Different but Equal:

How Constructivist/Deconstructionist Teaching Strategies Perpetuate the Achievement Gap

If they continue to require teachers to treat – teach – minority and other economically disadvantaged students differently than other students, a false sense of self-esteem and a lack of core knowledge caused by these constructivist teaching strategies will perpetuate the achievement gap.  Whole language reading, holistic grading, learning disability labels, learning style labels, group learning, thematic visualization and block scheduling are the constructivist teaching strategies that target and adversely affect minority and other underprivileged students by lowering academic expectations, standards and achievement!!  Here’s how they accomplish their mission:

Whole Language Reading

Whole language reading strategies target the poor by taking advantage of the statistical fact that low income parents are usually less educated, so their children are less likely to hear them use correct grammar or enunciate words properly.  Without this exposure to good grammar and word usage and the proper enunciation of commonly spoken words, their kids’ lack of language skills will put them behind their middle class peers when they begin kindergarten.  But if they’re taught phonics, they can learn to sound out letters, groups of letters and words, thus correcting their language weakness.  By the end of the 4^th grade, they could develop a reading vocabulary of over 24,000 words.  Without phonics, however, these children are essentially left in what Frederick Douglass called mental darkness.  Instead of being taught to sound out and thus read words, Deconstructivists ensure they are taught to memorize whole words on flash cards and other media, words they choose.  Whole language reading primers reflect this limited vocabulary, for which students are told to [de]construct their own meanings.  By the end of the 4^th grade, whole language readers are lucky to have memorized 1,600 whole words!  Children of middle class parents and those whose parents support reading at home will make up much of this loss in reading skills with supplemental [commercial] reading programs.  Most minority and other disadvantaged children will never get caught up.  They’ll be left behind.

In recognition that whole language doesn’t work and that it costs lots more than phonics [about $215 per child compared to only $30 per child], some state legislatures are intervening to do something about the lack of reading skills.  But in response to this opposition, whole language advocates now argue for a “balanced reading program” in which both phonics and whole language are used.  It’s easy to see where their potential profit loss is the motivating factor.  This compromise program, however, keeps students reading the same, expensive whole language reading primers, which continues to limit vocabulary development.  Again, students whose parents support their child reading at home will not be as seriously affected by this compromise.  And again, minority and economically disadvantaged kids will be left to whatever reading primers are used in the public classroom.  A devious pattern begins to show itself; constructivists/deconstructionists intend to keep children of low income families in mental darkness!!

Holistic Grading

While trying to teach students about formal essay requirements for writing Cause & Effect, Compare & Contrast, Problem & Solution and Definition essays, high school English teachers have to teach thousands of students how to write – period!  This is because of holistic [also called whole language or extended text] grading – grading writing assignments for the total impression of quality, rather than the separate rules of writing – basic grammar, word usage, diction and sentence structure, etc.  Holistic grading is a modernist Orwellian technique, one closer to Newspeak itself.  Since kids can no longer score well on writing tests, they decided to re-define the criteria for how writing tests will be graded.  Students’ writing hasn’t improved, but their scores make it look like they’re improving.  This insidious attempt to hide failed constructivist [a.k.a., deconstructivist] teaching strategies only goes to prove students need to follow those rules of writing they should have been taught by the 4^th grade.  But they’re not taught these rules because someone doesn’t want them to learn!!!  As before, some students will be minimally affected because of support at home.  Others, particularly the children of disadvantaged families will remain disadvantaged.  They won’t learn how to communicate effectively, which is apparently the way someone wants it.

Try to think of the human mind as a large, open field overgrown with tall grasses, shrubs and weeds.  If you walk directly across that field from one side to the other, again and again, eventually you’ll create a pathway through the field.  In the same way, when you read – really read – your mind is essentially creating a pathway by familiarizing itself with words you’ve learned to read by sounding them out phonetically rather than attempting to memorize them.  You not only hear the word in your mind’s ear, but you see it letter by letter, syllable by syllable.  And as you read, your mind records what these words mean by how they’re used in context.  The more you read, the more familiar certain words and word patterns – sentence structure, grammar and word usage – become for you.  The reading process not only builds vocabulary, it creates those pathways on which all language skills are built and improved, including writing skills.  If you don’t read, you will have no such pathways.  All you have is a mind full of weeds.  Holistic grading advocates would say that as long as you managed to find your way across the field, it doesn’t matter how straight the path you take or how long you spent wandering around in the field each time you set out to cross it.  And that’s stupid!!

