The College Board is betraying our trust

From a teacher at a high-performing high school:

To teach a class called AP anything, you have to have your syllabus approved by the College Board. They want to ensure that you are covering the content that they require. This already annoys me: let my students take the test and see how they do. Their results will indicate whether I am covering the material or not.

But it's their name so it's their rules. I submit my curriculum. First try, it comes back rejected: I have not provided evidence that my course is "student centered" and that I use "guided inquiry" to develop "critical thinking skills."

So to use the AP label, you give the College Board authority to define what you teach and how you teach it.

 Fortunately (as I ranted to my students), educationists use undefined buzzwords that can mean anything we want them to. So I announced that from this day forward, my class is now 100% student-centered. Can you smell the fresh clean scent? We then continued with the lesson as planned...

We can not make "critical thinking" the goal. Whatever critical thinking may mean (and I don't really know), we better hope that it emerges as a result of the careful work that we do teaching our specific subjects. But the goal should always be to teach the subjects!

When you make "critical thinking" the goal, then someone is going to say: so math/history/French/science is not that important -- let's just teach them how to think critically. What follows from that is nearly always some inane, time-wasting idea for an "activity" that is disconnected from reality and certainly disconnected from the subject I thought we were trying to teach.

If the College Board is now simply an outpost of Teachers College, it should say so, out loud.

Is this the work of David Coleman?

And is the ACT the last man standing?

College Board takes leave of its senses

In a new type of advanced government class at Seattle’s Garfield High, the students rarely sit quietly taking notes while their teacher stands and lectures.

Instead, they debate each other. They write legislation. They run for president in mock elections and pretend they’re lawyers arguing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

They sometimes even stand up and holler, as Sanai Anang did recently, playing a member of a Virginia-based group that lobbies for strict immigration controls.

In a simulated public hearing, Anang, who loves to ham it up, jumped to his feet without being recognized and declared, in a mangled Southern accent, “Ee-lee-gals come over and take our jobs. They don’t bee-long here.”

His classmates and teacher Jerry Neufeld-Kaiser cracked up.

They are all part of a teaching experiment that began six years ago in the Bellevue School District when a handful of frustrated government teachers teamed up with University of Washington researchers and turned the usual Advanced Placement curriculum inside out.

[snip]

The [College Board] is watching the teaching experiment carefully, interested in its promising results. In 2012 the board invited project leaders to its A.P. conference to present their ideas to A.P. teachers from across the nation.

It’s important that students gain an in-depth understanding of a subject, said Auditi Chakravarty, an A.P. program vice president. “And that requires more than the passive sit-and-get kind of learning.”

Sit and get.

That's a new one on me.

And when did high-school kids making fun of southern accents (and southern people) become a hands-on learning activity?

We are a long way from debate club.

Cliff Mass has a good comment in the comments thread.

From 1992 - David Klein and Jerry Rosen on fuzzy math and why we have it

The 1992 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools governs, to a considerable extent, the mathematics curriculum in California's public schools. It is a model of mediocrity. The Framework recommends that calculators be issued to kindergartners and used in all K-12 grades; it strongly discourages placing students by ability or achievement; it advocates that teachers do more "facilitating" and less "teaching;" it discourages testing, and promotes portfolios, "authentic assessment," and "holistic scoring rubrics;" it de-emphasizes basic skills and promotes "cooperative work" over individual responsibility. In short, it is the bible of "fuzzy math."

[snip]

Why is this kind of mediocrity promoted by so many education professors and education experts? We suggest that it is simply good intentions gone awry, resulting in institutionalized "liberal racism." Liberal education experts fear that minority students can't learn real math because of "cultural differences." They recognize that it would be preposterous to lower standards only for those students while maintaining high standards for other groups. Thus, the education experts lower standards for everyone, with "authentic assessment" replacing hard-core, standardized tests, and so-called "higher order thinking" supplanting basic skills.

The clearest refutation of the racism disguised by the Framework comes from the work of Jaime Escalante, the teacher who was immortalized in the movie, "Stand and Deliver." Mr. Escalante proved beyond any doubt that minority students from poor neighborhoods can do as well in mathematics as any other group. His methods were traditional and "non fuzzy."

HOW EXPERTS DUMB DOWN MATH EDUCATION
Los Angeles Daily News
May 31, 1996
HOW EXPERTS DUMB DOWN MATH EDUCATION
by David Klein and Jerry Rosen

Ten years ago, I would have rejected this explanation out of hand.

