A Blight Has Settled On Our Schools

There is a long history here and most people, especially parents, have no idea what has happened or continues to happen still.

If you’re a farmer you know the damage done by blight.  It sneaks in, attacks your crop, but doesn’t kill immediately.  Over the years, the disease has embedded itself into the very seeds so that gradually the whole farm crops are destroyed from within.

This is akin to what’s happened in education.  Educators — for various reasons, some for dubious pedagogic reasons, others for teacher-empowerment reasons — have subscribed to methods which were untested but had strong beliefs attached. 

Mindsets became engrained.  Constructivism is a global label for the predominant movement featuring — relativism, subjectivism, learning-by-doing, no textbooks, discovery, inquiry, child-centered, etc. approaches — excluding or disparaging standardized testing, direct instruction by teachers and evidence-based programs. 

It is this nose-thumbing of evidence-based research that is most troubling today.  Eric Kalenze in his popular education reform book — Education is Upside-Down, 2014 — says educators continue to “turn their noses up at research around building effective readers”. 

To get caught-up to the Reading-Wars and the mindset battles that continue to this day, read this 4 year old article — A is for Apple, B is for Brawl —

http://nymag.com/news/features/16775/index3.html

I agree,it must be a relationship in Ontario(Canada) between the large publishers,basals,and the Ministry.

Nothing else makes any sense.
With the internet,we can read about the research all day long.
What I notice is even with gold standard randomized trial research they dispute relevance and go on their merry way.
That`s just unconscionable!