Learning Disability Labels

                Students with Disabilities include students with physical and mental disabilities as well as supposed learning disabilities that have nothing to do with any real mental health problem.   In fact, there was a 50 percent increase in the number of students labeled as having a learning disability in only one decade between 1985 and 1995.  Wouldn’t you question what might be the cause or motivation behind this increase, especially since most of those being labeled LD and especially BED are children of minority and low income families?!  It’s a problem too that just about anyone can write an Individual Education Plan (IEP) and label a child for life.  He or she need only be serving in the capacity of a special education teacher.  They don’t have to have any special degree or training.  Students are tested, and based on the results of these tests, one person can make a life-changing decision for a child based on that child’s test scores, which he or she will claim as evidence of a learning disability.  That child must now be protected from teachers who might try to teach and thus require him to learn something, so his instruction must be modified right down to whether the teacher is allowed to fail that child in a particular course, regardless what the child does or doesn’t do. 

Motivation problems are always ruled out.  Every child wants to learn, they say.  This fallacy and the probability the kid scored low on these tests indifferently or especially because of missing core knowledge – knowledge that is missing because of multicultural teaching strategies, constant excuses and the simple fact the child has never been required to learn – leads the evaluator to determine the child is disabled and needs a label that legally allows him or her to be stupid!!!  Keep in mind that the majority of students being so labeled are minority and other disadvantaged kids.  You must ask yourself, “What advantage will a label do toward strengthening the learning weakness, or could the strategy be to maintain that weakness?”

Learning Style Labels

I prefer Eastern North Carolina pork BBQ or my wife’s Southern fried chicken to a piece of broiled fish.  I prefer collard greens boiled with ham hocks and just a touch of hot sauce to steamed broccoli.  I prefer my mama’s homemade pecan cookies or a thick slice of my Aunt Pearl’s homemade pound cake to a bowl of Jell-O®, even if it includes a whipped topping.  I prefer all of the above, but I’ve learned the hard way that my preferences can kill me.  That’s how I came to have a stroke at 48. 

Many students today prefer to be read to rather than read it themselves.  Many students today prefer to work in a group and avoid personal responsibility for completing the project. Many students today, especially minority and children of low income families who’ve already been adversely affected by the previous teaching strategies, prefer to draw pictures or cut out paper dolls relating to some topic in a major piece of literature rather than read and analyze that literature for its literary devices, allusions, symbolism and overall intrinsic value.  Most students today, especially that special targeted group code-named “diverse learners,” would prefer to do anything but be actively engaged in real learning, but one day their lack of core knowledge will kill their chances of getting into a good college or getting that good paying job.  Just as we feed our children nutritional foods rather than the junk food they’d prefer, we can help kids now by feeding them the facts and knowledge they really need.  Or we can let them do what they prefer to do and program them for failure. This learning styles doublespeak is one of the latest reform measures ransacking public school classrooms.  As with whole language, somebody is making money on it, thus profiting on a strategy that essentially leaves children, particular those of disadvantaged families in mental darkness.  When cigarette or beer manufacturers target disadvantaged Americans for the sell of their products, watchdog groups get upset.  Why isn’t there the same outrage over these different teaching strategies, expectations, standards and subsequent achievement?! 

Group Learning

                Here’s the plan for improving standardized test scores:  From now on, there will be no more than 15 students to a classroom during testing.  Five students previously identified as Academically Gifted (AG) [but now mixed with less “academic” students] will sit in the middle of the classroom, starting at the first seat, going back to the fifth seat.  Ten students previously identified as low achieving, diverse learners will sit in the seats parallel to them.  When everyone is seated, those students seated to the left and right of an AG student will slide their desks into the middle until each AG student has a partner to his/her left and right.  Answer sheets will be distributed to all students, but test booklets will only be issued to each of the AG students.  When the test begins, the AG student will read the instructions and do his/her best to answer each of the questions, recording the correct answer on the answer sheet.  Diverse students seated to his/her left and right will copy the same answer on his/her answer sheet.  Students with special accommodation LD labels not requiring them to fill in those difficult little bubbles on the answer sheet will, as always, have their answers marked for them by the test administrator.  I call this new testing strategy Group Testing.  Hey, it makes just as much sense as Group Learning!

Despite all the rhetoric published by socialistic constructivists and psychologists, learning must take place in the individual’s mind first.  Learning, therefore, is not a social [or socialist] process.  I don’t care what their theoretical research has to say!  Learning is a personal process aided by others, most particularly a teacher [as opposed to a facilitator].  Anyone desiring to be a teacher must have the knowledge necessary to teach and be willing to actually teach that knowledge, or he/she needs to get out of the classroom!!!  Students are tested for individual knowledge, not the knowledge of the group. The strategy called Group or Cooperative Learning has to be one of the most Orwellian terms in modern education.  The group cannot learn for the individual, and the only real cooperation taking place is the teacher cooperating with deconstructionist administrators, all the while compromising his/her integrity by failing to actually teach his/her students and require them individually to learn.  Through mixed ability grouping, those motivated AG students [who usually want to learn] are placed in the same classroom with unmotivated students [who only want to hang with their friends and be cool] for the sole purpose of doing their work for them.  Group learning fails to develop Academically Gifted students while robbing the minds of those who are yet too immature to realize learning is personal; it’s not a group thing.

