slippery slope

…[I]f once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

Thomas De Quincey, "Second Paper on Murder"
via Fallacy Files

let's not and say we did

In Michigan’s Wayne County, prosecutor Kym Worthy plans to meet this month with the Detroit City Council to discuss an ordinance she’s proposing to require parents to attend conferences. The most severe penalty would be three days in jail. It troubles her when she hears of Detroit schools that have 300 students, and just two parents will show up for conferences. A lack of parental involvement often leads to truancy, which leads to crime, says Ms. Worthy. She knows her proposal may be challenged by civil libertarians, “but at least we’ll get the conversation started.”

How Would You Grade Parent-Teacher Conferences
by Jeffrey Zaslow
Wall Street Journal
October 6, 2010, 9:40 AM ET

That's going to be one short conversation.

Number one: yes, indeed, civil libertarians are going to object. Strenuously.

Number two: do they teach logic in law school?

Number three: perhaps prosecutor Kym Worthy should ask teachers whether they want parents showing up for parent-teacher meetings on pain of arrest and incarceration.

And that pretty much covers it.

Next.

let's not and say we did
let's not and say we did, part 2
let's not and say we did, part 3

iParent

Now that my son is in high school and getting real grades (not vague 1-5 and 6-10 rubric scores), I'm much happier. On top of that, I get to check all of his grades online at iParent. The high school apparently laid down the law and told teachers to get the grades uploaded as soon as possible. In fact, there were a couple of times when I knew his test scores before he did. This is quite different from middle school where I never saw a lot of work, let alone the grades. The weightings are all there and the current grade is given.

I expected grading in high school would be better defined and defendable, what with the importance of GPAs. At the open house last week, almost all of the teachers talked about grading and how grading in the different classes are coordinated. In math, they decided to reduce the weighting of math homework to just 5% because they felt that too many were using homework to pull out a passing grade. There is a sense that they really spend time on the issue. I never felt that way in K-8. It now seems like many more parents and kids are paying attention.

are we having fun yet?

Two memories of this math controversy in SCASD never fail to make me chuckle when I think back on them.  The first was a comment posted on the CDT site after the Ed Mahon wrote his first article on the subject, entitled “The Great Math Debate”.  The commenter wrote, “If you say ‘math debate’ over and over again, it sounds kind of funny.”

The second one happened at a math information session for parents last spring.  The district curriculum staff were telling the parents how much fun Investigations was for their children, and a parent raised his hand and said, “You know, it’s okay if my kids don’t have so much fun if they learn some more math.  They have plenty of fun at home.”

Parents for Quality Math Education

student loans

The privately held Drake College of Business, which trains people to be medical and dental assistants, relied on taxpayers for 87 percent of its revenue in 2007. Almost 5 percent of the student body at its Newark, New Jersey, branch is homeless, says Jean Aoun, director of admissions and student services there. Late in 2008, it began offering a $350 biweekly stipend to students who show up for 80 percent of classes and maintain a “C” average.

“It’s basically known in the community: If you’re homeless, and you need some money, go to Drake,” says Carmella Hutson, a case manager at the Goodwill Rescue Mission in Newark, where about 20 clients have enrolled at Drake in the past two years. “It would put money in my pocket, help me buy a car,” adds Jerome Nickens, 45, who lived at the mission when he talked to a Drake representative but decided not to enroll.

Homeless High School Dropouts Lured by For-Profit Colleges

college tuition

my money blog

[T]uition has been been increasing annually (7.88%) at more than three times the rate of inflation (2.37%) since 1978.

 Carpe Diem


You can't attribute the fantastic increase in college tuition to special education.

Or to unions, for that matter.


This has got to be a big part of it:

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in 2005 to include private student loans as one of the 10 debts that can't be forgiven.

Robert Siegel talks with Stephen Burd, senior research fellow in the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, who says federal loans had long been included in this list, but private loans were included in 2005 because lenders had been reluctant to take on the risk of student loans.

