Comments needed

If you have time to comment on Barry and Katharine's new article at The Atlantic, please do!

More fun with passive voice

Katie and I have just finished 5 chapters of exercises for Ed's European history textbook!

FIVE!

A great weight has lifted from our shoulders, soon to be replaced by Great Weight Number 2: finish another 5 chapters before Katie leaves in July.

I've just this moment revised the section on passive voice after our editor cut the line saying all good writers use it. We'll get pushback on that, she says.

(We handled the possibility of pushback by dropping the claim about good writers & doubling down on the assertion that passive voice is essential to cohesion.)

While I was Googling p.v., I found this:

All good writers use the passive voice. Orwell actually uses it while criticizing it: In bad prose, "the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active," he writes. He could have recast that sentence, but his focus was on the (alleged) stylistic sin; that was the logical subject, even if that required a passive verb.

The authors of usage guides shamelessly doctor the evidence on passive by offering examples that range from unlikely to fantastic: Strunk and White's is, "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." But there's more to vividness than active verbs. "Someone killed my parakeet" has an active verb. "My parakeet was hacked to bits with a machete" doesn't.

What we get wrong about passive voice by Jan Freeman

And, my favorites (which I'm sure I've posted before):

• 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
• Passive aggression

Thesis statements are really, really, really hard & you're-not-special (& Facebook)

oh, man!

Finally finished my semester (grading still to do, but classes & exit exams are done...) and am immersed, with Katie B, in a now-nearly-desperate attempt to finish the exercises for Chapter 3 of Ed's European history textbook.

Subject: the thesis statement.

We've been trying to create a thesis-statement algorithm. And not just an algorithm, but a foolproof algorithm. I'm the guinea pig.

I thought we had it nailed -- finally! -- and......

We don't.

So: starting over.

....................

It's a good thing I went to school in the days before commencement speakers telling students they're not special and classroom teachers creating opportunities for students to fail against an exemplar of excellence (an actual comment I saw an actual teacher actually make on a Facebook thread concerning the you're-not-special commencement speaker, who is also a teacher.)

I would be in big trouble if my high school teachers had spent a lot of time creating opportunities for me to fail against exemplars of excellence.

That would be way too much failure for one person to surmount.

Take this afternoon. (Please.)

Ed and Katie and I were dealing with the failure of our algorithm (actually, the failure of my algorithm, which I'd come up with while dealing with the failure of the previous algorithm the 3 of us had hammered out just a couple of days ago).

Today's algorithm involved telling the student to start by picking a sentence in the textbook and turning it into a who-, which-, why-, or how- question.

Sounds simple, right?

So, the sentence we tested (on me) was:

It is difficult to determine which country was most responsible for WWI.

Which I instantly turned into the following question, while exclaiming 'This is easy!:

Which country was most responsible for WWI?

Wrong.

The question I was supposed to turn it into:

Why is it difficult to determine which country was most responsible for WWI?

So then Ed and I got into a whole long argument about whether a college student would or would not make the same boneheaded mistake I had just made, since any fool (we're foolproofing, remember?) could plainly see that "which country was most responsible for WWI" was not the whole sentence.

The whole sentence was "Why is it difficult to determine which country was most responsible for WWI?"

So there I was, the progenitor of an algorithm I myself could not use, having to argue, at length, that 18-year olds who are taking their first college-level history course are as dumb as I am.

Which I successfully did.

....................

Change of topic: I've become a Facebook person, heaven help me. Mostly because Debbie S. said I should: that's where the moms are, she said.

Facebook is pretty fun -- and it's different from a blog, somehow. Different in a good way.

I'm thinking of putting up a ktm Facebook page, but I want to keep it relatively separate from my Irvington life & have to figure out exactly how that works.

I think ktm readers would actually have to join the FB page (which is fine with me but possibly annoying for you --- ?)

Back to work.

Uncommon Students in the Common Core

I have a piece on how special ed students are faring under the new Common Core Standards on the online Atlantic:

Emotional Intelligence brings empathy!

This shocking discovery was worthy of a headline in last week's New Haven Register.

Within the article, one finds pronouncements that are similarly astounding:

Emotional intelligence plays a part in a variety of human interactions.

and:

“Emotions are fundamental to who we are as humans. If we don’t have emotions, we can’t do our work, we can’t make decisions, we can’t have relationships.”

