The August 2 cover of TIME magazine screamed: “The Case Against Summer Vacation.”

With this subtitle: “We romanticize it. But all that downtime is making our kids fall behind — especially those who can least afford to.”

Now, isn’t TIME magazine clearly telling us that summer vacation is a BAD thing??

In fact, toward the end of a long article, the writer makes clear that enrichment programs–not run by the public schools–are often beneficial, and extending the public school year might create more problems than it solves. So, at the end of a long misleading story, TIME gets it right.

The problem is that most of the story suggests that the public schools are doing a great job all year but, woe is us, during those three months of idleness, all those wonderful academic gains are lost. And the solution would be to keep those kids in school all year. Don’t even think about it!

The premise is the problem. Those schools are definitely not doing a good job from September to June. Many kids are learning very little; and in a permanent sense, many are learning nothing at all. So how can you lose what you never really had?

The problem is that public schools are religiously devoted to reading methods that don’t work, arithmetic methods that don’t work, and classroom methods that don’t work. Which is a lot to overcome.

(That’s the story TIME should be telling: “We romanticize PS 111. But all that dumb-time is making our kids fall behind international competition…”)

TIME doesn’t seem to have the answer to the real problem, so here it is. We need to systematically eliminate all the non-phonics methods of teaching reading. We need to systematically eliminate all the bad tendencies referred to by the terms New Math, Reform Math, and Standards Math. We need to curtail the pedagogies known as self-esteem, constructivism, cooperative learning, no memorization, no mastery, guessing, multiculturalism, authentic assessment, and 50 others. We need to be wary of a new wave of fancy slogans not signifying much: 21st century skills, common core standards, Race to the Top. Indeed, for more than 75 years, the elite educators have tended to recycle the same old ideas, all of which tend to undercut traditional education and replace it with feel-good social engineering.

Success in the public schools depends on the good faith and competence of the Education Establishment, that is, the bosses who put so many bad ideas and unworkable methods into the schools in the first place. Some say ideology made them do it; some say they’re just incompetent. Either way, the schools went downhill. After so many bad decisions for 75 years, maybe these rogues are ready for a new direction, a new American curriculum.

Improve-Education.org has prepared a short five-point program called NEW AMERICAN CURRICULUM that spells out the items to be minimized, and the items we should restore. (Google title: New American Curriculum.)

Author Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, a high-level education and intellectual site. One focus is reading; see “42: Reading Resources.” Another focus is education reform; see “38: Saving Public Schools.” Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is “THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.”

Category: Education
Keywords: summer, knowledge, learning, k-12, public schools, study, facts, memorization, reading, math