony’s insistence of education. Parents and family matter.
I almost stopped reading this the moment she brought up equity. Fuck equity. Every student should be encouraged to perform at the highest level. That includes the use of tracks. I was one of those kids in the gifted and talented tracks.
They wanted to move me up two grades but the gifted and talented program was much better. The social consequence of being moved up two grades from third grade would have been horrible. I never would have gotten laid in HS.
I was bored and underachieving with straight A's in my normal classes. We were solidly middle class. I asked my dad to teach me how to read at age 4. He tried but it didn't stick. I don't know why I wanted to know how to read. Just seemed like the thing to do.
I don't know that I was smarter than other kids. It was just easier for me to pick things up. I never cared about any of that shit. I just wanted to learn cool and interesting shit. Up to that point, the teacher was using me to teach other kids. That sucked balls.
By all means, add knowledge building to the curriculum. That makes sense to me. But the equity agenda needs to be exterminated. That is just an extension of the system of woke indoctrination. We are a pluralistic society. They have no business pushing a state-sanctioned religion.
Equity isn't the objective unless you are a brain dead communist. Excellence is the objective. Education should prepare kids for life with critical thinking not thinking critically. The little communists don't get to put kids through woke indoctrination in public schools without push back.
If they want to segregate on ideology, that is fine with me. The communists can send their kids to indoctrination camps. The rest of us will send them to educational institutions.
They don't get to wildly change every meaningful aspect of our public institutions to whatever extreme they desire without answering to the rest of us. Fuck those assholes. Fuck equity. Fuck the state. Fuck their little religion.
Another advantage of gifted and talented is that smart kids can be in class together, which is good for them socially as well as academically. I remember that we had a gang of smart kids who all took the same classes when I was in high school. My son is now taking honors and AP classes, include AP calculus, even though he isn’t great at math and has no interest in it. I asked him one time why he doesn’t take regular math, and he told me it was because all his friends are in AP calculus, and he doesn’t want to be in class with other kids who don’t pay attention and aren’t learning anything.
As a teacher, I've seen firsthand how much time and money is devoted to objectively ineffective teaching methods, curriculum, etc. I say objectively, because all you have to do is look at Hattie's metastudy to see that it's clear what is and is not effective.
And right there, in the top 10, is prior knowledge and ability. The trend to focus on processes and skills instead of knowledge acquisition--especially at the elementary level--has had a terrible effect on students. And the effect is worse for those who don't have a lot of knowledge built into their early lives at home.
We will never, ever see truly equitable outcomes. But focusing on helping students gain knowledge should be paramount to helping all kids perform at their best.
There is a very big difference between primary language learning and what comes later. Kids learn to speak long before they enter school. That process is difficult to pin down because it doesn't happen under tightly controlled conditions. But it is known that the language environment matters a lot, and it has a knock-on effect for further language development. Kids who are read to, talked with, and regularly converse with adults have a big advantage. For schooling outcomes down the road the use of complex sentences by parents - which correlates strongly with education level - is also a big plus.
I suppose I have Bill Watterson to thank for my son’s language ability. My son was obsessed with Calvin and Hobbes. My mom bought him the four-volume complete Calvin and Hobbes (highly recommended, by the way), and I used to spend hours reading it to him. It’s funny and cute, but the language level is also pretty high. No matter how much time I spent reading, my son wanted more, and he taught himself to read on those comics. We used to read other books too, but man, Calvin and Hobbes had a huge effect on my son.
Yes! A home environment where the child is constantly exposed to conversation and is read to every single day! This article touched on many things but I think skirts the main issue. A rich home environment is going to put a child in position to excell in school and life. Family income level correlates with, but is not the cause of, success.
If you ask linguists like Noam Chomsky, they have all sorts of magical grammar devices they've dreamt up and think are part of our "innate biology" explaining how children (and adults) learn language, despite that none of them know a thing about neuroscience, genetics, or any form of biology and there's no hard science supporting any of their beliefs whatsoever. Such matters fall under fields like those, not linguistics or philology, but for some reason those in the soft sciences are always eager to give their opinion on subjects like biology.
Never trust linguists, most who ever did anything of scientific, cultural, or political merit—rather than abuse Latin they can't understand, like the whole linguistic lexicon; mostly all gibberish like that of other modern scientists, with 20th century and later Latin making their intellectually plebeian nature obvious to anyone who can read the classical kind—were actually philologists, and that one is studied now and not the other is suspect with the reasons obvious: one focuses on ancient languages, comparative and historical linguistics, etymology and literature; the other focuses on what is mostly semantics and non- or ascientific gobbledigook.