The person quoted here is Susan Rivers, deputy director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University. As the article's lede explains: "Emotional intelligence is in the ascendancy at Yale University."

Yale, the same Ivy League institution that designed a new test that measures creative and practical skills and proposed it as a placement for the SATs, has recently jumped on the decades-old emotional intelligence bandwagon. This fall, it will officially open its emotional intelligence center. As the article reports:

The center, already operational, recently held its biggest training session to date, with educators from more than 50 schools across the country. They join 75,000 school leaders from more than 500 schools worldwide who also have had the training.

What exactly does the training consist of? It's hard to tell. In the words of director Marc Brackett:

“It isn’t a kit you can buy. It’s an approach. We are teaching the teachers and the kids. Some people call these 21st-century skills."

As the Register explains:

The training is known specifically as the RULER approach. It stands for: recognizing emotions, understanding the causes and consequences of emotions, labeling the full range of feelings, expressing them appropriately and regulating them.

Despite the gigantic number of school leaders who have already "had the training," much of it has yet to be developed. Purportedly in the works are instructional videos, games, and online simulations that will, in the Register's words, "illustrate emotional intelligence."

First train people, then develop the training curriculum... what's the logical final step? Perhaps, after hundreds of thousands more people have been trained and hundreds more schools have signed on and millions of dollars have changed hands, the center will conduct an efficacy study.

The ultimate goal? In the words of director Marc Brackett: "making Connecticut an emotionally intelligent state — one district at a time." How could anyone argue with that?

As for Yale itself, presumably it will take the lead in making emotional intelligence the single most important criteria for college admissions. In fact, it's already moving in this direction--especially when it comes to homeschooled applicants. "Yale wants to make sure homeschooled kids are not socially awkward," Joanne Jacobs reports. She cites Yale's admissions website:

We look for evidence of social maturity from all our applicants and especially from home-schooled students. Your personal statement, interests and activities, and letters of recommendation should speak to your ability to integrate well with other students and tell us about your non-academic interests.

As a side note, when it comes to impositions on home schooled children, we find another Yale-connected educational power broker. This would be Yale alumnus David Coleman, former lead architect of the Common Core and current president of the College Board. Coleman has been working had to align the SATs with the Common Core--in ways that, as Paula Bolyard writes in a recent post on Pajamas Media, may pressure home schools to conform to what's going on everywhere else.

Now all we need is for the Common Core to broaden its standards enough to make emotional intelligence its Meta-Standard. After all, emotions are so fundamental to who we are that, if we don’t have them, we can’t make decisions and do our work. Let alone attain any of the Common Core Standards.

(Cross-posted at Out in Left Field).

Are Grading Trends Hurting Socially Awkward Kids?

There's a rather spirited discussion going on at the TheAtlantic.com regarding various questions raised by my article there. Some people are claiming that the demands of the 21st require students to work in groups and be graded on their presentation skills. Please weigh in if you have an opinion on this!

Devlin's Lament: the symbol barrier

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

In an article in the most recent issue of American Scientist entitled "The Music of Math Games," Keith Devlin (head of the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford University and NPR's "math guy") says that learning math should be like learning to play the piano. In doing so, he recalls (but does not credit) Paul Lockhart's Lament ("A piano student's lament: how music lessons cheat us out of our second most fascinating and imaginative art form"), which I blogged about here.

Though Devlin is no literary virtuoso, not all of what he writes here is mushy metaphor. He begins with a discussion of educational software, and here his points are clear and consistent with my own experience. Most "math games" and "math education" software programs I've seen don't make mathematics an organic part of the games or activities. Instead, math problems--mostly arithmetic problems of the "mere calculation" variety--are shoe-horned into non-mathematical situations. Here they serve simply as tasks you must complete before moving through the current non-mathematical activity or on to the next non-mathematical activity.

As Devlin writes:

To build an engaging game that also supports good mathematics learning requires... understanding, at a deep level, what mathematics is, how and why people learn and do mathematics, how to get and keep them engaged in their learning, and how to represent the mathematics on the platform on which the game will be played.

The same is true of language learning. Most linguistic software taps only superficial aspects of language, and, as I know from personal experience, it takes great effort to build a program that does more than that.

