“So what’s the solution? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation thinks it has one – redesign the high schools:
The key problem is political will. Elected officials have not yet done away with the idea underlying the old design. The idea behind the old design was that you could train an adequate workforce by sending only a third of your kids to college and that the other kids either couldn’t do college work or didn’t need to. The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and – for their sake and ours – they have to.
And Gates has put his money where his mouth is. His foundation has already invested almost $1 billion thus far to help redesign the American high school.
I am always amazed at the ignorance of billionaires, smart enough to create great new industries, but totally misinformed when it comes to the problems of our education system. The problems do not start in high school. They start in primary school, and often in kindergarten and pre-school. The blatant educational malpractice that takes place in those early school years is what sets our students on the road to academic disaster.
The educators can get away with this academic genocide because their methods seem to produce acceptable results up to the 4th grade. But after that, it’s all downhill to the bottom of the slope in 12th grade. And by the time we get to the 12th grade, everyone – including Mr. Gates – forgets what happened in the 1st grade.
We’ve written extensively about how the teaching of reading by the whole-word method produces the symptoms of dyslexia. We’ve explained how these teaching methods were devised by our top educators to produce the results they wanted: the dumbing down of America. And Mr. Gates believes that he can stop the dumbing-down process by redesigning the American high school with more rigorous courses in math and science.”
“Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education, including: “Is Public Education Necessary?” “NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education,” “The Whole Language/OBE Fraud” and “Homeschooling: A Parents Guide to Teaching Children.” His books are available on Amazon.com.”
Jenny Hatch