by Richard Schulman
The 100-page New York Times Magazine special, “The 1619 Project,” is the latest example of Progressives’ malign influence on education.
Progressives are Leftists who dislike the Constitution, bipartisanship, and a delimited national state — regarding these as obstacles to utopian schemes such as the Green New Deal and to defining citizens by group classifications rather than as individuals. All the present Democratic presidential candidates are Progressives. The New York Times is the flagship newspaper of their movement.
In the Times own words: “The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our birth year” — that is, to locate American identity as grounded in slavery rather than the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
Ridiculed by both Left and mainstream historians
Amusingly, one of the most scathing criticisms the Times’ 1619 project comes from a publication of the Trotskyist Left:
[T]he 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal ‘identities’—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race….Hundreds of thousands of extra copies of the magazine and a special supplement have been printed for free distribution at schools, libraries and museums across the country.
The mainstream history profession is also up in arms against the Times, the Wall Street Journal reports. Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer-prize winning historian of the American Revolution, calls the 1619 Project “so wrong in so many ways.” He finds it “amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support.” Another Pulitzer-prize winning historian, James McPherson, is quoted calling the Times feature an “unbalanced, one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” Its “implicit position [is] that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”
Two decades of stagnation
It’s not just history that has been traduced. Progressives’ bear much blame for the fact that US education overall has stagnated for two decades. The PISA tests are given internationally every three years to fifteen-year-olds. In the 2019 PISA scores just published by the OECD, “U.S. students performed slightly above average in reading and science, and slightly below average in mathematics,” US News reports. There has been no significant change in scores “since 2000 in reading, 2003 in math and 2006 in science,” despite the fact that US per-pupil spending is the highest in the world.
The centrality of reading competence
The Progressive connection is this: achievement in all academic subjects, including math and science, requires competency in reading. According to the NAEP, which puts out a report card on the performance of US states, “In 2019, only 34 percent of fourth-grade public school students performed at or above Proficient level in reading.”
Why so low? The dominant teachers union in the US, the Progressive-dominated NEA, created a nation of non-readers by promoting “whole language” reading instruction – later renamed “balanced literacy” — despite research proving that teaching the alphabet and letter-sound correspondences (“phonics”) first is the prerequisite to reading competency. Massachusetts and military bases, where phonics-based teaching are the norm, have the highest reading proficiency scores in the US. California, where the Progressive NEA and whole language methods prevail, has one of the lowest.
If children haven’t learned how to read competently by the end of first or second grade, they almost certainly will fail to become competent readers. But achievement in all the other school subjects depends on reading competency, including math and science.
Math fads
Progressives bear additional responsibility for US math illiteracy. This traces back to the nation’s dominant teachers college in the 20th century, Teachers College, Columbia. It was dominated by Progressive educators beginning with John Dewey and his colleague, the highly influential math educator William Heard Kilpatrick. Both promoted child-led learning “in which the student, not the teacher, decides what should be learned….Kilpatrick believed that anything beyond arithmetic was useless to most of the population,” The Atlantic reports. Kilpatrick headed an NEA committee that made this national policy. Although the policy was later abandoned, it was replaced by other Progressive math fads such as constructivism – the time-wasting notion that only what students discover for themselves is truly learned – and the doctrinaire replacement of long-division instruction by calculators.
The astonishing scarcity of US students in graduate science programs is fully explainable by the math illiteracy of most US high school graduates, only a small proportion of whom are capable of undertaking rigorous undergraduate science and engineering courses.
US education will never improve as long as Progressives’ malign influence on education prevails in the teaching of reading, math, and history – using discredited pedagogies and the false narratives of the NY Times.
Two previous Founders Broadsheets articles on US education may be accessed here and here.
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