My new book explains the crisis in the public schools, and how we fix it

I've been writing about education more than 25 years. It's been a fascinating journey...but mystifying!

So much in education is counterintuitive. Our schools seem to do everything in the slowest, most inefficient ways. How can we explain this? It's almost as if our educators merely pretend to believe in universal education. What they seen truly committed to is universal mediocrity.

When you consider all the studies and statistics, you realize they all paint the same bleak picture. We spend more and more billions every year but SAT scores fall. Our better students do not compete well with the better students from other countries. The general public seems to know barely enough to read a daily newspaper. Can most Americans find Idaho on a map? Never mind Japan? And then there's the really big mystery: 50 million functional illiterates. How could this happen?

At this point I have more than 120 articles on the web trying to explain how and why our educators got off track. I've been especially obsessed by the Reading Wars, which is our biggest, dumbest scandal and a blazing paradigm for everything else. As I understood the damage caused by bogus reading methods, I began to have a clearer sense of what we need to do across the board: namely, toss out all the bogus ideas.

Oddly enough, we are engaged in a war with our own educators. I want to persuade the public that this is an intellectual war; and we must fight the bad ideas promoted by educators with good ideas. So I've collected my 50 favorite articles in a book titled THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happened To American Education. Partly it's a history book. It's also a guidebook to the toxic nonsense in American schools. Most importantly, it's a map to a better future. It's also entertaining. What other book talks about Pavlov, Mick Jagger, the Tao, John Dewey, birds, robots and the plight of poetry?

My thesis is that we have no hope of improvement unless we understand exactly what happened to American education: our schools were made dumb by design. Throwing more billions of dollars at the problem won't help. Writing more glowing policy recommendations won't help. Giving money to so-called best practice won't help. Our educators are set in their ways. Our first job is simply this: we have to grasp that our house is dirty and then clean it.

We have to get rid of the over-hyped "progressive" innovations that turn out in practice to be destructive and regressive. For example, Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, Self Esteem, No Memorization, Invented Spelling, Cooperative Learning, Fuzzy Anything, and many more. We need to restore basics and academics to their proper prominence.

Many people are comforted by the idea that our educators are clumsy or befuddled by fads. No, I'm afraid you really have a much better sense of what happened if you imagine a bunch of Socialists like John Dewey gathered around a table discussing their philosophical goals, devising strategies, and trying to figure out how to keep the public from interfering. I should mention by the way that I never criticize teachers. I'm concerned only with the top educators, people with Ph.D.'s at Teachers College and such. These people are responsible for what happens in American education; teachers are as much their victims as children are. The deeply troubling part is that Obama wants to give our devious educators even more money. I'd suggest: not a penny more until they clean up their act. To save this country, and its economy, we first have to save the schools.

If you might enjoy a short, fast but entirely intellectual critique of American education, please check out THE EDUCATION ENIGMA (on Amazon; or any store can order it for you). This little book can save our public schools.

Please also visit Improve-Education.org, where many of these ideas were incubated.