"But but but schools just need more money!"

Countless times, the Department of Education tried just that: Sending schools piles of money.

Ya know what happened every time?

No academic improvements.

Here are four examples🧵 Under Obama, ED sent out $7 billion in "School Improvement Grants" to overhaul the lowest performing schools

The results?

From the department's own report:

"Implementing any SIG model had no impacts on test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment."

The most common question I'm asked is "What else?"

If not project-based learning and Dewey, what should teachers read? You've convinced me direction instruction works. So how do I do it well?

Here are 5 resources to get teachers started

A mini-🧵 If nothing else, read Rosenshine's "Principles of Instruction"

It's 9 pages, explaining 10 no nonsense pointers for better teaching. No b.s. Just useful recommendations

No doubt, the most benefit for the least amount of reading

Consider my conversion final

I think classical education is the last best hope to save American education I graduated teachers college a devotee of John Dewey, project based learning, letting student interest dictate curriculum, “student centered” discipline, every nostrum of progressive pedagogy

Back in 1848, Horace Mann predicted the current politicization and resulting parental exodus from public education:

"If parents find that their children are indoctrinated into what they call political heresies, will they not withdraw them from the school?" Seriously, he predicted it perfectly:

"Each schoolroom will at length become a miniature political club-room, exploding with political resolves, or flaming out with political addresses, prepared, by beardless boys, in scarcely legible hand-writing, and in worse grammar."

Project based learning!

Where kids will spend lots of time putzing around with PowerPoint animations, one kid does all the real work, and no one actually learns any worthwhile content.

Hooray education fads! Very learning, much engaging! One to one computing!

So every child can play Slope or watch ASMR videos during class instead of paying attention

Hooray education fads! Very learning, much engaging!

Watching “What is a Woman?” by @MattWalshBlog. Some thoughts as I go🧵 To begin, these people are obviously not used to their ideas being pressed or contested.

Unable to answer even the simplest questions and turning to frustration or anger real quickly

Finally getting to John Taylor Gatto. My feelings are… mixed.

It’s a book of thesis statements with only anecdotal evidence. And yet gosh dang it if he isn’t compelling. I find his view of human nature overly idealistic. The whole “if we only let children be, then they’ll be bright shining ✨stars!✨”

One image in particular, that children are like uncut stone slabs, pair back the cultural excess to expose the statue within

Seattle public schools' math curriculum asks "How important is it to be right [in math]? What is right?"

Something tells me it's pretty damn important when we're designing bridges and buildings... Topics to cover: identity, power, history of resistance, oppression.

I dunno. Maybe teach math in math class?

It saddens me (frustrates me) that concepts of cognitive science get such short shrift in many teacher training programs.

Primary-secondary learning, schema theory, cognitive overload, automaticity, working memory, chunking. and so on. Primary/secondary learning has really been on my mind recently.

Just because kids learn motor skills and verbal language through experience and play doesn't mean they will learn written language, history, or advanced math this way.

Modern teacher training programs:
- We made BLM friendship bracelets in our capstone course
- I was told to make my students activists
- Many of our readings dealt with CRT in schools
- Instead of papers, many graduate students wrote acrostic poems - If we read a classic work with students, we were told to do so through a Marxist lens
- In a circle, we passed around a popsicle stick with googly eyes while discussing our feelings
- I had to affirm "everyone has their truth.

Let's be honest, though. If we're doing this, then they become units/classes about post-colonial theory, feminism, or psychoanalysis--not literature--which is fine but let's at least be honest about it.

It's an approach to literature that affirms one worldview

https://twitter.com/mattcarton/status/1344401331780349953

I could teach my students a Calvinist Christian "lens" but I doubt many would be happy about it. Read character motivations, themes, and author's contentions against my faith through the idea of "total human depravity" but then I'm just self-affirming my beliefs.

So my biggest problem with the whole #DisruptTexts thing isn't their treatment of "the canon" (whatever that means) but their literary theory.

It turns every book into an echo chamber. Traditional literary theory sees a book carrying a certain purpose, a message, engagement with certain themes and ideas.

T.S. Eliot believed that great authors introduced readers to ideas themselves, and we as readers are to engage with those ideas.