After turning untold numbers of victims into functional illiterates for life, government education officials in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) decided that perhaps it might be time to try something else. Basically, they hope to start using the only method that has worked to teach reading for thousands of years: Phonics.
As hard as it may be to believe, government schools across the state of Wisconsin and all over America claim to be teaching children to “read” by teaching them to memorize whole words and guess words that they have not memorized by looking at pictures on the page. This is public knowledge, too, with local reporters openly discussing it.
“Currently, many school districts in the state, including MMSD, use cueing techniques to teach young readers,” Amanda Quintana reported for Channel 3000. “This means when a student comes to a word they don’t know, they’re often encouraged to guess the word, try to figure it out by looking at a picture, skip it or replace it.”
If that sounds absolutely insane, that’s because it is. It is criminal. It is child abuse. That would be as outlandish as teaching children to figure out a math problem by looking at the color of the paper that it is printed on.
And yet, it is what passes for “education” today in government schools all across America. In California, half of children are illiterate, according to government data. And in Washington, D.C., more than 2/3 of adults are functionally illiterate, government data show. It is not hard to figure out why.
A local mom in Madison confirmed that the criminally insane quackery was used on her son, causing him to struggle with reading. “The techniques they were using were more, he would be responsible for memorizing the words or ‘Look at the picture and tell me what the picture is,’ and I can only imagine what some kids say it could be,” mother Angela Kowieski was quoted as saying.
Finally, Kowieski did the only sensible thing a parent can do in such a situation — she removed her children from the MMSD government schools and hired a tutor. Within a year, they were all reading at grade level, with phonics being what “unlocked in their brains what needed to be unlocked.” Duh!
“After years of interventions to not have any results, and then a year of one hour a week of tutoring to have such excellent results, to me it’s kind of mind boggling,” Kowieski told Channel 3000. “Like what’s going on in that time during school?”
Numerous other experts and tutors who have spoken with The Newman Report have had similar experiences rescuing children from illiteracy in almost no time at all.
What Kowieski and millions of other American parents do not realize is that the handicapping of children with quack “reading” instruction is deliberate . Indeed, the quackery being used in Madison and across America — “sight words,” dubbed the “Thalidomide of the brain” by a top reading expert — is literally mandated under Common Core. That is despite it having been exposed over 150 years ago.
The quackery was first tried on non-deaf children in government schools in Boston in the early 1840s, and it was exposed as a failure just a few years after it was introduced under then-Education Commissioner Horace Mann. As the schoolmasters of the city put it in their explosive 1844 essay debunking the methods, “such a change, as that proposed by Mr. Mann and others, is neither called for, nor sustained by sound reasoning.”
After the Boston schoolmasters exposed the fraud, the “sight word” method was abandoned for 50 years. At least, it was abandoned until socialist-humanist activist John Dewey — the “founding father” of America’s government school system — resurrected it about half a century later knowing full well the damage it would unleash.
Since then, countless other experts have highlighted the problem. Most notable among them have been Rudolf Flesch in his earth-shattering 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, followed by Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld in his 1973 book The New Illiterates. The book Crimes of the Educators by Blumenfeld and this writer outlines the full history of the battle.
Children are being literally crippled for life by government schools — and the education establishment knows it. Reading is important to virtually everything in life, from reading the Bible and history to being able to pursue a career. It is time for the perpetrators of this monstrous crime against America to be held accountable.
