Dom discusses the need to accelerate student learning and defines what it means to "Make …

Welcome to Old School, New School, Next School with Dom Giordano, a podcast devoted to preserving your parental rights, including the right to choose the best school for your child. This podcast is dedicated to gaining the option of school choice for every parent in America.

Here's your host, educator and noted talk media commentator, Dom Giordano.

Hey, everyone. Welcome in to this week's edition of Old School, New School, Next School with Dom Giordano.

This week, we've kind of reached a turning point again. I have the numbers of various states and the national numbers as far as Americans failing in school.

So really, when we're talking about school choice, we're talking about charters as one outlet.

Overall, what we're talking about is make America educated again. I'm looking at an article this week that is startling that says the from Stanford. This is Stanford now, too. So it's not a conservative necessarily think tank. The looming $90 trillion cost of learning loss and the policy solutions to address it. In other words, after $200 billion spent coming out of COVID, not nearly,

as aggressive as I'd like with low-cost tutoring, intense tutoring, one-on-one tutoring.

We are teetering, says this Stanford study, on kids that have been through COVID and up to now losing in their earning power. You heard that. How much is a trillion dollars? Well, we don't have long enough in this podcast each week to talk about that. Here's another headline.

The new national report card scores dash hope of post-COVID learning recovery. So over the years, we've known of the difficulties that America faces in learning and kids learning. But now post-COVID, $90 trillion on the line, meaning if these kids don't get back up to reading and math and the like, that's what the net loss will be. And I think the first thing to mention is,

It wasn't always this way. Now, I don't know if you'd have to go back to the 50s or 60s in the average public school. I know in Philadelphia where I'm based, there was a time when a great number of Philadelphia public schools were seen by any standard as capable and reasonable. Now you have double digits easily of schools in Philadelphia where the entire testing class, no one is on grade level, no one is proficient.

in reading or math. And the wheel just keeps on turning.

So the first thing to recognize is it wasn't always this way, even with the public schools.

And then that gets us to the next level. What does a parent do? What does a listener do?

If you're unable to get into school choice, unable to get into vouchers, charter schools or the like.

Well, I have some solutions and a couple of other problems that block making America educated again. Playing off the whole MAGA thing, it's a good thing to play off of when $90 trillion is at stake. A guy named E.D. Hirsch, I think he's in his 90s now, just read about him again the other day. I interviewed him over the years, and when I used to teach at community college, I used a lot of his work. He wrote the book Cultural Literacy.

3,000 dates, terms, et cetera, that every educated American should know. Now, his theory of education, and this is if your kid is anywhere, you want to accelerate them, even in a private school, it doesn't matter. You want to do it in a public school. I use this at community college. These are what I think should be everyday terms to people that you don't have to look up. You have to know them. In other words, E.D. Hirsch of one level says,

You have to know it. Memorize it even. Yeah, like what's the significance of 1939 to 1945? What does the phrase any port in a storm mean? What's a bear market? What's a bull market? It's a panoply of quotes and dates and proverbs. And his theory is if you don't know these, you really cannot read or understand.

at any kind of level. So after E.D. Hirsch got this going with cultural literacy, first of all, the term cultural literacy. Well, why is this term in here and not this? Okay, we can debate them. He came up with 3,000 of them, and I happen to think most of them are spot on. What he came up with next is this, and particularly if you have kids in the younger grades, he came up with a series of books, usually about 150, 200 pages for parents. Here's one.

what every child should know by the end of first grade. In other words, you're in public school. Your kid's getting A's and B's. You're in touch with it. It seems like everything's okay. It may not be. It may be just that your child does the homework. You're an involved parent. They're cooperative, that kind of thing. I've taught in public schools over the years. And if you did that in some of these schools, particularly in the inner city, you're going to get a B. Well, wait a minute. What about testing? No, no, no. You're going to get a B.

because often you have kids that are really behaving badly, parents that are nonexistent, and no homework done. So if you do those things, you're going to be moving forward. And then I taught the SATs for a while, particularly the English, the vocabulary. It was shocking to see people that said, well, I have an A-minus average. What do you mean I don't know any of this stuff? What do you mean I wouldn't succeed on the SATs? So what happened? You had people attacking the SATs. Guess what?

The SATs are coming back in force. More and more schools over the last two years, Ivy League schools too, are back in using the SATs as a prime determinant of getting into that school or where to place you. So the bottom line is this, with these E.D. Hirsch, H-I-R-S-C-H, H-I-R-S-C-H books, what you get is a report card of your own. These are entertaining, interesting books with all the things that the child

should know and could read to you and see how much they know.

And if they don't, then you have a problem that you have to address.

And you can't say yes, but look at what they're doing in school.

I think Hirsch is right, that it's shocking.

We've all experienced this, right?

You've seen some people maybe that were just a high school graduate.

My mother was one, but we always chose her to play Trivial Pursuit.

She knew stuff.

She memorized stuff.

She could call that up.

She could put it in context.

So just because your child is, quote, succeeding in public school does not mean they're succeeding in life.

And I'm telling you, E.D. Hirsch is a guy that I have cited for more years, particularly those books that get into the notion of what they should know by the end of first grade, second grade.

I think he goes up through the first eight grades.

It makes a lot of sense.

