He's heard no complaints at all.

Of course, he says the same thing about the parents.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Feb 2006

From the Los Angeles Times
X = Karin (Johnny) {gt} 95%
What does it take to learn algebra? First you have to master the fundamentals.
By Karin Klein
KARIN KLEIN is an editorial writer for The Times.

February 4, 2006

JOHNNY PATRELLO was a greaser. I was a dork. And yet, despite our rigidly stratified school culture, we came together in the spring of 1968 at Walt Whitman Junior High School, where I tutored Johnny in algebra.

I thought about Johnny again as I read The Times' series this week on L.A.'s dropout problem. Algebra, the reporters found, is an insurmountable stumbling block for many high school students.

What struck me was that the reasons why Johnny can't do algebra in L.A. today are remarkably similar to why Johnny Patrello couldn't do algebra almost four decades ago in Yonkers, N.Y.

Johnny and I were brought together by Mrs. Elizabeth Bukanz, the algebra teacher. Mrs. Bukanz wore her sandy hair in a frizzy French twist and her glasses on a chain. But she was gentle and smiling, and she had passion — at least for what she called "the beauty of algebra." I, too, loved its perfect logic and tidy solutions, so unlike my messy teenage life.

But Johnny was deaf to algebra's siren song. He was flunking, and Mrs. Bukanz hoped that if I used my study halls to tutor him, he might score at least 65% on the New York State Regents exam. Passing the exam allowed even failing students to move on to high school, which started in 10th grade; otherwise, Johnny would be left behind.

Johnny wore his leather jacket in class despite the spring warmth, and he habitually tilted his face toward the floor so that when he looked up at me, he seemed embarrassed. Yet for such a cool guy, he was surprisingly friendly and committed to giving this a try.

Things looked pretty hopeless to both of us those first couple of sessions, as Johnny stumbled through algebra problems while I tried to figure out exactly what he didn't understand. Then, as we took it down to each step of each little calculation, the trouble became clear: Johnny somehow had reached ninth grade without learning the multiplication tables.

Because he was shaky on those, his long multiplication was error prone and his long division a mess. As Johnny tried to work algebraic equations, his arithmetic kept bringing up weird results. He'd figure he was on the wrong track and make up an answer.

This discovery should have made us feel worse. How could we possibly make up for a dearth of third-grade skills and cover algebra too?

But at least we knew where to start.

We spent about half of those early sessions on multiplication drills. Seven times eight, eight times seven — Johnny could never remember. As an adult, in memory of Johnny's struggles, I would rehearse my kids at an early age in that one math fact. Get that 56 down, I would tell them, and the rest of multiplication is a snap.

Today's failing high school students, though plagued by more poverty and upheaval than Johnny or I ever knew, bring the same scanty skills to algebra class, according to The Times' series. They never quite grasped multiplication tables, but still they moved on to more complicated math.

Who can focus on the step-by-step logic of peeling back an equation until "x" is bared when it involves arithmetic that comes slow and slippery, always giving a different answer to the same calculation?

Yet in all these decades, the same school structure that failed Johnny goes on, dragging kids through the grades even if they don't master the material from the year before. This especially makes no sense for math, which is almost entirely sequential.

Leaving children back isn't a solution; it simply makes them feel stupid. They learn, like Johnny, to look at the floor. The floor can't embarrass them.

What I learned from Johnny — aside from the fact that greasers could be sweet-natured and very, very smart — is that schools are structured to help administrators feel organized, not to help children learn.

Young children's skills are all over the map, yet we corral them into second grade, third grade and so forth, where everyone moves at one pace in all subjects. Better to group them according to their skills in each subject, without the "grade" labels, and let them move on to the next skill when they have mastered the one they were on. If they're not getting it, give them extra tutoring, but don't push them forward until they're ready. This way, there is no failure — only progress.

It requires a sea change in thinking, but it's not impossible or even all that hard. Back before standardized tests put classes in lockstep, some progressive schools already were using team teaching to do this in math as well as reading and writing.

Johnny finally nailed seven times eight, then with amazing quickness worked his way through basic "x" problems up to multiple variables and beyond. Still, I couldn't quite catch him up to a year's worth of work in a couple of months. And on a sweltering June day, with humidity that neared 100%, the regents exam came, faster than we felt ready for it.

A couple of weeks later, I saw Johnny in the hall. He shot me a dazed look and broke the news — 95%! That moment has wiped from memory my own regents score. But I won the algebra award at the graduation ceremony. Johnny cheered, apparently undaunted by the fear of appearing uncool.

We lost touch in high school. I was college-prep, he was voc-ed. We would pass occasionally in the halls, and he would glance up from the floor and say, "Hi, teach!"

I know he received his diploma because I see his picture in my old yearbook, wearing a suit and tie instead of his leather jacket. His eyes still look up cautiously from his slightly downcast face, as though he is a bit surprised to be there.



BEFORE I USED Johnny's full name in a story that would reach more than a million readers, it was only right to try to contact him for permission. Directory assistance found one John Patrello, not too far from Yonkers.

The phone was answered by his wife, Joann. It was the same Johnny, but he had died a year and a half ago of a massive stroke, leaving behind Joann and four children.

As she and I talked, both of us in tears at times, it was amazing how much of what I remembered about Johnny continued throughout his life — the tough outer look, the sweetness a millimeter underneath, the quick mind, the habit of tilting his face toward the floor. His eldest is a doctor; the second, a teacher. His teenage daughter wants to be a journalist, and I'll see what I can do to help her along the way.

Johnny became an auto mechanic. ("He loved math, and you know auto repair involves a lot of math," Joann said. Yes, it does.)

Another thing Joann told me about Johnny: He was incredibly fast at multiplication.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Feb 2006

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SandraStotskyOnReadingAndEdSchools 30 Jun 2006 - 16:42 CatherineJohnson

Abstract: Reading instruction is one of the very few areas where it is not the case that “more research is needed.” Educational policy makers already have the theory and the evidence supporting it to guide the implementation of effective reading programs from K-12. In fact, they have had the theory and the evidence for decades. The central problem they face in providing effective reading instruction and a sound reading curriculum stems not from an absence of a research base but from willful indifference to what the research has consistently shown and to a theory that has been repeatedly confirmed. Using Jeanne Chall’s The Academic Achievement Challenge as a point of departure, I suggest why our education schools, through their influence on teachers, administrators, textbook publishers, and state and national assessments of students and teachers, have come to be the major obstacle to closing the “gap” in student achievement.

source:
Why Reading Teachers Are Not Trained to Use a Research-Based Pedagogy:
Is Institutional Reform Possible?
Sandra Stotsky
Research Scholar
Northeastern University
Prepared for the Courant Initiative for the Mathematical Sciences in Education Forum:
“Delivery on the Promise of Mayoral Control”
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University
October 2, 2005

David Klein on Bennet-Kew

Not all teachers can accept the kind of environment one finds at Bennett-Kew. Newly credentialled teachers from prestigious universities are sometimes turned away after a semester or two. Education college doctrine is often at odds with what works at Bennett-Kew, and Mrs. Ichinaga has found that in some cases noncredentialled teachers provide better instruction than credentialled ones.

source:
High Achievement in Mathematics:
Lessons from Three Los Angeles Elementary Schools
by
David Klein
Commissioned by the Brookings Institution
August 2000

I have never heard of it

Notices [of the American Mathematical Society]: Starting in 1968, the government funded a huge study called Project Follow-Through. It cost a billion dollars and ran almost thirty years. The purpose was to examine how different teaching methods or philosophies affected student performance. What they found was that the traditional, “direct instruction” method was the most effective. Are you familiar with this study?

[President of NCTM,] Gail Burrill: I have never heard of it.

source:
Interview with Gail Burrill by Allyn Jackson

Project Follow-Through — what happened?

I've barely skimmed the surface of writing about what happend and why.

However, out of my very small sample of articles on the subject, Cathy L. Watkins' piece is the first thing I'll read in full.

excerpts:

The history of Follow Through and its effects constitute a case study of how the educational establishment functions. As in other bureaucracies, it is composed of parochial vested interests that work to either maintain the status quo or to advance a self-serving agenda. As a result, the largest educational experiment in history (costing almost one billion tax payer dollars) has been effectively prevented from having the impact on daily classroom practices that its results clearly warranted. Let's look at some factors that operate at each level of the educational establishment to influence decisions about teaching methods and materials.

Policymakers. Follow Through demonstrated that public policy is based on public support, not on empirical evidence....Because the Direct Instruction model represents a minority view in education, it was not surprising that policymakers failed to take a strong position in support of the Follow Through results.

Although some policymakers may have some formal training in areas of education, they typically rely on input from education professionals when developing and supporting programs. The influence of stakeholders in traditional educational practices can be seen throughout the history of Project Follow Through....For example, the chairman of the Follow Through National Advisory Committee was the dean of the Bank Street College of Education, whose model was ineffective in improving academic achievement or affective measures.

....In fact, some social policy analysts assert that in situations where administrators are strongly convinced of the effectiveness of a program, it is likely that an evaluation will be disregarded. This is tragically illustrated in California where policy makers enamored with Whole Language were seemingly incapable of attending to data showing serious declines in students' reading performance, including a national assessment on which California students placed last.

[snip]

Colleges of Education. Project Follow Through was unique because it examined not only instructional programs, but the educational philosophies from which they were developed....The majority of models were based on philosophies of "natural growth" (Becker and Carnine, 1981) or what Bijou (1977) referred to as "unfolding." According to these models, learning involves changes in cognitive structures that are believed to develop and mature in the same manner as biological organs. Whole Language is an example of instruction derived from this philosophy. It is based on the belief that reading develops naturally given sufficient exposure to a print-rich environment.

The second philosophical position is concerned with principles of learning or "changing behavior" (Becker and Carnine, 1981). From this perspective, teaching involves specifying what is to be taught and arranging the environment in such a way that the desired change in behavior results.

Although the data from Follow Through support the latter position, the majority of colleges of education espouse a philosophy of cognitive restructuring. Thus, the data from Follow Through fail to support the philosophy that dominates colleges of education. This obviously made it difficult for educators to accept the Follow Through findings and they responded by discrediting the evaluation as well as by voicing specific objections about the Direct Instruction model or questioning the values of the model. For example, educators are fond of accusing direct teaching approaches of ignoring the "whole child" by emphasizing academic achievement at the expense of affective development. The Follow Through data clearly show that no such trade-off occurs. The Direct Instruction model was more effective than any other model on measures of self-esteem. A second objection is that this Direct instruction is reductionistic and results in only rote learning of non-essential skills. Yet, the data show that students in the Direct Instruction model demonstrated superior performance on measures of complex cognitive skills. In contrast, not a single model that set out to improve these cognitive skills was able to do so.

[snip]

The training paradigm underlying most teacher training programs has little to recommend it, with students spending the majority of their time listening to lectures about theory and method. Sponsors of Follow Through models found that lectures about teaching had little impact upon actual teaching practices. Training was most successful when it included modeling of the desired behaviors, opportunities for teachers to practice, and feedback about their performance (Bushell, 1978)....

Teachers. Probably the biggest obstacle is the fact that the instructional methods a teacher uses are most likely to be those taught during his or her own training....there are currently thousands of teachers in classrooms who do not know how to teach beginning reading, because the professors who "taught" them adhered to a philosophy of "natural growth." One teacher confided to me, "I do not know how to teach reading to someone who doesn't already know how to read"!

Teachers may not seek out empirically validated methods, such as Direct Instruction, because they fail to recognize that their current methods are not effective. [ed.: self-assessment is difficult for everyone, not just for students] Student failure is more likely to be attributed to deficits within the child or to external factors such as the child's home life, than to ineffective instruction. ...even if teacher did know there was a better way to teach, how would they acquire the necessary skills? Surely not by returning to the schools where they received their initial teacher training.

Teachers who are motivated to look for and use effective methods, often run into opposition....

School Districts. The fact that effective teaching methods are available does not mean that they will be adopted. According to Alan Cohen (personal communication, 1992), "We know how to teach kids, what we don't know is how to get the public schools to do it!"

....One way that Follow Through differed from other federally funded programs was that in exchange for funding, particular instructional practices were specified and monitored. This system of supervision resulted in a higher degree of fidelity of implementation of the model than might otherwise be expected. However, schools are generally not organized to provide the level of supervision that Follow Through model sponsors found necessary to ensure fidelity of implementation.

Publishers. Much, perhaps most, of what a teacher does is determined by the materials he or she uses....materials are not field tested to ensure their effectiveness with children. The publishing industry does not initiate the development of instructional materials, but instead reacts to the demands of the educational marketplace....In California the state adopts an instructional framework. Criteria for instructional materials are then derived from the framework. Publishers are provided these criteria and busily get to work developing instructional materials that conform to them. They submit their materials during the textbook adoption process and panels evaluate the extent to which the materials correspond to the specified criteria. Noticeably absent from these criteria is any mention of measured effectiveness. ...field tests are expensive, and the prevailing contingencies provide absolutely no incentive for publishers to conduct them in order to provide learner verification data because such data are not considered in textbook selection and adoption. (See "Why I sued California, Engelmann, ADI News, Winter, 1991).

The Public. What the public has supported is a system which has continued to neglect effective methods of instruction....Parents and others have been led to accept that the failure of a great many students to learn is due to deficits in the children. The general public has no way of knowing that children's achievements are largely a function of how they are taught.

source:
Project Follow-Through: Why Didn't We? (full text of Cathy L. Watkins' article)

teaching to crammery

I've attended many CSE meetings, and until recently it hadn't occurred to me that our definition of 'learning disabilities' is entirely a function of public school curricula and teaching practices — which is not to say children don't have biological differences in learning ability. They do. But the definition of LD is comparative. You don't diagnose a learning disability with a brain scan or a blood test. In fact, I don't think learning disabilities are actually 'diagnosed' at all, are they? [please fill me in — I remember my neighbor, who is a clinical psychologist, explaining this to me a couple of years ago...]

IIRC, a child's problems in school 'qualify' as a learning disability when he or she has a normal IQ, but performs two years below grade level.

The possibility that the child may be two years below grade level because of a problem in the school, not the child, is never raised — and, in fact, can't be raised. It's not on the menu.

In 100% of all cases, the problem is discovered in the child, not in the school.

Once you let this fact sink in for a bit.....you're midway into a paradigm shift. A big one.

At ktm, we've talked about kids who do OK in spiral curricula.

I was one of those kids; probably many or most of you were, too.

Lately I've been wondering what it is about some children that allows them to do OK in courses that aren't taught to mastery.

I've called Christopher's accelerated math class a Death March to Algebra.

It is a Death March to Algebra, but there are going to be a bunch of kids still standing at the end. If I have anything to do with it, Christopher will be one of them.

How are they doing it?

And how normal is it that they are doing it?

Lately I've been realizing......we've based our concept of normal learning on these kids.

Learning disabilities are defined in relation to these children. Christopher's class is mostly populated by 'high-achievers,' by which I mean kids who do OK in spiral curricula. I'm starting to see this particular group of kids as a group, as a specific sub-population within any larger population of children. There's 'something about them' — something different. (I'm thinking it has to do with speedy memory; these are kids who can be taught to crammery. But I don't know.)

A child who's two years behind the kids who 'do OK' in a spiral curriculum is diagnosed with LD.

At the moment, I've got only one word to say about this realization and what it implies, or may imply:

yikes



update: from Charles

The indispensable Fordham Institute had a big report on why the big Follow-Through study was ignored.

Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices (And What It Would Take to Make Education More Like Medicine) by Douglas Carnine

If you're interested in Project Follow-Through, Carnine's article is probably the place to start.


Washington Times article on Project Follow-Through
Effective Educational Practices (issue devoted to Project Follow-Through]]
Project Follow-Through: Why Didn't We? (brief summary Watkins' article)
Project Follow-Through: Why Didn't We? (full text of Cathy L. Watkins' article)
Sciencephobia (EDUCATION NEXT)
Illinois LOOP page on Project Follow-Through

cram school
teaching to crammery in middle school
the kind of kids who can be taught to crammery
free teach to crammery clip art
teachtocrammery



-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Feb 2006

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CarolynOnMasteryLearning 07 Feb 2006 - 19:54 CatherineJohnson



I was just doing some Librarian work on ktm (linking like posts with like, dropping 'back doors' into existing posts, posting links in the book-style index) — and I discovered that Carolyn wrote a post on mastery learning back in May!

How good is mastery learning? Two of the review studies looked at mastery learning by itself and with combinations of other curricula, and found that mastery learning by itself produces better results than what was termed 'conventional instruction'. However, mastery learning got its best results when used with other teaching techniques. One study got decent results for "mastery learning with corrective feedback" (meaning -- electric shock? The review didn't say), but got its best results from mastery learning with 'enhanced cues' -- extremely detailed instructions to the students on how to do problems.

Another study found that mastery learning and cooperative learning strongly enhanced each other (note: cooperative learning is structured working-together among students, as opposed to simply being stuck in groups to do your homework together: see part two of this series).

It's interesting, reading this post now, not least because I recognize one of the author's names: Doug Carnine.


Report to the California State Board of Education

-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Feb 2006

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WholeSchoolReform 11 Feb 2006 - 01:38 CatherineJohnson



A series of links, starting with Carnival of Education, then moving to Jenny B & on to Foundations of Teaching and Learning brought me to a professor's notes taken on a lecture about bringing "research-based practices to scale in school."

I'm out of my depth here. I've begun reading books & articles on 'whole school reform'.....and that's about it.

Translating the findings of cognitive science on the nature & process of learning, which I do understand, into public policy and systemic institutional reform — I can't make that jump.

This lecture, and the study to which it refers, appear to come out at least moderately in favor of very early grades scripting, which I know sets a lot of people's teeth on edge —

As far as I can tell, it appears that scripting was effective in Kindergarten, but not in grade 3 (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I think I've mentioned that the Saxon books are scripted early on. I know the Kindergarten book is scripted, because I have it. I know the 1st grade book is scripted because my sister-in-law uses it in IL.

I don't know when Saxon stops scripting lessons, but I'll bet it's somewhere around 2nd or 3rd grade. (Again, if anyone knows for sure, chime in.)



leadership in schools

Although I don't understand public policy well, this passage doesn't surprise me:

ASP - focused on "cultural control" aimed at promoting "powerful learning" that schools needed to define themselves. Instruction is not specified in any centralized way.

AC - focused on "professional control" in which the emphasis is adhering to standards of teaching and learning. A key feature was a very aggressive leadership training program focusing on principals and coaches.

SFA - focused on "procedural control" in which instruction is highly scripted. What students should learn and how they should be taught are quite clear, particularly given the scripting. Coaches and leaders teach the design and monitor fidelity of implementation.

Teachers report that SFA and AC (compared with controls) have greater design specificity and consistency, and more interaction with leaders, but ASP has more support for teacher autonomy.

[snip]

Effects on achievement (using the TerraNova test).

SFA had a 1.5 month grown effect at K but not at grade 3.

AC had a positive effect of 2 months at grade 3, but not at K

ASP didn't have any significant effects.

As far as I can tell, for years researchers have been saying that strong principals are the key.

Until someone proves that to be wrong, I believe it. 'The person at the top sets the tone.'

It doesn't surprise me that a reform focusing only on 'culture' or on 'teacher autonomy' would produce no results. Schools need strong educational leadership.



question

Ken may know the answer to this.

What is the difference between Success for All & Engelmann's Direct Instruction?



update: Vlorbik on SFA

i'll take that one after barely glancing
at "success for all": engelmann is clearly
a human being with actual opinions of his own
but "s.f.a" is a committee of mushmouth obfuscators
with nothing in the world to say but feel-good cliches.








-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Feb 2006

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RichardRothsteinReportCardForEverything 15 Feb 2006 - 01:36 CatherineJohnson



via eduwonk, a link to Joe William's new blog for New York Charter School Association, The Chalkboard.

Horrifying:

The Economic Policy Institute's Richard Rothstein, in a lecture this week at Amy Stuart Wells' Columbia University, complained that focusing too much attention on reading and math under the federal No Child Left Behind law will make kids better in reading and math, but at the detriment of other subject areas.

Rothstein, according to this news item from Teachers College, is now calling for schools to be held accountable for even more subject areas, including basic academic skills; critical thinking; social skills and work ethic; citizenship; physical health; emotional health;^* the arts and literature; and vocational education.

Apparently Rothstein is working on a report.




Richard Rothstein in a nutshell

Rothstein is the enemy of eduwonk-Jenny D-Joe Williams-type reformers everywhere.

Rothstein:

But even if lawsuits demanding an "adequate education" could produce more money, class differences will continue to ensure an achievement gap because schools alone, no matter how well financed, can't by themselves overcome the cultural, social, and economic causes of the differences in academic achievement. The drive for "adequacy" is bound to be seen, when someday it has played itself out, as only another failed education crusade.

source: Must Schools Fail? by Richard Rothstein
New York Review of Books $
Volume 51, Number 19 · December 2, 2004

That's Rothstein. Academic adequacy, inside quotes or out, is a pipe dream.

First we need to fix everything else.

This is the kind of thing I find particularly hard to take:

...the Thernstroms praise a chain of middle schools called the KIPP Academies, which try to enforce an academic culture that the Thernstroms say most black families lack: strict discipline, constant talk of college plans, and a focus on basic skills.[13] But these charter schools do not enroll black children from typical low-income families....Parents who send their children to such schools are already unusually interested in their education; children are accepted only if parents agree to monitor their homework, enforce approved disciplinary measures, and limit television-watching. If children or their parents violate these agreements, the children can be expelled—a rare occurrence, but a threat nevertheless.

Talk about your soft bigotry of low expectations. The typical low-income parent isn't "unusually" interested in his or her child's education, can't or won't monitor homework, & can't or won't enforce approve disciplinary measures or limit television-watching. With friends like Rothstein, who needs enemies?



nerd celebrity death match

Meanwhile, Rothstein's son is involved in a nasty fight with Caroline Hoxby, who's behaved none too well herself, I'm sorry to say. Of course, she didn't start the fight.

Five years ago Harvard's Caroline Hoxby, a rising star in economics, wrote a paper that reached an unusual conclusion: Cities with more streams tended to have schools with higher test scores.

Today her work is a widely cited landmark in the fierce national debate over free-market competition in public schools. And it's at the center of a bitter dispute with another economist that is riveting social scientists across the country.

Her adversary is Jesse Rothstein, a young professor at Princeton, who says her study is full of flaws. In a rebuttal to her critic, Dr. Hoxby wrote of his work: "Every claim is wrong." She has also accused him of ideological bias. Dr. Rothstein, in turn, says she resorts to "name-calling" and "ad hominem attacks" on him.

[snip]

Dr. Rothstein, 31, is the son of Richard Rothstein, a former textile-union organizer who's now a lecturer at Columbia. Father and son have both worked closely with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The son got interested in the streams paper while studying for his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. He is now an assistant professor at Princeton, not yet eligible for tenure. His Berkeley thesis adviser, David Card, describes Dr. Rothstein, who had majored in math as a Harvard undergraduate, as "tenacious" and having "very good technical skills."

[snip]

In July, Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, quoted Dr. Hoxby, whose father is African-American, as saying that "there is a lot of race and gender bias going on here."

In an email, Dr. Hoxby says that the paper misrepresented her views and that she had made no allegation of racial or gender bias. The Crimson's president, Harvard senior Lauren Schuker, says the paper stands by "a fair story (that) covered all sides."

[snip]

An economics Web log called "The Lowest Deep" sums up the squabble as a "nerdy Celebrity Death Match."

The fight is over Hoxby's method of counting streams inside a city — the entire article is worth reading for insight into the kind of 'found experiments' economists like Hoxby perform.

I love that stuff.















^*If schools were to begin 'measuring' mental health & citizenship, I'd be marching in the streets. I'd have plenty of company, too.

-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Feb 2006

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MathOnBroadway 11 Feb 2006 - 16:34 CatherineJohnson



Ed and I went to see Beauty & the Beast Thursday night (NYU had discount tickets on sale). The first act was so boring we almost left at intermission, but the second act was great. There were a zillion little kids in the theater having the time of their life, so that was fun, too.

Seeing as how I had my AlphaSmart with me, I was able to record, almost verbatim, the conversation behind me. The person speaking is female:

He said, Why are you going to be gone for 6 weeks?

I said, Well 6 weeks divided by 3.

He said, 5?

I said, Divided by 3.

He said, 3?

