Prologue
Advocacy of Children
1982
I wrote this vitriolic condemnation of the educational system in 1982 in response to what I considered the rape of children by the schools. I still agree with 90 percent of what I wrote. In the paper I state that the business community may be the only hope for the system. I currently believe that the business community may be as screwed up as the educational community and can't be relied on for much more than do-gooder deeds that lead to poignant photojournalism and self-serving PR. I also don't totally agree with what I wrote about tenure. This disagreement is based on some of the dirty pool that employers have played in firing people who have benefits so they can hire folks who don't have benefits.
The bottom line, however, is still the same. I have personally worked with over 200 schools that have achieved excellent performance, far above the means of schools with comparable demography. NOT ONE WAS ABLE TO MAINTAIN THIS LEVEL OF PERFORMANCE for more than 2-5 years. A new superintendent, new state framework, or new epiphany about how students learn have ravaged these programs so that after a few years, the school population returns to the pre-intervention rate of failure, and nobody, including the business community, says one word. The process is like those magic drawing boards that whisk away what had been drawn and keep no record of the earlier inscription.
Kathy Watkins wrote an article that impugns an even larger group of participants in education (the press). Her version is more thoughtful than mine, but I found mine to be curiously timely today. Go to article.
Featured Video
Kindergarteners Showing Off Their Math Skills 1966 Uncut demonstration of at-risk children who were taught math by Zig Engelmann as four year olds and five year olds. The session was filmed in front of a class of college students in August with no rehearsal. Children work addition, subtraction, multiplication, division problems, basic algebra problems, fraction problems, area problems, factoring, and simple simultaneous equations.