But today, as a classroom instructor teaching "basic" composition, I wonder.

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: college freshmen whose skills are far below where they need to be can be perfectly intelligent and 'smart' when you stick to spoken language.

They can be and they are.

In fact, it's not necessarily possible to tell which students have better skills and which poorer by listening to classroom discussion.

The Cambridge Pre-U courses are a case in point. I gather Cambridge Pre-U is being sold to districts (and to parents) as a rigorous replacement for AP courses that does not require grouping. All kids, at all levels of skill and ability, can take the same course and it's still advanced.

The reason that claim can be made is that the courses -- at least the one I witnessed -- primarily involve Googling (there is no assigned reading), creating group Powerpoints for presentation to the class, and class discussion. (The class I saw required one paper, written at the end of a year and a half of 'study.')

On the day I visited a Cambridge Pre-U class, one of the students strongly challenged a presentation four other students were giving. Every point the challenger made was dead-on.

Afterwards, the principal told us how wonderful the class is because you can't tell the AP kids apart from the non-AP kids.

Then he said proudly that the student who had done all the challenging was a kid who would never have been allowed to take a regular AP course in his school.

Naturally, that got my dander up. A talented student who hadn't been prepared by his school to take an AP course didn't seem like something a principal should be talking about with anything other than embarrassment and regret.

Today I feel a bit differently.

I certainly believe that the student I saw in action should have been prepared by his school to take one Advanced Placement course by graduation. He was headed for college, and that being the case, preparing him for AP was the school's job.

On the other hand, I now know that being smart and capable in speech does not mean being smart and capable in writing. Not even close.

I also know that writing really is thinking in any number of ways. Which means if you can't write....you're not the smartest person in the room.

So, back to Klein and Rosen. It now seems entirely plausible to me that, like me, a large contingent of education reformers has registered the fact that that underprivileged students fare better talking than writing (or doing math).

Education reformers don't have to have decided consciously to tackle the achievement gap by making math into a discussion subject in order to have done just that.

The New York Times is going to be surprised again

The New York Times is surprised 12/11/2013

In the Times today:

In past years, the College Board, which administers the program and the exams, has been justifiably criticized for requiring too much rote learning of a broad range of facts, and too little time for in-depth study, lab work or creative ventures. But now the board is beginning a drastic revision of its courses and exams, which will focus on the most important core concepts of a subject and leave more room for students and teachers to become more creative.

Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up
In Math and Science, the Best Fend for Themselves

Ostensibly, the New York Times editorial board believes AP courses are flawed and approves of the current effort to gut revise them.

Close reading of this passage, however, compels me to point out that the choice of the word "drastic" as the modifier for "revision" signals a certain ….. foreboding …. on the part of the Times.

Conclusion: the collective basal ganglia of the Times editorial board is crying out to be heard.

10 days between AP exams versus 1 day

ABSTRACT
In many education and work environments, economic agents must perform several mental tasks in a short period of time. As with physical fatigue, it is likely that cognitive fatigue can occur and affect performance if a series of mental tasks are scheduled close together. In this paper, we identify the impact of time between cognitive tasks on performance in a particular context: the taking of Advanced Placement (AP) exams by high-school students. We exploit the fact that AP exam dates change from year to year, so that students who take two subject exams in one year may have a different number of days between the exams than students who take the same two exams in a different year. We find strong evidence that a shorter amount of time between exams is associated with lower scores, particularly on the second exam. Our estimates suggest that students who take exams with 10 days of separation are 8% more likely to pass both exams than students who take the same two exams with only 1 day of separation.

The Impact of Time Between Cognitive Tasks on Performance: Evidence from Advanced Placement Exams
Ian Fillmore and Devin G. Pope
NBER Working Paper No. 18436
October 2012 JEL No. D03,I20

Dartmouth strikes a blow against A.P.

So glad we didn't have C. apply to Dartmouth (my alma mater):

“The psychology department got more and more suspicious about how good an indicator a 5 on the A.P. psych exam was for academic success,” said Hakan Tell, a classics professor who heads Dartmouth’s Committee on Instruction, so the department decided to give a condensed version of the Psych 1 final to incoming students instead of giving them credits.

Of more than 100 students who had scored a 5 on the A.P. exam, 90 percent failed the Dartmouth test. The other 10 percent were given Dartmouth credit.