I said, 2. Six divided by 3 is 2. I’ll be gone 2 weeks. And what do you care anyway? You’re not even in my group.

True story.


-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Feb 2006

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TheLimitsOfScientificResearch 14 Feb 2006 - 00:02 CatherineJohnson



From a terrific short essay by Chester Finn, warning of an almost-certain-to-occur (IMO) Unintended Consequence. It's worth reading the whole thing.

Science and nonscience: The limits of scientific research

American education research has turned a corner. The 2002 creation of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the ascendance of accountability, and the No Child Left Behind act's demand for "scientifically based research" have radically altered an educational research culture that just a few years ago bridled at the "medical model" and too often championed ethnographies, action research, "critical narrative," "discourse analysis," and other approaches that provided parents, practitioners, or policy makers with little useful information.

Together, both NCLB and IES represent a demand that rigorous scientific principles be used to assess programs. This development did not "happen" and it was not an inevitable evolution embraced by the education research community. Rather, this change was the consequence of prodigious efforts by proponents like Congressman Michael Castle, reading expert Reid Lyon, and IES head Russ Whitehurst. For their efforts, they have met with fierce resistance from some quarters of the education research community, as well as professional discourtesy, bizarre conspiracy theories, and ad hominem attacks.

[snip]

Amidst this good news, however, lurks the risk that the pendulum will swing too far, that the lure of "scientifically based research" will cause certain methods of study—especially randomized field trials—to be demanded even when ill-suited for the issue at hand.

[snip]

...we risk stifling sensible and promising structural reforms in schooling. This risk is posed when we start to imagine that reforms to personnel, management, or financial systems need to be subjected to these scientific standards. In such cases, a premature or unyielding application of the tenets of "scientific research" could insulate ineffective and dysfunctional arrangements from needed and attainable reform.

How does this danger arise? In large part, it occurs from an imperfect understanding of how the "medical research model" works in medicine and how and when to import it into education. It's vital to recognize that there are really two kinds of "reforms" in medicine or education—and that the proper role of science and scientifically-based research is very different from one to the other. One kind of reform relates to specialized knowledge of how the mind or body works, and the other relates to the manner in which we design and operate organizations, governments and social institutions.

In education, the former category deals with the science of learning and with behaviors and programs that induce it....Such interventions are readily susceptible to field trials, and findings on effectiveness can reasonably be extrapolated to other populations.

[snip]

The second category of reform entails governance, management, or policy innovations intended to improve organizational effectiveness. It includes such innovations as permitting mayors to appoint school boards, permitting schools to operate free of some regulations, paying employees based on performance, and so on. None of these changes is unique to education. They draw upon a mass of experience gained in other sectors—and their effects are consistent enough and understood well enough across a broad swath of human experience that it's neither useful nor appropriate to use the scientific method to determine whether, for example, initiatives to reward excellence, increase managerial flexibility, or ensure accountability may hold promise in schooling. Such interventions are rarely precise, do not take place in controlled circumstances, and generally are administered to classes of people rather than discrete clients. Since the results of these structural reforms will be contingent on the context and manner in which they are implemented, even well-designed studies will find it problematic to draw lessons from isolated experiments that trump our broader body of knowledge regarding the use of incentives or markets. Of course, we should welcome inquiry and take new findings into account when reflecting on policy or program design. However, it's vital to remember that we've got a vast store of knowledge on these questions, and that whatever the results of small-scale experiments with merit pay or educational competition, this existing body of knowledge ought to weigh more heavily than the results of one or another context-specific study.

[snip]

....in medicine, while we deem it appropriate for the Food and Drug Administration to monitor and approve drug therapies and treatments, we don't require FDA approval before we permit doctors, hospitals, or health care firms to change their management practices, compensation strategies, accountability metrics, or work routines.

In truth, charter schooling, accountability systems, school vouchers, alternative certification, and merit pay are not really "educational" innovations in any meaningful sense. They don't rest on conceptions of teaching or learning processes or practices in the way that decisions about literacy or math programs do. They are decisions about how to arrange and deliver services, similar to those made in social welfare, library management, higher education, or private enterprise. Such decisions draw upon our experience across a wide range of human endeavors and organizations. They apply practical wisdom and experience about human behavior from a wealth of sectors. We should welcome research on the effects and efficacy of such reforms and use them in debating and crafting policy. But we also need to understand the limits of science.

The notion that rewarding performance ought to be subject to scientific validation before adoption is akin to suggesting that the National Institutes of Health should determine permissible compensation systems for doctors.

in a nutshell

• there are two kinds of reforms in education: roughly, 'educational' reform (curriculum & teaching) and 'management' reform (mayoral control, vouchers, pay scale, etc.)

• educational reform is the proper subject of scientific research

• management reform can be studied, and has been studied, but management reform is always context-specific and thus not susceptible to random-assignment controlled studies

• we possess a wide and deep body of knowledge concerning effective management practices, which transcends particular institutions and can be generalized

• there is a danger that in embracing 'science' as the arbiter of all reform, needed management reforms will be held hostage to context-specific studies that will be many years in the making and won't give us as much information as we already have about good management

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Feb 2006

---

NyuMathMajor 03 Oct 2006 - 01:13 CatherineJohnson



Ed talked to an undergraduate majoring in math today.

I guess the kid spontaneously told Ed that, "Calculators are the worst thing that ever happened to math students."

Ed said he almost burst out laughing, because next this student went on to say that nobody who used calculators as a kid can do fractions, and if you can't do fractions you can't do calculus.

Ed said this guy could have been channelling me.

The student also said that, in high school, his calculus teacher had told the students who were having trouble, "You're having trouble because you used calculators in grade school and you never learned to do fractions." It was obvious to her. He spent quite a lot of time describing automaticity to Ed, and how important it is.

Ed asked why he hadn't used calculators as a child, when everyone else was, and the answer was chilling: he hadn't used calculators because he 'was into' math, he liked it, and he wanted to do the calculations by hand.

What that tells me is that only the natural born Math Brains are going to make it through these days — natural born Math Brains who know they're natural born Math Brains.

Your basic kid is going to use the calculator if the teacher hands it to him.

Then he's going to regret it later on.

That's what happened to the other kids in his high school calculus class.

Ed asked him whether the kids who'd used calculators could catch up.

The kid didn't think so. At least, he hadn't seen it happen.

Math is hard, he said. It's hard, it takes a long time to learn, and he didn't think a high school student who'd lost that much time could make it up.

That's what James Milgram said, too.



no calculators in Irvington

I don't think any of the grade school kids here are using calculators.

One of main criterion for choosing a new math curriculum was (paraphrasing) 'constructivist approach.'

One of the other main criterion was emphasis on math facts & computation.

TRAILBLAZERS was the only constructivist curriculum they considered that stressed fluency in math facts.

(I assume they're teaching the traditional long division algorithm in spite of the fact that TRAILBLAZERS teaches 'forgiving division,' but I don't know. Nevertheless, nobody's passing out baskets of calculators.)

Good for them.



which reminds me

I had to buy Christopher an expensive graphing calculator (or something) last fall, for Middle School.

He never used it once, and then finally lost the thing.

Good riddance!

His teacher is letting them use calculators for the first time this year, to calculate circumference & area of circles. I'm not even sure that's such a good idea.

Since he's doing KUMON, though, I figure it's OK. He's incredibly fast & accurate on the KUMON sheets.

Of course, the two "Fraction Levels" - E & F - are killers.


-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Feb 2006

---

NewYorkStateMathTestGrade6Part2 30 Jun 2006 - 11:07 CatherineJohnson



update: oops

Ms. Kahl did send home state test prep material (see below). Apparently, Christopher has a PACKET.

Good!

He and his dad are working on the scale drawing right now. (see below) They're having a blast.

fyi, I think scale drawing is a fabulous assignment. Christopher is finally getting some extended practice using a ruler, and of course a scale drawing means fractions, ratios, & proportions.

It's true Christopher couldn't do this assignment on his own. (I'm feeling smug today because my fiercest competitor-mom, aka the 'Homework Nazi,' could not do this assignment. She told Ed, 'I didn't even know where to start.' Hah! I say Hah! because this woman is good. She's blowing me out of the water.)

However, Ed isn't doing this assignment for Christopher. He's helping.



update update

Ed is grumpy.

The scale drawing was fun for the first two hours.

The last two hours weren't fun at all.

"This is vacation."

"I don't see why they're giving this much homework on vacation."

"I have a huge amount of work to do myself; this took 4 hours."

"Christopher doesn't know anything about ratio."

"He doesn't have any conceptual understanding at all."

"He kept looking for formulas to do things."

"He didn't even know where to begin."

"He doesn't have a lot of natural ability in math." [ed.: Any assignment that ends with the parent deciding his child doesn't have any natural ability in math is the wrong assignment a far as I'm concerned]

"She has no idea how to structure an assignment." [ed.: ditto]

Over dinner Ed was pondering the 'packet,' which turns out to be a special Glencoe-produced 58-page booklet called "Mastering the Intermediate Level Mathematics Test: Diagnose — Prescribe — Practice Workbook."

Fifty-eight pages of items aligned to the New York state test, with no answers or solutions.

Apparently our job over 'break' is to Diagnose — Prescribe — Practice and also create our own answer key.

Well, thank God I've got Smartest Tractor lighting the way (pdf file).



back again

I've been off doing Career Stuff that's actually been quasi-fun.

I say quasi because my particular career seems to involve heaping loads of crapola^* (not a nice word on Sunday!), not to mention the occasional bolt from the blue.

The other day I called my agent and, when her assistant answered the telephone, said, 'Hi, this is Catherine.'

The assistant said, 'Who?'

That's the crapola aspect; I'll spare you & me both an extended account of the bolt from the blue part (though poor Caroline is slated to get an earful today....)

Anyway, I've been off because I was doing Career Stuff that was actually a blast.

This involved going into the city to meet with our kids' psychiatrist, Eric Hollander (that was the fun part), after which I decided to surprise Ed in his lair. (What is that woman in white doing in the picture?)

It had to be a surprise, because I didn't have my cel phone with me. I didn't have my cel phone with me, because I forgot my cel phone.

I need WAY more exercise.

So I decided to drop in unannounced.

Naturally that didn't work out; Ed wasn't there, and when he finally did get there he had five minutes to get to a faculty meeting.

So there was nothing left to do but visit the NYU bookstore and look at every single education title on both floors.



what are graduate students in Diane Ravitch's department reading?

Nothing by Diane Ravitch, that's for sure.

It was all constructivism all the time. Every last textbook.

That and feel-good books about heroic white teachers teaching poor black children — books like Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School. (I'm thinking a 'small' victory probably doesn't include teaching kids enough algebra to graduate from high school, but I don't know.) There were many of these books.

Until that visit, I hadn't realized that heroic white teacher saving poor black children must be an important fantasy element in ed schools today. I say fantasy element, because I'm pretty sure all of the teachers in all of the books were white, while all of the kids were black. Certainly Jaime Escalante was nowhere to be seen. (Of course, neither was Rafe Esquith, and I don't expect to see Our School turn up on the assigned reading lists any time soon, either.)

Perusing the offerings, you wouldn't know teachers teach math. Everything was about 'literacy' and 'authentic assessments' of literacy and the like. Which is probably just as well, considering.

There was one book that stuck out like a sore thumb: Techniques for Managing Verbally and Physically Aggressive Students. I think that was the title. This book was so unadorned by photos of Beaming White Teachers surrounded by Adoring Black Children that it was refreshing.

Leafing through the pages I found instructions on what a teacher should do when he is being strangled by a student.

The 2 or 3 books that did address math were constructivist all the way. Liping Ma was absent; John Van de Walle's now-classic hundred-dollar tome Elementary and Middle School Mathematics: Teaching Developmentally, Fifth Edition was present in abundance.

The funny thing was, the store management had stocked a bunch of food business textbooks just across the aisle from the ed books. There was a book on restaurant math — I think it was Math Principles for Food Service — that was pure direct instruction. No photos of smiling white teachers surrounded by black students yearning to succeed in food services, just stuff you need to know. Chapters on 'weights and measures,' 'portion control,' 'converting and yielding recipes,' 'production and baking formulas,' and 'using the metric system of measure.' If you're going to make it in food service, you're going to need some math. Seeing as how the first chapters cover addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, apparently you're not going to learn any of this math in grade school.

Part 1 is titled: Using the Calculator.



upstairs, downstairs

So those were the texbooks, which are housed downstairs in the basement.

Upstairs, in the 'commercial' section, I found:

• Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and jean Piaget by Kieran Egan

• John Dewey & The Decline of American Education: How the patron saint of schools has corrupted teaching and learning by Henry T. Edmondson III

• Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement by Anthony S. Bryk and Barbara Schneider

• What Great Teachers Do Differently: 14 Things That Matter Most by Todd Whitaker

AND

• Dumbing Us Down by John Gatto Taylor

A clean sweep.



New York state tests coming right up

In March.

Christopher's class took a sample test (pdf file) this week; only 2 kids scored a 4. Christopher thinks he got a 3. Apparently the teacher told them that any kids scoring a 1 or 2 would be moved down to Phase 2-3.

This is the Highly Accelerated, Algebra-in-the-6th-grade, Death March to Algebra-in-the-Eighth Grade Phase 4 extravaganza I've been banging on about. Only two of 19 children can score a 4 on the sample test and apparently there are enough kids in danger of scoring 1s and 2s that the teacher is talking about it in class.

So here's the scoop.

Christopher is studying algebra in the 6th grade, but he can't do percent. I pulled the Sample Test, which turned out to be the test Christopher's class took this week, and asked him about problem number 26:

On Friday and Saturday, there were a total of 200 cars in the parking lot of a movie theater. On Friday, 120 cars were in the parking lot.

Part A

What percent of the total number of cars were in the parking lot on Friday?

Show your work.

Part B

What percent of the total number of cars were in the parking lot on Saturday?

Show your work.

Christopher has no idea how to do this problem, in spite of the fact that he's just 'finished' the chapter on ratio, proportion, and percent in Prentice-Hall. (Says he 'froze up' on the test; expecting another D; etc.)



my vacation and welcome to it

We are on mid-winter vacation this week.

For my vacation, I will be teaching Christopher how to do percent.

I know how I'm going to do it. I'm going to use the Singapore-Saxon bar models and the Saxon-Dolciani percent charts.

I think I'm starting to get a feel for teaching-to-crammery, which is the skill middle school parents need most. If I've got 5 days to teach percent word problems to proto-mastery, I'm going to need bar models & charts (& possibly Saxon's brilliant starter W_P variables to boot).

If that were all I had to do this week, I'd be cool.

It's not.

I'm also going to have to figure out what's on the freaking test.

I read some guy last week complaining that Most Parents don't have the Sense of Responsibility it takes to find out what the state standards are.

Sure, sure; we all know about those Parents who don't have a Sense of Responsibility as defined by the people who write state standards.

How many parents fall in this category?

I'd estimate, conservatively, that perhaps 99% of all parents have zero interest in what the State Standards are.

The reason 99% of all parents have zero interest in what the State Standards are is that their Bayesian priors are telling them the State Standards are likely to be:

a) impossible to find

b) bunk

Given my household's limited common sense-y, my own attitude can be characterized as: 'Damn the Bayesian priors, I want those standards!'

Thus, I have now attempted to a) locate and b) comprehend my state standards.

Which means I am now qualified to tell you that all those irresponsible parents are correct. Spending your Sunday morning tracking down New York state standards (pdf file) is what Carolyn calls a FWOT.





See?



a visit to the mathematical reasoning strand!

1. Students use mathematical reasoning to analyze mathematical situations, make conjectures, gather evidence, and construct an argument.

Students:

• apply a variety of reasoning strategies.
• make and evaluate conjectures and arguments using appropriate language.
• make conclusions based on inductive reasoning.
• justify conclusions involving simple and compound (i.e., and/or) statements.

This is evident, for example, when students:

• use trial and error and work backwards to solve a problem.
  
• identify patterns in a number sequence.
• are asked to find numbers that satisfy two conditions, such as
  n > -4 and
  n < 6.

That certainly clarifies things.



source:
New York state standards




the return of common sense-y

So forget about the New York state standards. If I need standards — and I do — I'll use California's.

My job now is to go through every page of the Sample New York state test, pull out the problem genres, and teach them to crammery.

I have one week to do this.

We're going to have to pedal, because we also have to help Christopher with the massive scale drawing exercise Ms. Kahl has sent home for the kids to do over vacation:

The Task: Stop daydreaming and design the bedroom of your dreams!

This project requires you to be creative and draw up the floor plans of your ideal bedroom. Will you have a big screen television, a walk in closet, or even a king sized bed? You will map out the blueprint for your room and show the furniture and items contained in our room from an aerial view in the form of a scaled blueprint.

The blueprints must contain at least two of each of the following geometrical figures:

• square

• rectangle

• triangle

• trapezoid

• paralleleogram

• circle

Oookaaaayyy!

Two trapezoids coming right up!

And two parallelograms!

In a 6th grader's dream bedroom!

Making those real world connections!



my vacation and welcome to it, part 2

Getting Things Done:

• analyze sample state test

• find out if Christopher can do any of the problems on it

• teach to crammery

• re-vamp book proposal, deal with inevitable assorted mishegoss sp?

• help Christopher construct highly complex scale drawing he can't possibly do on his own

question

You are teaching accelerated 6th grade math.

You give your class of 19 students a sample New York state standards test.

Only two children score a 4, 'exceeds state standards.'

Many of the children, who have just taken a test on ratio, proportions and percent, miss the percent question.

For mid-winter vacation you assign:

• daily 20-item problem sets of percent, ratio, and proportion problems ranging from simple calculations to word problem applications

     or

• a complicated scale drawing requiring two trapezoids and two parallelograms

Alright. It's 2:28, and I must go for my 45-minute aerobic walk-run. If I do this 6 days a week until I'm dead I'll be younger next year and, even better, I'll stop screaming at my kids.

So I'm going to do it.

Because I am a responsible parent!

When I get back I'll analyze the test. Then I'll break the news to Christopher that we're going to spend mid-winter break cramming math.

Farewell, Ms. Kahl! We who are about to die salute you!



update, update, update: Verghis speaks!

For the blueprint, why not have a square study desk whose top is decorated with (a) 2 trapezoids, (b) 2 parallellograms, (c)....

This should (1) satisfy Ms. Kahl's requirements and (b) blend nicely with the surrealism that pervades the math curriculum.

Don't you think?

Yes! I do think!








resources for grade 6

• Academic content standards for kindergarten through grade twelve, adopted by the California State Board of Education for mathematics

• Mathematics Content Standards

• David Klein's Practice Problems for California Mathematics Standards Grades 1 - 8 (excellent)

^* heaping loads of cr***** probably doesn't distinguish my job from most other people's jobs, I realize



pre-algebra is bunk
death march to algebra
NYU ed textbooks; NY math test
state test impending doom

cram school
teaching to crammery in middle school
the kind of kids who can be taught to crammery
free teach to crammery clip art

Glencoe Top Secret Test Prep
Amsco protects its 'customers

teachtocrammery


-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Feb 2006

---

TodayInTheTimes 22 Feb 2006 - 00:10 CatherineJohnson



The New York Times has identified a Whole New Problem: college students who send inappropriate email to their professors.




Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Jennifer Schultens [associate professor of mathematics at UC Davis]
had a student ask what kind of notebook to buy.



Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Meg Worley, an assistant professor of English at Pomona College,
has rules for student e-mail...."One of the rules that I teach my students is,
the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.


Various hypotheses are offered for the advent of this phenomenon, including this observation, from a professor of education:

Christopher J. Dede, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied technology in education, said these e-mail messages showed how students no longer deferred to their professors, perhaps because they realized that professors' expertise could rapidly become outdated.

"The deference was probably driven more by the notion that professors were infallible sources of deep knowledge," Professor Dede said, and that notion has weakened.

I'm sure that's it.


-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Feb 2006

---

StandardThree 08 Mar 2006 - 20:15 CatherineJohnson




I've been searching the NY state standards site, trying to figure out exactly what it is Christopher is supposed to learn this year, and what that knowledge might look like on the state test.

You really have to see it to believe it (intermediate means middle grades):










It's always worse than you think.





Mathematics Core Curriculum MST Standard 3 Revised 2005 (pdf file)
Standard 3 Mathematics (pdf file)
Standard 3 student work (pdf file)
State Assessment Elementary Intermediate
NY State learning standards A - Z
Latest News on ELA, Mathematics, and Grades 3-8 Testing
Mathematics Resource Guide with Core Curriculum
Core Subjects / Learning Standards
Math Science & Technology standards

Glencoe Pre-Algebra standardized test practice New York



-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Mar 2006

---

CollegeGraduateLiteracyRates 09 Mar 2006 - 16:27 CatherineJohnson



I think Ken left a link to this study awhile back, but I have no idea where it is, and I don't think I wrote it down anywhere, so I'lll start with this:

Reports on college literacy levels sobering
'Study: Most students unable to handle complex but common reading tasks'

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees, or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

3 forms of literacy

• analyzing news stories and other prose

• understanding documents

• having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips

worst area is math

The survey examined college and university students nearing the end of their degree programs. The students did the worst on matters involving math...

Almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station. About 30 percent of two-year students had only basic math skills.

what they could do

from the CBS News account:

Most students at community colleges and four-year schools showed intermediate skills, meaning they could perform moderately challenging tasks. Examples include identifying a location on a map, calculating the cost of ordering office supplies or consulting a reference guide to figure out which foods contain a particular vitamin.

in a nutshell

• more than 50 percent of students at four-year schools & more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked skills for complex literacy tasks

• literacy defined as:
  • analyzing news stories and other prose
  • understanding documents
  • having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips

• can't interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure

• can't understand arguments of newspaper editorials

• can't compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees

• can't summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school

• worst area is math

• 20 percent of students in four-year programs & 30 percent in 2-year programs had only basic quantitative skills

• students with basic quantitative skills can't tell whether their car has enough gas to get to the service station

college accountability?

There's been talk lately of holding colleges accountable. I haven't followed it, but it's out there.

The AIR study of college student literacy reminds me of an obit I read when Peter Drucker died. The writer said that Drucker had made many correct predictions in his lifetime, and that his main prediction lately had been that colleges as we know them would cease to exist. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have saved the article, but a new article by Walter Russell Mead is about the same issues:

Paying for college education is one of the biggest financial worries facing middle class and working families....

...perhaps [government] could offer an alternative: a federally recognized national baccalaureate (or 'national bac') degree that students could earn by demonstrating competence and knowledge.

With input from employers, the Department of Education could develop standards in fields like English, the sciences, information technology, mathematics, and so on. Students would get certificates when they passed an exam in a given subject. These certificates could be used, like the Advanced Placement tests of the College Board, to reduce the number of courses students would need to graduate from a traditional college. And colleges that accepted federal funds could be required to award credits for them.

But the certificates would be good for something else as well. With enough certificates in the right subjects, students could get a national bac without going to college. Government agencies would accept the bac as the equivalent of a conventional bachelor's degree; graduate schools and any organization receiving federal funds would also be required to accept it.

Subject exams calibrated to a national standard would give employers something they do not now have: assurance that a student has achieved a certain level of knowledge and skill.

This is a long excerpt, so I'll put the rest of it here.


Without having thought about it, I'm in favor of anything that increases the public's knowledge of what students are actually learning in school.


National Assessment of Adult Literacy
"A nationally representative and continuing assessment of English language literacy skills of American Adults"
key findings of NAAL

AIR press release
complete AIR study here

AP account



-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Mar 2006

---

DontStudyForTheTest 30 Jun 2006 - 16:44 CatherineJohnson



Christopher is upstairs screaming and crying — I have also heard the f-word — because I've missed my train to the city and thus will be home tonight & able to make him STUDY FOR THE STATE TEST.

This is occasion for screaming, crying, and f-wording because he is the ONLY child in the ENTIRE SCHOOL who is being FORCED to STUDY FOR THE STATE TEST.

That, I believe.

There's no reason a parent should do what I'm doing unless he or she wants to. [update 6-16-06: wrong] Even if he or she did want to, I'm not sure most parents could, on short notice, put together a STUDY FOR THE STATE TEST PROGRAM.

The reason I can do it is that I've spent the past 4 months of my life a) figuring out what 'pre-algebra' is, and b) assembling a superb collection of 'pre-algebra' worksheets, if I do say so myself.

(Most of them are linked on the Our Favorite Math Supplements for Kids page on the sidebar.)^*

From there it was a reasonably short hop to figuring out the state test.