Now that lenders have no risk, Burd says, student loans have become a very lucrative business.

2005 Law Made Student Loans More Lucrative

algebra I and optics...

Solve for x, given k = x + 1/x and that k is fixed.

This is a reduced and massively rearranged derivation of the lens equation, when the separation distance between an image and object is known, and the focal length of a lens known and fixed at a single value. x = d_o / d_i. (Or due to symmetry, it could just as well be the other way round.)

Mathematica kindly pointed out (as it solved the equation for me) that you could write it this way:

k = x + x^-1

which resembles a quadratic equation, oooh. kinda. In real life you already know every k (= S/f -2) determines two solutions from experiment, but I was trying to decide how symmetric the ratios theoretically were.

Algebraic equation solvers tell me the solution has approximately the same form as quadratic roots, taking the form p +/- sqrt(q). Kinda. The general solution is x = 0.5 [ k +/- sqrt(k² -4)]

Unlike most quadratics though, there is a gaping asymptote, and the function y=k rapidly changes from -inf to +inf as x passes from -c to c, where c is a number arbitrarily close to zero. When x is large, k is approximately x; when x is small, k is approximately 1/x.

I puzzle in my head how to solve it algebraically on paper -- this college student who has (up to this point) taken Calc III, linear algebra, and the mess of multiple equilibrium scenarios that tricky chemistry professors throw at you. How do you algebraically solve "inverse-order" polynomials? I mean, this equation should be simple to solve, right?

schoolbook simplification

a. Between 1860 and 1991, American publishers produced readers for the same grade at widely divergent LEX levels (e.g., in 1968, first grade readers were available between -68 and -31).

b. The most difficult readers were generally published before 1918. By modern standards, Professor McGuffy’s pre- and post- Civil War readers were very difficult.

c. After World War I, mean reader LEX levels for all grades were generally simplified.

d. After World War II, mean levels of readers for all grades but third became even simpler. These were the books used by the Baby Boomers and successive cohorts.

e. School publishers in Great Britain did not simplify heir first grade readers after World War II, implying that there was no compelling educational reason for American publishers to further simplify their readers.

f. Today’s mean sixth, seventh, and eighth grade readers are simpler than fifth grade readers were before World War II.

g. Sentences were also shortened, from about 20 words before World War II to about 14 words now in Grades 4—8.

h. Texts for grade x + 1 are typically more difficult (lexically) than those for grade x. When the early readers in a series are simplified by a publisher, so too (generally) are the readers for later grades.

American readers were rewritten after World War II for many reasons: to modernize their content and graphics; to incorporate principles from research in education, psychology and linguistics; to emphasize new kinds of social relations; and to respond to television, which was fast becoming an unprecedented rival for students’ attention. Those considerations required that readers be changed but not that they be simplified. Chall (1967) described the justifications given at the time for simplifying schoolbooks; they were to increase their accessibility for students and raise the level of reading success.

The extent of this simplification is notable. Apart from one extraordinarily simple text (LEX = -75), most first graders in the Baby Boom era used readers whose LEX levels were between -53 and -65; that is, on average, first grade readers were 12 LEX units less difficult than the readers used by their parents and grandparents between World Wars I and II and 15 LEX less difficult than the texts used by students in the same grade in Britian — where the students were a year younger in age. Since the empirical range for LEX is about 140 units, a 12 LEX simplification represents 9% of the empirical range. Workbooks are also designed by the same publisher as the readers and are used in conjunction with them. Given the workbooks’ format, we cannot measure their LEX levels. It is unlikely the publishers would make the workbooks harder than their own reader for the same grade level.

In simplifying the readers’ patterns of word choice, the publishers also shortened sentence length (Figure 5). From the fourth grade on, the average sentence length was contracted by about 6 words — this is the equivalent of dropping one to two clauses from every sentence. This reduced the students’ experience in working out the meanings of more complex sentences.