Where I begin to part ways with Mr. Devlin is in his discussion of traditional math and what he thinks is an excessive emphasis on symbols:

Many people have come to believe mathematics is the memorization of, and mastery at using, various formulas and symbolic procedures to solve encapsulated and essentially artificial problems. Such people typically have that impression of math because they have never been shown anything else...

...

By and large, the public identifies doing math with writing symbols, often obscure symbols. Why do they make that automatic identification? A large part of the explanation is that much of the time they spent in the school mathematics classroom was devoted to the development of correct symbolic manipulation skills, and symbol-filled books are the standard way to store and distribute mathematical knowledge. So we have gotten used to the fact that mathematics is presented to us by way of symbolic expressions.

This approach to math, Devlin suggests, is at odds with the resolutions of a "blue-ribbon panel of experts" serving on the National Research Council’s Mathematics Learning Study Committee ("Adding it Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics," National Academies Press, 2001). In Devlin's words: these resolutions hold that math proficiency consists of:

the aggregate of mathematical knowledge, skills, developed abilities, habits of mind and attitudes that are essential ingredients for life in the 21st century. They break this aggregate down to what they describe as “five tightly interwoven” threads. The first is conceptual understanding, the comprehension of mathematical concepts, operations and relations. The second is procedural fluency, defined as skill in carrying out arithmetical procedures accurately, efficiently, flexibly and appropriately. Third is strategic competence, or the ability to formulate, represent and solve mathematical problems arising in real-world situations. Fourth is adaptive reasoning—the capacity for logical thought, reflection, explanation and justification. Finally there’s productive disposition, a habitual inclination to see mathematics as sensible, useful and worthwhile, combined with a confidence in one’s own ability to master the material.

Ah, "21st century skills," "habits of mind," "conceptual understanding," "real-world situations," "explanation," "disposition"...--all this makes me wonder about the ratio of mathematicians to math eduation "experts" on this blue-ribbon panel. (It should be noted that Devlin himself is not, strictly speaking, a mathematician; he holds a Ph.D. in logic from the University of Bristol, and, while affiliated with Stanford, is not a member of the Stanford math department.)

Standing in the way of these lofty goals is what Devlin calls the "symbol barrier":

For the entire history of organized mathematics instruction, where we had no alternative to using static, symbolic expressions on flat surfaces to store and distribute mathematical knowledge, that barrier has prevented millions of people from becoming proficient in a cognitive skill set of evident major importance in today’s world, on a par with the ability to read and write.

To the rescue comes... Devlin's math education software program:

With video games, we can circumvent the barrier. Because video games are dynamic, interactive and controlled by the user yet designed by the developer, they are the perfect medium for representing everyday mathematics, allowing direct access to the mathematics (bypassing the symbols) in the same direct way that a piano provides direct access to the music.

Devlin's notion that a well-designed math video game can help students meet the National Academy's goals for math education rests on two assumptions. One is that students can achieve a sufficient level of mastery in mathematics without symbols. The other is that playing such video games is to math what playing the piano is to music.

To address the first claim, Devlin elaborates the analogy to music:

Just how essential are those symbols? After all, until the invention of various kinds of recording devices, symbolic musical notation was the only way to store and distribute music, yet no one ever confuses music with a musical score.
...
Just as music is created and enjoyed within the mind, so too is mathematics created and carried out (and by many of us enjoyed) in the mind. At its heart, mathematics is a mental activity—a way of thinking—one that over several millennia of human history has proved to be highly beneficial to life and society.

But there's an important difference between math and music--and a reason why no one confuses music with a musical score. Music has a privileged place in subjective experience. Along with sensations like color, taste, and smell, it produces in us a characteristic, irreduceable, qualitative impression--an instance of what philosophers call "qualia." Just as there's no way to capture the subjective impression of "redness" with a graph of its electromagnetic frequency, or of "chocolate" with a 3-D model of its molecular structure, so, too, with the subjective feeling of a tonic-dominant-submediant-mediant-subdominant-tonic-subdominant-dominant chord progression. Embedded in what makes music what it is to us is the qualia of its chords and melodies.