[snip]

The College Board, which administers the A.P. program, said it found the Dartmouth results hard to credit.

“It’s very difficult to believe that 90 percent of students with a 5 on their A.P. would flunk a test on an introductory course,” said Trevor Packer, the College Board official in charge of the A.P. program. “We have research, including Dartmouth students who got a 5 on their psychology A.P., showing that they did better than students without that A.P.”

Mr. Packer said he believed Dartmouth had an obligation to share details of the experiment.

Dartmouth Stops Credits for Excelling on A.P. Test
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: January 17, 2013

Suburban schools in my neck of the woods are itching to dump AP courses, and Dartmouth's move will be cited far and wide and often. Thanks!

Dartmouth needs to release the data. AP courses are developed by disciplinary specialists; in the past Ed's been approached to work on AP history. In terms of content the AP course is a college course.

I agree that high school teachers are in no way the equivalent of college professors with Ph.D.s in the field, but that is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is Dartmouth's claim that entering students who have scored 5s on the AP Psychology exam fail an introductory Dartmouth psychology department exam. I don't believe it. I know the kind of kid who gets accepted to Dartmouth -- I personally know several students attending Dartmouth now -- and they're not failing introductory-level course exams. If they are, there's something wrong with the exam.

Here's a student essay, from the AP Psychology Examination, that scored 10 of 10. (Scoring commentary here)

Here's the College Board's explanation of scoring for the writing portion.

Psychology Course Description

books vs 'visuals'

Just found this comment by an AP history teacher:

Videos (DVDs, films, whatever) are overrated. A full-length movie had better be virtual time travel to be worth the time showing it. Bits and pieces are okay. I used a lot of stuff off of YouTube - there are excerpts from everything there.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Students are appallingly jaded when it comes to visuals, and, to be honest, they're so used to watching stuff, that they don't actually pay attention any more. If you show something, you're going to have to explain it much more than you think. What does haunt them is in the books. I always showed a Japan class some propaganda films with heavy atrocities - didn't faze them a bit - and then had them read "Hiroshima" - and they had nightmares from it.

off-topic: While I was in Illinois, Blogger completely reworked the post window.

I don't like it.

At least, not so far.

winner-take-all schools redux

more from the conversation re: public versus private school on College Confidential:

cpt of the house writes:

The fundamental reason for my sending my kids to a private school is that I could see that they got more opportunities for high level academics, sports, music and a lot of other things as compared to their highly regarded high school. Now some kids were able to get those same goodies at their public schools, and that is a wonderful thing. I did not enjoy those years of paying that tuition and if our public school, or any public school in the area could have provided the benefits that the privates could, I would have jumped on it. But they did not. I had kids who could not get into AP programs at our county school districts, but got into them in the private schools and got all 4s and 5s on the tests.

and:

Now in our case, we were taking chances since our kids were not the top grade academic kids in K-12 that are at these private schools and were in the bottom half and even quarter of their class in high school. They needed every bit of positive push we could give them....they would not have had those advantages and choices from our public school. They would not have gotten into the top classes there that are gate kept (I checked), they could not get the number of ECs in terms of performing arts, and they would not have gotten the athletic opportunities. Their peers would not have been the kids who were assuming they were going to go to college as our high school is very diverse in socio economic situations and since they would not be in the classes where college is the main goal.

This is what Paul Attewell documented in his study of elite public high schools. Kids who are capable of earning 4s and 5s on Advanced Placement exams are tracked out of the most advanced courses.

Paul Attewell's Winner-Take-All in bullet points
The Winner-Take-All High School: Organizational Adaptations to Educational Stratification. Paul Attewell. Sociology of Education, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), 267-295

Edgemont High School

Jay Mathews' Newsweek Challenge Index is now at the Washington Post (very glad to see it survive Newsweek's sale), where it is now called The High School Challenge.

How schools are ranked:

The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2010 by the number of graduating seniors.

Edgemont High School is ranked 197 in the country, which is not surprising given the high socioeconomic status of its students.

What is surprising - what is astonishing, really - is Edgemont's "Equity and Excellence" score, which gives the percent of graduating seniors who have scored a 3, 4, or 5 on at least one AP exam by graduation: 86.6% of Edgemont's graduating seniors passed at least one AP test.^*

Can that possibly be true?

I assume it can, given that Rye and Chappaqua have reported similar scores now or in the recent past. 

Their figures over the past several years are very high compared to the percent most schools - including most affluent suburban schools - post.

