An “insufferable bleakness” has overtaken childhood training as a “pedagogy of the depressed” pushes a simplistic imaginative and prescient of “America the Problematic” on impressionable younger college students, wrote Robert Pondiscio in Commentary final 12 months.
A former trainer, Pondiscio is presently a senior fellow on the American Enterprise Institute and the creator of the 2019 ebook How the Different Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over College Alternative (Avery), a behind-the-scenes account of Success Academy, considered one of America’s most completed (and controversial) constitution faculty networks. (Watch Cause’s interview with Pondiscio about that ebook.)
Public colleges have failed to show youngsters to learn and write as a result of they use approaches that are not based mostly on confirmed methods based mostly on phonics. Many faculties have been influenced by the work of Columbia College’s Lucy Calkins, who’s the topic of a brand new podcast collection from American Public Media, Bought a Story, “an exposé of how educators got here to imagine in one thing that is not true and are actually reckoning with the results—kids harmed, cash wasted, an training system upended.”
“The South Bronx elementary faculty the place I taught fifth grade for a number of years was a proponent of Calkins’ strategy,” Pondiscio wrote in a 2022 New York Publish op-ed. “We adopted her educating strategies and employed her literacy coaches for years, to little or no impact. Her best sin in opposition to literacy comes after youngsters study to ‘decode’ the written phrase, whether or not or not they’re taught with phonics, which is simply the beginning line for studying.”
How did this occur? Is the answer faculty selection—a system through which mother and father can decide out of conventional public colleges and their flawed approaches to educating studying? As Pondiscio argues, is withdrawing “concern for conventional public colleges” equal to withdrawing “concern for our republic”?
Be a part of Cause’s Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller for a reside dialogue with Robert Pondiscio on all these questions and extra this Thursday at 1 p.m. ET. Watch and depart questions for Pondiscio on the YouTube video above or on Cause‘s Fb web page.
