If Bernie Madoff taught reading, he'd use Sight Words--the only con as big as his own

To pull off a big-time crime, you often need big-time sophistry. For example, Bernie Madoff explained his success at making money by citing his proprietary system: split-strike conversions.

Please savor this polysyllabic deceit. Almost no one could see through it; almost everyone agrees it can't generate the claimed profits. But this wisp was Bernie's passport to stealing $50 billion.

The phrase "split-strike conversions" reminds me of the equally empty poetry concocted by our Educational Establishment. These people rarely come up with strategies that work educationally; but they are geniuses at coming up with names and slogans that sound as if they might actually mean something or do something.

Evaluate these phrases both as poetry and as marketing tools:

Whole Language

Self Esteem

Open Classroom

Outcome Based Education

Multiculturalism

Invented Spelling

New Math

Cooperative Learning

Constructivism

Bilingual Education

Reform Math

Alternative Assessment

They sound great, don't they? But the more I've analyzed these things, the more sure I became that they were never more than wisps; and that in the typical classroom they actually work to diminish education. Indeed, that seems to be their whole point, just as "split-strike conversion" was never intended to work financially. Its only purpose was to make you lower your guard and hand over your money.

(One fascinating thing about American education is that you never see innovations such as "A Passion for Physics" or "History for Kids Who Hate History"--that is, pedagogies whose clear aim is to teach a particular academic subject. Apparently nobody in education is actually interested in that, which is a revealing thing.)

Madoff was the King of Ponzi, and the question naturally arises as to which of the main ed sophistries is most like a Ponzi, where the con is ongoing day after day, and the suckers keep paying year after year?

Well, there's no question that the Big Satan among education sophistries is the scam variously known as Look-Say, Whole Word, Whole Language, Dolch Words, Memory Method, Sight Words, Balanced Literacy, and more. Contemplate that array of aliases. You know you are dealing with a repellent criminal.

Sight Words, by whatever name, have been the official way to teach reading since 1930; and this hoax has arguably created 50 million functional illiterates and a million dyslexics. I think the people pushing this scam are a lot like Madoff. They can't believe they're getting away with it but as long as nobody stops them, they keep right on going. Like Madoff, they should be going to jail.

(For a chart comparing Whole Word and Phonics, please see article #37 on Improve-Education.org. What sort of educators devise stuff like Whole Word? Bruce Price addresses this question in his new book THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happened to American Education.)