Memo to President Obama concerning Education

1) The Obama Administration has endorsed a huge increase in education spending. Several factors argue for a reconsideration of this policy, completely apart from the national indebtedness.

2) Money is not the essential problem in American education. Many experts would say that the U.S. already spends excessive amounts on education. And wouldn't we all agree that children can be wonderfully educated, if necessary, in one-room school houses, shacks or tents, something that is done around the world every day? The crucial factor is this: what do the people in charge truly want to accomplish? What are their priorities?

3) Our public schools are often charged with dumbing down their students, and giving a poor return on investment. Why does this happen? Apparently because America's elite educators were seduced by a collectivist sensibility. In their world, mediocrity is not only an acceptable outcome, it may well be the goal. To give these educators ever more billions to spend will simply confirm them in their bad habits. In these difficult times, shouldn't they be expected to do more with less? Better still, we should probably recruit new people armed with new thinking. The 21st Century is no time to rely on the flawed ideas that caused so much harm in the previous century.

4) Much evidence suggests that American education, like Gulliver in the famous novel, is tied down by an array of flawed methods. The paradigm for all these bad ideas is Sight Words, an absurdly unworkable way to teach reading that doesn't teach anyone to read. Isn't that the pattern we see over and over? New methods are said to produce X; but at the end of the year we somehow end up with less of X. These so-called innovations turn out to be ingenious sophistries, not genuine pedagogies. Consider, for example, Reform Math, Constructivism, Cooperative Learning, Self Esteem, Invented Spelling, Bilingual Education, Multiculturalism, and many others. We see a remarkable consistency: each of these things is said to produce magical results that never seem to materialize. So the first order of business may well be to identify and eliminate all these pretenders. A strong case can be made for getting back to basics and academics, albeit taught in the most entertaining ways.

5) More than anything else we need to move away from leveling and mediocrity, toward excellence and academic success. Children come to school with very different abilities--that´s the way it will always be. Shouldn't our concern, as educators, be to ensure that all children are encouraged to develop their abilities to the maximum possible extent, no matter whether those abilities are great or small? This approach is clearly best for the individual child and for the entire society.

6) To understand the broader context of our problems, your advisors may profit from perusing "THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happened to American Education." It's a short, lively, entertaining book. But it provides a deeper understanding of what went wrong in the past, and a map for a better future.

(Bruce Deitrick Price has been writing about education for 25 years; he has distilled this research into his fifth book, THE EDUCATION ENIGMA. He is also the founder of Improve-Education.org.)