Thematic Visualization

                This prole producing, constructivist teaching strategy ties together that pernicious cancer called whole language with the stupidity of learning style labels and the waste of block scheduling.  The concept is to encourage those special diverse students previously targeted to visually express how they feel about a particular theme in a piece of literature, historical event or personality.  They are to do this by drawing pictures, cutting out paper dolls, creating a power point presentation of photos or an online cartoon drawing.  The point is to be able to see it – but not in writing! 

Okay, so let’s put this concept into practice.  In Elie Wiesel’s book about the Holocaust, Night, there are two major symbols.  One is night itself and the other is fire.  The symbolism of night takes into account that night is characterized by darkness, and darkness essentially is an absence or light.  Biblically speaking, God is Light; therefore, when night is used as a symbol of the Holocaust, a time when six million Jews were systematically murdered by mindless Nazi devils, it is essentially depicting an absence of God.  Draw that!

The second symbol in the book Night is fire. Throughout the book, there are references to fire coming from the smokestacks of the crematories or the burning pits.  Fire then is the means by which the Nazis devils destroy (i.e., hide) the bodies of the Jews they’ve slaughtered.  But in the Bible, fire is the means by which God destroys the wicked in hell.  Ironically, in Night, fire is used by the wicked to destroy the innocent!  How many pictures will you have to draw to illustrate this analogy?!   Yeah, a picture can paint a thousand words; but with a strong vocabulary and analytical thinking skills, a single word like night or fire can paint a thousand pictures!!!  You have to read first though to get that kind of vocabulary and write to develop those kinds of thinking skills.

Thematic visualization is a farce.  It’s another attempt to appease the preferences of those diverse students who would prefer not to learn anything, which is what constructivists/deconstructionists prefer them to learn.  Nothing!  School administrators who pressure teachers to use this anti-knowledge teaching strategy are complicit in the dumbing-down of public school kids, particularly minority and other disadvantaged kids, thus creating a generation of proles!!!

Block Scheduling

As if constructivists hadn’t created enough ways to dumb-down education, the late 90s saw a resurgence of a previous “reform” measure tried in the late 70s and early 80s, called Modular Scheduling.  This new and improved version is called Block Scheduling.  I’ve read the parental comments about the BS initials being appropriate for this not-so-new, experimental strategy and the reactions many folks have had to this monster are well deserved.  As with most experimental strategies, block scheduling is devouring classroom instruction time and the minds of those students least able to afford any loss of instruction time.  Exactly who turned this monster loose is less important now than why no one is willing to kill it!!!

The block schedule concept is simple:  courses that would normally be covered in two semesters of 50-minute classes are now compressed [deconstructed] into one semester of 90-minute classes.  Two immediate attention and retention problems arise. Because teenagers’ attention spans rarely last more than half an hour anyway, teachers are forced to cut content instruction by as much as half, replacing real learning with fun activities.  Also, since sequence courses like English I and English II, etc. are assigned to Freshmen then Sophomore, etc., retention of material and skills learned in the previous level suffer greatly by the time students take the next level.  A third major issue involves simple math.  One semester of 90-minute classes is nearly 10 percent less than two semesters of 50-minute classes, which means less actual time that can be spent in the classroom, again reducing content or core knowledge.

Academically Gifted kids and those otherwise self-motivated kids whose parents also strongly support real learning will learn something, even under these time constraints, but children of minority and low income families are made to believe these Check-the-block strategies are what education is all about, that coming to school and doing something fun is learning.  They don’t know and don’t care that they aren’t really learning anything until they can’t get a good paying job or pass an entrance exam.  Because teachers now must entertain rather than teach, elitists are getting what they’ve wanted all along.  By replacing the sage on the stage with a facilitator or guide on the side, they have ensured the next generation will be even more thoroughly – but Legally STUPiD. To counter these arguments, block scheduling supporters claim what instruction is given is in greater depth. [See Thematic Visualization.] They’ve even developed clever but meaningless banner slogans like “Less in More.”  Oh, that’s so true.  And Ignorance is strength!

Separate but Equal or Different but Equal,

It’s still NOT equal!!!

    Folks, we can do something about these discriminating teaching strategies right now.  State legislatures can essentially outlaw the above Seven Deadlies and forbid school districts from using them to target minority and underprivileged children.  Colleges can also stop indoctrinating new teachers with these racist strategies.  And the federal government can stop supporting them by refusing federal funds to any school system using Different but Equal  strategies, expectations, standards and subsequent achievement.  We need to act quickly though.  Minds are being wasted as you read this, but as you read this, be thankful all these strategies were not in place when you were learning to read.