I looked up Natalie Wexler and she has a JD and MA (juris doctor and master of arts). If she wanted education to be more scientific she should have studied science instead, and that she went for two degrees and chose not to shows her real priorities, as well as that her real interest in science is as a true disciple of it (i.e in scientism, not science itself), which is also obvious from her use of weasel word clichés like "experts agree" sure to make both the general public and any worthwhile scientists cringe.
Never disregard yourself for having a "non-expert" opinion, most "experts" are like her and only masquerading as such in things they have no more expertise in than anyone else. Someone who's really an expert with true expertise and intelligence—not only credentials—won't need to tell you they are one, nor will they feel a need to demonstrate their inferiority complex by putting you down or disregarding questions, thoughts, or truths for a lack of credentials.
But it’s important to also note that a child who hasn’t acquired a language by puberty never will be able to. Other skills have similar limitations. That part of the brain shuts down. So time is truly of the essence.
But can you apply this rationale to impoverished, uneducated immigrants at the turn of the last century, and a system that was deemed successful?https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/004208596900400303. Few things substitute for respect for learning, high standards, and discipline. Inarguably, the more theories and certifications and specialties, the worse our education system becomes. The three Rs were important.
And there's something to be said for tracking. All kids matter, fast track, and slow, yet we seem to be building society around the latter - at the expense of the former. When a child, it can be torture to comprehend a story and read through it and have to wait or not finish the story because someone else has a problem. You've got to allow, encourage, the kids who are smart to thrive while at the same time giving the child who is having problems help. That's what tracking is.
I was in what we called the "fast" groups in elementary school in reading and social studies. I was in the slow group for math, and that's putting it mildly. My fourth grade teacher wrote my parents that "Susie still struggles" when it comes to math. I survived and do not work at NASA. My sixth grade teacher, a horrible little man who wore those spongy elevator shoes that laced on the side, told me and my best friend that because we talked and giggled so much we'd "amount to nothing." Let's stop treating children like hot house flowers.
Probably a good starting point is eliminate any new teaching techniques from the last couple of decades, and go back to the basics (knowledge). And find a God that isn't a person or political org.
It's a common economics problem, rent seeking behavior. Those in power shape the system, and its resources, to stay in and gather more power. Choice is the only remedy here and most states act aggressively to limit charter schools or any alternatives that would reduce their control, both money & power.
The only remedy is for enough parents to sacrifice and seek out alternatives so that school enrollment continues to shrink, leading to collapse of the system itself. You can't fix what we have today, you just need to move onto the next thing and let the old thing die. Some kids/families will get impacted through this process, but who said life is fair. Just ask all the carriage drivers that Henry Ford put out of business.
Precisely. It's why we're seeing the explosion of a parallel/alternative system of micro, charter, private, and even homeschooling. More and more people are recognizing how the public system has failed us as a society.
Good points. Another aspect I haven’t seen here yet is the childcare part. Because it became desirable that both parents work, a lot of the function of public schools has become “free” childcare. Obviously it’s far from free, but that is how it is perceived. Any teacher faced with the problem of being a childcare person too must be really frustrated.
When I was in high school I took 4 years in 3. To do so I went to summer school for Math. The rest of the class were there because they failed math so the teacher taught each lesson three times each in a different approach. The first approach he figured he would get through to 1/3 of the students. The second he would pick up a second third and hopefully the third time through he would pick up the rest. I think it was a great approach. Different people learn in different ways.
The Anglo-American Establishment is responsible for the rewriting of US History and controlling how US History is taught throughout the educational system!
Through the largess of their foundations the Rockefellers, Carnegie, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Guggenheim Foundations colluded to begin the process of designing our current public education system.
In 1905 J.D. Rockefeller kick-started the creation of the General Education Board (GEB). Rockefeller alone, with 1905 dollars, initially gifted $1 million dollars, then increased it to $10 million in 1907, later a further sum of $32 million and through subsequent decades granted some $7.5 billion. With significant money buys significant influence and loyalty.
In 1913, the Sixty-Second Congress created a commission to investigate the role of these newly created NGO foundations. The commission after a year of testimony concluded:
“The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social services of the nation. The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free of any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially increased by building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.”
The Guggenheim Foundation agreed to award fellowships to historians recommended by the Carnegie Endowment. Gradually, through the 1920’s, they assembled a group of twenty promising young academics, and took them to London. There they briefed them on what was expected of them when they became professors of American history. That twenty were the nucleus of what was eventually to become the American Historical Association. The Guggenheim Foundation also endowed the American Historical Association with $400,000 at that time.
