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.)