Widespread objections from teachers and parents, and media publicity over the simplified, often dull, Dick, Jane, and Spot-like readers, caused most publishers to acknowledge that they had oversimplified their first and second grade readers. In the 1963 —1991 era, the mean LEX levels for those grades was restored to pre-Worid War II levels — and without ill effects. While they made those early texts harder, the publishers made the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade readers even easier — to the point where these are now at their lowest level in American history.

Schoolbook Simplification and Its Relation to the Decline in SAT-Verbal Scores
Donald P. Hayes, Loreen T. Wolfer, Michael F. Wolfe
American Educational Research Journal
Summer 1996, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 489-508

schoolbook simplification & the 50-point drop in SAT scores

I'm sure I've posted this before, but it bears repeating:

The 50+ point decline in mean SAT-verbal scores between 1963 and 1979 is widely attributed to changes in the composition of the test-takers. Several inconsistencies in that explanation are identified. That explanation also ignores the pervasive decline In the difficulty of schoolbooks found by analyzing the texts of 800 elementary middle, and high school books published between 1919-1991. When this text simplification series is linked to the SAT verbal series, there is a general fit for the three major periods: before, during, and after the decline. Long-term exposure to simpler texts may induce a cumulating deficit in the breadth and depth of domain-specific knowledge, lowering reading comprehension and verbal achievement. The two time series are so sufficiently linked that the cumulating knowledge deficit hypothesis may be a major explanation for the changes in verbal achievement. Only an experiment can establish whether this is causal, so we describe a simple, low-cost experiment schools can use to test how schoolbook difficulty affects their students’ verbal achievement levels.

Schoolbook Simplification and Its Relation to the Decline in SAT-Verbal Scores
Donald P. Hayes, Loreen T. Wolfer, Michael F. Wolfe
American Educational Research Journal
Summer 1996, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 489-508

cumulating knowledge deficit...

junket

The perennial issue of foreign language instruction in the early grades is alive once again in my district. I say "perennial" because, where foreign language instruction in the elementary grades is concerned, administrators are perennially against it while parents and interested bystanders are perennially for it.

The question of Mandarin keeps cropping up, too.

Looking for articles on edu-junkets to China, I found this:

Top San Francisco schools officials, who will consider expanding Mandarin language programs later this summer, quietly accepted a free trip to China recently to visit schools and meet with government officials who hope to persuade U.S. educators to expand Chinese curriculum.

Interim Superintendent Gwen Chan, five school board members and four principals made the unannounced trip from June 28 to July 4, spending time in Beijing and visiting schools across several provinces.

A staff member from the district's "multilingual programs department" also joined the entourage, which included about 400 schools officials from across the United States.

"This trip is not costing the school district any money," said Chan, whose first job in the district nearly 40 years ago was teaching Mandarin. "It is a goodwill and educational journey to promote Chinese immersion programs."

The Chinese government picked up the tab as part of its efforts to persuade U.S. schools to teach Mandarin, the official language of China.

[snip]

The San Francisco contingent -- including board members Mar, Jill Wynns, Dan Kelly, Norman Yee and Eddie Chin -- said they found the trip inspirational.

"I feel it helps us understand a significant portion of our student body,'' said Mar.

Wynns said there was great value in seeing another society, "especially one from which so many of our students have come.''

The trip included excursions to the Great Wall of China and Tiananmen Square in addition to a speech by the Chinese minister of education in the Great Hall of the People.

Even though five elected school board members traveled together without a public announcement, Wynns said the trip did not violate California's open-meeting law known as the Ralph M. Brown Act because no official business was discussed.

Kelly put an even finer polish on the point:

"You could say it was a junket," he said. "Totally a junket. We did no real work at all."

China trip for top schools officials
- Jill Tucker, Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writers
Thursday, July 13, 2006

A: The point of junkets is to get junketeers to spend money. There is no free junket.

B: Open Meetings law applies to any gathering of a majority of the board. A special exception for junkets does not exist.