By 1950 the Rockefeller Foundation endowed Columbia Teachers College in New York City, formerly named the Russell’s Teacher College, produced one-third of all presidents of teacher-training institutions, one-fifth of all American public school teachers, and one-quarter of all superintendents……
I hate this disdain for tracking. As a mom whose child could read the newspaper in kindergarten and solve math problems it was cruel for him to sit in a classroom where other kids were learning that "f" makes a fff sound. My other child did fine in regular class but when you force a child born with those qualifications it is like putting a special needs child in an accelerated program. This is the same victim/ oppressor ideaology that resents success of any sort that is not shared equally. Accomodating children with different needs rather than one size fits all is necessary and overlooked in todays world.
When my son was in fourth grade I was dismayed when his teacher at he beginning of the year sent home math homework in addition. Fourth grade math should be division. I spoke to the teacher about this and was assured that they were just doing a review. A month later he is still bringing home addition homework. Then the teacher admitted to me that she was compelled to teach to the lowest common denominator (no pun intended) and that addition was all the dumb kids and English as a Second Language students could handle. I pulled my son out of that crappy public school and home schooled that year and his math and reading scores increased by two grade levels by the end of the year. All this while working a full time job myself.
If you love your kids, get them the hell out of the public school system and into anything else, whether a charter school, home school teaching pods, anything. And read the Underground History of Education. The original is out of print by can be downloaded free at: https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758
I homeschooled as well. Read, read, read - quality books, not twaddle, and above their reading level. Well written books help children expand their vocabulary and will help them learn to write well. And for Pete’s sake teach them spelling and grammar and good sentence structure (diagramming). It’s not difficult. I don’t even have a bachelors degree but my kids can read and write and speak well. Both got perfect scores on the English and Reading sections of the ACT. It was a big financial hit (though I was able to work PT) but worth the years we had to live frugally. A lot of people “after school,” supplementing their kids’ public education, if they can’t homeschool.
Many people just can't let go of the "blank slate" view of human capabilities. Some people are simply smarter than others, just like some kids are better athletes or musicians. Shaker Heights proved that, but she doesn't want to see it.
Check out Aporia on Substack for a thoughtful discussion of how gifted kids get the shaft in this country.
I never understood the blank slate hypothesis. Ordinary people can look at elite professional athletes and instinctively know that no matter how much they practice and how hard they train, most people cannot achieve that level. The brain is part of the body, and similarly differs between people, but somehow because you can’t physically see the differences it means there are no differences? It would be laughable even if we didn’t know about autism, personality disorders, synesthesia and so on. But even if you didn’t accept that brains differ because bodies differ it is obvious to anyone who pays attention that not all brains are the same. All of which goes to show, people just believe what they want to believe, and then make up the justification later.
I suppose it's just too lucrative. If you're earning a living as a run-of-the-mill vocal coach, the last thing you want to discuss is students' vocal cords, or the ability of students to discern pitch changes.
On top of that there are entire industries addressing the fictions created in order to prop up the blank slate theory.
I think her point about tracking is that if you haven't first given children with gaps in their knowledge some specific information to help them understand what they're reading, tracking will channel those smart (but less informed about that topic) children into a lower-level group that is really not right for them. She specifically says that tracking is okay once knowledge gaps have been addressed.
Exactly. She even notes that it's wrong-headed to consider everything an honors class then dumb down the honors class so everyone can take it. The point is that we start the tracking so early that we aren't fairly evaluating the cognitive abilities and interests of the children involved because we haven't given all children the basic skills and abilities to express them on the appropriate level.
I can't stand it either, I was that kid and in Canada, it's even worse. Everyone is dragged down to the lowest level and the most gifted are in the same class rooms as the retarded.
The way adults treat the most intelligent kids is absolutely tyrannical. It's interesting that it's actually a learned behaviour and kids themselves have no inherent biases against their most intelligent peers, but ultimately learn to see and treat them differently from the adults—something Hans Asperger observed, although most of what he observed is not well liked and widely misunderstood or mistranslated on purpose (i.e "little professor" is a mistranslation of "little aristocrat").
Almost everything this Natalie Wexler says is foolish and the type of thought contributing to the decline of our species and intelligence as a collective whole. Rather than try to reward the most intelligent children regardless of class and ensure they have the chance to succeed in spite of being almost guaranteed to be bored to death by school, she wastes her time on the children who do not have a major impact on society, the public utility, and common good. Civilisation is moved forward by a small percentage of the most intelligent, not by the mediocre or unintelligent.
To provide evidence of what a waste of time her work is (to be clear, I'm not actually an elitist and think helping more people succeed is a worthwhile goal, but that it's become pathological) and prove as such for the interested reader:
Intelligence is strongly heritable and much better understood genetically than people think, although in some populations better than others (the genes can vary by race and ethnicity). The alleles associated with educational attainment can be added up over the genome to get someone's "polygenic score."
Overwhelmingly, what studies suggest is that intelligence is actually very rarely selected for, obviously in nature in general that's true but also in our own species; mostly it's only selected for in societies that have in the past had an emphasis on trade which then required mental arithmetic and language acquisition, for example people around the Niger river and North Sea regions, Punjabis, and Ashkenazis. Btw, evolution has sped up in the past 10k years from gene-culture co-evolution, not slowed down like people assume.
Research tells us intelligence is actually selected *against* today. To name two examples off of the top of my head, there is an Icelandic study (Kong et al. 2017) showing a decline in the genes associated with educational attainment and intelligence since a cohort studied in 2010, and Soviet Estonian research showing cranial size being selected against in an otherwise homogenous population where no explanation but selection can suffice (Valge 2020).
A molecular biologist and paleogenomics researcher, Beth Shapiro (unrelated to the homo erectus member sharing her last name and whose feelings don't care about facts), found when she was a research assistant that intelligence is neither selected for among humans today nor does it even originate in homo sapiens, a finding which was suppressed by her department chair:
"There's a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession–compulsion and Asperger's syndrome. That cluster correlates very strongly. I can trace some genes back to the interglacial around 450,000 years ago, and others back to another burst of evolutionary innovation during the Eemian interglacial about 130,000 years ago. ... The hybridization was successful in the Stone Age, but the environment has changed. I found that modern culture selects for socialization but against the Neanderthal traits for mathematics and intelligence ... I don't know how you'll survive when our genes are gone.” (Hecht 2008)
Yes, what will those like Natalie Wexler do? All they care about is their socialisation and egaliatarian social ideals that aren't based on reason.
Relatedly, most plants were domesticated not by homo sapiens but by an as of yet third unidentified species. This one I don't recall off the top of my head to cite, but is easy to look up. My personal non-scientific speculation is they could be ancestors of Native Americans since they were the undisputed masters of cultivation and agriculture to the point Europeans didn't recognise it; aquaculture too, there were forms of aquaculture in ancient South America more advanced than ours today. If so, it'd explain why they end up being last to be identified due to their destruction by savages.
Thank you for your perspective and personal experience.
Agreed. One thought I had about tracking is how it is used today in Europe, specifically the UK. I know from reading biographies that some form of tracking was common in England in the past. Is that still the case today?
This problem can't be solved in the schools. It must be solved at home by better parenting.
The correlation between test scores (of any kind), K-12 educational outcomes and the number of parents in the students home is about .9. Minority kids from two parent households do about as well as white kids from two parent households in most educational outcome measures.. The reason that Asian students as a cohort have the highest SAT scores is because they have the lowest single parent household percentage.
Knowing people whose families are Asian-American, and whose children have excelled in school. I can tell you that, at least for the people I know, there is a lot more at play than having two parents. There is a culture around learning and discipline that I haven’t seen in other families. One friend has a daughter going to PhD medical school. His other daughter gets up at 4AM to do school work so she can make time for extracurricular activities. Another family has two children who are now concert-level pianists in addition to excellent students. One of my coworkers plays violin and was a competitive swimmer in addition to going to school for pre-med and then switching to computer science. I can’t say if this kind of thing is overall good for the kids, but they are going to have more opportunities because of how hard their parents pushed them.
My 1st grader was "falling behind" in reading. So much so that the school has organized a team of five individual experts to create a "plan." They started sending home flash cards so he could memorize "sight words." Sight words?? That's not reading. So after he does his flash cards we get out a real book and work through it. He gets extremely frustrated, because that's not whatever they do at school. But for the benefit of my tax dollars, I have the responsibility to teach my child how to read. Maybe it's better that way, but our 1st grade teacher is making $105K a year...
There is a list of high frequency words—the Dolch list—and learning these does expedite reading. You can make it more fun by playing games with them—such as concentration: https://sightwords.com/sight-words/games/. As you say correctly, it isn’t reading, but they are helpful to know. Reading aloud to your child, learning, rhyming songs, and watching educational TV will all help your child learn more quickly. Starfall and phonics books like this help also: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3270692-i-can-read-it.