My point: I'm possibly the only parent in all of Irvington — apart from the 6th grade parent who actually is a math teacher in real life — who's in a position to do what I'm doing. You can be a genius at math, you can work in a math-related profession; that doesn't mean you're going to know what's in 'pre-algebra' or what's going to be covered in a brand-new, never-before-administered, annual 6th grade state assessment.



do you see steam coming out of my ears?

The reason I missed my train is that I had to take Christopher & his friend M. to tennis.

In the car they both went nuts over the fact that Christopher is being FORCED TO STUDY FOR THE STATE TEST. They were horrid.

Both boys say, and I believe them, that virtually every single teacher they have — they named names — has told them they shouldn't study for the state test because they don't know what will be on it.

I'm furious.

I'm so furious I'm going to be writing a non-furious email to the principal when I calm down. [update 6-16-06: nope, didn't do it]

The message being given to Christopher, which directly contradicts the message we are giving him at home, is:

• we don't know what's on the test; it's random; it's capricious; it's pointless

• the only reason to study for a test is to get a good grade

• there is no intrinsic value in study & learning
  

let's start with 'we don't know what's going to be on the test'

4 problems:

• Number one, it is false. The state has content standards; the schools know what they are.

• Number two, unless you're taking an open-book test no one ever knows what's going to be on the test.

• Number three, all of the teachers have done extensive test prep all year long. The kids take one 'sample test' after another; Ms. Kahl's class has done nothing but take sample tests and do practice test problems for the past two weeks. If you shouldn't study for the test, you certainly shouldn't spend taxpayer money on Top Secret Glencoe Diagnose - Prescribe - Practice test prep workbooks.

• Number four, politics. Why do we have NCLB? We have NCLB because the schools are not doing their jobs. We have NCLB because black and Hispanic children graduate from high school functioning at an 8th grade level compared to white kids, whose level is already low compared to the rest of the world. If you want to talk to the kids about The State Test, tell them the truth.

'the only reason to study for a test is to get a good grade'

Appalling.

Is the content being tested on the state test worth knowing or not?

If it's worth knowing, it's worth studying.



'there is no intrinsic value in study and learning'

Ditto.



paying the school to make my job harder

Ed and I are bookish people. Two Ph.D.s, 5 published books between us, etc.

We believe in study and learning. We are the 'lifelong learners' it is the mission of IUFSD to create (SEE: 4th paragraph from the bottom).

At home we are trying to teach Christopher that hard work is good, going above and beyond what's called for is good, learning is good.

Why are we studying for the state test when nobody else is studying for the state test?

Because we can.

Because we have an opportunity.

Because we believe 6th grade mathematics is important and we want Christopher to master it.

That's what we tell Christopher.

Then he goes to school and the grownups there tell him not to study for the test because he doesn't know what will be on it.

And after that we have screaming, we have the F-word, we have eye-rolling and hectoring even from Christopher's friends.




vignette

"People think you're crazy, Mom. Do you know that?"^*

Won't be the first time.







update from Carolyn

This is the truth:

I think what you're seeing here echoes a general sentiment among teachers (here at least) that the CSAPs (the CO state equivalent) are capricious if not malevolent, and that they have no clear control over the test's outcome for kids, either as individual or in groups. I think they feel the whole exercise is doomed to failure.

and from Doug!

Yeah. Of course it's always the same schools that get the good scores and the same schools that get the bad scores. (Bar a few schools getting better or worse each year.)

Perhaps the tests are delivered in a Chevrolet Caprice?

It took me a couple of minutes to get that one —


^* I've got the two most important resources at this particular link, but do a search on the entire page if you're looking for material; I'm afraid some of the stuff may be scattered around in various categories.

^*'crazy' meaning: crazy math-tutoring mom, crazy math-test-studying mom, etc. In the same vein as homework Nazi



don't study for the test
news from nowhere (placement in accelerated science)
don't study for the test part 2



-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Mar 2006

---

MathJournalDayThree 12 Mar 2006 - 21:40 CatherineJohnson


State test starts on Tuesday next week, and today is Thursday. It's getting close.

So today the kids wrote in their math journals about two quotes, not just one. Assignment was the same as always: give their reaction and say how the quote would help them on the test.

Christopher remembers today's quotes as being:

If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.


and


You'll always face challenges, but you should never be defeated.

I'm thinking I should send in the quote Jeff Boulier found about automaticity, and suggest she have the kids journal about the importance of having utterly mastered one's work.

That would be a novelty.

They have so utterly mastered their work that they work without thinking;
Holding three-fifths of their brain in reserve for whatever betide.
So, when catastrophe threatens, of colic, collision or sinking.
They shunt the full gear into train, and take that small thing in their stride.

I have to go find my collection of Margaret Thatcher quotes about hard work and why people like to do it.

Have I mentioned that in the state of New York it's against the law to homeschool your child in just one subject?



back again

Can't find the Thatcher line I was thinking of. It's buried somewhere on the basement PC, so that's a project for another day. However, I did scare up a bunch of alternate quotes I'd like to throw up on that board....

In the meantime, here's Stephanie:

I cannot believe they're still writing in the journals! Do they have stress counselors standing by, too? At this point, they should be giving the kids practice in problems that the kids already know how to do, and that will appear on the test. How 'bout giving the kids some feelings of actual success on actual math problems before the testing starts?

As usual, a KTMmer has read my mind.....you guys are starting to get psychic.

Check this out.

I've (obsessively) mentioned the fact that Christopher is not one of the straight-A students in math (or anything else).

So today Christopher comes home full of pep, opens with his 500-millionth 'THE TEACHERS SAID YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO STUDY FOR THE STATE TEST' protest, then stands there in the middle of the living room looking cocky.

'What's up?'

Math journal, two quotes, rainbow, rain, etc.

'Did you do any math in math class?'

oh, yeah!

We did problems about cups.

'Cups?'

Yeah, how many cups in something. There was a really hard problem, and I was the only person who could do it.

With some prompting, he finally remembered the problem:


______ quarts = 48 ounces


The kids were given a chart showing what all of the various liquid measures equal, and they had to go from ounces to quarts.

This is the accelerated class.

Christopher was the only kid who could do it.

She's psyching them out.

update: Christopher wasn't the only kid who could do it — though he was one of only a few — and no, she's not psyching them out.



dimensional analysis rocks

One of my Mental Categories now, when I think about how to teach math, is to prefer to teach procedures that instruct while also solving the problem.

For instance, I don't think cross-multiplication — which I would teach (it's just too powerful & easy to remember to forego) — has a lot of instructional value. (That's my guess.)

Dimensional analysis, I think, is the exact opposite.

Not only is it an incredibly useful, simple, impossible-to-forget procedure, BUT it gives you 'instruction' in converting units of measurement every time you do it.

When you set up a sequence of unit multipliers, you see the conversion process all laid out in front of you. You see that to convert from ounces to quarts you're going to go through 4 steps (ounces to cups to pints to quarts). You see that sometimes you multiply & sometimes you divide.....You're getting a mini-lesson in what you're doing while you're doing it.

Christopher didn't use unit multipliers to solve the conversion problem in class today. (Dang!)

But the reason he could do it when everyone else couldn't (apart from the fact that we're not sitting around journaling about COPING WITH MATH FAILURE) is that he's done a bunch of dimensional analysis problems here at home.

Thank you, Dan K.


Ms. K teaches dimensional analysis



-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Mar 2006

---

OpenEndedProblemsInMathematicsEducation 16 Mar 2006 - 21:43 CatherineJohnson



While visiting Hung Hsi-Wu's website yesterday, I found an article he published last year on The Role of Open-Ended Problems in Mathematics Education.

I'm still not at the level where I can easily read his work, though I think I could muscle my way through. (I should put this proposition to the test, shouldn't I?)

That said, I assume Hung Hsi-Wu is talking about the kind of problem I think of as Problems The Kids Can't Do. We call them Extended Response here in Irvington; they have various names elsewhere. Possibly the most famous such problem is the haybaler problem from IMP, which Barry Garelick posted awhile back. Google "haybaler problem" and you get 619 hits.

Here is Hung Hsi-Wu:

Open-ended problems have become a popular educational tool in mathematics education in recent years. Since mathematical research is nothing but a daily confrontation with open-ended problems, the introduction of this type of problems to the classroom brings mathematical education one step closer to real mathematics. The appearance of these problems in secondary education is therefore a welcome sight from a mathematical standpoint. More than this is true, however. While these problems may represent something of a pedagogical innovation to the professional educators, the fact is that many mathematicians have made use of them in their teaching all along and do not regard their presence in the classroom as any kind of departure in educational philosophy. For example, I myself have often given such problems in my homework assignments and exams.2 Nevertheless, I have chosen to take up this topic for discussion here because, after having reviewed a limited amount of curricular materials for mathematics in the schools, I could not help but notice that they pose certains hazards in practice. These hazards include the possibility of misinforming the students about the very nature of mathematics itself.

Two things:

a) open-ended problems are not confined to high school mathematics.

and

b) I'm going to dive in and take it as a given that open-ended problems for 9-year olds and misinformation about the very nature of mathematics go hand-in-hand.

But in fact, I don't know.

What do you think of these problems?

Eggs for 9 year olds (pdf file)
multiples of 4 that end in 4 for 13 year olds (pdf file)
the Million Dollar Job a group problem for 8th graders (pdf file)

source:
Sources of Mathematics Open-Response Items
World Class Arena




it's always worse than you think

I've now skimmed enough of Hung Hsi Wu's article to see that I was right. His subject is Problems The Kids Can't Do.

And, yes, it's always worse than you think:

...in discussing these three problems with some teachers, I was astounded to be told by one and all that they considered the first part of Problem I (“WHAT MIGHT ITS AREA BE??”) to be a good problem because it allows the students to make up their own questions and answers, but that they thought the second part (“WHAT WOULD THE LARGEST AREA BE??”) was bad because it pins down the students to a single correct answer. Since a good part of mathematics, pure or applied, is pre-occupied precisely with such maximization problems, we have here an example of an educational philosophy that has distorted the way a group of teachers think about the subject they are supposed to teach.5 This should be a matter of grave concern.

I'll say.


extended response problem from IL state test
extended response problem 1
extended response problem 2
extended response problem 6
extended response problems 7, 8, 9
direct instruction & the rigor conundrum
Dan's daughter reacts to extended response problem
defensive teaching of Singapore bar models
open-ended problems in math ed
problems that teach - "Action Math"
email to the principal



-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Mar 2006

---

NclbIsWorking 16 Mar 2006 - 23:44 CatherineJohnson




Truth in headlines: NCLB may or may not be working, I don't know

And the downside is obvious: states will dumb down their standards and declare victory

Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch are now warning that the political pressures unleashed by NCLB may corrupt NAEP, too. ($) free version here: Basic Instincts

Nevertheless, the principals in this WAPO article are saying exactly what I want to hear:

Why Is Your School On This List?
More than 200 Washington-area schools failed to meet the standards set under the No Child Left Behind Act. So Outlook asked local for an explanation.

Sunday, March 12, 2006; B01

BY Reginald Ballard

I am having my teachers develop plans to determine the skills that the students who were close to receiving satisfactory scores need to improve. I have teachers doing lesson plans on those skills, and they have to tell me where their students are after each assessment, and how they are going to move them to the next level.

[snip]

Our students are often functioning two to three years behind their peers. So wherever and whenever possible we continue to go back and provide remedial services to improve the students' basic learning skills. We do it through daily drills and practice, learning centers and after-school tutoring programs.

We remain optimistic and positive about the gains the students are making. We realize that America has established a measuring stick and we offer no excuses for not attempting to meet the established mark, while at the same time we strive every day to meet our students' emotional and social needs.

[snip]

This year, as soon as we identified the students who did not pass the tests, or who our other assessments suggested may not pass, we designed an individual learning plan for each student and monitored each student's progress. Adjustments in each student plan have been made throughout the year to best meet the needs of the individual child.

[snip]

Our goal is to fully understand what each and every student knows and is able to do. To achieve this goal, we frequently administer, record and analyze student growth and achievement, using the standards as our guide. By identifying the root causes of our achievement deficiencies, we are able to focus our resources and differentiate our staff development. We don't make excuses, we find solutions.

[snip]

We recently held our second annual family math night, where we offer parents the opportunity to learn how to turn practicing mathematical concepts into games.

[I threw that last one in there to see if you're awake]

The wonder of it all is that, obviously, none of these principals were doing this before they were required by law to make AYP.

And that's the Public School Way.

I've just reconnected with an old friend whose kids are in private school. She told me her kids are tested four times a year by a 'learning team' at the school, after which the parents are given a complete rundown of each and every skill their children are learning and whether their children have mastered that skill. One of her kids is behind on plural pronouns, so now he'll have extra instruction on plural pronouns.

The kids in the school are so far ahead of public school kids they can't use tests used by public schools. They have to use the ERB, I believe it is, a test used by private schools.

Needless to say, our own schools, here in Irvington, do not do this. Ever. The kids are tested and tested and tested; Christopher takes at least a test a week, sometimes more.

Then he's given a grade—usually a mediocre one, seeing as how he has no clue how to study & we seem to have forgotten ourselves — and the parade moves on.

Nothing is retaught.

The parent is not informed.

If the child failed to learn the material, tant pis.

All this for $18,000 per pupil spending per year.



Iowa Test of Basic Skills

Awhile back, Lone Ranger left information on how to have your child tested on the ITBS.

I'm going to do it.

order form for the spring test

DEADLINE: April 16, 2006

cost: $38


-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Mar 2006

---

NewsFromNowhere 22 Mar 2006 - 01:26 CatherineJohnson

• all the kids thought the state math test was super-easy. Christopher finished his open-ended questions so fast he had time to check his answers at least twice. Ms. K. never did tell them what 'explain your answer' would look like to a state-test-grader, so none of the kids has a clue how they did at writing explanations.

• Jason Project Museum at the middle school last night, 5:30 - 7:00. Foyer of middle school filled to bursting with solar system styrofoam ball kits from Michael's. At least two reports - reports were displayed along with styrofoam kits - were identical in wording & title. We asked Christopher if the kids had been told that a 'report' can't be downloaded from the web. "I think so," he said, sounding uncertain.

• Speaking of the web, IMS offers a class in 'Technology.' The Technology Teacher - this would be, I believe, the woman who hung up on me earlier this year - taught the kids how to download pictures from the web, and, it seems, how to upload pictures of themselves. Now I'm hearing reports of 6th graders downloading photos from funbay, something they did not know how to do before technology class. Another kid Christopher knows posted a video of himself throwing up somewhere. Sure they can't do unit conversions, but look on the bright side!

• news of Mrs. R - parents in an uproar - one mom says her child has been called 'stupid' 3 times & Mrs. R still doesn't know the child's first name even though it's March - principal never, ever moves kids out of any class no matter how upset the parents are (heh) - etc.

• speaking of the principal, his greeting to us was, 'I thought you'd been banned from the building!' (We love the guy. Not kidding. update 5-24-06: I take it back.) He and Raina Kor, who's moving to the Main Street School next year, have plans afoot to make the 6th grade transition easier. Sounds good.

• viz.: eye-rolling, back talk, last word-itis, Raina says, Forget it. Things don't get better until 9th grade.

• pi day today - kids made Jello vanilla pudding, poured mixture into frozen pie shells

• Christopher's close friend J. won the pi memorization contest. Christopher says J. remember pi out to 137 digits. Ed and I flatly refuse to believe this.

• Christopher remembered pi out to 5 digits. Someone is going to have to introduce him to the joys of chunking sooner rather than later.

• tonight's homework: write 'reflection' on pi day

• last but not least, Irvington UFSD's 1st Technology Expo is coming right up! Join teachers and students from all four of our schools as they share the many ways technology is used in our classrooms everyday. [sic] In addition to teachers and students, we will have vendors demonstrating some of the most up to date technologies being used in classrooms today. VENDORS will be present! Think of it! (Do I recall a technology line item on the school board wish list? Yes, I believe I do!)
  
  reading on....ah! Students will share digital portfolios, computer programming, and multimedia presentations. yes, well, I got an eye-ful today, that's for sure.

I hope they're planning to follow up the Technology Expo with a colloquium on how to crack your kids' AIM password and search his browser history.

Because we're gonna need it.







keywords: Irvington


-- CatherineJohnson - 17 Mar 2006

---

ArithmeticWeNeed 21 Mar 2006 - 13:41 CatherineJohnson



Here's something fun you can do with a Mary Dolciani textbook.



Mary Dolciani

Mary Dolciani Halloran (1923-1985): A great American mathematician, Mary Dolciani had a considerable impact on modern mathematics education. An inspiring teacher at Hunter College, she authored over thirty mathematics books. A specialist in number theory and modern algebra, she was active in many professional organizations and lectured to teachers and administrators throughout the United States.

source:
Herkimer's Hideaway

Mary Dolciani's bio at the NCTM

Mary P. Dolciani is remembered for the great impact she had on students and for her professionalism in the mathematics community. Her enthusiasm for mathematics, teaching, writing, and research and her love of life continue to be inspirations to many. She was a teacher of undergraduate students and a teacher of teachers for 42 years. In her memory, the Houghton-Mifflin Company made a gift to the Mathematics Education Trust (MET), establishing a fund for the improvement of the quality of mathematics teaching.

[snip]

Her accomplishments and contributions to the field of mathematics will continue to be remembered in a special way. The MAA headquarters in Washington, D.C., is named the Dolciani Mathematical Center. In 1979 the building was dedicated by Mary Dolciani as a living tribute to her father, an immigrant who died at a young age and struggled to provide for her education.

Barry Garelick on Mary Dolciani

Mathematicians have agreed for years that emphasizing sets and number bases in math programs designed for the lower grades was a horrendous mistake. Notwithstanding these errors, however, the difference between the current slew of textbooks and those from the new-math days of the 1960s is definitely worth noting: Accomplished mathematicians wrote many of the texts used in that earlier era , and the math—though misguided and inappropriate for the lower grades and too formal for the high school grades—was at least mathematically correct. Some of the high school texts were absolutely first-rate, and new-math–era textbooks like Mary Dolciani’s “Structure and Method” series for algebra and geometry continue to be used by math teachers who understand mathematics and how it is to be taught. (They usually use them on the sly, since most teachers are required to use the books that the schools have adopted.)

I first learned about Mary Dolciani in Barry's article, and now have a small collection of her books, including Pre-Algebra: An Accelerated Course (Amazon has posted excerpts), Algebra Structure and Method, Book 1, and Basic Algebra. I'll probably order her other high school books as well.

I'm starting (re-starting) algebra in a couple of weeks.

I've decided to use two books, Saxon Homeschool and Brown & Dolciani, Structure and Method. I'll use Foerster's Algebra 1 [THANK YOU, BOOK FAIRY!] 'on the side.'

I am going to use these books to learn algebra.

I figure (re)learning algebra will keep me busy. I'm not going to have a lot of time left over to infuse equity by gender into the classroom.

And anyway, if I'm going to spend my time sniffing out gender inequities in math books, I'm going to be looking at sexism in Everyday Math.



the voice of the Amazon bird

I love Amazon reviewers:

I just had to use Pre-Algebra: An Accelerated Course for school, and we got done with it. I (was) in Seventh Grade.

This book really teaches everything you need to know for Algebra, as I have looked at the Algebra I book (next book in the series.) This book is actually kind of confusing. It does not explain things very well, as it only defines vocabulary, and shows example problems. I wouldn't have done very well in this course if it wasn't for the daily notes our math teacher made us take.

This book tells basically everything, in a challenging manner. The "A" problems indicated that the problems were pretty basic. The "B" problems indicated that the problems were fairly dificult.

The "C" problems indicated that the problems were very hard, nearly making you want to rip your brains out. However, this was an accelerated course, so it's to be expected. The problems took a lot of math sense and logic. The only things that this book didn't teach was Polynomials. We had to use worksheets from the Eight grade pre-algebra book (by Glencoe) to do this.

Some of the methods in the book are clearly outdated, including using Trig tables and Interpolation. We used other methods when we came to that.

Overall, this book really prepared us for Algebra, in a challenging manner, and was 10 times better than Everyday Mathematics (used in elementry), even though some of the methods are outdated. Dolciani should be congradulated. [sic]

P.S., Our school is using these books again, even though many are falling apart. They are just buying new used ones, because this was the only good Pre-Algebra AP book they could find.





Well, Algebra 1 was pretty good (as algebra books go). I was a student who used it. It explains the concepts you need to know well, but sometimes you get lost on the wording. or at least I did, and it cost me an answer or two. But considering the whole book, thats not bad. Compared to those Chicago Math Books, it's way better, those i get lost about every other sentance. [sic] So anyways, i give it 4 stars.





Basic Algebra is a wonderful algebra book, and I only wish it would be reprinted in a more affordable copy with all of the extras---teacher's copy, supplementary worksheets, tests and answer guides. I use this book in teaching algebra to my special education students, and even my 8th graders are handling the lessons with skill, and developing solid comprehension in the use of algebra. When I tutor at a learning clinic that I own, students arrive, confused from the mishap instructions in the Chicago Math books and/or their clones. I pull out this wonderful book and reteach the lesson using a well-designed process. The child returns to class understanding the concept. Constantly the children complain, "Why can't we have decent books like this one to use at our school?" I totally agree. Why can't we?

Basic Algebra, now with Richard Brown listed as lead author, is fantastic. I used word problems from it for Singapore Math. The students in that class were brainy 4th graders, but I think Basic Algebra would be a fantastic book for children considered LD. I'm planning to post some of the teaching strategies later on.

• Mary Dolciani (Mathematics Genealogy Project)

• Dolciani texts

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Mar 2006

---

TomFriedman 29 Mar 2006 - 23:32 CatherineJohnson



Tom Friedman makes me slightly crazy....

It's all the "Message to America" moments.

Like this one.

Message to America: They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.

source:
Still Eating Our Lunch
by TOM FRIEDMAN
NYTIMES $
September 16, 2005

Please.

I can't read another Message to America.

Can't and won't!

But this is a good one:

Friedman at a recent hearing of the House education panel, said that American parents used to tell their children to clean their plates because children were starving in China. Now, he said, parents should be telling their children to study their math and science because children in China want their jobs.

source:
A New Sputnik Moment?
by BRIAN FRIEL
NATIONAL JOURNAL ($)

The only thing wrong here is that I don't think anyone ever told their kids to clean their plates because there were starving children in China.

As a matter of fact, I was trying to remember this just the other day — which country was it?

Was it Africa or India?

I think it was Africa.



grump

Naturally Tom Friedman's child is one of five kids in the entire United States who gets to use Singapore Math books in her math class.

Here's a thought. How about Tom Friedman stops haranguing parents and kids about their lousy math skills, and starts haranguing schools and school boards about their lousy books?

That might help.

Math Literacy Scores, 15-year-olds, 2003
 
Country     Math literacy score
Mexico             385
Turkey             423
Greece             445
Portugal           466
Italy              466
United States      483
Spain              485
Poland             490
Hungary            490
Luxembourg         493
Norway             495
Slovak Republic    498
AVERAGE            500
Germany            503
Ireland            503
Austria            506
Sweden             509
France             511
Denmark            514
Iceland            515
Czech Republic     516
New Zealand        523
Australia          524
Switzerland        527
Belgium            529
Canada             532
Japan              534
Netherlands        538
South Korea        542
Finland            544

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development

Average Math SAT Score

1995               506
1996               508
1997               511
1998               512
1999               511
2000               514
2001               514
2002               516
2003               519
2004               518
2005               520

SOURCE: College Board, 2005

source:
The Science Scare
by BRIAN FRIEL
NATIONAL JOURNAL $
1-14-2006



Tom Friedman
Tom Friedman piles on
Tom Friedman, Tom Friedman

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Mar 2006

---

EmailToThePrincipal 08 Oct 2006 - 22:40 CatherineJohnson




back story here

Ed just talked to the principal on the telephone.

He was aggressive and unresponsive. The principal, I mean. Not Ed.

So.




Hi Scott —

I’m sending a detailed memo covering our experience with Ms. K’s class this year.

But I’d like to respond to one point immediately.

You observed that Ms. K does not know whether Christopher can do the calculations involved in constructing a scale drawing.

Scott, I agree.

Ms K does not know whether her students have learned the material she’s covered in class.

This is true for all of her students, including those who did record their mental math. We know of one child in the class who has earned grades of C and D on his tests, while scoring an unbroken string of As on the Extended Response problems he takes home to do.

What has that child learned about pre-algebra?

Can Ms. K tell you?

Punishing a child for failing to write down mental math is not teaching; nor is it information. Punitive grading is entirely negative. It demoralizes the child, angers the parents, and erodes trust.

We have two core problems with Ms. K’s teaching, one concerning her ability to inspire, motivate and lead her students to success in mathematics, the other concerning her ability to assess performance. It’s the latter that concerns me here.

Ms. K does not perform systematic, ongoing formative assessment.

She covers material, gives tests, and assigns grades.

And there her responsibility ends.

This year Ed and I have been fully responsible for seeing to it that Christopher actually learns the math Ms. K has ‘covered.’

This wasn’t the case at Dows Lane; nor was it the case with all but one of Christopher’s teachers at Main Street School. That teacher was not asked to return.

I would hope everyone involved in Ms. K’s tenure case would ask himself this question:

Suppose Christopher—or any other student in the class—does not know how to construct a scale drawing?

What happens now?

Ms. K’s answer is: Nothing. Once she’s recorded a grade, she’s done.

If Ms. K wanted to know whether Christopher can construct a scale drawing, she would have him do a simple scale drawing in her presence. She should do that with the entire class, because none of the kids I know was able to handle this assignment on his own. By rights, Ms. K ought to be finding out whether any of her students can do a simple scale drawing independently, without parent guidance.

Instead, it’s up to us to make sure Christopher has mastered this skill.

I will do so this summer when I reteach pre-algebra using Saxon Algebra 1/2.

If I’m going to do Ms. K's job, I want a refund. Ms. K, after two years of work, is going to be awarded lifetime employment, lifetime benefits, and a generous retirement, all funded by taxpayers like me.

Scott, I need to earn a living. I have two children with severe handicaps who will require lifetime care; I must fund my own retirement.

I need to be able to rely on our very well paid teachers to teach my son.

Instead I’m pulling worksheets, buying and studying textbooks, reteaching math lessons, preparing Christopher for the state test (Ms. K told the kids not to study because they ‘don’t know what’s going to be on the test’),^* and helping Christopher’s friends in the class to boot.

This isn’t right.

Catherine Johnson

^* Topics covered on the New York State tests are listed here: http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/mst/mathstandards/g6.html. These topics are also listed in the Glencoe Test Prep book Ms. Kahl sent home sporadically in the run-up to the test.





I am KICKING myself for not homeschooling.

Actually, it's not even at that level.

I'm kicking myself for not having a clue.

I'm kicking myself for not having the slightest idea what was wrong with our public schools.

I'm kicking myself for not even suspecting that, when it comes to public schools, money ≠ quality.




Christopher won't be doing any more 4-hour projects for Ms. K.

That's over.

My only concern now is: is he learning pre-algebra to mastery?

Everything else is noise.




extended response problem from IL state test
extended response problem 1
extended response problem 2
extended response problem 6
extended response problems 7, 8, 9
direct instruction & the rigor conundrum
Dan's daughter reacts to extended response problem
defensive teaching of Singapore bar models
open-ended problems in math ed
problems that teach - "Action Math"
email to the principal

keywords: performance indicators New York state tests New York state standards


-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Mar 2006

---

ExecutiveSearchConsultantSpeaks 29 Mar 2006 - 23:50 CatherineJohnson



yup

-- CatherineJohnson - 29 Mar 2006

---

ChangeAgentMe 30 Mar 2006 - 01:23 CatherineJohnson



I was cruising the web, looking for High Church Authorities pronouncing on the subject of punitive grading and showing your work when I found this:

Becoming a Change Agent on Campus

the change adopters curve:




I think I'm in the chasm.





Speaking of which....I remember a few years ago, an autism dad — very smart, self-made man-type guy — telling me about the book this comes from.

Does anyone know the title?

Actually....I'm thinking the title might actually be 'Crossing the Chasm.'

Something like that.



hey look! it's the Principles of Good Assessment!

I'm sure these will come in handy.



strange bedfellows

And here I was planning never to read another word by Alfie Kohn.

If you click on the link, be sure to scroll down for the Alfie Kohn bibliography.

This one sounds good:

• Butler, R. (1988) Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation." British Journal of Educational Psychology 58 (1988): 1-14.

The British Journal of Educational Psychology.

Not the U.S. Journal, or the New Zealand Journal.

The British journal.

That sounds authoritative.

I wonder what the Brits have to say about dropping a kid two letter grades on his one and only successful math assignment in 7 months because he didn't show (all of) his work.





Or....take this guy.

I wonder what James H. McMillan has to say on the subject?





Funny.

I'm getting the feeling that dropping a kid two letter grades on his one and only successful math assignment in 7 months because he didn't show his work might not be consistent with best practices.


Crossing the Chasm
The Innovator's Dilemma
Change Agent Me
Linda P on K12
eduwonk op-ed in TIMES on virtual charter schools

keywords: marketing


-- CatherineJohnson - 30 Mar 2006

---

ThePitch 08 Oct 2006 - 22:18 CatherineJohnson



I think I've found it.

I think I've found what Temple (Grandin) calls 'the basic principle,' the one-line expression that captures the core educational reform our family needs for our own children to receive a sound education.


low stakes testing



Tonight I Googled images for high stakes testing.

Then I Googled images for low-stakes testing.

Parents hate high-stakes testing.

Parents hate teaching to test.

Parents are right.

Now I discover that not only does my school teach to the test, it grades to the test.

Mr. and Mrs. Berenson,
I know that you do not agree with the amount of points deducted [20 points from 100, reducing a grade of A to a grade of C] from the recent math test that Chris took. Ms. Kahl requires (as do all of the teachers at IMS) that students show all work including all calculations. This is consistent with NY State, which requires that students show all work on their state assessments. I realize you feel the number of points was punitive. This was because much of the grade was based on the work that students were asked to show. Chris did not show the required work and thus the deduction in points. I will certainly discuss your views about mental math with Karen Palmer, our department chair.

Scott Fried
Principal
Irvington Middle School

update here

Until this week, I did not know that Irvington Middle School bases grading policy on the State tests.



low stakes testing

My child needs low stakes testing. He is being pressured and squeezed and ground down by his school's laser-beam focus on our state tests magnified many times over by high stakes grading.

"The mission of the Irvington School District is to create a challenging and supportive learning environment in which each student attains his or her highest potential for academic achievement, critical thinking and life-long learning."

source:
Our District

I'm sure there are children in the Irvington Middle School who are reaching their highest potential.

But our child is not. Our child does not thrive in a high stakes environment.

He is being left behind.

We have a law about leaving children behind. Let's respect it.


Formative Assessment in Mathematics
by Dylan Wiliam

-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Mar 2006

---

HomeschoolingInIrvington 31 Mar 2006 - 18:44 CatherineJohnson



I checked with Christopher's guidance counselor about whether he'd be able to participate in school activities if he is homeschooled.

Just heard back today:

I just found out from the district office that students who are home schooled can't participate in sports. Hope this answers your questions.

Griffin Murray

I need a lawyer.


-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Mar 2006

---

ParentBillOfRights 02 Apr 2006 - 01:11 CatherineJohnson



I've been reading articles about George Mason, who refused to sign the Constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights:

Mason was among those who opposed adopting the draft constitution because it had no language to protect individual rights. They failed at first. But the Declaration of Rights Mason had written into Virginia's constitution 11 years earlier became the model for the Bill of Rights that was adopted in 1791 as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. It became Americans' guarantee of free speech, free association, religious liberty and all our other fundamental freedoms.

source:
Final Four's Founding Father
USA Today

Naturally, that got me to thinking...maybe parents and students at Irvington Middle School need a bill of rights.

That seemed like such a good idea that I figured somebody else must have beat me to it.

So I started Googling things like "student bill of rights"; "student bill of rights" "middle school"; "parent bill of rights"; "parent bill of rights" "middle school"....

One thing led to another, and I landed on this document: Bill of Parent Rights and Responsibilities, New York City Department of Education, January 2005 (pdf file). (It's posted on this webpage as well.)

This document has been prepared by:

Jemina Bernard, Executive Director
Office of Parent Engagement
New York City Department of Education

Office of Parent Engagement, I thought!

How does New York City get an Office of Parent Engagement and we don't?

Not that I want to pay for a whole new Office of Parent Engagement (although Ed has decided the Irvington School District needs an ombudsman).

I started flipping through pages.....and I realized that some of this sounds like the rights my disabled children actually do have.

Then it occurred to me: I need to be looking at the specific language used in special education.

Meanwhile, this isn't a bad place to start:

THE RIGHT TO BE ACTIVELY INVOLVED IN THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN

Parents have the right to be given every available opportunity for meaningful participation in their child’s education.

Parents have the right to:

1. be treated with courtesy and respect by all school personnel, and to be accorded all rights without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, gender, age, ethnicity, alienage, citizenship status, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or economic status.

2. participate in communication with teachers and other school staff and share concerns regarding their child’s academic, social and behavioral progress.

3. visit their child’s school to meet with his or her teacher and principal at mutually agreeable times.

4. participate in meaningful parent-teacher conferences to discuss their child’s progress in school.

5. be informed of their child’s academic and behavioral progress in school.

6. be encouraged to participate and receive assistance in participating effectively in governance and educational decision-making through the School Leadership Team at their child’s school.

7. be accompanied by a friend, advisor, or interpreter at hearings, conferences, interviews and other meetings concerning their child, in accordance with established procedures.

8. be provided, if they are hearing impaired, with an interpreter at any meeting or activity which they attend which is specific to the academic and or disciplinary aspects of their child’s educational program, provided a written request is made prior to the meeting or activity; if an interpreter is unavailable, other reasonable accommodations shall be made.

9. have school staff make every reasonable attempt to ensure that parents receive important notices from the school, such as notices concerning parent-teacher conferences, open school week, parent association notices, etc.

10. be a member of the parent or parent-teacher association of his or her child's school without regard to the payment of dues.

etc.

THE RIGHT TO FILE COMPLAINTS AND APPEALS

Parents have the right to follow appropriate procedures to pursue complaints or appeal decisions affecting their child.

Parents have the right to:

1. appeal any entry in their child’s records on the grounds that it is inaccurate, misleading, or in violation of their child’s privacy rights and request that such records be amended, in accordance with Chancellor’s Regulation A-820.

2. follow applicable procedures for filing complaints or appealing decisions which they believe violate their own or their child’s rights.

What I don't see here is the right to have one's complaint and appeals resolved within a specified period of time, or ever.



parent rights in 1970

I'm just starting to look into this area.

Here's a page that mentions a Parent Bill of Rights in Philadelphia in 1974.

As well, the state of Texas has a law governing parent rights. Haven't read yet, but I like this section:

Access to Teaching Materials

(a) A parent is entitled to:

(1) review all teaching materials, textbooks, and other teaching aids used in the classroom of the parent's child; and

(2) review each test administered to the parent's child after the test is administered.

(b) A school district shall make teaching materials and tests readily available for review by parents. The district may specify reasonable hours for review.

(c) A student's parent is entitled to request that the school district or open-enrollment charter school the student attends allow the student to take home any textbook used by the student. Subject to the availability of a textbook, the district or school shall honor the request. A student who takes home a textbook must return the textbook to school at the beginning of the next school day if requested to do so by the student's teacher. In this subsection, "textbook" has the meaning assigned by Section 31.002.

You have to love the fact that somebody actually had to write a law requiring the school to let kids take the textbooks home.

oh - wait!

They didn't even get that far.

The school has to let students take textbooks home subject to availability.

yeah, well, I can see that.

Our 7th grade Spanish class doesn't have enough books to go around.

So if everyone wanted to take a textbook home to study, they'd be in trouble.


-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Apr 2006

---

AllKenAllTheTime 10 Apr 2006 - 23:07 CatherineJohnson



Ken's been practicing again. [update: original post is here ]

I have to put up some posts from a book I found....in Cambridge, I think. It's about what great teachers do differently. One of the main things they do differently is have high expectations for themselves.

Also, I MUST interview my sister finally. She was a teacher before she had kids; she is the exact opposite of the teachers on Ken's thread.

When we talked about her experiences teaching, she said things like, 'I always felt like if a child got a bad grade, that was a grade on me.'

Japanese teachers say the same thing, IIRC. (I think Stigler & Stevenson report this, but I'M NOT GOING TO LOOK IT UP NOW!)


-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Apr 2006

---

FourSevens 20 Apr 2006 - 02:11 CatherineJohnson



via D-Ed Reckoning, an example of traditional math versus reform math in Seattle schools:

TRADITIONAL MATH

Simplify each expression.

1. 25 — 10 ÷ 5
2. 14 + 7 x 6
3. 50 ÷ 5 — 2
4. 32 ÷ 8÷ 4
5. (32 ÷ 8) ÷ 4
6. 32 ÷ (8 ÷ 4)

REFORM MATH

Write an expression for each number using exactly four 7's and no other digits. You may use the following symbols as often as you wish:
+ - ( ) X ÷

1. ______________________ = 1

2. ______________________ = 3

3. ______________________ = 9

4. ______________________ = 10

5. ______________________ = 28

6. ______________________ = 35

Offhand, I don't know how to solve some of these. 77 ÷ 77 works for number 1; 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 is the answer to five; 7 + 7 + 7 ÷ 7 is the answer to number 3.

And after that, I would have to sit and stare at my paper for awhile.

Which presents an opportunity cost.

Figure out how to express the number 9 using four 7s and no other digits?

Or do two lessons in Saxon Algebra?

I know!

I'll get all of you Math Brains to tell me the answers, while I go (re)learn some algebra.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Apr 2006

---

TitleIxForMath 20 Apr 2006 - 01:20 CatherineJohnson




The Math and Science of Quotas
by Jessica Gavora



It's always worse than you think.





update

No, it's not.

The Bush administration announced that it would extend Title IX requirements to math & science departments.

Then, two weeks later, it announed that it would not be extending Title IX requirements to math & science departments.

On March 25, National Journal reported that the Bush administration planned an unprecedented expansion of Title IX enforcement into the math and science departments of the nation's leading research universities. In interviews with several publications, Assistant Secretary of Education Stephanie Monroe announced that the Department of Education would be teaming up with the National Science Foundation to investigate the sex disparities in hard sciences--particularly engineering, physics, and computer science--that got former Harvard University president Larry Summers into so much trouble when he broached the subject in an academic meeting last year.

Monroe said that, beginning this summer, Education's Office of Civil Rights--which she heads--would conduct intensive investigations of colleges and universities to determine if they are complying with Title IX in their treatment of women as undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Unlike investigations that arise as the result of a specific allegation of discrimination, these investigations, called compliance reviews, are initiated by the government, often take months, and usually result in a new policy that all colleges and universities must follow. In the past eleven years, only three Title IX compliance reviews in math and science have been conducted by the Education Department. This summer, Monroe said, she planned to do six.

Monroe's comments were noticed by a few conservative blogs and ignited a muted but intense uproar among conservative women's groups and education specialists. The issue wasn't just that Monroe was taking Title IX into virtually uncharted territory, it was the specific criteria for enforcement of the law that she cited.

She told Inside Higher Education, for example, that because the discrimination faced by women in math and science is often "subtle," the government would investigate policies that result in women "feeling unwelcome" in their pursuit of advanced degrees or tenured positions in the hard sciences. Although Monroe promised to "not simply look at the numbers," the unwelcoming environments for women she intended to investigate were in fact schools where a relatively small number of women pursue postgraduate work or where relatively few women are hired as faculty in math and science.

This was not the first time that Monroe, who was confirmed by the Senate last December, had shown a propensity for expansive interpretation of Title IX. In February, she earned praise from groups like the Feminist Majority Foundation for her first act in office: putting school districts on notice that the Bush Department of Education will enforce Clinton-era rules on sexual harassment in schools--including grade schools. These rules made schools responsible for harassment of students by other students--a sweeping expansion of liability for schools, which now have to worry about "inappropriate sexual behavior" between six year olds. [ed.: I was wondering where all those 'zero tolerance' policies came from]

[snip]

...the expansion of Title IX into federal oversight of math and science programs would have bested even the most aggressive enforcement schemes of Monroe's Clinton-era predecessor, Norma Cantu, who was dubbed, along with Lani Guinier, one of Clinton's "Quota Queens."

So on March 29--four days after Monroe's announcement appeared in National Journal--the White House quietly forced a retraction. On Department of Education letterhead, a statement was released over Monroe's signature promising that "the Department of Education is not expanding Title IX enforcement beyond its regular activities to combat unlawful discrimination. Further, the Department is not implementing any quota system or new enforcement program to advance study opportunities in math and science." And then Monroe promptly went on "travel," according to an Education Department spokesman, and has since been unavailable for interviews.

Good.





I spoke too soon

...it was under the previous Democratic administration that sex quotas became the reigning method of enforcing Title IX compliance in athletics. Clinton administration officials like Cantu worked closely with liberal women's groups to advance a legal and regulatory strategy that transformed Title IX from an equal opportunity law to an equal outcomes law, regardless of differences in interest between men and women athletes. The result was that in the 1990s, for every woman who gained an opportunity to play organized collegiate sports, 3.4 men had the opportunity taken away from them.

And at the same time that quotas were gaining a foothold in athletics, feminists were pushing for their expansion into other areas of education. In fact, some women's groups have argued that the success of Title IX quotas in athletics has overshadowed what they believe to be the law's mandate to provide equal outcomes in other areas of education. Not just math and science programs, but areas like sexual harassment and standardized testing are tempting targets for advocates of gender-quota logic. This logic, so well entrenched in collegiate athletics today, begins with the presumption that men and women and girls and boys are identical in their interests and abilities. And if interests are equal, then "gender equity" demands that actual participation must be equal. Anything less is proof that someone is being discriminated against.

And once accepted, why must this logic end at the playing field's edge? The answer is, it won't. When Stephanie Monroe's successor announces plans to use gender quotas to determine which colleges and universities get federal research funding in math and science, some future White House won't slap her on the wrist; it'll pat her on the back.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Apr 2006

---

NclbPoll 21 Apr 2006 - 17:06 CatherineJohnson



great post at D-Ed Reckoning - wonderful stuff. My favorite passage so far:

Some students come to school way behind their peers. They may not have good English skills, or study habits, or parents to reinforce lessons at home. The law says schools must overcome that.

I'm also partial to this observation:

"I think the standards are being applied to everybody indiscriminately, without regard to their abilities," said Steve Peterson of Knoxville, Ill., who has been teaching for 31 years.

reading on....oh mercy —

Sara Jane Cross, a 75-year-old kindergarten teacher in St. Petersburg, Fla., said she knows that some students come from homes in which education is a priority, but that some of their classmates do not.

"You don't know who you're going to get in a classroom -- what type of child, what kind of home," Cross said. "You can't expect them to keep up with children who come from fine homes."

I'm waiting to see whether (and how) NCLB will force some of these contradictions out into the open. Weren't we told that schools are already treating students 'indiscriminately'? Wasn't that the whole point of multiculturalism/bilingual ed/fuzzy math/differentiated instruction/etc.? The language in all but the third of these passages still sounds reasonable and natural, but I think the strains are starting to show. Maybe.

I'm hoping we get to the point where educators start telling folks to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.


[update — just got this email from Carolyn: put your mouse over the wizard in this image and hold it there]






-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Apr 2006

---

DougOnMoneyAsASignal 27 Apr 2006 - 19:27 CatherineJohnson



from Doug

"But there's hard, and then there's Kafkaesque."

One of the big problems with this is that kids are terrible at telling the difference between the two.

Parent: "Clean up your room."

Kid: "I can't."

After years of that, when a kid comes home saying that his class is "too hard", the parent is biased away from sympathy. If the parent doesn't have very strong knowledge about how to teach appropriately for the skill level of the kid, this is a rational result. After all, we pay teachers to be SMEs (subject-matter experts) in education, so we should listen to them.

Historically, there's been a presumption of competence of our kids' teachers. I don't know that presumption is warranted anymore. It's certainly rebuttable, and all too frequently rebutted.

As to what we should do about this sad state of affairs? Support school choice, whether through charter schools, "choicing in" to regular public schools, or vouchers. There must be effective signalling back to the schools when their results are insufficient, and money is the only signal that works consistently.

Is it true that money is the only signal that works consistently?

I have no idea. I'm asking.

From where I sit, he's right about parents being biased away from sympathy. I'm actually close to developoing a Unified Theory of Middle School, and Doug's observation reminds me that part of the way the whole thing works is that you get middle school grade deflation at the exact moment your kids are most difficult to deal with inspiring of sympathy, confidence, and good thoughts generally.


-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Apr 2006

---

CatholicSchoolClosingsInNewYork 01 May 2006 - 21:24 CatherineJohnson



I mentioned the other day that Ed's come so far in his thinking about public schools he's almost ready to start sending charitable contributions to Catholic schools.

I feel the same way. It's horrifying to think of these schools closing:

Something precious in the lives of many deserving New Yorkers is slowly dying in Mayor Bloomberg’s glittering city. The New York Catholic Archdiocese recently announced that it would close 14 schools, following on last year’s announcement by the Archdiocese of Brooklyn that it would shutter 22 of its schools in Brooklyn and Queens. Located in some of Gotham’s neediest neighborhoods, these schools have served for over a century as a haven for low-income but striving families. Many of the predominantly minority children in those closed schools will now have to attend failing public schools.

The school closings result in part from the inexorable laws of competition. No, I don’t mean that the Catholic schools have fallen behind in the areas of academic achievement or classroom productivity. Quite the contrary. Catholic schools still deliver a far bigger bang for the education buck than the public schools. For example, in last year’s state reading and math tests for 4th and 8th graders, Catholic school students scored from 7% to 10% higher than their public school counterparts. And the Catholic high school graduation rate is nearly double that of the public high schools. Moreover, Catholic schools deliver these stellar results with per-pupil expenditures remaining about a fourth of the costs of the public schools.

In a truly competitive education world — one, that is, where taxpayer money followed children to their school of choice — the Catholic school sector would be thriving financially as well as academically, prodding the public schools to do better. But with no vouchers or tuition tax credits in place, the Catholic schools are finding it harder and harder to compete financially with an insatiable public school monopoly,ever more expansive under mayoral control. The city’s Department of Education budget now tops $17 billion, or about $15,000 per pupil. This spending growth has allowed Mayor Bloomberg to raise teacher’s salaries by 33%. The top public school salary of $93,000 is now double that of the highest paid Catholic schoolteacher. (When I first started writing about Catholic schools 10 years ago,the salary gap was a “mere” 60%.) To try to keep teachers from leaving for the public system, the Catholic schools have had to boost salaries, too, forcing up tuition and putting the squeeze on their lowincome families. According to the Brooklyn Archdiocese, average tuition in its schools has risen from $1,659 in 1992 to $3,000 in 2004.This increase has already resulted in an outflow of thousands of low-income families to the public schools.

The Catholic schools could close this gap with more private philanthropic money. Mayor Giuliani understood this need, believing that a vital Catholic school sector was good for the city. Stymied on taxpayer-funded vouchers, he sponsored a private voucher program for the Catholic schools, bankrolled by a group of New York philanthropists. But our current billionaire mayor has never said a word in support of the Catholic schools and seems to want all the philanthropic money in town to go to his own public school empire.And he and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have been hugely successful in that venture, raising over $300 million in private funds in just three years. That’s enough money to create an endowment that would forestall all the Catholic school closings, and then some.

Catholic schools are now also at a competitive disadvantage in receiving private philanthropy. Giving to Catholic schools (and many heroic New Yorkers still do give) has always been a matter of individual conscience.

source:
Stop This Tragedy
by Sol Stern

Does anyone know how to donate money to these schools?










Catholic Schools and the Common Good
Sol Stern on Catholic schools
Howard Fuller in Ed Next
High School Achievement by James Coleman
obituary, James Coleman, sociologist
Andrew Greeley report, research on Catholic Schools, 1997
Why Catholic Schools Spell Success for America's Inner-City Children
The Attraction of Private Schools Terry Moe



-- CatherineJohnson - 01 May 2006

---

KenDeRosaBlog 01 May 2006 - 17:09 CatherineJohnson



D-Ed Reckoning

It's fantastic.

He's already out-writing Carolyn and me; he's managed to get several posts up on the NEW YORK MAGAZINE "reading wars" article before I checked back in today!

One thing I've noticed: Ken's got title-writing down. I've never been able to write titles. I don't know why.

Title-writing is an actual job in Hollywood, fyi. A novelist friend of mine was once hired to come up with dozens of titles for a film that was in production. Ken could probably nail that job, although, on second thought, few Hollywood movies are likely to be titled, When Losers Don't Surrender.





the emporer has no clothes

Ken posted this wonderful passage from War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse that I'd forgotten:

While some kids may learn to read from this approach (nothing is preventing them from learning what they're supposed to learn), some higher performers may totally misinterpret the game, and lots of lower performers fail to catch on to what reading is.

We once did a nice demonstration that showed how confusing the approach may be to naive kids. We went into a first grade classroom where a teacher had worked on four different selections. Each had an illustration and the text. The kids could "read" all selections perfectly. We then switched the illustrations and the text (paired them with different texts) and tested the kids. About half of the kids pointed to the words one at a time and, with great fidelity, recited the passage that was appropriate for the picture. In other words, half the kids didn't have the faintest idea what reading was all about.

Devastating.

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 May 2006

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HelicopterParentsOfTheWorldUnitePart2a 14 May 2006 - 13:24 CatherineJohnson




Rewriting lost posts for posterity....

t-shirt order from cafepress —

from:
Helicopter Mom





from:
Autism Rocks





helicopter parents, part 1
helicopter parents, part 2
helicopter parents, part 3
helicopter parents at the AFT
news from nowhere, part 6 (AP students)
helicopter parents of the word, unite
helicopter parents of the world, unite part 2a (t-shirts)
MiddleWeb says hovering is good

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 May 2006

---

StupidMayorTrickPart3TheGoodNews 16 May 2006 - 13:55 CatherineJohnson



I've finally subscribed to the New York Sun, which means I can read Andrew Wolf's columns.

Here's good news:

The resignation of Carmen Farina as deputy chancellor for teaching and learning comes as no surprise to city education insiders. Rumors have been swirling for weeks that she was leaving her post, having risen as far as she could in the Department of Education hierarchy. It has been clear in recent months that the direction of the department has drifted away from changes in pedagogy and more toward restructuring and new management techniques.

I think we can safely conclude that the category of "education insiders" does not include anyone writing for New York Magazine.

Those close to Ms. Farina have suggested that she initially took the job with an understanding that Chancellor Joel Klein would be moving on during Mayor Bloomberg's second term and that she would be able to end her long career in the city schools as chancellor. This, apparently, is not in the cards.

[snip]

The question is whether her departure will mark a change in the city's "progressive" instructional approach, which has come under fire from traditionalists such as the Manhattan Institute's Sol Stern, educational historian Diane Ravitch, and even the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten.

Significantly, the department's executive director for curriculum, instruction, and professional development, Laura Kotch, is also leaving her post, at the end of the school year. In the realm of pedagogy, Ms. Kotch shares Ms. Farina's "progressive" views. Both educators have long favored reading instruction via the "whole language" methodology and constructivist or "fuzzy" mathematics programs.

Ms. Kotch served as Ms. Farina's deputy both during the period that Ms. Farina was superintendent of District 15 in Brooklyn and when she was named as regional superintendent of Region 8. When Ms. Farina was named to succeed Diana Lam, she brought Ms. Kotch with her to the Tweed Courthouse.

I have speculated that it was Ms. Kotch who was responsible for Ms. Lam's disastrous choice of "Month-by-Month Phonics." This deceptively named program has been criticized as being a way that school districts can pay lip service to phonics instruction, while continuing their whole language or balanced literacy teaching methods. Phonics instruction is mandated by the federal government's Reading First initiative, a prerequisite for receiving federal funds. And, despite warnings from critics such as Ms. Ravitch, the city's balanced literacy program and Month-By-Month Phonics were indeed rejected by the feds in 2004, an embarrassment for the mayor and Mr. Klein.

Ms. Kotch first brought Month-by-Month Phonics to District 10 in the Bronx, where she was director of literacy initiatives before joining Ms. Farina. This was done to appease a new school board elected there in 1999, which was looking to restore phonics instruction and banish whole language. The gambit worked, and the same tactic apparently also fooled Mayor Bloomberg, who campaigned for control of the schools promising a "back-to-basics" approach.

How can this be happening?

Don't these people realize America is a divided country?

blue state:whole language
red state:phonics

Everyone knows that.





Lucy Calkins, Lucy Calkins

Both Ms. Farina and Ms. Kotch have a long relationship with Lucy Calkins, the Columbia University Teachers College professor who is the moving force behind the whole language and constructivist educational program adopted by Ms. Lam. It was no surprise that this approach has expanded under Ms. Farina.

[snip]

Ms. Farina's successor, Andres Alonso, is the educational equivalent of John Roberts or Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court justices who were nominated in large measure for their lack of a paper trail that could tip off their ideology.

uh oh

Mr. Alonso is even more of a mystery man. Nobody knows what he stands for in terms of reading instruction or math instruction. He has served as Ms. Farina's chief of staff, a position he first assumed under Ms. Lam. Presumably, he couldn't survive unless he shared at least some of their ideology. Mr. Alonso is a graduate of Harvard University's Urban Superintendent's program, but has never served as a principal - considered the most important pedagogical experience needed to run a school system. His teaching experience is limited to 11 years as a special education teacher in New Jersey.

Significantly, Mr. Alonso is also an attorney, the profession he practiced before making the career change to teaching in 1987. This puts him in a similar position to Mr. Klein, an attorney of note, and the many attorneys and MBAs that Mr. Klein has brought to positions of power in the Department of Education.

My hope is that Mr. Alonso will come in with no predetermined educational agenda, and relax the rigid instructional mandates of his predecessor. I wish him well, but I have to convey some healthy skepticism.

I can't say that sounds good.

On the other hand, the fact that Alonso spent 11 years teaching special ed may help. Once a student has been moved to special ed, he gains a (weak) legal right actually to learn the content being taught.

source:
ldonline

stupid mayor trick
Thank you, whole language
guess and check reading
stupid mayor trick part 3: the good news

National Reading Panel (official website)
The Partnership for Reading
(govt website: "bringing scientific evidence to learning")
National Reading Panel report full text (pdf file)

who is Lucy Calkins
having a Lucy Calkins day
Cargo Cult Lucy from Becky



-- CatherineJohnson - 16 May 2006

---

NoBlowouts 02 Jun 2006 - 11:17 CatherineJohnson

...the board that regulates high school football in Connecticut is going to impose a rule saying that a coach that has a blowout win can be suspended from managing teams, because this could hurt the feelings of the opposing team. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a science fiction story once about a society in which everybody was handicapped so all outcomes would come out equally. This is taken right out of that. This, I think it goes against life. Sports is teaching people about competition in life. By literally saying you can't have a blowout victory, you are basically teaching the wrong lessons about life, because there is no timeout in life.

source:
Whit and Wisdom
(scroll down)

Speechless.





no blowouts
no blowouts part 2



-- CatherineJohnson - 30 May 2006

---

BarryGarelickAtEdspresso 31 May 2006 - 00:15 CatherineJohnson




polite agreement or something we can use?





national mathematics advisory panel
polite agreement or something we can use?



-- CatherineJohnson - 30 May 2006

---

LiveBloggingTheMathTeachThread 07 Jun 2006 - 20:19 CatherineJohnson



Midway through a math-teach thread at Math Forum, and I feel much better now; I’ve just reached the spot where Wayne Bishop quotes Reid Lyon saying we ought to blow up the ed schools

I love the math wars.




live-blogging the math-teach thread
the Jerry Springer of the math wars
blow up the ed schools, part 2

reidlyon
blowuptheedschools



-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Jun 2006

---

MathTeachAtMathForum 07 Jun 2006 - 21:27 CatherineJohnson



Math-teach is the Jerry Springer of the math wars.

- Barry Garelick





I can't believe it took me two years to figure out:

a) the names of math-teach and math-learn

and

b) where to find them





live-blogging the math-teach thread
the Jerry Springer of the math wars



-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Jun 2006

---

CommonSenseInEngland 08 Jun 2006 - 18:18 CatherineJohnson



In the midst of a terrific post at math-teach, Vlorbik (who, I'm discovering belatedly, has created VLORBLOG 2.0) links to this article in the TELEGRAPH:

Back to basics as maths problems multiply

Modern methods of teaching maths which have mystified parents and confused many pupils are to be abandoned six years after the Government forced them on primary schools.

The same unit at the Department for Education which devised the strategy now wants teachers to go back to the "standard written method" it abolished.

The decision has prompted a backlash from some primary teachers and maths advisers who say children are better able to understand the concept of arithmetic when they break sums down into a series of units.

They say the "back to basics" approach heralds a return to the "dark ages" of adding up, subtracting, multiplying and dividing in vertical rows without understanding what they are doing.

But evidence has shown that many pupils are arriving at secondary school unable to do long division and multiplication and reliant on columns of workings out which take longer and are more prone to errors along the way.

The proposed change, put out to consultation yesterday, has already won support from many teachers on the website of The Times Educational Supplement, who say it is better for pupils to master one, simple, standard method than struggle with many. [ed.: I'm not surprised - I also haven't been able to track this down.]

[snip]

The decision to return to the old methods will come as a relief to many parents.

Christine Turno says she dreads the twice-weekly homework with her nine-year-old daughter.

"She goes ballistic," she said. "We have massive rows because she says I'm doing it wrong and she has to do it the way the school says. But she can't understand what they want and it's a complete mystery to me."

A 20-minute homework session turns into an hour.

Mrs Turno, of west London, said: "The teachers say it is the new way and if the answer is wrong it doesn't matter as long as she is using the right method. It's quite bizarre."

I've learned from The War Against Grammar that Britain also restored formal instruction in grammar in 1998.

So we'll see.





All this stuff is going away:








British education URLs

• Department for Education and Skills
  UK Department of Ed
  

• QCA
  "non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES)...
  maintains and develops the national curriculum and associated assessments, tests and examinations"
  

• Ofsted
  "inspectorate for children and learners in England"
  

-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Jun 2006

---

MeanwhileOnAnotherPlanet 13 Jun 2006 - 18:36 CatherineJohnson



So today, David Brooks has a column ($) on "The Gender Gap at School":

Researchers in Britain asked 400 accomplished women and 500 accomplished men to name their favorite novels. The men preferred novels written by men, often revolving around loneliness and alienation. Camus's "The Stranger," Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" topped the male list.

The women leaned toward books written by women. The women's books described relationships and are a lot better than the books the men chose. The top six women's books were "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights," "The Handmaid's Tale," "Middlemarch," "Pride and Prejudice" and "Beloved."

[snip]

Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more).

It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture. Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women.

This wouldn't be a problem if we all understood these biological factors and if teachers devised different curriculums to instill an equal love of reading in both boys and girls.

The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls.... There is still resistance, especially in the educational world, to the findings of brain researchers.... [ed.: I'll say]

Young boys are compelled to sit still in schools that have sacrificed recess for test prep. Many are told in a thousand subtle ways they are not really good students. They are sent home with these new-wave young adult problem novels, which all seem to be about introspectively morose young women whose parents are either suicidal drug addicts or fatally ill manic depressives. [ed.: remind me to tell you about the middle school book slam one of these days...]

It shouldn't be any surprise that according to a National Endowment for the Arts study, the percentage of young men who read has plummeted over the past 14 years. Reading rates are falling three times as fast among young men as among young women. Nor should it be a surprise that men are drifting away from occupations that involve reading and school. Men now make up a smaller share of teachers than at any time in the past 40 years.

[snip]

During the 1970's, it was believed that gender is a social construct and that gender differences could be eliminated via consciousness-raising. But it turns out gender is not a social construct. Consciousness-raising doesn't turn boys into sensitively poetic pacifists. It just turns many of them into high school and college dropouts who hate reading.

meanwhile, some place on a nearby planet

So I read Brooks' column this morning and then, this afternoon, stumbled across this flap on a Park Slope email forum:

New York mag has a cute front-of-book item today on an only-in-Park-Slope battle that recently raged on an email list for earnest and progressive parents in that earnestly progressive Brooklyn neighborhood. As Ben Mathis-Lilley explains:

A few weeks ago, a member of the Park Slope Parents e-mail forum who’d encountered a stray piece of winterwear in the neighborhood posted a notice to the group titled “Found: boy’s hat.” … [S]ubscriber “Lisa” went public with her problems regarding the gender-specifying description of the hat. Wondering how such a categorization would feel to a spiky-hat-wearing girl, Lisa wrote, “It’s innocent little comments like this that I find the most hurtful.”

Gawker seems to have posted most of the thread. Definitely a thing to be gawked at, and I have.

First impression: these folks are not concerned about the 60-40 gender gap in college.

In fact, these folks appear never to have heard of the 60-40 gender gap, which is now — what? Twenty years old?

A couple of the emails are hilarious —

First, the offending email:

Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:25:27 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Found: boy’s hat

Hi:

Friday, at the corner of 11th street and 8th ave, adorable navy blue or maybe black fleece hat with triangles jutting out ofit of all different colors. Sorry did not post right away. For older child.

-Helene

Lisa reacts:

Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:34:48 -0500
Subject: RE: Found: boy’s hat

Helene,

I’m sorry, I know that you are just trying to be helpful, but what makes this a “boy’s hat”? Did you see the boy himself loose it? Or does the hat in question possess an unmistakable scent of testosterone?

It’s innocent little comments like this that I find the most hurtful…

What does this comment imply about the girl who chooses to wear just such a hat (or something like it)? Is she doing something wrong? Is there something wrong with her?

Lisa

Then Trina reacts to Lisa:

Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:34:55 -0800 (PST) Subject: RE: Found: boy’s hat

Lisa,

Its emails like yours that drive me up the wall! Is it that you have so much time on your hands that you can take the time to make such a comment. The original poster was just trying to do something nice and return a lost item to someone. If it was my hat I wouldt care if she posted it as a dogs hat found Id just be happy to get it back. ....

Trina

Good point, Trina.


Abbey chimes in:

Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:34:14 -0500 Subject: Re: Found: boy’s hat

It’s emails which try to suppress all matter of interesting dialogue which are my pet peeve.

I appreciated Lisa’s email very much and I am glad she wrote it. I imagine it has nothing to do with some rigid standard of “PC” which led her to post her response.

I know that many people like to think they are beyond these issues and that sexism doesn’t apply to them, but truthfully it is alive and well. “Rambuctious” girls are still “punished” for the same actions which for “active” boys are not. Boys are still noted more for their math skills, even when there are girls in the same class who are equally skilled. I’ve witnessed it first hand. The emphasis on how a girl should look and dress and act is much stronger than it was when I was a kid, and frankly it’s very oppressive to a girl who doesn’t fit or want to fit “the mold.”

etc.

My favorite response thus far:

Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 08:43:13 -0500
Subject: Re: helene’s post about the boy’s hat

Look — everyone stop ! ! !

It is my hat, OK? I’m a 42 year-old man and I like wearing little boy’s and girl’s hats, as long as they have little triangles on them. In fact I’m pretty much fixated on all kinds of triangles. Gosh, what a great shape. Three sides!

It’s my pathetic little obsession, and yes I’m seeing a shrink about it. OK? I’m sorry I dropped my little hat. I miss those triangles so.

Helene, can I have my hat back please and can everyone stop speculating that I might be a little boy or little girl? I’m sad now.

Ben

P.S. I’m good at math.

oops - it's always worse than you think

Apparently these folks have heard of the gender gap:

...how can we encourage and develop styles of playing and games which enhance girls skills and love of math and science? Why is it that society is suddenly obsessing about how boys are falling behind in reading? Are they really and is it a function of sexism that everyone cares so much about the sucess of boys when girls have been shut out of math and sciences for decades? Doesn’t it rebalance in middle school and high school when boys pick up speed and girls start dumbing down so that they can be cute for the boys? And what about puberty itself, how does that effect academic success?

That's Abbey talking.


-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Jun 2006

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ParentInvolvementTheRightWay 23 Jun 2006 - 21:32 CatherineJohnson




Richard J. Murnane seems to be the go-to guy for research on "21st century skills" and how our schools are failing to teach them. My copy of his book, Teaching the New Basic Skills, arrived this week. I'll post excerpts as I read.

In the meantime, here's Murnane on "parent involvement" in the schools:

FamilyEducation Network: In your book, you describe the Zavala Elementary School in East Austin, Texas, and the changes that were implemented in this school to improve children's basic skills. How did this school change?

Richard Murnane: The changes in the Texas school involved using for all children a curriculum that had previously been used only in gifted and talented programs. There was also intensive teacher training. Lower class size was implemented. And finally, there was deep and intensive parent involvement. This included allowing parents on governing boards, parents being involved in hiring decisions -- a level of parent involvement that goes way beyond what most people think parent involvement means.

That is exactly what I want.

Public schools function as a form of government. They set policies and regulations, which they have the power to enforce, governing parent and student behavior and rights.

We parents are legally and morally responsible for our children, but we are forced to relinquish decisionmaking power to administrators and teachers.

I've come to think of it this way. A pediatrician can't give orders. A principal can.

A pediatrician gives expert counsel, and the parent makes the decision.

Teachers and administrators are the last professionals in the country giving enforceable orders to the people they serve.

That needs to change.








-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jun 2006

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ProgramsForDeptOfEdSchools 23 Jun 2006 - 15:46 CatherineJohnson




Dramatic Solutions

Looks pretty good.



-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Jun 2006

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BillAndMelindaGates 24 Jun 2006 - 15:13 CatherineJohnson







I love this photo.








interview with Bill & Melinda Gates

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Jun 2006

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TrailblazersAndMathWars 28 Jun 2006 - 18:25 CatherineJohnson



Lots of Trailblazers stuff here. Also sample activities from each grade here.

The FAQ page has this to say about Trailblazers and the math wars:

Q. I heard that the "math wars" are about the two philosophies of teaching math: Traditional/Classical that emphasizes learning math facts, computation skills and applying those with word problems, and the other is Constructivist math which emphasizes discovery in group activities but is supposedly very weak in basic math facts and computation.

A. Not true. First of all there are not only two philosophies of teaching mathematics. Some people may be able to divide the world into black and white, but reality is more complex. Math Trailblazers was developed by the TIMS (Teaching Integrated Mathematics and Science) Project at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was founded and is directed by Philip Wagreich, a mathematician, and Howard Goldberg, a particle physicist. Goldberg and Wagreich were motivated by the appalling quality of mathematics and science teaching, and textbook, in their children's schooling. In addition, they were confronted daily with college students who could not do the most basic mathematical and scientific reasoning.

In 1984, they decided to take time away from their demanding research activities to find ways to improve education for all children. Before the NCTM Standards, before Math Wars, before they had even known there was a "philosophy of constructivism", they set to developing the foundations of "the TIMS Philosophy." The hallmarks of the TIMS Philosophy are to make mathematics meaningful to children, to challenge them with a rigorous and mathematically sound curriculum, and to help children learn the reasoning skills that are so important in the workplace of today (and will be absolutely essential in the world they will meet when they graduate -- say, in 2012).

I admire the fact they've taken the bull by the horns here, going so far as to print the words "math wars." In politics the rule is, I think, that you don't speak your opponent's name. The fact that they've and named the opposition takes the Math Trailblazers folks out of the realm of politics, to my mind, at any rate.

Unfortunately, they're still in the realm of marketing, PR, and spin:

Q. What is the opinion of the scientific community regarding the Standards set by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics?

A. Math Trailblazers meets the Standards set by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. These standards have undergone extensive review. The opinion of the scientific community is accurately represented by the The Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP)-the leadership organization for more than 1 million scientists and science educators. It commended NCTM for producing its most recent standards document, Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000). On its certificate of commendation, the CSSP noted that Principles and Standards is "a significant and high-quality contribution toward the improvement of mathematics education for all students." The Council also encouraged "prompt, thoughtful, and careful consideration of and thorough review of the recommendations and ideas for implementation by all who share a stake in the effective teaching of mathematics."

The CSSP is a nonprofit organization comprised of the presidents, presidents-elect, and immediate past presidents of more than 60 scientific societies and federations, whose combined membership numbers more than 1 million. CSSP serves as a strong voice in support of science and science education, as the premier national science leadership institute, and as a forum for open, substantive exchanges on current scientific issues.

Its praise continues recognition from the scientific community for NCTM's work. A National Research Council report, released in May 2004, gave NCTM high marks for process of creating Principles and Standards. The report says, "The committee finds the process established by NCTM to solicit comments from the field to be commendable and the process established by them to analyze those comments to be exemplary." The National Research Council is the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the preeminent scientific organization in the United States.

This one is worse:

Q. Has Math Trailblazers been around long enough to demonstrate its effectiveness?

A. Math Trailblazers was the end product of 12 years of research and development, partially supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. It has been pilot tested, revised, field tested and revised once more. The TIMS Project is constantly researching ways to improve student learning as well as ways to help teachers be more effective. This is our passion. Contrast this with the dozens of commercial publishers who put together their textbooks using consultants and development houses that have little deep knowledge of the subject matter and few thoughtful ideas on how to make our children better learners. They just go with the fad of the year.

The TIMS Project and Kendall/Hunt have collected data on student achievement that show that schools adopting Math Trailblazers have made significant improvements on standardized test (See Student Achievement) Moreover, a rigorous scientific study of student achievement on standardized tests comparing students using NSF funded reform curricula to students using traditional curricula showed that the students using reform curricula performed at a statistically significantly increased level (See ARC Center study). In short, Math Trailblazers is not new and it has been proven effective.

This is the publisher's website, and I suppose there's some kind of provision in the Constitution holding that a textbook publisher doesn't have to testify against itself.

But these passages go well beyond misleading by omission. There aren't too many mathematicians out there touting the virtues of Math Trailblazers. And the National Research Council has explicitly characterized Math Trailblazers as an "experiment." The NRC says the results aren't in, and the wording in this passage makes me think the folks at the NRC aren't optimistic:

These 19 curricular projects essentially have been experiments. We owe them a careful reading on their effectiveness. Demands for evaluation may be cast as a sign of failure, but we would rather stress that this examination is a sign of the success of these programs to engage a country in a scholarly debate on the question of curricular effectiveness and the essential underlying question, What is most important for our youth to learn in their studies in mathematics? To summarily blame national decline on a set of curricula whose use has a limited market share lacks credibility. At the same time, to find out if a major investment in an approach is successful and worthwhile is a prime example of responsible policy. In experimentation, success and worthiness are two different measures of experimental value. An experiment can fail and yet be worthy.

An experiment can fail and yet be worthy, you say.

Call me crazy, but I wouldn't write such a line unless I thought there was a distinct possibility failure was the direction things were headed.


-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006

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JohnDeweyAtEdspresso 26 Jun 2006 - 20:01 CatherineJohnson




Kicking the Ed School Blues

The fan mail is rolling in and paparazzi are following me to work every day despite the great lengths to which I’ve gone to protect my identity.

[snip]

Of all the comments, two in particular stand out. One from a friend who asked if I thought I was making a difference with this little venture into blog space. The other asked whether I thought I’d be making a difference teaching in a system that prevents effective math teaching in a world infiltrated by NSF, NCTM/ed school dogma and math police.

I don’t know the answer to the first question. But I’m in ed school, where there are no wrong answers.

Good one.

Moving right along —

...what is the chance for change with only a few enlightened teachers battling the math police?

My answer to the second question is based on the fact that I’ve never had an original idea in my life. Being part of the baby boomer generation means that whatever so-called original idea is in my head is also in the heads of thousands of other people. Which means that many people getting ready to retire and who have science or math backgrounds may also be looking into teaching.

Whoa.

That's my experience exactly.

I'm a walking cliche. Always have been, always will be.

I keep telling Ed, who is not a walking cliche, "Look, if I'm obsessing over X that means five zillion other people are obsessing over X, too. Either that, or they're about to start."

It's true.



Unfortunately, when it comes to television I'm an outlier.


it's always worse than you think

In the class I just took, the professor one night espoused the ubiquitous ed school philosophy that one of the biggest hurdles to conquer in teaching math is students’ math anxiety.

[snip]

The ed school of thought holds that if you just relax and get over the anxiety, the greater truth will prevail. Not a word about how inadequate preparation may play a role. “At-risk” students are particularly vulnerable to math anxiety according to ed school wisdom. One instructor the professor knew was quite good with such students. He told how she gave each student a name having to do with a concept in algebra. One student was called “perfect square trinomial”, another was “binomial”, and so forth. (They may have had name tags). Their task was to learn how each of them “related” to one another, thus forcing them to learn what these terms meant.