It's a great barometer for parents to use if you're stuck in a public school, or even if you're in a private school, you want to know where your child is. Now, as far as where we're going, case in point with all this, and make America educated again, we are seeing quite an outbreak of socialism across the country. Everybody knows about Mondami in New York, but the woman in Seattle that's just taken over is a socialist.

The new mayor-elect, someone who had not worked a job, a full-time job, well into her 30s. The mom, there's a picture of it, had to help her fill out a job application. And she says that the fact that the mom and dad pay for child care, even though she's married with a husband who apparently doesn't work, makes her more relatable to people in Seattle because they can't pay for child care.

schools do with this. For example, if your school, if you're unlucky enough, and any number of schools across the country do this, that your school uses as a textbook of sorts, Howard Zinn. This guy spares no expense at attacking America and propping up places like Castro's Cuba, Mao's China. I was on Fox News with a local city councilwoman who said, well, Castro wasn't,

And Philadelphia Public Schools uses that. A lot more schools do or books similar to it. And one of the key things propelling socialism, other than affordability in New York, Seattle, childcare and all that, is people glom onto it because it seems to them like a new idea, like this hasn't been done before. So much so that now Florida,

John DeSantis in Florida has just passed a curriculum on communism. And communism will be talked about from all the way from pre-K or at least kindergarten on through eighth grade and into high school at each class level. And what will be said is there is no other side to communism. This is what gets people killed. It's the worst idea, arguably, in history. And they even talk about Joe McCarthy. I've read books on Joe McCarthy now, and I think there were a lot of communists.

I think McCarthy was excessive in his pursuit. But the idea that this was all made up and it was just this maniac McCarthyism going on out there is way off the point. Do we have communists today? Is Mondami a communist? Well, we'll let others decide that. But certainly these are socialist. And the way to combat it is to have people in school knowledgeable about socialism, knowledgeable that it has existed.

It's failed in every place it's been tried

Now our society has some elements of socialism

Social security for example

Some things that ease the edge of capitalism

Because capitalism with all of its upsides

Does have downsides

That's fair

The point is

Is this going on in your school

Private or public

It doesn't matter

It's something to look at

And one other thing that has happened here throughout this whole shutdown, the Department of Education has been shut down. And yet you notice in almost every state, the money is still flowed to the schools. Things have been fine. So why do we need the Department of Education? Isn't it more like a middleman kind of laundering money when really the states can handle all this stuff itself?

Bottom line on all this stuff is that making America educated again is completely necessary and doable. There are solutions, be it from just the parent all the way up through public policy. I can't emphasize enough, though, vigilance in seeing what your child's doing in school, particularly if they're in the public school. How in the world would you have Howard Zinn textbooks without massive numbers of people?

And why in the world was E.D. Hirsch, the guy that I mentioned to you, why was he an outcast? All because he said that memorization, core knowledge he called it, is the type of thing you have to know it. You can take a look. You can just Google it. You can see for yourself dates 1861 to 65. Phrases like any port in a storm, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Who was Jonah?

Now, things like that, if you don't know those, if those are something you could articulate your child to at each grade level, well, then they really can't read effectively. They're reading words, but they're not comprehending what they're reading. I couldn't recommend this more as a safeguard. Not something you have to do every day, but over the course of time, over the summers or even during the year, occasionally taking a look at this. With math, he goes,

into that a bit too. You can get a sense, is your kid on grade level or not, and what the issue might be. But more importantly, particularly with their reading, their grammar, their English, their knowledge of literature, it's all there and doable for the average parent. And remember what the stakes are to make America educated again. Things were already bad before COVID, but now post-COVID, Stanford University, hardly a

of conservatism puts out this study, the looming $90 trillion cost of learning loss and the policy solutions to address it. And one of the things they say is what I've been saying. We need to spend more money, more intensity. We have to stop lying and saying everything's okay. They're predicting, if not, that's a $90 trillion loss of the earning potential, the life potential of America's kids as they grow up.

up into adulthood.

And if you live through that with kids, you know how traumatic it is, what it exposed about the public schools, about teachers, and about the fact that it's a monopoly, which brings us then to the ultimate solution.

We know it's school choice.

A case in point, Pennsylvania just recently got out of their shutdown and passed their budget.

One of the things they did, Republicans did, to give the Democrats something, because Democrats gave up a climate thing that allowed us to use more energy in Pennsylvania, was to let them attack cyber charter schools. Just another tool in the box, cyber charter schools, kids at home, homeschooling with a curriculum through the Internet. Works wonders. There's about 70,000 kids on that in Pennsylvania. It came through COVID.

One of the reasons parents like it, one of the biggest problems they have is they're concerned about safety in the school or going to school. Having their kid at home is a multitude of benefits. They work with them. The cyber part works with them. Why go after that? Why just attack that? Because you have enemies of school choice, and I would argue a parenting out there ultimately and giving parents to tools. So what I'm trying to do this week is help us out.

you cope with wherever you are.

If you've gotten out and you're into a school that you like,

the stuff I told you about E.D. Hirsch is something that just enriches and adds to it.

If you haven't gotten out, well, then it is dire emergency that you check out E.D. Hirsch.

Hey, thanks for listening this week.

Now, questions, comments, always willing to field them.

Dom Show at AOL.com.

D-O-M-S-H-O-W at AOL.com.

And also, thank you for spreading the word about Old School, New School, Next School. Old School, New School, Next School with Dom Giordano is a presentation of Giordano Productions, LLC. Copyright 2025. All rights reserved.