Once your child knows their letter sounds and at they’ll be able to read this. Have them read it over and over daily until they can read it well. This boosts confidence because they will know they are reading and even though the story is ridiculous they will understand it. The author is right about both phonics, sight words, and prior knowledge all being important. Children’s rhyming songs help with phonics and educational children’s TV helps with prior knowledge—Computer games like Starfall and story time—listening to a picture book are fun ways to learn.
All you need is books, reading to them and teaching to read them, although rhymes and music aren't bad and every family should play. Stay away from the TV and computer games, those sorts of things will like Internet usage damage your kids' brain and impair development. Playtime should be active, not passive, and outdoor and physical when possible. A life well started to create a strong child is one spent licking the compost heap and getting dirty out in nature whenever possible.
Studies show that kids, who learn nursery rhymes read earlier—there is a correlation. The rhyming helps with language development. Studies also show that kids, who watch educational programs are more advanced at school. This is most likely due to prior knowledge aiding comprehension. Kids with more recess and breaks outdoors also do better at school. There is a mind body connection, and our minds can only focus for so long before we need a break. Curiosity, discovery, and beauty are important yo learning as well.
Unfortunately, not even that will prevent "unequal outcomes".
Why is that unfortunate?
Good point.
Because it reveals a class system, which people would rather not have to pay attention to.
If it's competition-driven, couldn't it also be called meritocracy?
If the word actually denotes anything.
Unequal outcomes - at what point? And what do we mean by outcomes? Personal? Social? Conforming? Financial? Mate-selection?
The problem needs to be solved at school and at home. Schools need to be using better practices and homes need to help their children build foundational knowledge and push accountability for their children.
Therein lies the problem. The government is fueling the destruction of the home/family so as to fill the vacuum created said entity. It is the ideological divide in this country. Look to the individual or look to the state (collective). The solution should be a natural rise in the power of the states.
This. This. This.
I am over 75. Six brothers and sisters. We are all successful by any objective standards. Most of us are still working professionally after 65.
I owe it all to my parents. When I used to ask” why can't I go out after dinner and play outside like all the other kids?”
You have homework to do and books to read.
We did what we were supposed to do. My parents did what they were supposed to do.
It wasn't hard.
I had one brother. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. His outcome was, to say the least, not as good as mine. He had the same firm, honest, dutiful, loving and devoted parents I did. May he rest in peace.
Illness is tough to overcome and might be impossible to beat.
Unequal outcomes, especially between this group and that group, are something over which we have no control. We should have figured this out after two generations of expensive, failed programs trying to address it. Why not just admit it and move on? A good first step would be removing the most disruptive students so the rest can learn.
True, my two grandchildren, one, has reading comprehension skills off the chart. The other struggles, yet has lots of common sense. She can size up most situations & function, whereas the other gets flustered if there is change. Everyone is different. But I tell them both all the time, they must be able to read & do math, or they will be cheated in life.
The thing is, you never know which one will be more successful. I know plenty of A and B students who work for C students.
If the parents don't value education, you won't get an equal outcome. Same if it's abusive or neglectful. The kids that read at home, sing, do nursery rhymes, etc will just have more practice than those in homes that don't, and it will show.
What really gets me is that what is billed as "reading comprehension" is more like inferring the definition of something. It is not encouraged to look up words in a dictionary, or even how to do that, or find the right definition for context. We don't need scads of new textbooks. The old McGuffey readers give a great start for students (you can find old copies on eBay). Kids should also be self-paced, with the teacher being more of a supervisor.
Fun fact, we didn't even have a Dept of Education in the govt before 1979. We've been throwing tons of money at a problem, creating great sinecures, but getting worse results. "No child left behind" turned into "no child getting ahead".
I learned to read on my own, reading the back of cereal boxes at breakfast and the back of baseball cards for hours. The "science" of education is like the "science" of life. The goal is not some notion of equity, it is learning to do what is necessary to live and thrive. The notion of equity is itself the enemy, we are not all the same, we just need the opportunity to thrive.
Same here. Nobody taught me how to read. Although I wish somebody had taught me arithmatic. I was good at geometry, so-so at algebra, and completely flummoxed by calculus.
Agree, the substances I ingested before algebra class didn't help. Fortunately my teacher was my football/basketball coach so he got me through...