^*IB scores count, too, but I don't think Edgemont has IB courses.

Steve H on the Race

Speaking of the Race to Nowhere, Steve H writes:

At any level, there will likely be students who work harder than you do. This only matters because the top colleges pick those kids. A parent I know has most of her kids at Phillips Andover, with the goal being an Ivy League school. Does a high school think that competition will go away if they eliminate AP classes?

I like AP classes because it forces some sort of rigor on high schools, but I don't like the AP arms race. These are two separate issues. The arms race has to do with supply and demand at colleges. A senior I know is taking 5 AP classes even though she will be going to a college that is ranked only about 90th for liberal arts colleges. IB doesn't help. It's actually worse in terms of commitment. With AP, you can choose what you want to do.

Even if the demand goes down and the college SAT cutoffs are reduced, there will still be the same percent of students stressed out about getting into their first choice colleges. Is supply and demand the problem of K-12 education?

There are also the problems of curriculum and how well classes are taught. Students can be stressed by working very hard, but be quite happy when they get into the college they want. Students can also be stressed when they find out that all of their hard work didn't prepare them properly.

Of course, this doesn't say anything about the kids at the middle and lower end. I find it odd that when many see problems in high school, they think that the problem to fix is in high school. They translate everything into one problem to solve. Even in K-6, I see solutions based on remediation and not finding the source of the problem.

If the problem is overstressed students (not bad classes or curricula), then don't push them. Tell them not to take so many AP classes and do so many activities. Our son is not at Phillips Academy, but we don't ignore the game. It's my job to help him find the right balance. It's the school's job not to waste his time.

Anonymous on Race to Nowhere and over-work

Anonymous writes:

This movie was shown in our district courtesy of our PTO. The re-cap in the local paper confirmed what a friend told me about the event: the discussion hosted afterward quickly ended up in favor of less AP classes. Parents wanted to ditch AP and Honors class in favor of more vocational and elective type classes. This would be more an annoyance than a serious concern if I didn't live in a district that has already eliminated gifted ed and doesn't support ability grouping until middle school. Eliminating AP classes is just one more way to take away opportunities for the motivated, the gifted, and/or the plain 'ole hard-working kid.

However, I do think the message may be partially right. Our kids are working too hard-- they're spinning their wheels for all the wrong reasons: poor curricula, lack of ability grouping, constructivist classrooms, lack of pedagogical content, and other issues often discussed on this website. It's really hard to waste time of a group project or power point presentation and then wonder why the SAT and ACT questions are so challenging, why you now need to hire a tutor, or why you're going to have to give up that dream of becoming an engineer because you never developed the requisite skills. Not having the proper foundation means you're going to have to work really, really hard to make things happen... and sometimes, it's just so difficult you just give up.

The peril to AP classes is a real worry to me. My district would clearly like to eliminate them (although I'm guessing they'd be interested in replacing AP with IB).

I wish I'd filmed the three college presentations we've attended. It's all AP all the time; colleges want to see AP courses on transcripts.

They make no bones about it.

AP science & math

from Education Week:

Begun in the 1950s to let gifted students undertake college-level work in high school, AP courses, in Mr. Sadler’s words, have since become “the juggernaut of high school education.” Growing at a rate of 9.3 percent a year in the past two decades, enrollment in AP courses well outpaces the 1 percent yearly increase in the number of students graduating from high school, the book says.

[snip]

...some students elect to retake the AP course they took in high school by enrolling in an introductory-level course in the same subject in college.

In his study, Mr. Sadler and his research partner, Gerhard Sonnert, look more closely at the retakers in 55 randomly selected colleges across the country.

Their aim was to see whether students who took and passed high school AP courses had an edge over their college classmates in the same subject, after controlling for differences in students’ academic backgrounds or previous science coursework. (AP course-takers typically have more extensive science backgrounds and better grades than non-AP students.)

The answer, judging by the students’ grades in the introductory-level college classes, was yes. The former AP students didn’t ace the classes—their grades fell on average in the range of B to B-plus—but they did better in their chemistry, physics, and biology classes than peers without any AP experience.

That was not the case, though, for students who had previously failed an AP biology test; they fared no better in that subject in college.

Grade Bump

In another study featured in the book, Mr. Sadler also applies some systematic analysis to the GPA-boosting “bonus points” that high schools often assign to AP-course grades. College-admissions officers also use similar methods to add weight to AP-course grades when comparing students’ grades.

