I’ve been working on this question for more than five years. I would argue that it’s a lot more complex and murky than most people would ever imagine.

Haven’t we all watched, for decades, as the government dumped billions of dollars on the public schools without accomplishing very much?

Haven’t we watched the big foundations try to make a difference? And as well the think tanks, commissions and pundits? But what changes?

Keep in mind that we are the richest country on the planet, and that we spend more dollars per student than anybody else. Probably two or three times as much.

Note that in every city in this country there is an excellent private school. These schools are your templates if you are trying to create an outstanding public school. Why do our educators seem to ignore best practice, and instead perpetuate worst practice?

The closer you look, the more the mystery grows.

Okay, I do want to create some drama here. I want to pull everyone into the puzzle. The mediocrity of the public schools is a great problem that we need to solve, otherwise we will keep recycling the same failures.

I’ve just published a complete solution to this mystery on my site Improve-Education.org. Here’s the mini-version:

The historical fact is that, starting a century ago, our educators got sidetracked by social engineering schemes. It was a private decision they made; and they didn’t want the public to know. So at that point we entered a twilight zone, and we are still there. There’s a big pretend that public schools are primarily trying to serve academic ends. Not true.

My pathway into this whole thing, more than anything else, was the reading wars. Specifically I really focused on Whole Word for about a year until I could finally say: this thing can’t possibly work; it’s a hoax; it’s child abuse. Now, place those assertions next to this fact: our educators kept Whole Word in play for 70 years and created 50 million functional illiterates. Something’s rotten at Teachers College. I don’t think you can intelligently argue that our educators were simply making mistakes for 70 years. The number 50,000,000 is way too big. They got bad results; but they kept going. So I conclude the obvious: they were comfortable with those bad results. They were comfortable with lots of Americans not being able to read well.

And once you suspect that this reading pedagogy was never intended to teach reading, you can look at all the other methods more objectively. I’m thinking of constructivism, reform math, self-esteem, bilingual education, no memorization, multiculturalism, cooperative learning, and many others. I believe that these methods were not designed to work academically so much as they were designed to work socially and psychologically.

The pattern was clear to me: none of the most popular pedagogies delivers as publicly promised. But I suspect they all deliver as secretly intended. That is, kids are kept busy in ingenious ways but nobody learns very much.

And that is the reason why it’s so difficult to improve public schools. There is a lot of gunk and goo in the wheels of education. So the first order of business is to identify these bad ideas, expose their flaws, and then eliminate them. That’s the message of “38: Saving Public School--A New Paradigm” on Improve-Education.org.

Read the report and decide for yourself.

My broader thesis is that we can’t save the country if we don’t first save the schools. The progressive educators deliberately dumbed down the schools for ideological reasons. Now we need to deliberately smarten them up by deconstructing the phony ideas put in play by John Dewey and pals, while simultaneously restoring basics and academics to their proper prominence.

(My new book THE EDUCATION ENIGMA also deals with these themes. Available on Amazon.)

Public schools seem to be in a constant state of disarray and low performance. We have to wonder: are our educators hopelessly inept? Or is intellectual sabotage a factor?

Some experts argue that educators have been sidetracked by social engineering, where the main goal is that students have correct opinions rather than that they learn a lot.

Note that schools in Socialist and Communist countries engage in endless indoctrination, but they also find time to teach a lot of information, as required by the traditional educational model. So it’s clear that both can be done.

The striking thing about American public schools is that students stop learning even the simplest things. Children are in school roughly a thousand hours a year, for a total of 12,000 hours from grades one to 12. But in that vast mansion of time there doesn’t seem to be room for a match box of facts. Find Japan on a map? Don’t be silly. Nobody needs to know that.

Can social engineering, as normally defined, explain why American children know very little? I don’t think so. The ignorance is too towering. The more I looked at the shortcomings of our public schools, the more I was forced to conclude: somebody is deliberately aiming very, very low.

The picture starts to make sense if you assume that American educators, at the PhD level, are not social engineers so much as ignorance engineers. All their ideas and policies appear directed at mass-producing mediocrity, to the degree they can get away with it.