I have been a teacher for 35 years, over 20 of them in schools in inner-city / south LA. I also taught for 6 years in a small rural school in Nebraska, where i also moonlighted as a remedial writing instructor at a local junior college. I am certified and have taught English, art, and social studies classes. From what I've read, it seems that some of the previous commenters haven't grasped the main idea here, so perhaps they're suffering from the same deficits in reading that are described. Anyway, Wexler's points are solid, and, from what I've seen, beyond question at this point. Descriptions of 'the science' aside, one way to sum up her main thrust is that motivation and pre-existing knowledge are crucial factors in learning to read. A clear-eyed appreciation of student needs and experience goes a long way toward confirming this for any teacher. The powers-that-be, however - school administrators with direct control over school or district-level activity - are usually slow on the uptake about good instructional practices, and this can reliably be attributed to their own lack of teaching experience and/or lack of content knowledge. Most are careerists and, if they participate in teacher evaluation programs, also lack a strong background in the subjects being taught by those they evaluate. Their overall, group-level awareness of content is thin at best. They aren't really qualified to supply instructional leadership because they don't know what they're talking about. This weakness is pervasive. I think adoption of Wexler's priorities would provide a strong counterweight and show results, though people of extreme political attitudes would certainly remain unsatisfied. It's much more gratifying to bemoan cultural imperialism or insufficient parenting.
Exactly right. Administrators have meetings where they go around the table, creating more questions and problems, giving side eyes and dry snitching. All in order to complicate things to justify creating another administrative job. There's a little more to it, but schools are for administrators moreso than the students.
Here in Akron, property tax went up a lot last year, while the cost per student is $3000 more than the Ohio average. Akron Public School district is lousy, it should be less not more.
Traditional tracking can lead to social inequities—especially when it is clearly racial segregation. Flexible grouping, which includes flexible achievement grouping, can enable teachers to scaffold appropriately while keeping the whole group in their zone of proximal development. In early reading instruction, students may be years apart in development on the first day. Grouping students by achievement with regular reassessments for reading groups, allows a teacher to focus on all students learning. Kindergarten teachers have such a wide range of abilities-from kids, who don’t know the alphabet, to kids reading novels and writing free responses. Her comment that while phonics is important—having prior knowledge is also important to comprehension— This is 100% true.
Few things:
1. My son taught 8th grade English for a couple of years. He said he could tell you within 6 weeks who would succeed and who wouldn't based on what their household was like and what their parents expected (not of the teacher, but of the child) with about 90% accuracy.
2. No matter what we do, we have to stop making rules based on the lowest common denominators in classrooms. It is unfair to those who are bored out of their minds, who do not enjoy the chaos, and who are there to learn.
3. One thing they taught at one of the very good schools my kids attended was root words. If you can teach root meanings, it will help them to forever get an idea.
4. Phonics is king and I'm so glad that's how I was taught.
Phonics. Also how I was taught by a teacher in charge of 9 grades in a one-room parochial school. Best. Education. Ever. But the fact is, my parents expected me to learn, too.
I was a product of the IQ standard in high school in early 50’s. Engineers were in demand and I was put into the college program because I had an IQ of 149. I learned to read early and my favorite reading genre was the “Hardy Boy” mysteries. Very little comprehension was needed there and I, to this day, still have comprehension difficulties. Made it out of college with a barely C average. Ended up eventually in construction where I thrived being a problem solver. My education did help me in learning how to search for knowledge when needed.
On another note, Tony, a widowed black father of 6 moved to our village in eastern OH in the late 40’s. Worked in the steel mill where he made decent money. Built a small house. The four boys were good athletes but education was foremost for Tony for his kids. All went to college on scholarships, both athletic and academic. The oldest died young at 27 before he could achieve his goals. One became a ‘go-to’ expert in child education, one an engineer at Catapillar, one a dentist and one an HR head of a large school district. The grandchildren of Tony have become dentists , lawyers all because of Tony’s insistence of education. Parents and family matter.
I almost stopped reading this the moment she brought up equity. Fuck equity. Every student should be encouraged to perform at the highest level. That includes the use of tracks. I was one of those kids in the gifted and talented tracks.
They wanted to move me up two grades but the gifted and talented program was much better. The social consequence of being moved up two grades from third grade would have been horrible. I never would have gotten laid in HS.
I was bored and underachieving with straight A's in my normal classes. We were solidly middle class. I asked my dad to teach me how to read at age 4. He tried but it didn't stick. I don't know why I wanted to know how to read. Just seemed like the thing to do.
I don't know that I was smarter than other kids. It was just easier for me to pick things up. I never cared about any of that shit. I just wanted to learn cool and interesting shit. Up to that point, the teacher was using me to teach other kids. That sucked balls.
By all means, add knowledge building to the curriculum. That makes sense to me. But the equity agenda needs to be exterminated. That is just an extension of the system of woke indoctrination. We are a pluralistic society. They have no business pushing a state-sanctioned religion.
