CORE KNOWLEDGE AND RIGGS: AN ANSWER TO REPLACING COMMON CORE

Thank you, Jane, for sharing this with me! My understanding is that Riggs is the company built around Spalding Writing Road to Reading developed by Romalda Spalding, a disciple of Dr. Samuel Orton, founder of the Orton Dyxlexia Society. This program is effective with children first learning to read keeping them from ever acquiring a "learning disability" (school induced dyslexia) Principal John Winston discovered that his identified "dyslexics" fell from 40 to 1 when he initiated the Spalding Writing Road to Reading in the elementary (90% minority, serving 3 housing projects in Louisiana) and brought their reading scores from the 25th percentile to the 80th. Add that to a Core Knowledge curriculum (sequential learning skill upon skill foundational rather than thematic) and our children will soar!

The program is also effective with those learning English as a second language as well as those who already have learning disabilities. 

But, this will NEVER HAPPEN IF YOU LEAVE IT TO THE COLLEGES OF EDUCATION. They have been brainwashed and taken over by PROGRESSIVE educators who have a political agenda. Our only hope is to take education out of the hands of professional "educators" and allow those with degrees outside of education to take their places in the classrooms of our country. Master teachers do not have more knowledge to impart. Their certification relies upon their "methodology". Does their class exemplify thematic learning, group learning, peer tutoring, multiculturalism, inferential learning (rather than direct instruction). 

Good civics instruction would be wonderful as would authentic History. But, those who have teaching certificates have been indoctrinated into an ideology rather than content (as leading Harvard pedagogue, founder of Liberation Theology, calls it in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.) This philosophy dominates our colleges of education and those materials in Common Core produced by Pearson. 

Our schools must first have leaders who are not followers. They must have the moral courage to reject "current wisdom" (as Dean Kunkel of the Auburn College of Education called Whole language in the early 90s) but they are now bound by the money they have already spent and our children will continue to be slaves to that philosophy. 

Unless parents vote with their feet and start charter schools where THEY will determine the curriculum rather than those with "degrees" in current wisdom, you are back where you started.. 

I would love to be on a committee to make this happen. But, I am too outspoken, I guess. Plus, I think. Therefore I write. And you would know every detail of every conflict because it would take many voices to free our children from this debacle.