Our schools do ruin Singapore Math

SteveH has said a few times "Our schools would ruin Singapore Math." Well, we can dispense with the "would". Schools routinely ruin Singapore Math, just as they ruin every other initiative brought in. Not all schools do, of course, but badly run schools ruin everything --professional development, curricula, assessment, leadership initiatives. Bringing in good materials to a bad school doesn't work at fixing the school. (Whether it saves an individual student here or there is an open question.)

I have now seen schools ruin Singapore math. They do this by not reading Primary Math's own materials, not understanding or seeking out anything about how Singapore taught using Primary Math, by not getting their staff any professional development at all for using Singapore Math. So their teachers know nothing about how the lessons are supposed to be taught, what "Concrete->Pictorial->Abstract" means, and teach math the same way they taught before. Typically, they don't even get them a full complement of materials. I've seen schools where the teacher NEVER read the teacher's guide, and just assumes that since the textbook looks simple to them, there's nothing more to it.

Then they ruin it some more by teaching it out of order to "match the state standards"(more on this in an upcoming post next week.) Since nearly everything in Primary Math is carefully predicated on what has been taught before, this makes no sense at all.

I've now seen schools ruin Lemov's Teach Like a Champion, too. They do this by using it as a micromanagement tool--lesson plans must look exactly like this, word choice must sound exactly like this,   etc. to beat the teachers into submission. Then they ruin it some more by using the lack of techniques present during a class to penalize a teacher during an evaluation.  Nothing like making the teachers hate the administration, or that their lesson planning is a waste, or that all "teacher improvement" is really just a cover for a method for trying to fire a teacher to make the school function!

I've now seen schools ruin PLCs, too.

What is the common denominator?  cargo cult education.  To shamelessly quote myself:

Unless they understand what's underneath the "lessons of the high performing school" (the high performing parents, the high performing teachers, the high performing students) then it won't matter. Unless the "lessons" they grab are that they need teachers who already know classroom management skills and content, need solid curricula that can be built to mastery, need ability grouping rather than differentiated instruction, need schools that already enforce discipline and control their students' behavior, need raised expectations for all students, and more, then they will be missing something essential."

In each case, these schools have no idea what the actual function of teaching is, what knowledge you're supposed to impart to the students. So they grab PLCS, or TLAC, or Singapore Math, but it's just coconut shell headphones. Their teachers don't know that their students don't know 10/9 is a fraction; their teachers don't know that you can't teach the chapters of a math book in another order; their teachers don't know why place value works. Their principals don't know that their teachers haven't read the Teacher's Guide at all; their principals don't know that "accountable talk" isn't the same thing as explaining your bar model; their principals don't know that their teachers didn't follow any scope and sequence this year; their principals don't know what their teachers and students don't know. And they may test prep their way to better scores, but their students will still not know enough to succeed in high school, let alone college.

The real question is: can you find a school that isn't practicing cargo cult education? How would you know?