Time to blow up the ed schools.


edspresso search: Dewey letters

John Dewey at edspresso, part 1
John Dewey at edspresso, part 2
John Dewey at edspresso, part 3
John Dewey has the stomach flu
John Dewey at edspresso Letter #5

John Dewey at ktm
John Dewey at ktm part 2
John Dewey experiences stomach flu
John Dewey writes again

johndewey

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jun 2006

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FamousLastWords 02 Jul 2006 - 14:46 CatherineJohnson

I could kick myself that five years ago we should have paid more attention to curriculum.

— Tom Vander Ark in the Chicago Tribune

I think Tom Vander Ark should start reading Kitchen Table Math.

-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Jul 2006

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HelicopterParentsAtWikipedia 05 Sep 2006 - 19:18 CatherineJohnson




I have just staged my first intervention at Wikipedia.

Guess which section I wrote.

-- CatherineJohnson - 13 Jul 2006

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JohnSaxonPrefaceAlgebra2 20 Jul 2006 - 17:25 CatherineJohnson




Preface to Saxon Algebra 2

This is the second edition of the second book in an integrated three-book series designed to prepare students for calculus. In this book we continue the study of topics from algebra and geometry and begin our study of trigonometry. Mathematics is an abstract study of the behavior and interrelationships of numbers. In Algebra 1, we found that algebra is not difficult—it is just different. Concepts that were confusing when first encountered became familiar concepts after they had been practiced for a period of weeks or months—until finally they were understood. Then further study of the same concepts caused additional understanding as totally unexpected ramifications appeared. And, as we mastered these new abstractions, our understanding of seemingly unrelated concepts became clearer.

Thus mathematics does not consist of unconnected topics that can be filed in separate compartments, studied once, mastered, and then neglected. Mathematics is like a big ball made of pieces of string that have been tied together. Many pieces touch directly, but the other pieces are all an integral part of the ball, and all must be rolled along together if understanding is to be achieved.

A total assimilation of the fundamentals of mathematics is the key that will unlock the doors of higher mathematics and the doors to chemistry, physics, engineering, and other mathematically based disciplines. In addition, it will also unlock the doors to the understanding of psychology, sociology, and other nonmathematical disciplines in which research depends heavily on mathematical statistics. Thus, we see that mathematical ability is necessary in almost any field of endeavor.

Thus, in this book we go back to the beginning –to signed numbers—and then quickly review all of the topics of Algebra 1 and practice these topics as we weave in more advanced concepts. We will also practice the skills that are necessary to apply the concepts. The applicability of some of these skills, such as completing the square, deriving the quadratic formula, simplification of radicals, and complex numbers, might not be apparent at this time, but the benefits of having mastered these skills will become evident as our education continues.

We will continue our study of geometry in this book. Lessons on geometry appear at regular intervals, and one or two geometry problems appear in every homework problem set. We begin our study of trigonometry in Lesson 43 when we introduce the fundamental trigonometric ratios—the sine, cosine, and tangent. We will practice the use of these ratios in every problem set for the rest of the book. The long-term practice of the fundamental concepts of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry will make these concepts familiar concepts and will enable an in-depth understanding of their use in the next book in the series, a pre-calculus book entitled Advanced Mathematics.

Problems have been selected in various skill areas, and these problems will be practiced again and again in the problem sets. It is wise to strive for speed and accuracy when working these review problems. If you feel that you have mastered a type of problem, don’t skip it when it appears again. If you have really mastered the concept, the problem should not be troublesome; you should be able to do the problem quickly and accurately. If you have not mastered the concept, you need the practice that working the problem will provide. You must work every problem in every problem set to get the full benefit of the structure of this book. Master musicians practice fundamental musical skills every day. All experts practice fundamentals as often as possible. To attain and maintain proficiency in mathematics, it is necessary to practice fundamental mathematical skills constantly as new concepts are being investigated. And, as in the last book, you are encouraged to be diligent and to work at developing defense mechanisms whose use will protect you against every humans’ seemingly uncanny ability to invent ways to make mistakes.

One last word. There is no requirement that you like mathematics. I am not especially fond of mathematics—and I wrote the book—but I do love the ability to pass through doors that knowledge of mathematics has unlocked for me. I did not know what was behind the doors when I began. Some things I found there were not appealing while others were fascinating. For example, I enjoyed being an Air Force test pilot. A degree in engineering was a requirement to be admitted to test pilot school. My knowledge of mathematics enabled me to obtain this degree. At the time I began my study of mathematics, I had no idea that I would want to be a test pilot or would ever need to use mathematics in any way.

I thank Tom Brodsky for his help in selecting geometry problems for the problem sets. I thank Joan Coleman and David Pond for supervising the preparation of the manuscript. I thank Margaret Heisserer, Scott Kirby, John Chitwood, Julie Webster, Smith Richardson, Tony Carl, Gary Skidmore, Tim Maltz, Jonathan Maltz, and Kevin McKeown for creating the artwork, typesetting, and proofreading.

I again thank Frank Wang for his valuable help in getting the first edition of this book finalized and publisher Bob Wroth for his help in getting the first edition published.

John Saxon
Norman, Oklahoma



Beautiful.

The third editions of the Saxon books seem to have done away with John Saxon's prefaces; at least, that's the case with the 3rd edition of Algebra 1/2.

Thanks to our ktm Book Fairy, I have a copy of the 2nd edition of Algebra 1/2, so I'll post that preface, too.

The books themselves don't seem to have been changed in other bad direction. If you're interested in buying the 2nd edition, though, Rainbow Resource seems still to have them. So does Seton Books. I'm sure other homeschooling stores do as well.



Wilfried Schmid on procedures and understanding

''I'm a professional mathematician, and I myself very often use mathematical methods that I understand only imprecisely,'' he said. ''It is while I use them that I begin to understand. After a while, the use and the understanding are mutually supporting.''

source:
The New, Flexible Math Meets Parental Rebellion (scroll down)
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS (NYT) 2403 words
Published: April 27, 2000

Carolyn on procedures and understanding

Carolyn has said more than once that she believes in teaching procedures first. Conceptual understanding follows. (I can't find any of her posts on this, so if I've misremembered I'll delete this.)

I was always a little skeptical of this, although my working assumption is that where Carolyn and I disagree, Carolyn is right.

I've now spent enough time working my way through Saxon to see what Saxon, Schmid, and Carolyn are talking about. When you practice a procedure you don't understand over and over and over again, at some point it "naturalizes." It seems right and inevitable. And it makes sense.

John Saxon stresses this idea in book after book. Math isn't hard; it's different. It's unfamiliar.

When you've done so much math that it no longer seems strange, it starts to seem easy — or at least not harder than other subjects.

Of course, the irony is that this naturalizing process leaves me unable to explain procedures to someone for whom math is still strange. It does, however, make me understand why "math brains" tend to say things like, "It just is" when I ask for an explanation!

I'll add that Saxon (and probably Carolyn & Schmid, too) rarely teaches a concept stripped of all meaning or explanation — though he does do so far more often in Algebra 1 than in the earlier books. A student using Algebra 1 must take a lot on faith.

If nothing else, meaning helps memory; it's easier to remember a procedure you understand. (I have references for this observation, but don't want to spend the time to dig them up just now.) I'd be willing to bet that meaning increases student motivation, too. I recall Steve H saying that students always want an explanation if they can get one. (Steve - am I remembering that correctly?) Every one of Saxon's explanations in 6-5 through 7-6 has been pure pleasure to read, and has made me want to learn more math. In contrast, my motivation sometimes flags as I work with Saxon's highly abstract Algebra 1, my motivation sometimes flags.

In short, I think it's probably always good to try to teach some conceptual understanding along with procedure. I also think, after living through Ms. K's Phase 4 math class, that it's essential to include mini word problems — although Saxon does not do so in Algebra 1. But John Saxon can get away with it, because he's a genius math textbook writer. If you're not a genius math text writer, or a genius math teacher, you can't.

Nevertheless, these caveats aside, math is first and foremost something people do. Barry says that constructivist math ends up teaching math appreciation, not math, and I agree.

Teach procedures supported by meaning where possible, and, where not possible, teach the procedure and practice it to mastery. Understanding will follow as "totally unexpected ramifications appear."







John Saxon & John von Neumann on math
preface to Saxon Algebra 2



-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Jul 2006

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TwoSides 12 Aug 2006 - 14:53 CatherineJohnson




Shortly after posting a link to Michael J. Petrilli's What Works vs. Whatever Works: Inside the No Child Left Behind law’s internal contradictions (registration required) it struck me: there are only two sides, and neither of them is neoprogressive.

-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Aug 2006

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NixOnColumbiaTeachersCollege 07 Aug 2006 - 20:41 CatherineJohnson




new old schoolteacher is guestblogging for eduwonk. Until June she was, I believe, a graduate student at a school of education in NYC which I take to be Columbia Teachers College, although her blog doesn't currently identify the institution.

Columbia Teachers College, the employer of William Heard Kilpatrick, is Ground Zero for curricular & pedagogical awfulness. E.D. Hirsch argues that Kilpatrick, not John Dewey, is the real founder of progressive education.

Here is new old school teacher:

I am currently attending the KIPP Summit 2006 in New Orleans, attended by all the KIPP schools as well as other excellent charter schools and charter school networks (for example, Uncommon Schools and Achievement First). It is awesome. Compare some of the AERA presentations I talked about yesterday with these, presented over the last few days here in New Orleans:

--"Basics on Advising College-Bound Students"
--"Analyzing Test Scores"
--"Activities and Questioning with Bloom's Taxonomy"
--"Informal Assessment of Reading Difficulties"
--"Overview of Expository Writing, Parts I and II"
--"A Typical Day in Math 8"
--"Developing Number Sense"

These sound a little more practicable and useful than a session on Taiwanese mail-order brides, don't you think? Yesterday I learned a ton of great strategies for creating a safe, calm, effective learning environment and how to deal with students with difficult behavior. Today in 1.5 hours I learned exactly how to teach my kids to write summaries from fiction or non-fiction and how to highlight text effectively (college, hello!). THIS IS WHAT I ALWAYS WANTED from grad school and NEVER GOT. And was so sad about that I had to write an angry blog full of tirades. It's $30,000 worth of tragic.

That's $30,000 to not learn how to teach.


My favorite W.H. Kilpatrick saying:

activity leading to further activity without badness

That's the project method.





The Columbia School of Pragmatism
William Heard Kilpatrick UNESCO

-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Aug 2006

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WilliamHeardKilpatrickMathBrain 07 Aug 2006 - 20:55 CatherineJohnson




William Heard Kilpatrick, the real father of progressive education in America, began life as a math guy:

Kilpatrick completed his bachelor’s degree at Mercer University in 1891. Lacking any compelling career goals, he undertook graduate study in mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, an event which changed his thinking and his life. The environment there, which prompted open-ended intellectual inquiry and his discovery of the domain of modern, evolutionary science, led him to embrace the ideas and outlook of modern science and to pursue secular truth.

After completing one year of graduate work at John Hopkins, Kilpatrick served as a high school teacher and principal in Blakely, Georgia. During these years, he began his systematic study of education and began applying progressive techniques to public schools—habits he would continue throughout his public school career. At a summer institute to develop his pedagogy, he saw the need to get students involved in meaningful experiences, and became committed to devising activities that would build on their interests. Though dedicated to teaching and his students, Kilpatrick returned to Johns Hopkins to continue his study of mathematics. He left after a year, disillusioned by what he considered low-quality teaching and an insufficiently robust academic program.

[snip]

In 1897, Mercer University offered Kilpatrick a faculty position in mathematics and astronomy. He served as acting president of the school from 1903–1905, returning to the faculty full time during his final year. His growing religious doubts culminated in a heresy trial that resulted in his resignation from Mercer at the conclusion of the 1905–1906 academic year. Kilpatrick then served as a principal and mathematics teacher in Columbus, Georgia.

During a summer school session while at Mercer University, Kilpatrick took a course offered by John Dewey. Though his initial reaction to Dewey was not positive, Kilpatrick’s later interaction with him changed his philosophy of life and education.

[snip]

While at Teachers College, he ran into Dewey again. Instead of getting discouraged, he took on the challenge of explaining Dewey to others, and became a protégé of the progressive education movement. Kilpatrick eventually became known as Dewey’s chief interpreter for his popularization of Dewey’s somewhat dense educational philosophy.

Hirsch says no one understood Dewey's prose or lectures. He gained a following thanks to Kilpatrick.


-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Aug 2006

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HelicopterTeachers 07 Sep 2006 - 01:33 CatherineJohnson




Here's my question.

Do parents have hostile slang terms for bad teachers?

I don't think we do. I think we just say things like "bad teacher" and leave it at that.

I ask because over at Cottonwood Press I find this title: How to Handle Difficult Parents:

Practical advice for teachers, presented with a sense of humor. The stress of dealing with difficult parents remains one of the top reasons teachers cite for leaving the ranks, according to the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy. How to Handle Difficult Parents helps teachers learn how to cope more effectively.

Learn how to handle parents like these:

• Helicopter Mom, who hovers constantly, ready to whisk away any problem or inconvenience that might befall her child.

• The Intimidator, who wants what he wants and wants it now.

• Pinocchio’s Mom, who believes that her child, unlike every other child in the universe, never ever tells a lie of any kind.

You will also find out more about the Caped Crusader, Ms. “Quit Picking on My Kid,” the Stealth Zapper, the Uncivil Libertarian, No Show’s Dad, and the Competitor.

Let me ask you.

Does a book like this show good character?

I mean, now that our schools have ditched self esteem in favor of character education 24-7 [see: Irvington school calendar 2006-2007], I'm interested in the character of the people who will be teaching character at school.

Is this it?

Teachers are people who can be expected to write, publish, purchase, and/or read entire books filled with hostile stereotypes created by teacher-authors for the amusement of their fellow teachers?

So exactly how much time do teachers spend trash-talking students and their parents behind closed doors?

Apparently quite a lot.

“Unfortunately, more and more of my time as a school psychologist is spent as a consultant to those dealing with problematic parents. This is a must-read book for anyone in education today. Ms. Tingley addresses a sensitive subject area with humor and a wry wit while delivering practical, well-reasoned strategies and techniques to avoid or resolve conflict.”

— Steve X. Gallas,
School Psychologist,
Williamsburg, Virginia

I'd love to read a copy of Steve X. Gallas's job description.





great teachers & difficult parents

I've said it before & I'll say it again: we've had a number of fantastic teachers over the years. They probably spend some time grousing about (some) students and parents, & I don't blame them if they do.

On the other hand, I also happen to be related to two terrific teachers, and I don't recall either of them ever complaining about even one student or parent.

I suspect that really expert, experienced teachers probably don't have a lot of complaints. They teach so well that they don't have parents breathing down their necks.

I could be wrong. However, I hope that any book on the subject of "difficult parents" would give teachers help in considering what they might be doing to contribute to the problems they're having.

In my experience, "helicopter moms" are a two-way street.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Sep 2006

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JohnDeweyExperiencesStomachFlu 08 Sep 2006 - 13:21 CatherineJohnson




I fear that our friend John Dewey is beginning to show the strain.

He started out gangbusters, enrolling in ed school, acing the Praxis II, landing a reasonable, non-crazed individual as professor of his first ed school class.

That was then.

This semester it's NCTM Time.

[pause - back shortly]


I think this may be my favorite part:

What grabbed my attention was the standard that required that students be able to solve quadratic equations in one variable with a graphing calculator as the primary tool. My feelings about graphing calculators aside, I noted to the others in my group that it said nothing about students learning the quadratic formula, much less its derivation. A woman in my group, in apparent defense of the standard, told me her daughter didn’t have to learn the quadratic formula in Algebra 1. I pointed to that standard and said “You’re looking at the reason why.”

When our turn came to report our findings to the class, I said the Algebra 1 standards were vague and allowed teachers to not teach the quadratic formula. Some others in the room agreed. The teacher—Mr. NCTM—in a thinly veiled, poker-faced support of anything resembling NCTM standards, responded that the standards were in fact, not “prescriptive”. This generated some discussion about giving teachers flexibility and I found myself in a debate with a bright young man who although agreeing that the quadratic formula should be taught was also caught in an unconscious effort to please the teacher. He found himself arguing that the standards were what must be taught “at a minimum”, that the non-prescriptive nature of the standard gave teachers flexibility to go beyond the minimum.

I've come to view language like "not prescriptive" as fighting words.

NCTM is not a libertarian organization. Search its site for the words "to each his own," or "live and let live," or "different strokes for different folks." See what you get.

Bupkis.

Sure you might find "different learning styles" or "differentiated instruction."

You will not find the sentiment that for some folks teaching algebra 1 without using a graphing calculator to solve quadratic equations in one variable might be a good idea, too.

I managed to invent a new term yesterday (at least, I think I invented it): micro-fascism.

I say that tongue in cheek, but in its essence it's true. Organizations like NCTM are authoritarian in nature, design, and ambition. End of story.

ARG Cartoon Animation



edspresso search: Dewey letters

John Dewey at edspresso, part 1
John Dewey at edspresso, part 2
John Dewey at edspresso, part 3
John Dewey has the stomach flu
John Dewey at edspresso Letter #5

John Dewey at ktm
John Dewey at ktm part 2
John Dewey experiences stomach flu
John Dewey writes again

johndewey


-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

---

HedgehogsAndFoxes 08 Sep 2006 - 19:21 CatherineJohnson




I mentioned earlier that neoprogressive educators are hedgehogs.

Dan Drezner quotes a terrific passage from Louis Menand's review of Philip Tetlock's book:

[In the realm of international affairs] a hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out. Foxes, on the other hand, don’t see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.”

Tetlock did not find, in his sample, any significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes. (Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.) He also did not find that his foxes scored higher because they were more cautious—that their appreciation of complexity made them less likely to offer firm predictions. Unlike hedgehogs, who actually performed worse in areas in which they specialized, foxes enjoyed a modest benefit from expertise. Hedgehogs routinely over-predicted: twenty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs claimed were impossible or nearly impossible came to pass, versus ten per cent for the foxes. More than thirty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs thought were sure or near-sure did not, against twenty per cent for foxes.

The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you’re right you can be really and spectacularly right. Great scientists, for example, are often hedgehogs. They value parsimony, the simpler solution over the more complex. In world affairs, parsimony may be a liability—but, even there, there can be traps in the kind of highly integrative thinking that is characteristic of foxes. Elsewhere, Tetlock has published an analysis of the political reasoning of Winston Churchill. Churchill was not a man who let contradictory information interfere with his idées fixes. This led him to make the wrong prediction about Indian independence, which he opposed. But it led him to be right about Hitler. He was never distracted by the contingencies that might combine to make the elimination of Hitler unnecessary.

Our problem is that ed school professors aren't Winston Churchill & Hitler.

Ed school professors are Winston Churchill & India.




hedgehogs

Plato
Dante
Proust
Nietzsche


foxes

Montaigne
Balzac
Goethe
Shakespeare

source:
The Fox and the Hedgehog



Chapter 1: Quantifying the Unquantifiable

KTM Guest shows how to do it
hedgehogs and foxes



-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

---

NctmReformsAgain 14 Sep 2006 - 16:52 CatherineJohnson




In today's Wall Street Journal ($):

Arithmetic Problem
New Report Urges Return to Basics In Teaching Math
Critics of 'Fuzzy' Methods Cheer Educators' Findings;
Drills Without Calculators Taking Cues From Singapore
By JOHN HECHINGER
September 12, 2006; Page A1

The nation's math teachers, on the front lines of a 17-year curriculum war, are getting some new marching orders: Make sure students learn the basics.

In a report to be released today, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents 100,000 educators from prekindergarten through college, will give ammunition to traditionalists who believe schools should focus heavily and early on teaching such fundamentals as multiplication tables and long division.

The council's advice is striking because in 1989 it touched off the so-called math wars by promoting open-ended problem solving over drilling. Back then, it recommended that students as young as those in kindergarten use calculators in class.

Those recommendations horrified many educators, especially college math professors alarmed by a rising tide of freshmen needing remediation. The council's 1989 report influenced textbooks and led to what are commonly called "reform math" programs, which are used in school systems across the country.

The new approach puzzled many parents. For example, to solve a basic division problem, 120 divided by 40, students might cross off groups of circles to "discover" that the answer was three.

Infuriated parents dubbed it "fuzzy math" and launched a countermovement. The council says its earlier views had been widely misunderstood and were never intended to excuse students from learning multiplication tables and other fundamentals.

Nevertheless, the council's new guidelines constitute "a remarkable reversal, and it's about time," says Ralph Raimi, a University of Rochester math professor.

Francis Fennell, the council's president, says the latest guidelines move closer to the curriculum of Asian countries such as Singapore, whose students tend to perform better on international tests.

So maybe it wasn't such a great idea after all for IUFSD to ban my Singapore Math course.



new timeline

According to their report, "Curriculum Focal Points," which is subtitled "A Quest for Coherence," students, by second grade, should "develop quick recall of basic addition facts and related subtraction facts." By fourth grade, the report says, students should be fluent with "multiplication and division facts" and should start working with decimals and fractions. By fifth, they should know the "standard algorithm" for division -- in other words, long division -- and should start adding and subtracting decimals and fractions. By sixth grade, students should be moving on to multiplication and division of fractions and decimals. By seventh and eighth grades, they should use algebra to solve linear equations.

Here's the Singapore sequence.




Lutherans turning into Catholics

A recent study by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington nonprofit group, found that only two dozen states specified that students needed to know the multiplication tables. Many allowed calculators in early grades.

Chester E. Finn Jr., the foundation's president and a former top official at the U.S. Department of Education, blamed the earlier math-council guidelines for state standards that neglect the basics. He described the new advice as a "sea change," saying that "it's a little bit like Lutherans deciding to become Catholics after the Reformation."

Understanding math, rather than parroting answers to poorly understood equations, was the goal of the council's controversial 1989 standards. Those guidelines called on teachers to promote estimation, rather than precise answers. For example, an elementary-school student tackling the problem 4,783 divided by 13 should instead divide 4,800 by 12 to arrive at "about 400," the 1989 report said. The council said this approach would enable children using calculators to "decide whether the correct keys were pressed and whether the calculator result is reasonable."

"The calculator renders obsolete much of the complex pencil-and-paper proficiency traditionally emphasized in mathematics courses," the council said then. In 2000, in another report, the council backed away somewhat from that position.

Still, in response to the earlier recommendations, many school systems required children to describe in writing the reasoning behind their answers. Some parents complained that students ended up writing about math, rather than doing it.

As the debate heated up, concern grew about U.S. students' math competence. In 2003, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a test that compares student achievement in many countries, ranked U.S. students just 15th in eighth-grade math skills, behind both Australia and the Slovak Republic. Singapore ranked No. 1, followed by South Korea and Hong Kong. Fueling concern about the quality of elementary and high-school instruction: one in five U.S. college freshmen now need a remedial math course, according to the National Science Board.

low-income students

This is very exciting. The AIR report (pdf file) led me to believe that Singapore Math had been a flop in low-income schools because the student mobility is so high (and see Hirsch on this subject, too):

If school systems adopt the math council's new approach, their classes might resemble those at Garfield Elementary School in Revere, Mass., just north of Boston. Three-quarters of Garfield's students receive free and reduced lunches, and many are the children of recent immigrants from such countries as Brazil, Cambodia and El Salvador.

Three years ago, Garfield started using Singapore Math, a curriculum modeled on that country's official program and now used in about 300 school systems in the U.S. Many school systems and parents regard Singapore Math as an antidote for "reform math" programs that arose from the math council's earlier recommendations.

According to preliminary results, the percentage of Garfield students failing the math portion of the fourth-grade state achievement test last year fell to 7% from 23% in 2005. Those rated advanced or proficient rose to 43% from 40%.

Last week, a fourth-grade class at Garfield opened its lesson with Singapore's "mental math," a 10-minute warm-up requiring students to recall facts and solve computation questions without pencil and paper. "In your heads, take the denominator of the fraction three-quarters, take the next odd number that follows that number. Add to that number, the number of ounces in a cup. What is nine less than that number?" asked teacher Janis Halloran. A sea of hands shot up. (The answer: four.)

Ms. Halloran then moved on to simple pencil-and-paper algebra problems. "The sum of two numbers is 63," one problem reads. "The smaller number is half the bigger number. What is the smaller number? What is the bigger number?" (The answers: 21 and 42.)

