The most cited book in education was written for Brazilian adult literacy. Now we use it to build theories to teach American seven-year-olds. The tip of the iceberg of America’s educational decline.
Students are struggling in 2026. Standards are decreasing. Pedagogy has gotten worse over the last twenty years. And the education profession is slowly starting to wake up as districts continue to push us to work miracles with kids who struggle to do things that were basics in our lifetime.
A blog companion to this episode is FREE!
That’s my thesis, and this episode will provide some supporting evidence and resources for the teachers that don’t plan to take this lying down. First, we will cover the collapse — the numbers, which are brutal. Then the autopsy: seventy years of philosophy, a rigged definition of good teaching, and the largest educational experiment in American history, which the profession decided to ignore. Then we bring it into the choir room, because music education is not immune to this, nor are we a special case. And at the end of the show, my proposed way out.
So, stick around to the end and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Maybe even have some of your core assumptions about what it means to be a teacher shaken a bit. Not because I think I have landed a monopoly on the truth, but because our students deserve a community of educators who are as engaged in the art of teaching as we expect THEM to be in our content.
Be Sure to Find Choralosophy on TikTok!
For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and Facebook
@choralosophypodca