Another education fad that won’t work

By Dick Fredericks

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Ignoring its many critics, and without any believable evidence to show it works, the Nov. 8 guest column by State Board of Education President Rosie Hussey deceivingly claims the Core Curriculum as the latest education fad to fix Iowa schools.

Hussey blatantly ignores the fact that fixes by educrats in the State Board of Education, Iowa Department of Education, Iowa State Education Association (teachers union), etc., teacher union etc., have all failed to work despite costing at least an estimated

$4 billion.

The following education fads and touted fixes not only failed to improve student achievement, they made it worse: new math, whole language, smaller class size, teacher in-service days, teacher training phases I-III, mandatory kindergarten, funding for phantom students, state aid to schools, special education, Area Education Agencies, self-esteem (feel good about failure), preschool, higher teacher pay, excluding low test scores, dumbed-down tests, among others.

The website at www.iowalive.net/ contains a link to “The long history of Iowa public school failures,” showing reasons for spiraling costs and declining student achievement, foisted on Iowans by promoters of failed education fads. Hussey ignores the failures. She also ignores the fix that works.

Judy Hintz, at Educational Resources in West Des Moines, routinely uses proven instruction methods and curriculum to bring failing public school students up to grade level in about six months. Sylvan Learning Centers achieve similar results. Hussey and her ilk ignore these successes, and how they were accomplished.

They instead believe the dangerous constructivist theory that students are flawed, not the teacher union-controlled public schools.

The defective student theory allows for avoidance of accountability and the charting of real improvement in Iowa education, while continuing the incessant demands for increased funding to handle the “defective students” in the belief they are the source of the student achievement problem. Nowhere in the Hussey guest column is there any mention of the schools able to bring these very type of “defective” students up to grade level in less than one year.

Hussey forces Iowans to wait until 2015 for evidence the Core Curriculum will fail - just as Iowans were forced to suffer years of damage to children for past failures to be proven.

Educrats have denied the failures and were supported in doing so by the Cedar Rapids Gazette and other newspapers, especially the Des Moines Register, which just finally admitted that Iowa schools are failing dismally.

It is far past time for Hussey, and other educrats and constructivists to talk to Hintz and officials at Sylvan Learning Centers, to learn and practice what they have to say. It works!

No way should parents have to pay taxes for failed Iowa public schools and also have to pay private education businesses to teach their children.

Dick Fredericks of Palo is retired executive director of Rockwell Collins Organizational Development and is spokesman for Iowalive Network, a network of volunteer residents and professionals for improving Iowa. Comments: dfred@fmtcs.com