In this class, the students didn't use the lettered variables that are so prevalent in standard algebraic equations. Instead, they arrived at answers using Cuisenaire rods, sticks of varying colors and lengths that they manipulate into patterns on the tops of their desks. The children use the rods to learn about the relationship between multiplication and geometry. The goal: a visceral and deep understanding of math concepts.

"It just makes everything easier for you," says fifth-grader Jailene Paz, 10 years old.

Cuisinaire rods for bar models!

That's so cool!




TERC time

The Singapore Math curriculum differs sharply from reform math programs, which often ask students to "discover" on their own the way to perform multiplication and division and other operations, and have come to be known as "constructivist" math.

One reform math program, "Investigations in Number, Data and Space," is used in 800 school systems and has become a lightning rod for critics. TERC, a Cambridge, Mass., nonprofit organization, developed that program, and Pearson Scott Foresman, a unit of Pearson PLC, London, distributes it to schools.

parents don't get it part 1

Ken Mayer, a spokesman for TERC, says many parents have a "misconception" that Investigations doesn't value computation. He says many school systems, such as Boston's, have seen gains in test scores using the program. "Fluency with number facts is critical," he says.

parents don't get it part 2

Polle Zellweger and her husband, Jock Mackinlay, both computer scientists, moved to Bellevue, Wash., from Palo Alto, Calif., two years ago so their two children could attend its highly regarded public schools. She and her husband grew suspicious of the school's Investigations program. This summer, they had both children take a California grade-level achievement test, and both answered only about 70% of the questions correctly. Ms. Zellweger and her husband started tutoring their children an hour a day to catch up.

"It was a really weird feeling," says their daughter, Molly Mackinlay, 15. "I do really well in school. I am getting A-pluses in math classes. Then, I take a math test from a different state, and I'm not able to finish half the questions."

Eric McDowell, who oversees Bellevue's math curriculum, says parents misunderstand Investigations.

If it weren't for the parents, teaching would be a great job.




math wars and war wars

In the Alpine School District in Utah, parent Oak Norton, an accountant, has gathered petitions from 1,000 families to protest the use of Investigations. His complaints began more than two years ago, when he discovered at a parent conference that his oldest child, then in third grade, wasn't being taught the multiplication tables.

Barry Graff, a top Alpine school administrator, says the system has added more traditional computation exercises. Over the next year, Alpine plans to give each school a choice between Investigations or a more conventional approach. Mr. Graff, who says Alpine test scores tend to be at or above state averages, expects critics to keep up the attacks and welcomes the national math council's efforts to provide grade-by-grade guidance on what children should learn.

"Other than the war in Iraq, I don't think there's anything more controversial to bring up than math," he says. "The debate will drive us eventually to be in the right place."

wow

I bet things are hopping over at math-teach & math-learn.

[pause]

hmm

No action thus far.

Once Wayne Bishop posts this baby, we'll be in a shooting war.

update: Bishop's got it!

let the fun begin



what Singapore students can do at the end of 7th grade

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Sep 2006

---

MathTrailblazersStudent 20 Sep 2006 - 17:13 CatherineJohnson




from one of our friends:

A friend of mine has a daughter who made A's in 4th and 5th grade Trailblazers. She did not know her times tables, ditto division facts, and her fraction knowledge was very basic to nonexistent.

She did not know that you could divide a fraction.^*

This was the A student. I can't imagine what the C student looks like in this class.

Another friend's gifted kid dropped dramatically in the standardized tests knocking him out of the high math track for middle school. I told her that it was probably math facts and fractions. She found out through an online assessment that, in fact, it was.

If a teacher looks at the good stuff that curriculums like Trailblazers offer, supplementing what is missing, then it is probably alright. But when they follow it to the letter, it appears to me to be a disaster waiting to happen.

^* Math Trailblazers does not teach the division of a fraction by a fraction.


-- CatherineJohnson - 13 Sep 2006

---

BarryGarelickInEdNext 15 Sep 2006 - 15:32 CatherineJohnson




Miracle Math by Barry Garelick — and don't forget An A-Maze-ing Approach to Math, which is the single article I give people to introduce them to constructivism and the math wars. UPDATE 11-9-2006: interesting. The NEA appears to have removed "A Parent's Guide to Helping Your Child with Today's Math" from its website. You can still read the original page here and here (pdf file)

After one read-through, my favorite passage is this one:

Another stumbling block for the Maryland teachers was their concern that the Singapore Math program did not contain “real-world” activities. The term, as used by those who follow the ideas supported by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and education schools for teaching math, generally means a problem for which American students have not received much instruction or preparation. This is intentional, it turns out, because it is believed to be good for students to learn to approach problems for which they have not received explicit preparation. The National Education Association (NEA), for instance, in its online version of “A Parent’s Guide to Helping Your Child with Today’s Math,” gives an example of a “real-world” problem:

A farmer sends his daughter and son out into the barnyard to count the number of chickens and pigs. When they return the son says that he counted 200 legs but the daughter says she counted 70 heads. How many pigs and chickens does the farmer have?

The NEA then suggests that some students may solve the problem using algebra (those who know how to do so, that is), while others might solve it using Guess and Check. Still others may choose to draw pictures to solve it. The NEA admits that some methods might be considered more efficient, but points out that the correct answer can be found using multiple methods and that “by allowing students to think flexibly about numbers,we encourage them to ‘own’ the math forever, instead of ‘borrowing’ until class is over.” That this real-world problem depicts an approach that no sensible person would use in counting pigs and chickens is beside the point. This kind of real-world math is indeed missing from Singapore’s program—apparently, if TIMSS tests mean anything, without much harm. Rather than waste students’ time with inefficient methods for solving problems, Singapore’s texts provide instruction that eliminates trial and error, one of the goals of mathematics. Bar modeling is a powerful pictorial technique that results in one answer, deduced by using mathematical principles that students have learned rather than by employing the haphazard trialand- error method of Guess and Check.

That same page at the NEA site also has this to say:

My child's teacher says that the mathematics curriculum is problem-based. What does that mean?

Teachers are now designing mathematical tasks that ask students to think deeply about math and how that math is part of their real lives. The problems students encounter won't be the two problems at the end of the lesson page that we all remember, but they'll be "real" problems that use math in a "real" way. It may be a problem that takes the children an hour, or perhaps several, to solve. There may be multiple ways to solve the problem.

Several hours to solve one problem.

Right.

And who's going to be keeping these kids on-task for the several hours it takes them to solve one problem? Somehow I don't think it's going to be the teacher.

(If you want to see parents spending the best years of their lives trying to get their kids through a constructivist math curriculum, take a look at the parents TERC Investigations thread at Math Forum. yowza)

I think we should sic the anti-homework forces on these people.




coming attractions

Barry also has a terrific brief explanation of the Singapore bar models that I can't link at the moment, because Ed Next hasn't got its html pages up yet. So we'll have to wait.



That this real-world problem depicts an approach that no sensible person would use in counting pigs and chickens is beside the point. — I love it!


-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Sep 2006

---

WeveNeverBeenAtWarWithEastasia 22 Sep 2006 - 18:14 CatherineJohnson




here, or access here if that link doesn't work


money 'graph:

Stanford University math professor James Milgram, who advised the NCTM on the new guidelines, told Education Week that the new guidelines represent "an end to the math wars."

[snip]

I told Cal State L.A. math professor Wayne Bishop that the NCTM was really coming around, but Bishop was skeptical. I chided him. After all, I noted, the guidelines may not call for third-graders to memorize multiplication tables, as California's substantive standards do, but at least they support "quick recall of multiplication facts" in the fourth grade. At least they deal with math now.

Bishop responded, "I would be surprised if behind the scenes they've moved at all." Now I wonder, too. It is not a good sign that, when I cited Milgram's quote about the end of the math wars, NCTM executive director Rubillo responded, "The math wars are just an invention in the last few years of just a couple of people."

Fuzzy Memory on Fuzzy Math
by Debra Saunders

Like possibly those 200 mathematicians & eonomists who wrote the anti-constructivist math letter to Secretary of Education Richard Riley back in 1999, say.


-- CatherineJohnson - 17 Sep 2006

---

BattleLines 26 Sep 2006 - 19:57 CatherineJohnson




Midway through today's TIMES report on the state's fourth grade slump:

E. D. Hirsch Jr., the author of a recent book, “The Knowledge Deficit,” said students do not learn enough vocabulary and content knowledge at younger ages.

Daniel P. Keating, director of the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan, said schools should prepare students earlier for the more abstract and sophisticated reasoning required in middle school.

“Perhaps the early preparation is not anticipating that shift to having those higher demands,” he said, adding that tests for younger children do not measure those skills. “All of a sudden we’re looking for the kinds of skills that just haven’t been assessed earlier.”

Note: one of these men is a developmental psychologist "whose research focuses on integrating knowledge about biodevelopmental processes, population patterns in developmental health, and social factors affecting individual and population development."

The other is a college professor who has spent a lifetime researching education, creating a superb core curriculum for K-6 students, and researching and writing new content in his own field of research.

The psychologist doesn't know anything about education or curriculum and is giving his best guess.

The curriculum specialist is stating the consensus view of cognitive scientists who've been researching this subject and publishing their results in refereed journals for many years.

Guess which man is winning the argument.


Irvington slump
NY scores slump
battle lines



-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Sep 2006

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OurBestStudentsPart2 04 Oct 2006 - 16:06 CatherineJohnson


from the National Center for Education Statistics:

KEY POINTS:

The performance of U.S. physics and advanced mathematics students was among the lowest of the 16 countries that administered the physics and advanced mathematics assessments.

In all five content areas of physics and in all three content areas of advanced mathematics, U.S. physics and advanced mathematics students' performance was among the lowest of the TIMSS nations.

In both physics and advanced mathematics, males outperformed females in the United States. This was true for 4 of the 5 content areas in physics and for all 3 of the content areas in advanced mathematics.

More countries outperformed the United States in physics than in advanced mathematics. This differs from results for mathematics and science general knowledge, where more countries outperformed the United States in mathematics than in science.


How Do Our Twelfth Graders With Advanced Mathematics Instruction Compare To Advanced Mathematics Students In Other Countries?

The performance of U.S. twelfth-grade advanced mathematics students was among the lowest of the 16 TIMSS nations who administered the assessment to a comparable population of their advanced mathematics students and below the international average. Figure 9 shows that 11 nations outperformed the United States, while U.S. scores were not significantly different from those of 4 other nations. No countries scored below the United States on the assessment of advanced mathematics.

U.S. advanced mathematics students included those who had completed or were completing pre-calculus, calculus, calculus and analytic geometry, or Advanced Placement calculus, repre-senting about 14 percent of the school-completing age cohort in the United States. If we compared only those U.S. students who had taken or were taking calculus or Advanced Placement calculus against all the advanced mathematics students in other countries, how did our calculus students perform?

How Do U.S. Twelfth Graders With Calculus Or Advanced Placement Calculus Compare To All Advanced Mathematics Students In Other Countries?

U.S. twelfth graders with calculus or Advanced Placement calculus instruction represented about 7 percent of the U.S. age cohort. These students did perform better in the assessment than the larger U.S. group that also included students whose highest course was pre-calculus.

Advanced mathematics students in 6 countries (France, the Russian Federation, Switzerland, Denmark, Cyprus, and Lithuania) outperformed calculus and AP calculus students in the U.S. Figure 10 shows that the performance of U.S. twelfth graders with calculus or Advanced Placement calculus instruction was not significantly different from the international average and 7 of the 16 TIMSS nations that administered the assessment to their advanced mathematics students. Our scores were significantly higher than those of two other nations (Germany and Austria).

The performance of U.S. twelfth graders with Advanced Placement calculus instruction, who represent about 5 percent of the U.S. age cohort was significantly higher than the performance of advanced mathematics students in 5 other countries. Figure 11 shows that one nation (France) outperformed the United States, while our scores were not significantly different from 9 other countries and the international average. Thus, the most advanced mathematics students in the United States, about 5 percent of the total age cohort, performed similarly to 10 to 20 percent of the age cohort in most of the other countries.

CHAPTER 3: Achievement of Advanced Students

Ed's going to love finding out that France is the only country that can beat AP calculus students.


Moving right along....ah-hah!

We have a gender gap! Precisely the outcome fuzzy math was invented to prevent:

Is There A Gender Gap In Advanced Mathematics At The Twelfth Grade?

In the United States, twelfth-grade males outperformed twelfth-grade females in advanced mathematics. The United States was one of the 11 TIMSS nations in which a gender gap existed. No significant gender gap existed in the other 5 countries. For the United States and 7 other countries, there was a significant gender gap existing in all 3 advanced mathematics content areas. (See Tables A5.8 and A5.9 in Appendix 5.) [emphasis in the original]

Classic.

It really is striking the way a disciplined focus on subject matter, learning, and excellence will lead to actual social justice, as opposed to no social justice accompanied by a great deal of blather on the subject (pdf file).


women & minorities learn differently


-- CatherineJohnson - 29 Sep 2006

---

JohnDeweyWritesAgain 14 Oct 2006 - 22:29 CatherineJohnson




Letter from John Dewey # 5

The folks at math-teach are grumbly, some of them.

Greg seems to be taking the reappearance of John D. in stride, however:

It isn't Back to Basics, it's Basics are Basic. No need to go back if you've been there, if you've never been there, you can't go back.

Basics are basic.

I like it.



Speaking of basics and whether one can or cannot go back, Christian cannot do long division. At all. He was never taught.

That's going to change.




good grief

Meanwhile, here in ed school, all is well. Our instructor, Mr. NCTM, assured us the focal points were just a clarification, and that nothing was different. Then we set about watching some videos of teachers using the discovery method in class. One video showed a teacher engaging her students in an activity in order to teach them about slopes. I tell you, these kids were busy. She had them measuring the volumes of two mystery liquids, weighing them, filling out a chart with the values, computing the ratios of mass to volume, and all the time, she asked questions. They plotted the ratios of mass to volume of liquids and obtained two slopes, checked their results with a graphing calculator, and she questioned them about what the graphs told them about the liquids. Luckily we saw that video on two occasions, because the first time I lost track of what these kids were supposed to be doing. I almost lost track the second time, but it finally sunk in. “Oh, she’s teaching them how to interpret what the slope represents.” I came to the following conclusion about her technique: If I had had a class like that in school, I would have grown up hating math.

This is reminding me of the time Christopher had an assignment on finding the equation of a line coming up, with zero instruction in anything concerning lines beyond graphing coordinated pairs, and my neighbor had to come over and show me how to do it.




welcome to L.A.

The teachers in both videos were extremely good at what they were doing, which brought home an unsettling realization to me: You can be very good at doing something that is absolutely horrible.

Here is a teaching moment re: Hollywood.

In Hollywood, "everyone thinks he's a writer."

I put those words in quotation marks because "everyone thinks he's a writer" is a saying. In Hollywood, everyone who actually is a writer goes around saying, "everyone thinks he's a writer."

Everyone isn't a writer. (I'm pretty sure "everyone isn't a writer" is grammatically incorrect, but I'm sticking with it.) A tiny group of people manage to become Hollywood writers, and in virtually all cases these are people who have to be incredibly good at doing something absolutely horrible.

Every once in awhile a TV writer gets a chance to work on something great.

But much of the time he has to work on something not great, and he has to be fantastically good at doing it.

Same deal with women's magazines, actually.

I wrote for women's magazines for years, and I sometimes had to write ridiculous stuff (not always, maybe not even often) and when I did I had to do it well.

My nadir was the time I had to write an article on "phone sex" for SELF MAGAZINE two weeks after giving birth to Jimmy. We needed the money; I couldn't turn it down.

I'm not the person to write an article on phone sex under any circumstances, but two weeks post partum I was really not the person to write an article on phone sex.

But I did it, and I did it well.

For a few years there I was a successful women's magazine writer. My articles would get picked up by radio shows; I went on Oprah once or maybe it was twice; often enough I created buzz. Once I was all set to debate the guy who said a woman over 40 had a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married, but then he chickened out.^* NEWSWEEK recanted on that one last year.

My favorite story was on why men like bitchy women.

Maybe you think men don't like bitchy women. Well, they do. If you'd been reading NEW WOMAN 20 years ago you would know this.



moving right along

Mr. NCTM moved on to the next comment from another woman who in all seriousness and with no sarcasm intended said “The teacher was very good at not answering the students’ questions.” There was unanimous agreement.

speechless







edspresso search: Dewey letters

John Dewey at edspresso, part 1
John Dewey at edspresso, part 2
John Dewey at edspresso, part 3
John Dewey has the stomach flu
John Dewey at edspresso Letter #5

John Dewey at ktm
John Dewey at ktm part 2
John Dewey experiences stomach flu
John Dewey writes again

single women and terrorists
An Iconic Report 20 Years Later: Many of Those Women Married After All
Reexamining the Marriage Crunch



^* Interesting. Katha Pollitt made the same argument I made at the time: the "husband" shortage was actually a shortage of slightly older men. Women prefer to marry men 2 to 3 years older than they are. As I recall (too lazy to look it up) at the time the NEWSWEEK article appeared 40 year old single baby boomers were members of the first half of the baby boom generation, born when birth rates were rising. Each succeeding year's cohort was larger than the cohort of the year before, so women looking to find slightly older husbands were fishing in a smaller pool. For the second half of the baby boom generation, I argued, things would be different. Those women would be seeking slightly older husbands born into larger populations of men.

REASON thinks the update is as stupid as the original.

johndewey


-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Oct 2006

---

ProgressReportPart3 29 Oct 2006 - 01:38 CatherineJohnson




Christian came in the other day and said he'd gotten a 95 on his first paper.

Then he got a 98 on his first test, and the professor invited him to attend a screening of a movie on hip hop artists made by his son. (I think it was hip hop artists.) Shortly after that Christian ventured out of his quiet overachiever hiding place and challenged the brainy female student who'd been dominating the class — and the professor sided with him!

Ed said, "He's getting straight As and he's the teacher's pet."

That's good.

Christian needs to spend some time being teacher's pet.

My favorite Christian story — my favorite Christian's mom story, that is — was the time in high school when somehow his entire team of teachers decided to call Christian's mom on the carpet.

Something like that.

She went in for the meeting, sat down alone in whatever room they put her in, and one by one each teacher walked into the room expecting to tell her all the bad things they knew about Christian.

Not all of the teachers came.

As far as I can tell from this distance, they were all supposed to come.

But some of them refused. Christian's English teacher told him, "I have no problems with you. I'm not going."

That's another thing. There are a lot of hero teachers out there. My kids have had some hero teachers, of course; more often they've had terrific teachers in settings where heroism wasn't called for one way or the other, thank heavens.

But lately I'm hearing other people's stories of hero teachers. One of these stories makes me cry just thinking about it.

Anyway, Christian's mom sat down alone in the room and one by one each teacher came in with his list of complaints and sat down facing Christian's mom.

The teacher would start to talk and Christian's mom would cut him off. "What are you doing for my son?" she said.

The teacher would start to talk again and she'd cut him off again. "What are you doing for my son?"

She just kept doing it until the teacher gave up and left. At least, that's what she did in her son's retelling of the tale.

Then she did the same thing all over again with the next teacher.


I'm sure that went nowhere, but it's a great story.




Saxon math placement test

So I gave Christian his Saxon math placement test and the news was grim: if he were a kid he'd be starting in grade 3.

Since he's an adult I ordered Saxon 5/4, the fourth grade book.

Christian went to 4 grade schools in 5 years. That's called "student mobility," and it's death to achievement,^* particularly math achievement. (I think I'm channelling an earlier post.)










I don't know which of these categories Christian was in — either the 2nd or the 3rd.

That's another story. Christian's mom was fighting with the special ed people to get Christian something, a keyboard I think, a reasonable request given that his entire 504C classification was apparently based on bad handwriting, and the special ed person told her to have Medicaid pay for it.

Christian's mom said, "I work, bi***."

That's the difference between Christian's mom and me.

When my school told me to have Medicaid pay for assistive technology, I went for it.^** I spent months shlepping the kids to WIHD for Medicaid-funded assessments. Then two years later Ed spent months trying to clear up the billing problems when Medicaid didn't pay for it after saying they would.

Our district does now pay for assistive tech for Andrew.

As far as Christian can remember, none of these schools ever checked to see what he knew when he came in. They just plopped him into whatever classroom had space, gave him whatever "services" his 504C standing entitled him to, and went about their day.

Anyway, whatever his income category, Christian went to 4 schools in 5 years.

So today he has 3rd grade level math.




my trip to the edu-attorney

I've mentioned that Ed and I saw an education attorney a few weeks back.

We were there on special ed business, but I was eager to ask about the legal status of typical kids.

Do typical kids have any kind of legal entitlement to an education?

Obviously they do; typical kids have a legal right to a free public education.

But do typical kids have any kind of legal entitlement actually to learn the material the teachers are teaching?

That's what I wanted to know.

The answer is no.

I asked the attorney, "How close are we to being able to sue school districts for negligence or malpractice?"

"People can sue doctors," I said, "people can sue lawyers, people can sue accountants.^*** Why can't people sue schools?"

He stared at me blankly.

I stared back.

"What do you mean?" he said finally. "On what grounds would you sue a school district?"

"Well," I said, "say a student goes all the way through school and graduates without knowing how to read. Could a parent sue because the school has passed her child through 13 years of school without teaching him how to read?" I'd read somewhere that this would be the first successful lawsuit brought by a parent against a district. That's why I brought it up.

No.

A parent could not sue on these grounds.

"If he's gotten all the way through school without being able to read," the attorney said, "then he should have been referred to special ed at some point."

I wasn't quick enough on my feet to ask whether a parent could sue a district for failing to refer her child to special ed, but I gather the answer to that question, too, is no.

The reason I gather that the answer is 'no' is that I now know children to whom this has happened.

I asked whether NCLB altered the legal landscape, but didn't quite follow his answer, which was, in essence, that "NCLB is a special ed law."

I'd never heard it put that way, but I suspect he's right.

I'm coming to the conclusion that parents don't understand the first thing about the law.




case law and custom

For some reason, I had been assuming that the reason parents can't sue schools was that there are state laws protecting school districts from legal action. It made sense to me that a coalition of teachers' unions and school districts would have been able to lobby for such legislation and get it passed.

The reality is far worse.

The reality is that parents have been suing schools for many, many years in many, many states, and they have always lost.

The courts have always ruled in favor of the schools.

Never in favor of the children.

Many decades of case law and custom tell us that no school is accountable for an individual child learning anything at all. I'm happy — in fact I'm eager — to revise this characterization if it's wrong. So let me know.

As our attorney put it, the courts have ruled against parents, because the reason a particular child failed to learn "could be something about the child."

I wasn't quick enough on my feet to ask whether a class action lawsuit would get around the "something about the child" issue (could it be something about every child?), but I doubt the answer would have been any better.




parents step in

For a couple of years now I've been getting the message that it's up to me to make sure my child learns the material covered in school.

When I say "getting the message" I mean "getting the message" in a global, big-picture kind of way.

I don't get this message from individual teachers, with a couple of exceptions. No teacher at Dows Lane or Main Street School ever gave me the impression that she wasn't reponsible for her students learning. The middle school, last year, had an official Grade Contract message assigning full responsibility for learning to students, but when we had our "team meeting" it was obvious every teacher there felt personally responsible for students in her class actually learning the material she was teaching.

So...this isn't a "teacher message."

It's a "school message;" an "administration message;" a "district message."

Why has my district shown no interest in formative assessment or teaching to mastery?

Because decades of case law and custom say there's no reason for them to be interested in formative assessment and teaching to mastery.

They are in the inputs business. The inputs business and the compliance business. They must provide teachers, buildings, books, lessons; and they must comply with countless thousands of pages of edu-law. When I was the parent rep on hiring committees, one of the key questions we asked every candidate concerned his or her familiarity with education law.

And that's it. So when schools innovate or "implement" reforms, they provide more teachers, buildings, books, and lessons. Character ed, differentiated instruction, portfolio assessment — whatever it is.

More stuff.

Parents have to understand that it's up to us to make sure our children learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. It doesn't just seem that way. It is that way.

Individual teachers take on responsibilities beyond what they have to take on; individual schools may do the same thing.

But if you don't have one of those teachers or schools, assessing your child's learning and remediating gaps is your job.

Saxon into the breach

So last week Christian started Saxon Math 5/4 Homeschool Edition.

