Resignation of an Education Activist: Tired of Banging My Head Against the Wall of Apathy
By Sharman Ramsey
I am seriously considering ending my education activism. When I first began battling Whole Language in the early 90s after seeing how many illiterate middle schoolers I had in my classrooms, I really thought the teachers in Dothan would join with me to battle this foolishness. Recently Judith Hanford, an investigative journalist produced a podcast that is an expose of this ridiculous "method" of reading instruction that actually teaches children "how not to read." (http://www.soldastory.org)
What happened in Dothan was a Whole Language hootenanny at the Dothan City School Board led by Dr. Patty Fritchie, the reading instructor at Troy State University. I do wish Judith Hanford could have been there to hear and see teachers supporting this method that had principals demanding that good/successful teachers leave their phonics books outside the door to be destroyed. The Hootenanny occurred when a group of parents (my husband and me included) flew an expert from a successful school that was 90% Black, served 3 housing projects, and had 40 identified dyslexics each year. The principal was given a mandate to improve that schools scores and he took a group of grudging teachers to participate in a seminar in learning the Systematic, Intensive, Direct and Early Method, The Writing Road to Reading, developed by Romalda Spalding a colleague of Dr. Samuel Orton founder of the Orton Dyslexia Society. Dr. Orton calls most dyslexia "school induced." After one year the scores in that school rose from the 25th percentile to the 80th, the number of identified dyslexics dropped from 40 to less than 5, and discipline problems declined.
My detractors will say everything I write is sour grapes because I was defeated in my run for Chairman of the Dothan City School Board where I refused donations because I did not want to be obligated to anyone. Twice. The campaign for the opposition was run out of the central office I was told by someone who was there. In the meantime, a local obstetrician who "had a heart for the children" and the president of Troy University became chairman of the Dothan City School Board and so everything the Director of Instruction and fellow "progressives" wanted got rubber stamped -- and still does. It is a circle the wagon mentality in education today. Don't rock the boat. Or as one principle of a very unsuccessful school put it, "Let's not get anybody hurt here." Losing one's retirement by going against the crowd isn't a wise move.
And though the reading scores reveal the failure, more money gets spent on programs like Reading Recovery as discussed by Judith Hanford. Each child who cannot read thinks they are defective. Their remediation in the school is more intensive more of the same. Parents who can afford it get private tutoring. Those who can't follow year after year of depression and failure and probably drop out early.
Unfortunately, the legislators cannot legislate success in Math when the math instructors in the colleges of education pretty much do what the reading instructors do--teach how not to do math (successfully that is). Social Justice Math is more important than real Math instruction.
Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is integrated into every subject into the Curriculum.
Oh, and during that time, with the debate over Goals 2000 and OBE/Mastery Learning/Outcomes Based Education (now called Equity) David Hornbeck (who wrote the Alabama First document promoted by A Plus, a clone of the Kentucky document) rewrote the Bylaws of Dothan City Schools replacing sequential learning with thematic learning. The Goals 2000 document also forbade drill and repetition (which Bear Bryant thankfully ignored). Phonics was kicked out and contemptuously labeled "drill and kill." Memorizing Addition/Subtraction/Multiplication/Division tables was now considered old fashioned so our children suffered through New Math and its later renamed clones. History Classes were shifted to Social Studies and the thematic lessons foreshadowed Critical Race Theory.
Social Emotional Learning now includes Eastern Meditation and the access to books the gatekeepers of the past would never have allowed in our libraries. And now, since I made them public, I no longer have access to them. But, Dothan City School students do. Oh yes, welcome to Comprehensive Sex Education beginning in Kindergarten. Words, activities, and pictures most of us have never seen or heard (and wish we would never see or hear) are now a part of the comprehensive education of students in Alabama schools.
And then we have Common Core ironically created and promoted by the Chicago purveyors of Progressive Politics making schools bee hives of community activism: Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, Barach Obama (who attended Saul Alinsky's schools on community activism paid by a Chicago pedophile priest Cardinal Bernardin), Arne Duncan (US Superintendent of Education) and David Coleman who worked with Ayers and Obama on the Chicago Annenberg Project, and destroyed education in Chicago.
Coleman claims to have produced Common Core. His philosophy? "These standards are the most serious attempt this country has yet made to come to grips with those early sources of inequality." So now with a salary of over a million a year he heads the College Boards.
The same passion that brought Patty Fritche's Whole Language Stepford Teachers to the Dothan City School Board to yell down the words of the Principal from the successful school teaching phonics ought to bring the same passion for getting rid of it! And reclaim our schools for the sake of our children!
But that won't happen and I am tired of banging my head against the wall of apathy.
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