Re: New Kozloff paper - 'If it Quacks Like a Duck, It's Probably Baloney'

Funny, but very similar things could be said about the spread of various
fact-free doctrines of psychotherapy, beginning with Freud. (Behavior therapies
being the chief exception.)

One cavil: Kozloff talks about the past 30 years. This sounds like about the
length of his own career to date. But I can remember my ex-schoolteacher mother
voicing the same complaints about "progressive" education back in the '30s. I
suspect 80 years would be a more accurate time frame for the kakocracy of
education professors, education
gurus, and education organizations.

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Here's the opening excerpt from a great new paper by Dr. Martin A.
Kozloff.  Marty's complete paper is on the web at URL:

http://www.uncwil.edu/people/kozloffm/baloney.html

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If It Quacks Like a Duck, It’s Probably Baloney
Martin A. Kozloff, Ph.D.
Watson School of Education
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
April, 2002

For the past thirty or so years, education professors, education
gurus, and education organizations (such as the National Council
for Teachers of English, the National Association for the
Education of Young Children, and the National Council for
Teachers of Mathematics) have managed to establish and
sustain dominion over public education—dominion over what is
taught, how it is taught, how instruction will be evaluated, what
education means, and what a good teacher is.

This would be just fine if their ideas had anything to do with
reality, if their instructional methods were tested and validated
by scientific research, and if the curricula that they teach
(and require new teachers to use; e.g., whole language and
constructivist math) actually worked.  But they don’t.

And the result is the high rate of student illiteracy in reading
and math; the low level of students' knowledge of history, logic,
and science; and the high rate of teacher burnout from too
many years trying to get students engaged and learning
using methods derived from education professors' pseudo-
progressive “student-centered” fantasies—which are disastrous
for students and teachers but do help the professors to get
publications, royalties, tenure, and nice retirement annuities.

Thankfully, enough parents, consumer organizations, state
legislators, serious educational researchers, and even federal
agencies have tied together two simple facts—
1. Too many students aren’t learning much.
2. This may have something to do with instruction.

And therefore, our nation has begun to look at scientific research
on which methods of instruction and which curricula in reading
and math work best and which do not, and at what is taught in
schools of education.

(See  http://www.nationalreadingpanel.org and
http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com and
http://www.uncwil.edu/people/kozloffm/teacherprep.html .)

However, in the meantime, ordinary citizens ought to know the
difference between sound instruction and snake oil.

(To read about the snake oil, sound instruction, and to read the
remainder of this paper, please set your web browser to the URL:

http://www.uncwil.edu/people/kozloffm/baloney.html

and visit that webpage.)

By the way, what Marty has to say is very much germane to
both Precision Teaching and to Direct Instruction, as you will
observe in the paper.  -- JE