Capstone Educator and Concerns

It looks as if we are now embarking upon a new brand of old education gimmicks. We've been here before with Outcome Based Education, Whole Language, etc. I got my new Capstone Educator, publication of the University of Alabama College of Education, my alma mater. The title Passion Changes Everything: the next generation of faculty, gives kudos to the eduspeak of the apparent new guru of education, Sir Ken Robinson (http://sirkenrobinson.com/read/). A whole new slew of professors will now be training aspiring teachers how NOT to be the "sage on the stage."  "The professor can no longer be the 'sage on the stage," the author writes. Today's teacher must be a "guide on the side" -- with passion!
"Today the classroom is necessarily more dynamic and more conversational than in the past and is inevitably linked to online resources."
Are these fresh faced new professors experienced and successful in the classroom as measured by what parents expect schools and teachers to do -- or have they merely mastered the psychobabble necessary for acquiring a PH.D. in Education. It was sequential learning and direct instruction got us to the moon. Then Ken Goodman published "Reading: a Psycholinguistic Guessing Game," in 1968, revolutionized reading instruction and brought teachers out for professional hootenannies in support of the liberation of the classroom and teachers. Sequential learning and direct instruction has now been pushed further down the trash bin in colleges of education and extremely high illiteracy rates (the basic reason businesses complain that that they cannot find competent employees) continue.
This quotation from the article on the new faculty ought to give you some insight: "... He is interested in developing translational learning and design theories grounded in empirical studies forming computational tools for learning based on these theories and conducting investigations on STEM learning and cognition both through experimental designs and design based research in authentic contexts." (Say what...?)
According to author, historian of education, educational policy analyst, and research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, Diane Ravitch, OBE reforms (something I fought in the nineties) usually had other disputed methods, such as constructivist mathematics and whole language, added onto them. So, when I read that the teaching methods for the new professor of Social Science (used to be History) Education "are strongly based on constructivist pedagogy" and the new professor of Elementary Literacy Education wants to examine "culturally relevant literacy instruction in elementary classrooms" my heart starts to pound a warning. With no more community watchdogs who determines cultural relevance?

Once, in my naivety, I thought the education profession to be pure, truly based on replicable research, to prepare children to read, write and compute -- untainted by politics. And then I discovered the huge number of illiterate students in my secondary classroom and set out to find out why. I now believe the source of America's academic decline can traced directly to America's colleges of education.