Their concern seems not to be with shaping opinions so much as making sure nobody learns anything worth having an opinion about! Perhaps this nihilistic kind of social engineering is more easily snuck into classrooms.

I didn’t reach this distrustful view casually or in a sudden epiphany. No, it was slowly forced on me as I contemplated the pitiful spectacle of math courses that don’t teach any math, a reading pedagogy that doesn’t permit anyone to learn to read, and geography, history and science courses that are not concerned with anyone retaining information.

What we seem to have is a widespread war against civilization, especially American civilization, conducted in every subject and at every level. Here’s a quick run-down of the incriminating evidence in the main disciplines:

MATH: Decades ago, our educators concocted a fatuous fraud known as New  Math. The public laughed. The educators went underground for several years and came up with a bunch of replacements now known (sarcastically) as New New Math. Some of today’s leading textbooks are called TERC, Connected Math, Everyday Mathematics, MathLand, etc. Children taking these courses learn virtually no real math.

To understand this craziness quickly, please see a wonderful video on YouTube titled “An Inconvenient Truth” by M. J. McDermott. Give McDermott 15 minutes and you will understand the vacuity of these programs.

What sort of people would devise math books that don’t teach math?? Ignorance engineers.

READING: It was by studying Whole Word (also known as Look-Say) that I really came to understand the scandal of our schools. This unworkable pedagogy has created  50,000,000 functional illiterates. What could be more vicious?

By all accounts, 99% of children taught with phonics learn to read by the age of 7, or 8 at latest. But children stuck in Whole Word classrooms are made to memorize word shapes one by one (a tedious process), thereby guaranteeing that most of these children will be semi-literate well into high school.

Still worse, this bogus pedagogy is shrouded in sophistry. Even highly educated people rarely understand what Whole Word is. How can the public defend itself against this dangerous hoax? That seems to be the point.

I’ve created some graphic videos that try to explain Whole Word in a few minutes. Please visit YouTube and enter “phonics versus whole word.”

For a longer, more historical analysis, please see “30: The War Against Reading” on Improve-Education.org.

FACTS, IN GENERAL: The dogma is that children should not be expected to memorize ANYTHING. Teachers say: “They can look it up.” In real life, this means that nobody knows nothing. About history, science, geography, the arts, or which way is north.

This rampant ignorance is dramatized every time Jay Leno goes “JayWalking.” I developed “The Quizz--100 simple facts that every high school student should know” to spotlight the same emptiness. (Google “20: The Quizz”)

IN CONCLUSION: Throughout all the years that this dumbing down has been going on, our educators have been yelling for more money. As if that is the key to the kingdom. Not at all. Genuine educators with half the budget would easily outperform the ideologues now in charge. The central tragedy is that these misguided educators seem to have little concern for the needs of children or the good of the country.  Let the people eat cake.

(Please print this piece and follow up the leads at your convenience. That our so-called educators would actually function as anti-educators is THE story of the 20th century.)

The next four paragraphs (from a review I just put on Amazon) are such a perfect little summary of what befell this country, I want to share them with you:
"Kafka can't match this. Imagine a conspiracy (a de facto conspiracy at least) to make sure that children don't learn to read. Then imagine that the very people running the conspiracy also write and publish all the primers and basal readers (e.g., Dick and Jane) that supposedly teach children to read. Then imagine that the same conspirators create an industry of counseling services, testing centers, treatment facilities, and an endless parade of advice books, all promising to help the millions of victims to escape the curse put upon them by this conspiracy! Give it up, Franz. You're little league next to these people.

Which brings us to 'How to become a better reader' (1953), a stellar example of said advice books. It's by Paul A. Witty, a Professor of Education, the Director of the Psycho-Educational Clinic at Northwestern University, the author of many little reading books, and a founder of the International Reading Association. At mid-twentieth century, Paul Witty was Mr. Reading.

What was his secret for teaching reading? It was memorization of Whole Words. What were the results? Massive illiteracy. Witty himself mused in 1950: 'Why are there so many poor readers in our schools?...Is it true that one-third of our high school students can't read at the fifth grade level? That's what one magazine writer estimated in 1946. Other articles have painted almost as bleak a picture.'

