K-12 classrooms are full of pretension and failure, especially in reading.

The children become more illiterate each year. Clearly, the professors do not know how to teach reading. They don't want you to know how pathetic and dishonest their efforts are. So they wrap their activities in dense, incomprehensible jibber-jabber.

Here is a randomized list of the most popular jargon from the last 90 years. This is techno-talk that cries out: we have no idea what we're doing.

Savor each one so you can experience for yourself why our public schools have become educational backwaters.

reading readiness

psycholinguistics

miscue analysis

reading strategies

comprehension strategies

whole word

guessing

picture reading

whole language

sight words

dolch words

prereading

balanced literacy

word walls

developmentally appropriate practices

active learning practices

closed instructional activities

thinking and learning about print

invented spelling

reading recovery

emergent literacy

cooperative learning

creative curriculum approach

eye-movement research

functional systemic linguistic theory

intervention

rich literacy activities

authoring cycle

capability beliefs

constructivism

lifelong readers

cognitive flexibility theory

goal orientation theory

independent reading

kid watching

communication delay/disorder

widespread technological integration

critical thinking

personalized learning

student-centered

facilitative teaching

differentiated instruction

formative assessment

growth mindset

grit

21st-century skills

flipped classroom

growth mindset

inclusion

instructional scaffolding

social and equity-focused terms

There is almost no legitimate need for any of this dishonest, insincere language. It's when people have stopped doing their real job that they turn to jargon.

By contrast, here's how reading is taught quickly and easily: children learn the letters, then the sounds of the letters, then the blends of those sounds. You don't need any jargon in honest instruction.

There are many wonderful people on the sensible side of education. My favorite is Marva Collins. She started her own school in the bad streets of Chicago. She said that she would teach every child to read by Christmas of the first year. That is an extraordinary claim!!! Today our experts don't claim to teach children to read by senior year of high school!!! That's a gap like the Grand Canyon

I have 50 short videos on YouTube. My favorite is the one about Marva and the other hot shots that I admire so much. In this 3-minute video you'll learn everything you need to know about how to save the schools by saving literacy: Reading Is Easy. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws)