Things You Can Do: K-12 Schools

"Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher

Things You Can Do: K-12 Schools. What ed schools have been doing to higher education (over the last two decades especially), they've been doing to the K-12 system for the better part of a century. With rare exception, to become a K-12 teacher, counselor, principal or superintendent, you have to have the relevant degree from an ed school. What's more, if you go online and look at the leadership of your state's Board of Education or Department of Education, chances are you'll see nothing but ed school graduates. In other words, the nation's worst academic institutions have a lock on the training and licensure of almost everyone involved in the nation's K-through-12 system.

And to remind you of just what academic disasters most of these institutions are, I'd urge you to visit the ed schools—that's one word—edschools.org website, which is the home of the most comprehensive study ever undertaken on the nation's K-12 teacher and administrator training schools. Remember, too, that this study was headed by an insider, Arthur Levine, who was president of Teachers College from 1994 through 2006, when this study was completed.

It's one of the most devastating and depressing documents I have ever read. Even more depressing is the fact that absolutely nothing was done in response to this report. If anything, teacher training schools have gotten even less academically serious and even more ideologically extreme. Most are now pushing the neo-racist principles of critical race theory with the same ideological fervor that they've been pushing the disastrous principals of whole language reading instruction since the 1970s.

In the long term, I believe the only real solution to the problems in our schools will come in the form of competition that is school choice—allowing all parents, not just the wealthy ones, to send their children to good schools (whether traditional public schools, public charter schools or private schools) with a track record of academic excellence. But in the short term, there are things parents can do now, not just for their own children, but for their neighbors’ children, too.

First and most important, find out how reading is being taught in the early grades in your local school. If there isn't a heavy emphasis on phonics instruction, or even if there is some emphasis on phonics, but children are being encouraged to guess at words rather than sound them out, that's a huge red flag. And here's the crucial point. Even if your own child is doing okay with reading and reading at grade level, that may be happening not because of, but in spite of the reading instruction your child is getting in school.

So I'd urge everyone to think communally here. Think of the children who may not have the advantages that your own child may have and whose parents may just assume that teachers are following evidence-based guidelines for teaching reading. The odds are they're not, and this is everyone's problem.

The second thing to do is find out how teachers in your state are being taught to teach reading, and you can find that out by going to the National Council on Teacher Quality website—NCTQ for short. This is a great, non-partisan organization, and one of the things they do is investigate ed schools to see whether their classes on reading instruction are following evidence-based practices. So you can look up your state to see how it ranks and look up individual ed schools within your state to see how they're training teachers to teach reading. If there are ed schools in your state not following these guidelines, and I guarantee you there will be, I'd urge you to contact your state representatives and find out why and what they plan to do about it.

Third, you can check the Nation's Report Card website and find out how the K-12 system is doing in the nation as a whole, how it's doing in your state, and how it's doing in your district. And remember, just because your own children are doing well in school, that doesn't mean that the school is actually serving the disadvantaged students. So, it may be that the parents of straight-A students will need to shoulder the burden for parents whose children aren't doing so well. This is something to keep in mind when attending a school board meeting and board members talk about all the new programs in “equity and social justice” they're developing. The best program ever devised for real social justice is a school that has a coherent, knowledge-based curriculum that gives less advantaged students the knowledge and the tools that their more advantaged peers pick up at home. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

Finally, there are many new organizations springing up around the country that can help amplify your voice when it comes to education. I'll mention two here.

The first is Parents Unite, an organization dedicated to "diversity of thought, freedom of discourse and self-expression.” Though centered in New England at the moment, the organization will likely have a national footprint very soon. So I'd urge you to get in touch with them by going onto their website at parentsunite.org.

The second is the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, otherwise known as FAIR: a non-partisan organization dedicated to—and I quote from the mission statement, "advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding and humanity." FAIR now has state chapters all over the country, and it's a great way to meet people who are concerned about ideological intolerance and intellectual orthodoxy in our schools and elsewhere, especially where race is concerned.

And speaking of race, let me close this series with a crucial point. No serious person—not one—thinks that the racial history of America shouldn't be taught in our schools or that racism doesn't exist in the United States. It does. It has and it's done terrible things to people—terrible things to my black fellow Americans, especially. And it's precisely for that reason that I'm so adamant, and I hope you are too, that we not create more racial division in the guise of fighting it.

Thank you so much for watching!

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Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)