MORE COMING






^* Probably the best article on this is Hanna Skandera & Richard Sousa's "Student Mobility and the Achievement Gap" in the Hoover Digest, but the link isn't working at the moment.

^** Christian's mom didn't have Medicaid because she made too much money. We had Medicaid because we got a Medicaid waiver.

^*** Tough to sue a writer, I've noticed. Free speech is a beautiful thing.

christianlearnsmath

-- CatherineJohnson - 17 Oct 2006

---

AgainstChallenge 01 Nov 2006 - 19:53 CatherineJohnson




More from Engelmann on teaching to mastery:

Rule 3: Always place students appropriately for more rapid mastery progress. This fact contradicts the belief that students are placed appropriately in a sequence if they have to struggle— scratch their head, make false starts, sigh, frown, gut it out. According to one version of this belief, if there are no signs of hard work there is no evidence of learning. This belief does not place emphasis on the program and the teacher to make learning manageable but on the grit of the student to meet the “challenge.” In the traditional interpretation, much of the “homework” assigned to students (and their families) is motivated by this belief. The assumption seems to be that students will be strengthened if they are “challenged.”

This belief is flatly wrong. If students are placed appropriately, the work is relatively easy. Students tend to learn it without as much “struggle.” They tend to retain it better and they tend to apply it better, if they learn it with fewer mistakes.

source:
Student Program Alignment and Teaching to Mastery (pdf file)
by Siegfried Engelmann

This is a perfect description of Irvington educational philosophy as it pertains to the rapidly dwindling student "elite," i.e. the chosen few who are allowed entry into accelerated and Honors courses.

The kids have to gut it out.

If they can't gut it out, down they go.

They "don't belong."



As a direct result of my experience muscling our family's way through "accelerated instruction" here in Irvington, I have now stricken the word "challenge" from my list.

I don't want to hear "challenge" ever again.

I want to hear "teach;" I want to hear "learn;" I want to hear "assess." That's "assess" as in assessment for learning, not grading.

During our meeting with the principal — which was very good — we raised the question of Irvington's rationing of accelerated courses.

That's another story; I'll get to it later. Suffice it to say that the middle school plans to offer two sections of Regents earth science next year, out of 8 sections altogether. Compare this to the Pelham school district which, a few years back (and possibly still today) had everyone in 8th grade taking Regents science and earning high scores on the Regents earth science test. Irvington has 25% of 8th graders taking earth science and apparently our Regents scores for the kids who take earth science in high school aren't good, or so I'm told.

Spot the difference?

Anyway, Mr. Witazek said he'd already had parents in to discuss the issue with him (good); he also mentioned that he himself had taken earth science in the 8th grade because in his school everyone took earth science in the 8th grade.

He's going to have to spend some serious time figuring this out, because this year the SOP^* isn't operative, SOP being that parents wait until after their child has been rejected to complain. We're complaining now.

Since he couldn't promise anything at that moment, he offered the observation that, "All courses can be challenging." This was sincere; it sounds like spin, but it wasn't.

I swatted it back across the net anyway. Time is short. I can't spend any more of my child's middle years swapping edu-language with the administrators who are in charge of his education.

I said, "Everyone who wants to take earth science needs to take earth science. Just telling people that this course or that course is 'challenging' isn't enough. An earth science course is either a Regents course or it's not."

The thing I like about the new principal so far is that he has exactly zero problem with a statement like that. Although he uses a great deal of edu-blah-blah in his official communications with parents, he clearly seems to think that parents are within their rights not to want to talk edu-blah-blah face to face.

Then I delivered my stump speech:

I don't want to hear 'challenging' any more. We've had 'challenging' in Phase 4 math for a year now, and it's a nightmare. All it means is the parents teach the course. Anyone can challenge a child. Just pull something that's over their heads off the internet and tell them to go do it. Teaching a child is what's hard. We want our child to be taught, not challenged.'

He said, "I hear what you're saying," and he meant it.

Since that meeting we've seen tangible changes in the math instruction.

Solutions to the homework problems are given out; kids check their own homework in class. (To me this is preferable to having the teacher collect the homework and correct it at home. These kids are perfectly capable of correcting their own homework as long as the teacher gives them the answers, and this way they get much more timely feedback.)

Then Ms. K finds out who missed which problems and gives each child individual help on those problems. (I'm thinking that as matters improve she shouldn't have to do that as often, because the kids should be getting homework assignments pitched to their level of mastery.)

A couple of days ago she gave a quiz consisting of two problems of the type they'd had on the homework assignment.

This is fantastic progress; it's exactly what we all desperately need; and it's happening because of the new principal.

We are impressed and grateful.

I've mentioned in the comments section that we're thinking the principal's background is a help.

Previously he worked with a disadvantaged student population in Albany schools.

During our meeting he seemed almost stunned to be finding out that he's got parents reteaching courses at home. This widespread practice has become naturalized for us; when there's trouble in a class, people immediately begin to reteach the content themselves; if trouble continues the next step is to hire a tutor. Parents take both of these steps quickly. Unlike a school bureaucracy, we don't wait for "the meeting" to provide "services."

Many parents hire tutors from the same school their child is attending.

All of this seems normal to us.

It does not seem normal to a person who just got off the train from Albany.

So far, I'd say he's making progress in changing the tone and culture of the school. Here is a bellwether: some of you will remember my friend who was spending close to $200 a week on tutoring by a middle school teacher to keep her child from flunking 6th grade.

I talked to her a couple of days ago.

She is now spending half that and she's spending nothing at all keeping her other child afloat.

She may be heading towards dispensing with the tutor altogether.

All of this appears to be happening because of the new principal.

The district needs fundamental reform.

At a minimum, we need a laser focus on student outcome.

What student outcomes will result from the proposed program or pedagogical approach?

And then: what student outcomes did result from the proposed program or pedagogical approach?

And we need to focus always on creating and maintaining the conditions for success.

One of those conditions is to dump the idea that unless a child is being worked to the point of burn-out or swamped by homework problems he has no idea how to do, he's not learning because he's not being challenged.

Teaching to mastery means the child is not gutting it out.

^* standard operating procedure


-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Oct 2006

---

NationalMathAdvisoryPanelLinks 21 Nov 2006 - 18:07 CatherineJohnson




meetings

• First Meeting (pdf file)

• Second Meeting (pdf file)

• Third Meeting (pdf file)
  

email updates

about the panel

homepage




where you can find links

I'm posting links to the Math Panel homepage, transcripts, & ktm posts here:

• recommended reading page
  

• book-style index
  

You can find both pages on the menu to the left.

If all else fails you can search posts using the keyword nationalmathematicsadvisorypanel with no spaces between words. (Works pretty well with spaces, too.)

I'm thinking this is about as findable and redundant as I can make the links now...unfortunately, you will have to remember some constellation of the words "national mathematics advisory panel" to find these links (that could be iffy for me these days....)

But I think I've just raised the odds of re-finding the transcript links considerably.


panel members w/links
Polite agreement or something we can use?
National Math Panel announcement
National Math Panel update
short story by Vern Williams

nationalmathematicsadvisorypanel


-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Nov 2006

---

WhoSpeaksForTheChild 01 Dec 2006 - 21:30 CatherineJohnson




Karen A pointed me to a post at Ken's, who pointed me to this passage from Siegfried Engelmann:

The problem with the current educational system is that it has no advocacy for the children. In fact, it is a very strong non-advocacy system, which is supported by all major components of the system—the law, colleges of education, local school districts, educational publishers, federal and state grant supports, and teacher unions.

I find this moving.

Every once in awhile I wonder what on earth Ed and I are doing.

Why would we be taking on our entire school district?

Why would we be pushing for systemic reform?

Why aren't we just getting what we can for our 3 kids?

That's what other people do - and that's what they say they're doing.

It's not that they don't care about other people's children. They do care.

They don't see any other way.

Most of the time they're right.^*


Engelmann's opening line reminded me of the last conversation I had with our departing head of special ed.

We were saying goodbye, and in the middle of the conversation she said, "You and Ed are very good advocates for your children."

Then she gave me a meaningful look for emphasis.

That took me by surprise.

Of course, I guess we are pretty good advocates for our children (she meant Jimmy & Andrew)....but I didn't realize that others might see us this way - or that they might see this as a good thing.

I guess I assume others see us as a pain in the tuchis, which we are when we need to be.


Over the past couple of years I've learned the lesson a lot of parents with special needs and typical kids learn: you have to advocate for the normal ones, too.

That was a surprise. I guess it shouldn't have been, but it was.

Anyway....reading Engelmann's opening line I thought: that explains it.

Advocating for systemic reform in our district is what we have to do to advocate for our typical child.

That's why we do it.

I'm sure we've got some civic duty motives mixed in there, too.

But if you ran an fMRI on both our brains right now, I expect you'd see the "good advocates for your children" areas lit up like a Christmas tree.

At some point I began to see the sameness of all the stories I was hearing.

I came to see that allowing a school to treat your child's problem as if it were his and his alone lets the school off the hook.

It's something about him, not something about them.

Of course, it is something about him....he's having a problem.

But he's having it at school.

So let's talk about the school, too.

I haven't written about the Princeton Charter School yet.

I'll do so soon, because it's important - and because I discovered yesterday that two of the signers of the anti-constructivism letter to Secretary of Education Richard Riley were founders of PCS.

For now, here is a passage from Chiara R. Nappi's account, "Why Charter Schools?": (pdf file)

When parents complained about their child's experience in school, even if they explicitly complained about the deficiencies of the curriculum, teachers and principals tended to treat each case as new and unrelated to any previous one, preferring to come up with solutions specific to a particular child rather than trying to modify the program to improve it for all children.

Engelmann is right: in American schools there is no one to advocate for the children.

It's not a case of bad people.

It's a case of bad structure.

Not to get into detail, it's been obvious to us everywhere we've been that the structure makes it quite difficult, perhaps dangerous in some cases, for teachers to advocate for children. And still they do it, often enough.

Here's Engelmann again:

Basically, the laws associated with teaching and student performance are two-faced. In one sense, the laws were instituted to protect the students and thereby protect the state's interest in a valuable resource. The other face of the law denies that teachers have any sort of professional skills that are not possessed by the person on the street, asserts that teachers have only "responsibilities," protects schools or teachers from liability, and refuses to recognize rights of students to receive a quality education. Although special education children are modestly protected by laws, the appropriateness of programs is not determined by anything approaching tight standards.

... there is not help from the law, no hope of malpractice suits (because these suits imply that teachers have professional skills, which the law denies), and no hope of support from state boards of education or state agencies because these agencies are not accountable for achieving their stated mission.

That's Engelmann, writing in 1982.



Accountability at Princeton Charter School

"A school that holds itself accountable is one that states its objectives, assesses its success in achieving those objectives, and reports to students, parents, and the community on its achievements.

Princeton Charter School (PCS) holds itself accountable to its various constituencies, including the taxpayers who largely support the school. School accountability begins with a curriculum that includes clearly stated, measurable outcomes logically developed within and between grades. PCS assesses and reports on many measures of student academic achievement and other important outcomes of the school's program."



The Princeton Charter School is a Blue Ribbon School.

^* I don't know if there is any other way normally. If Ed weren't a professor, if I weren't a writer, if Ed hadn't worked on the History-Social Science project in CA, if we didn't see eye to eye, if we were lots younger and less impatient with tomfoolery than we are at this stage of the game......things would be different.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Nov 2006

---

JohnDeweyJohnDewey 20 Nov 2006 - 14:05 CatherineJohnson




Somehow, I've managed to miss the fact that our friend John Dewey has dispatched not one, but two more letters from the front:

More on constructivism

and

Letter #7: A Good Swift Kick

From "More," this is wonderful:

I presented the problem [ from the TIMSS videotape of a math lesson in Japan (pdf file) ] to the class, saying I would like their feedback on whether such problem is appropriate for eighth graders. After my initial presentation of the problem I told them I would give them three minutes to work on it, but not to feel they had to solve it—I just wanted to reconvene at that time and then discuss it as a class. (This is in fact what they did in the Japanese classroom). All fell silent and worked at their desks. (Note to adherents of people-working-in-small-groups: In our class, when we are given a problem to solve, most of us like to solve it in isolation. When instructed to work in groups, one person in the group generally dominates. My mind becomes paralyzed and I crave being left to my own devices.)

After about a minute, I saw that people were perplexed, not getting anywhere, and I suddenly realized that in my excitement: I forgot to present the theorem they would need to solve the problem. I apologized and called for their attention and explained the key theorem they would need.

Now, I fully expected that no one would solve the problem in the three minutes and I would have to be “guide on the side” and coach them to see how to apply the theorem, thus proving to all who believe in constructivism that students can still “discover” when given information directly. I forgot that my classmates all have a math or science background and are not eighth graders. Three of my classmates solved it within a minute and others were on their way. Nevertheless, my oversight in not presenting the theorem did reveal something important: As smart and experienced as my classmates are, no one was having any great insights into a solution until I presented the theorem.

I led a discussion about the appropriateness of the problem for eighth graders. The people who solved the problem immediately thought that perhaps I should not give the theorem and let them “discover” it. Others who had a tougher time with the problem said, well, if you did that, maybe you should coach them to come up with the theorem rather than expecting them to do it on their own. Or maybe giving them the theorem wasn’t such a bad thing.

I suspect that the ones who had the easiest time were under the illusion that the theorem was superfluous and easily discovered. They forgot that a few minutes prior they were struggling until I told them what they needed to know. Just like people who in their memory believe they discovered all that was important in math. In short, anyone who was a constructivist at the beginning of the evening, was still a constructivist at the end of it.

We need lots more foxes in ed schools.

And lots fewer hedgehogs.

Crucial factoid about hedgehogs: hedgehogs actually perform worse in areas in which they specialize.

John Dewey, Edward L. Thorndike, constructivist

We've been operating under a misconception.

John Dewey is going to have to change his name to Edward L. Thorndike.







Edward L. Thorndike
Operant Conditioning and Behaviorism - an historical outline

John Dewey at Edspresso
John Dewey: The Complete Collection
johndewey

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Nov 2006

---

RegentsMathA 13 Dec 2006 - 20:38 CatherineJohnson




from 2004: ($)

To the Editor:

According to ''City High School Students Lag in Regents Test Scores'' (news article, Dec. 17), ''Some fear that raising the passing score'' on Regents exams from 55 to 65 ''could take a particularly harsh toll on city students.'' A representative of a coalition of civic organizations says, ''It's just cruel.''

Passing scores of 55 and 65 for the Math A Regents Exam are scaled scores that correspond to raw scores of 33 percent and 44 percent, respectively. In comparison, random guessing on the exam's multiple-choice component yields an expected raw score of 15 percent.

Under the current standard, a student who answers two-thirds of the questions incorrectly will pass. Under the proposed higher standard, a student who answers more than half of the questions incorrectly can still pass. In either case, students achieving the minimum passing score are unprepared for the Regents Math B course and most certainly lack the basic algebra skills needed for college-level mathematics. That seems cruel to me.

Stanley Ocken (scroll up, too)
New York, Dec. 19, 2004

The writer is a professor of mathematics, City College, CUNY.

how to ace Regents Math A

Saxon Algebra 1

That's it.

That's the answer.

Saxon Algebra 1.

Every lesson, every problem. Correct your wrong answers; take the tests.

I took the 2006 Regents Math A exam at the end of October, and I passed with distinction.

The test had 39 problems altogether:

• Part I: 30 multiple choice questions; worth 2 points apiece
• Part II: 5 short answer questions; worth 2 points apiece
• Part III: 2 short answer questions; worth 3 points apiece
• Part IV 2 short answer questions; worth 4 points apiece
  

I missed 4 items, all of them 2-point multiple choice items.

Raw score: 76 points out of a possible 84
Scaled score: 94 out of 100

Items missed:

• determine the equation of a perpendicular line - had never seen this problem before, didn't know how to do it. 2 weeks later Saxon Algebra 2 covered the material. So now I know.

• 2 problems on probability & factorials - no idea how to do either one

• 1 problem on graphing the equation of a linear equation, something I can (and frequently do) do in my sleep
  

So: 3 incorrect answers concerning material I'd never seen before.

1 incorrect answer due to dumb computation error.

This is where Saxon Algebra 1 gets you.

I can't wait to take a sample SAT test.



On the 2006 test the cut-off for passing is a raw score of 34, scaled score 65.

Cut-off for passing with distinction is a raw score of 65, scaled score 85.

If you got only the 2-pointers correct, you could pass the test by getting 17 out of 39 items correct.

I figure you could pass with as few as 14 out of 39 correct answers if you got full-credit for both 4-point questions and both 3-point questions (14 points), then got another 10 two-pointers right (20 points).

Unless I've made another dumb computation error.



Saxon: an alternate view

I hate Saxon Math right now! We have used Algebra 1 and 2 for two years, and it has been non-stop frustration. Why didn’t someone warn me that this would consume our lives? Why didn’t I pray more about this before taking the big step? Why wasn’t I smart enough to figure out after the first year that this wasn’t going to work?

For some reason, I find this comforting.

Another parent blowing it.

Another parent thinking she's got a plan when it's crystal clear to any rational person the plan isn't working, then obstinately continuing to think she's got a plan while things get worse.

Mule-headedness in parenting!

A good thing, as Martha Stewart used to say.

Well, muleheadedness in parenting often is a good thing, except when it leads to crying and yelling.

Crying, yelling, and recriminations.

Been there!

Done that!

But not, thank God, with Saxon Algebra 1 & 2.

Totally agree on the solution manual, though.

Regents Math A August 2006 (pdf file)
Regents Math A scoring key (pdf file)
2006 Regents Exams
archived Regents exams

Stanley Ocken to: Members of the Board of Education and other Interested Parties
regentsmatha

-- CatherineJohnson - 28 Nov 2006

---

RegentsReformAgain 02 Dec 2006 - 16:09 CatherineJohnson




Killer fact!

Calculators

Calling technology "a powerful student motivator," the committee endorsed more use of calculators, starting with basic four-function calculators in kindergarten, scientific calculators in grades 5-8 and graphing calculators beginning in grade 7. While the committee stressed that adequate state funding would be needed to assure all students have access, McSweeney said members were surprised to find widespread availability of calculators in cash-strapped New York City and other large cities.

source:
Panel: Make sweeping changes in math courses
Recommends to Regents new structure in tests, curriculum
November 18, 2004

Bill Brosnan and Terry McSweeney,
co-chairs of the Math Standards Committee.

Bill and Terry are right.

Technology is a powerful motivator.

Christopher, for instance, has been motivated to spend hours spelling "assface" on his Texas Instrument Solar Scientific Calculator Model TI 36X.


homage to Harry Hutton
(keep scrolling for complete, up-to-date list of Killer Facts)

-- CatherineJohnson - 30 Nov 2006

---

ScarsdaleSuperintendent 09 Dec 2006 - 04:41 CatherineJohnson




I know I've mentioned before that Irvington has a Scarsdale complex.

What Scarsdale does, we do.

Thus: if Scarsdale selects and implements Math TRAILBLAZERS, we select and implement Math TRAILBLAZERS. [ed.: that's a joke]

I can't for the life of me think why this would be, unless it has something to do with the fact that Scarsdale's SAT scores are a teensy bit higher than ours:

• Scarsdale 2005: 1251 Combined / 611 Math / 640 Verbal

• Irvington 2005: 1180 Combined / 602 Math / 578 Verbal
  
  source: Westchester Magazine (pdf file)
  

So today I learn that Scarsdale's Superintendent, one Mike McGill, has been named Superintendent of the Year.

Mike is a passionate guy, "a 1960s person ... pre-disposed to a kind of professive [sic] social vision," who is, of late, discovering the virtues of local control and the "danger in moving to big government."

The danger in moving to big government being, one gathers, way too much accountability.

Mike's not down with that:

If you listen to people like Richard Elmore, who’s a teacher at Harvard, he says the very top top American kids are scoring about the 75th percentile on international studies. So we know our top performing kids are doing very well.

I have now read this passage at least 10 times....and I'm still asking myself whether I can possibly be reading correctly.

Did the superintendent of Scarsdale's public schools just tell us that the top-top American kids are scoring at the 75th percentile in international studies?

Did he then tell us that when the top, say, 5 percent of our kids score at the 75th percentile internationally this is correctly viewed as an indication that they are doing "very well?"

It appears so:

...the very top top American kids are scoring about the 75th percentile on international studies. So we know our top performing kids are doing very well. What what are the challenges posed by those kinds of data? [ed.: you mean, aside from the challenge of our top kids scoring twenty-five points below the top kids in Europe and Asia?] What’s interesting to me about places like Scarsdale is that because high-performing school districts aren’t having to deal with some of the very gritty kinds of reality that some of our urban schools must deal with, we’re in a position to explore alternative ways of doing things and ask questions that go to the heart of what truly strong public institutions do and and to the heart of how they can function most effectively.

It’s a real privilege but it’s also a responsibility. [ed.: and the good part is ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY! slide and glide! Nobody's checking to see if any truly strong public institutions actually result from my spending a lot of time thinking about how truly strong public institutions can function most effectively!] Particularly today when so much of the impetus for educational change has shifted from localities to the federal or state government. I think it’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that historically one of the tremendous strengths of the American public school system has been the initiative and the individuality of local school districts.

When you cut through the blah-blah, Mike's point seems to be that what really interests him is "the important civic and ethical issues we face as human beings."

Drawing upon my top-knotch inferencing and restating skills, I would say that Mike's message is:

Hey. This is Scarsdale; I don't have to think about scores.

Good enough is good enough.

There is a huge amount of tutoring in Scarsdale, fyi.

You want to see tutoring up the wazoo, go to Scarsdale.

Also parent unrest.

There is parent unrest in Scarsdale. Possibly because they have to hire so many damn tutors.

In fact, if I had to bet, I'd bet Scarsdale will be the next town to have a listserv.







spot the TRAILBLAZERS difference

So here's an interesting factoid known only to me, Ed, my next-door neighbor, and our erstwhile Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum. (I know he knows because I gave him the data, walked him through it, and stood there while he read and reacted.)

You'll notice that Scarsdale is way out in front of Irvington on Verbal scores, but not on Math. We're close to even on Math.

Why would that be?

I don't know, but I suspect Math TRAILBLAZERS has something to do with it.

Scarsdale has had TRAILBLAZERS for quite awhile longer than we've had it.

They show a much more dramatic 8th grade slump in math scores than Irvington.

If you compare Irvington (pdf file) to Scarsdale (pdf file) in school year 2003-2004, here's what you see:

Irvington      4th grade       8th grade

Scores of 4       52%           41%
Scores of 3       40%           45%



Scarsdale      4th grade       8th grade

Scores of 4       71%           37%
Scores of 3       28%           56%

In school year 2003-2004, Math TRAILBLAZERS had been used in Scarsdale long enough for the 8th graders to have used TRAILBLAZERS in elementary school.

No children in Irvington had used TRAILBLAZERS at that point.

I assume that one reason our curriculum committee thought TRAILBLAZERS was a great idea was the fact that Scarsdale 4th graders were so far ahead of Irvington kids on the state tests. 71% of Scarsdale kids were scoring a 4, compared to just 53% of our kids. That's a big gap. (I assume.)

But did they look at the scores for 8th grade?

I don't know.

I've just checked last year's math scores for Irvington and Scarsdale.

The Scarsdale 8th graders, I believe, have been using Math TRAILBLAZERS for their entire school career.

The Irvington 8th graders left K-5 before Math TRAILBLAZERS was adopted.

28.4% of Scarsdale 8th graders last year, 2005-2006, scored a 4 on the state test.

38.9% of Irvington 8th graders last year, 2005-2006, scored a 4 on the state test — and these are kids, remember, who have been through Irvington's Death March to Algebra Phase 4 extravaganza. The Irvington Middle School math curriculum is a mess no matter who's teaching the thing.

And still, we have 38.9% of our kids scoring a 4 compared to just 28% of Scarsdale's TRAILBLAZERS kids.

I'm going to call upon my Bayesian priors to say there's a reason for that.






(Photo for Robyn)

-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Dec 2006

---

LindaMoranListserv 11 Dec 2006 - 19:25 CatherineJohnson




I think everyone here knows about Linda Moran's Teens and Tweens blog.

I've recently (re)discovered that she has a listserv attached to the blog.

I joined last week, and I think some of you might like to join as well. There have been some very interesting posts to the listserv that I don't believe have been posted to the blog itself — and that I don't expect to see posted to the blog itself.

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Dec 2006

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