Equity isn't the objective unless you are a brain dead communist. Excellence is the objective. Education should prepare kids for life with critical thinking not thinking critically. The little communists don't get to put kids through woke indoctrination in public schools without push back.
If they want to segregate on ideology, that is fine with me. The communists can send their kids to indoctrination camps. The rest of us will send them to educational institutions.
They don't get to wildly change every meaningful aspect of our public institutions to whatever extreme they desire without answering to the rest of us. Fuck those assholes. Fuck equity. Fuck the state. Fuck their little religion.
Another advantage of gifted and talented is that smart kids can be in class together, which is good for them socially as well as academically. I remember that we had a gang of smart kids who all took the same classes when I was in high school. My son is now taking honors and AP classes, include AP calculus, even though he isn’t great at math and has no interest in it. I asked him one time why he doesn’t take regular math, and he told me it was because all his friends are in AP calculus, and he doesn’t want to be in class with other kids who don’t pay attention and aren’t learning anything.
As a teacher, I've seen firsthand how much time and money is devoted to objectively ineffective teaching methods, curriculum, etc. I say objectively, because all you have to do is look at Hattie's metastudy to see that it's clear what is and is not effective.
And right there, in the top 10, is prior knowledge and ability. The trend to focus on processes and skills instead of knowledge acquisition--especially at the elementary level--has had a terrible effect on students. And the effect is worse for those who don't have a lot of knowledge built into their early lives at home.
We will never, ever see truly equitable outcomes. But focusing on helping students gain knowledge should be paramount to helping all kids perform at their best.
Yes! Prior knowledge is essential to learning, especially after elementary.
I read somewhere that no one really knows how kids acquire the ability to understand language.
They just do.
This suggests, in my totally non-expert opinion, that the problem is the schools not the students.
There is a very big difference between primary language learning and what comes later. Kids learn to speak long before they enter school. That process is difficult to pin down because it doesn't happen under tightly controlled conditions. But it is known that the language environment matters a lot, and it has a knock-on effect for further language development. Kids who are read to, talked with, and regularly converse with adults have a big advantage. For schooling outcomes down the road the use of complex sentences by parents - which correlates strongly with education level - is also a big plus.
I suppose I have Bill Watterson to thank for my son’s language ability. My son was obsessed with Calvin and Hobbes. My mom bought him the four-volume complete Calvin and Hobbes (highly recommended, by the way), and I used to spend hours reading it to him. It’s funny and cute, but the language level is also pretty high. No matter how much time I spent reading, my son wanted more, and he taught himself to read on those comics. We used to read other books too, but man, Calvin and Hobbes had a huge effect on my son.
Yes! A home environment where the child is constantly exposed to conversation and is read to every single day! This article touched on many things but I think skirts the main issue. A rich home environment is going to put a child in position to excell in school and life. Family income level correlates with, but is not the cause of, success.
If you ask linguists like Noam Chomsky, they have all sorts of magical grammar devices they've dreamt up and think are part of our "innate biology" explaining how children (and adults) learn language, despite that none of them know a thing about neuroscience, genetics, or any form of biology and there's no hard science supporting any of their beliefs whatsoever. Such matters fall under fields like those, not linguistics or philology, but for some reason those in the soft sciences are always eager to give their opinion on subjects like biology.
Never trust linguists, most who ever did anything of scientific, cultural, or political merit—rather than abuse Latin they can't understand, like the whole linguistic lexicon; mostly all gibberish like that of other modern scientists, with 20th century and later Latin making their intellectually plebeian nature obvious to anyone who can read the classical kind—were actually philologists, and that one is studied now and not the other is suspect with the reasons obvious: one focuses on ancient languages, comparative and historical linguistics, etymology and literature; the other focuses on what is mostly semantics and non- or ascientific gobbledigook.
I looked up Natalie Wexler and she has a JD and MA (juris doctor and master of arts). If she wanted education to be more scientific she should have studied science instead, and that she went for two degrees and chose not to shows her real priorities, as well as that her real interest in science is as a true disciple of it (i.e in scientism, not science itself), which is also obvious from her use of weasel word clichés like "experts agree" sure to make both the general public and any worthwhile scientists cringe.
Never disregard yourself for having a "non-expert" opinion, most "experts" are like her and only masquerading as such in things they have no more expertise in than anyone else. Someone who's really an expert with true expertise and intelligence—not only credentials—won't need to tell you they are one, nor will they feel a need to demonstrate their inferiority complex by putting you down or disregarding questions, thoughts, or truths for a lack of credentials.
This is a decent take.