So there you have it. Witty and a few dozen people just like him, using an unworkable pedagogy, brought ruin and havoc upon the children of America. And Witty & Company knew it! So, do you posit evil intent, or do you deduce that these were people too dumb to come in out of the rain? That's the big unanswered question of the 20th century; historians should get busy answering it...."
The book, of course, is obscure and not itself the point. I have reviewed two of Witty's books because they let us see directly into the dark heart of what has to be a conspiracy circa 1950.

Study this whole phenomenon for any time at all, and you will surely conclude that human incompetence cannot reach such towering heights, decade after decade. No, we must be talking about towering malevolence. At least, that's my conclusion. If you'd like to learn more about the evidence for this conspiracy, please see "30: The War Against Reading" on Improve-Education.org.

PS The creepy part is how much the experts relentlessly preaching about global warming today sound like the equally assured experts who told the country that children must learn to read via Look-Say.

It has been said that teachers are the hope of the future. This was never so true as it is today. More and more I think that if American education is to be rescued, teachers will have to do it.

I write a lot about our educators and their counterproductive theories. I always explain that when I speak of educators, I never mean teachers. I mean the people at the top, the bosses with PhD’s who control policy in the ed schools and the bureaucracy. (Indeed, my work is dedicated to America’s teachers--I always feel they are as much the victims of bad theory as students are.)

Unfortunately, teachers often allow themselves to be co-opted and controlled by these elite educators with their hidden agenda. Here is a better paradigm: teachers should distance themselves from these education commissars, and focus on what is genuinely best for children....

Mona McNee and Alice Coleman, two remarkable British teachers with more than 80 years of experience between them, have just published a searing new book titled ‘The Great Reading Disaster.” McNee and Coleman analyze education in the UK during the past 50 years, and reach this sad conclusion: “The real villains were not the victimized teachers who carried out the intellectual child abuse but the training establishments that brainwashed them into doing so.”

Victimized. Brainwashed. How many American teachers recognize themselves in that quote? Indeed, how many teachers have always known that they were being manipulated and managed in a variety of ways, and sent forth to do the ideological bidding of their trainers?....

Thomas Jefferson said: “A little revolution now and then is a good thing.” What we need, I believe, is for teachers to take that message to heart, and revolt against the secret manipulation by educators. Why not return to the real business of teaching--which is to raise children as far as you can. Not control them, not level them, not shape them to somebody else’s blueprint. But to enable them to achieve all that they can achieve--for their own good and for the good of society.... 

The USA seems to have two types of educators that cause most of the damage: the Rousseauvian/Hippie/Romantic/Permissive sort that scorns standards of any kind; and the Collectivist/Socialist/Communist/Totalitarian sort that hates this country and this civilization. The synergy between these two types is predictably negative: less and lower, dumb and dumber. Neither group is overly concerned with whether children can read or count. Indeed, academic success actually seems to get in the way of the social engineering schemes the top educators are often in love with.

It’s not that these people are evil. It’s that their field is contaminated, encrusted, weighed down by lame ideas and inane sophistries. Even the most motivated people are kept from doing their best. 

So, it’s a good time for teachers to pull back from the smothering embrace of educators. Teachers should turn toward doing what is best for their own minds, their own souls. As the Carnegie Foundation stated: “Teachers must think for themselves if they are to help others think for themselves.”....

Many teachers know in their hearts that they’re caught up in a huge con. What they don’t know is how to escape.

Well, first of all, with regard to educators, let’s just point out that the Emperor is quite naked. Educators since Dewey have been playing power games and ideology games, and many of these games got tangled up with money games (need I mention Big Publishing, Big Psychiatry, Big Pharma, Big Labor, all in a steamy bed with Big Ed). So here’s where we are now. The guy’s naked. Yes, the Emperor of Education is totally naked. Educators who would create 50,000,000 illiterates have no credibility. They ought to be laughed out of town, perhaps arrested. It’s child abuse, for one thing....

Teachers need to be liberated from their oppressors. We need to see some new political movements. Teachers should join, at least in their hearts, the Teacher Liberation Front. TLF! Power to the Teachers!

-----
These five excerpts provide a short version of a much longer article: "31: Teacher Liberation Front" on Improve-Education.org
Article has epilogue titled: Educator Liberation Front.