To find out if the extra points were warranted, Mr. Sadler asked college students in 113 introductory biology, physics, and chemistry courses about the level of high school science courses they had taken and the grades they received in them. He then compared the results with professors’ reports of their students’ grades in those introductory science classes.

Mr. Sadler found that students who took honors or AP courses in high school science added an average of 2.4 grade points, on a 100-point scale, to their college science grades for each additional level of rigor. Based on that calculation, he figures that students who take honors courses ought to receive an extra half-point on a grade-point-average scale of 1 to 4, while AP courses ought to be worth an extra point, and an extra 2 points if students pass the exam.

Book Trains Critical Eye on AP Program's Impact
By Debra Viadero
Published in Print: March 17, 2010, as Book Eyes Impact of AP Classes and Exams
Education Week

A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program
Edited by Philip M. Sadler, Gerhard Sonnert, Robert H. Tai, and Kristin Klopfenstein

Advanced Placement

terrific info on Advanced Placement courses & college admissions / college credit in this Comment thread

lgm on algebra in 8th grade

Comment left by lgm:

My college has shown statistics to interested alumni that say doing well in 8th grade algebra correlates with being successful in Calculus AB, which correlates to being most successful in earning an engineering degree in four years as opposed to dropping out or taking five/six years.

The "brain rule" that the brain needs 10 years to consolidate a memory comes as earth shattering news to me. Of course, I'd known about the 10-year rule for some time:

Some evidence that a great deal of practice, and not just talent, is a prerequisite for expertise is the "ten year rule," which states that individuals must practice intensively for at least 10 years before they are ready to make a substantive contribution to their field. What about prodigies like Mozart, who began composing at the age of six? Prodigies are very advanced for their age, but their contributions to their respective fields as children are widely considered to be ordinary. It is not until they are older (and have practiced more) that they achieve the works for which they are known.

Practice Makes Perfect -- But Only If You Practice Beyond the Point of Perfection
by Daniel Willingham
American Educator, Spring 2004

But it hadn't occurred to me that memory per se -- memory for ordinary, everyday skills and knowledge, as opposed to the memory involved in expert performance -- might also require 10 years to gel.

I am completely blown away by this.

Assuming John Medina is citing a field of research separate from the research on expertise (I'll find out when my copy of his book arrives), I'd say we have converging lines of evidence both for the 10-year rule and for assuming a causal rather than merely correlational relationship between algebra in the 8th grade, success in AP Calculus AB, and obtaining an engineering degree in four years as opposed to 5 or 6.

The fact that constructivist curricula are slower than the semi-traditional curricula they replaced is horrifying.

Steve on high school rankings & non-linear optimization

Steve has left several comments on the U.S. News & Newsweek rankings of high schools. In this one he responds to the question I asked about whether a parent could base a decisions about where to live in the rankings:

"In other words, say you're a parent looking to move to a district with good schools. Could you base a decision in these rankings?"

"Base a decision"? No. Is it of no value? No, but it's all relative. Schools think it's important because it's good PR. Our high school has a reference to it on its home page, and it's only a silver medal!

Over the long run, schools can take advantage of the formula. Anytime you have an extremely important formula that condenses a lot of information down into a single number, it's open to gamesmanship. But, the more that schools play the game, the less useful is the formula. I've seen cases where it's a constant arms race between those who want a formula to reflect reality and those who want to beat the formula.

If a school pushes all students to one AP class or another whether or not they are properly prepared, then that might improve the score, but the education might not be better. Or, it could be a false or local optimum and they completely miss a much larger global optimum that uses a different approach.

Important formulas generally force a trend towards one particular solution. Uncertainties in the formula can hide other solutions that might offer much better results. Instead of reflecting reality, they drive reality.

Think of a formula that tries to represent a topographic map. You want to find the highest point on the map but all you can do is plug in your latitude and longitude into a black box that will give you a height. You keep doing this and try to search for the highest point. If your second point gives a lower height, you turn around and go in the other direction and check the height.

This is called non-linear optimization and I have many books that discuss solutions to this problem. If you know derivative information, you can search faster. If not, you can find slopes numerically.

The problem is that you might find a mountain peak, but it's the shortest peak of the mountain range. Another problem is that the black box might not represent reality very well. There might not be a mountain peak there at all.