I must say, your first two paragraphs were each a big run-on sentence; I love semicolons as well, but I know when to end the sentence.
That’s for sure.
But it’s important to also note that a child who hasn’t acquired a language by puberty never will be able to. Other skills have similar limitations. That part of the brain shuts down. So time is truly of the essence.
But can you apply this rationale to impoverished, uneducated immigrants at the turn of the last century, and a system that was deemed successful?https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/004208596900400303. Few things substitute for respect for learning, high standards, and discipline. Inarguably, the more theories and certifications and specialties, the worse our education system becomes. The three Rs were important.
And there's something to be said for tracking. All kids matter, fast track, and slow, yet we seem to be building society around the latter - at the expense of the former. When a child, it can be torture to comprehend a story and read through it and have to wait or not finish the story because someone else has a problem. You've got to allow, encourage, the kids who are smart to thrive while at the same time giving the child who is having problems help. That's what tracking is.
I was in what we called the "fast" groups in elementary school in reading and social studies. I was in the slow group for math, and that's putting it mildly. My fourth grade teacher wrote my parents that "Susie still struggles" when it comes to math. I survived and do not work at NASA. My sixth grade teacher, a horrible little man who wore those spongy elevator shoes that laced on the side, told me and my best friend that because we talked and giggled so much we'd "amount to nothing." Let's stop treating children like hot house flowers.
Every kid should be taught as much as possible, not limited by some artificial barrier
Including smart kids.
So make sure they have a library card.
Where an entire world of knowledge resides.....
Probably a good starting point is eliminate any new teaching techniques from the last couple of decades, and go back to the basics (knowledge). And find a God that isn't a person or political org.
Yes, get teachers out of student's breeches & back into their brains,
It's a common economics problem, rent seeking behavior. Those in power shape the system, and its resources, to stay in and gather more power. Choice is the only remedy here and most states act aggressively to limit charter schools or any alternatives that would reduce their control, both money & power.
The only remedy is for enough parents to sacrifice and seek out alternatives so that school enrollment continues to shrink, leading to collapse of the system itself. You can't fix what we have today, you just need to move onto the next thing and let the old thing die. Some kids/families will get impacted through this process, but who said life is fair. Just ask all the carriage drivers that Henry Ford put out of business.
Precisely. It's why we're seeing the explosion of a parallel/alternative system of micro, charter, private, and even homeschooling. More and more people are recognizing how the public system has failed us as a society.
Good points. Another aspect I haven’t seen here yet is the childcare part. Because it became desirable that both parents work, a lot of the function of public schools has become “free” childcare. Obviously it’s far from free, but that is how it is perceived. Any teacher faced with the problem of being a childcare person too must be really frustrated.
When I was in high school I took 4 years in 3. To do so I went to summer school for Math. The rest of the class were there because they failed math so the teacher taught each lesson three times each in a different approach. The first approach he figured he would get through to 1/3 of the students. The second he would pick up a second third and hopefully the third time through he would pick up the rest. I think it was a great approach. Different people learn in different ways.
Anglo-American Rewriting of US History
https://open.substack.com/pub/william3n4z2/p/anglo-american-rewriting-of-us-history?r=1kb28q&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The Anglo-American Establishment is responsible for the rewriting of US History and controlling how US History is taught throughout the educational system!
Through the largess of their foundations the Rockefellers, Carnegie, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Guggenheim Foundations colluded to begin the process of designing our current public education system.
In 1905 J.D. Rockefeller kick-started the creation of the General Education Board (GEB). Rockefeller alone, with 1905 dollars, initially gifted $1 million dollars, then increased it to $10 million in 1907, later a further sum of $32 million and through subsequent decades granted some $7.5 billion. With significant money buys significant influence and loyalty.
In 1913, the Sixty-Second Congress created a commission to investigate the role of these newly created NGO foundations. The commission after a year of testimony concluded:
“The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social services of the nation. The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free of any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially increased by building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.”
The Guggenheim Foundation agreed to award fellowships to historians recommended by the Carnegie Endowment. Gradually, through the 1920’s, they assembled a group of twenty promising young academics, and took them to London. There they briefed them on what was expected of them when they became professors of American history. That twenty were the nucleus of what was eventually to become the American Historical Association. The Guggenheim Foundation also endowed the American Historical Association with $400,000 at that time.
By 1950 the Rockefeller Foundation endowed Columbia Teachers College in New York City, formerly named the Russell’s Teacher College, produced one-third of all presidents of teacher-training institutions, one-fifth of all American public school teachers, and one-quarter of all superintendents……