Another, more subtle issue is that (due to uncertainty) the very highest peak location is no better than a location that is 10 percent lower. If you think of a long mountain range, it might be much easier to climb to the slightly lower end of the mountain range than it is to climb the other end where the absolute highest point is located. In other words, an easier optimum to a problem (within 10 percent) might be located far, far away.

Rather than push all high school kids onto at least one AP track in high school, the easier approach might be to fix the problems in K-6 before they get large. They won't find this solution if they are focused on a formula that uses only high school data.

report: Reading First has worked

I had been hearing that Reading First had worked, mainly in interviews with E.D. Hirsch, I think:

And that, paradoxically, is the one area which has just come in for a scandal, the reading first program, because that program insisted that you have to have a phonics-oriented early reading program which was just what they have been pilloried for in this recent GAO report.

I'd been asking Ken about it, because I figured if anyone would know, he would.

Ken said he'd heard the same thing, but didn't know.

Turns out Hirsch was right.

Reading First has worked; Ken reports that it is one of only four programs in the Department of Education - and the only program within NCLB - rated "effective."


Reading First

• Reading First is a focused nationwide effort to enable all students to become successful early readers.
• Funds are dedicated to help states and local school districts eliminate the reading deficit by establishing high-quality, comprehensive reading instruction in kindergarten through grade 3.
• Building on a solid foundation of research, the program is designed to select, implement, and provide professional development for teachers using scientifically based reading programs, and to ensure accountability through ongoing, valid and reliable screening, diagnostic, and classroom-based assessment.

4 of 88 programs rated "Effective "

By my count, 4 of 88 Department of Education programs are rated "Effective":

• Adult State Education Grants "The Adult Education State grants program funds literacy and basic skills education programs to help adults become literate, get a secondary school education, or learn English. Funds are distrbuted by formula grants to States and States must distibute funds competitively to local providers." (that's good news)
  

• NAEP ("The Nation's Report Card")
  

• NCES (National Center for Education Statistics)

• Reading First

whole language lives on

New report out from Fordham; schools still disguising whole language as balanced literacy:

Moats, a psychologist and widely respected authority on early reading, authored a previous Fordham report in October 2000 called Whole Language Lives On. In it, she uncovered many whole-language programs hiding behind the phrase "balanced literacy" in order to win contracts from school districts and avoid public scrutiny.

Seven years later, such programs still exist-and still try to pull the wool over educators' eyes. Worse, major school systems, including Denver, Salt Lake City, and New York City, continue to adopt them, misled by materials that "talk the talk," touting the five elements of effective reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel, but which are actually just whole-language programs in disguise.

Here's Mike Petrilli:

"This report's findings help to explain why the federal government has to be prescriptive in its implementation of Reading First," said Michael J. Petrilli, Fordham's Vice President for National Programs and Policy. "Anyone can put the label ‘scientifically-based' on the cover of their reading program. But if we want to do right by kids, we need to dig below the surface. If the policy is to fund only programs that truly work, officials at all levels need to fend off the charlatans."

This is where I team up with Engelmann.

It's time for think tanks, policy wonks, and researchers to stop telling us about the "five principles" of effective reading instruction or whatever it is, and start telling us the names and authors of the programs that work.

But no.

Instead, Moats tells parents to ask their school, Does our school reading program--

• Have valid screening measures in place to identify children at risk and provide them with early/extra instruction in word recognition, comprehension, and writing skills?
• Interweave multiple language components (such as speech sounds, word structure, word meaning, and sentence structure) together in the same lesson?
• Support reading comprehension by focusing on a deep understanding of topics and themes rather than developing a set of shortcut strategies?

So say you ask your school these probing questions.

What's the answer going to be?

NO?

We DON'T interweave multiple language components such as speech sounds, word structure, word meaning, and sentence strugure together in the same lesson?

School district personnel, in my experience, routinely tell parents programs are "scientific," "supported by research" and all the rest whether they are or not.

My favorite instance of this was the time our former middle school principal told a huge gathering of parents that "all the research shows constructivist math is the way to go."

The only way to make that a true statement is to change "all" to "none."

He made this remark with aplomb.

Parents don't have a chance against aplomb.

My district uses balanced literacy, I'm told.

In case you were wondering.



Advanced Placement Test Fees and AP Incentives rated moderately effective

These are programs designed to increase minority participation in AP courses.

By my count 7 programs, of 88, are rated "Moderately Effective."

Not bad.


Reading First has worked
Reading Last