Like most other, more abstract concepts ("heliocentric," "temporary"), mathematic concepts don't generally evoke this qualia sensation. What makes math beautiful are things like eloquence, patterns, and power. Unlike a Bach fugue translated homomorphically into, say, a collage of shapes, mathematical concepts can be be translated into different representational systems without losing their essence and beauty.

Devlin argues that while we might write down symbols in the course of doing real-life math, it is primarily a "thinking process," and that "at its heart, mathematics is a mental activity—a way of thinking." I agree. Indeed, math is much more appropriately compared with thoughts than with music. But this makes math symbols the mathematical equivalent of linguistic symbols. While thoughts, like math, can be expressed in a number of different symbol systems, you need some sort of symbol system in order to represent your own thoughts and to understand the thoughts of others.

This is especially true of abstract thoughts--and of abstract math. As Devlin himself admits, "the advanced mathematics used by scientists and engineers is intrinsically symbolic. "What isn't intrinsically symbolic, Devlin claims, is "everyday mathematics":

The kind of math important to ordinary people in their lives... is not, and it can be done in your head. Roughly speaking, everyday mathematics comprises counting, arithmetic, proportional reasoning, numerical estimation, elementary geometry and trigonometry, elementary algebra, basic probability and statistics, logical thinking, algorithm use, problem formation (modeling), problem solving, and sound calculator use. (Yes, even elementary algebra belongs in that list. The symbols are not essential.)

OK, but what does this mean for education? Are we going to decide before the end of middle school which students are going to become scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and only help those students scale the "symbol barrier"? For a barrier it certainly is, as Devlin himself notes: "people can become highly skilled at doing mental math and yet be hopeless at its symbolic representations."

But Devlin is too busy appreciating the (well-studied) math skills of Brazilian street vendors, who do complex arithmetic calculations in their heads with 98% accuracy, and supposedly without the help of symbols (even mental ones?), to realize the educational implications of the fact that "when faced with what are (from a mathematical perspective) the very same problems, but presented in the traditional symbols, their performance drops to a mere 35 to 40 percent accuracy." No, not everyone is going to become an engineer. But not all non-engineers are going to become Brazilian street vendors.

It's ironic how deeply Devlin appreciates the difficulty that "ordinary people" have with the symbol barrier without appreciating what this says about their educational needs:

It simply is not the case that ordinary people cannot do everyday math. Rather, they cannot do symbolic everyday math. In fact, for most people, it’s not accurate to say that the problems they are presented in paper-and-pencil format are “the same as” the ones they solve fluently in a real life setting. When you read the transcripts of the ways they solve the problems in the two settings, you realize that they are doing completely different things. Only someone who has mastery of symbolic mathematics can recognize the problems encountered in the two contexts as being “the same.”

Instead of seeing this as a reason for exposing children to mathematical symbols early and often, Devlin sees this as reason to create computer games that somehow teach math non-symbolically.

He calls this "adaptive technology," a term that should raise red flags. In a recent blog post, I wrote about how assistive technology often becomes yet another excuse not to teach basic skills. Kids with dyslexia struggle mightily with the symbol system of written language; should they instead learn everything through text-to-speech and speech-to-text devices, and never learn how to read and write?

Devlin makes a few other strained comparisons to the piano:

The piano metaphor can be pursued further. There’s a widespread belief that you first have to master the basic skills to progress in mathematics. That’s total nonsense. It’s like saying you have to master musical notation and the performance of musical scales before you can start to try to play an instrument—a surefire way to put someone off music if ever there was one.

No it's not; it's like saying you have to master simple scales and exercises before you move on to Rachmaninoff.

The one difference between music and math is that whereas a single piano can be used to play almost any tune, a video game designed to play, say, addition of fractions, probably won’t be able to play multiplication of fractions. This means that the task facing the game designer is not to design one instrument but an entire orchestra.

Can one create a video game that functions "as an instrument on which a person can 'play' mathematics?"

Can this be done? Yes. I know this fact to be true because I spent almost five years working with talented and experienced game developers on a stealth project at a large video game company, trying to build such an orchestra.

What does Devlin's software do? The last two paragraphs of this article function as an extended but not very informative infomercial. Here's the most informative excerpt:

Available in early March, Wuzzit Trouble is a game where players must free the Wuzzits from the traps they’ve inadvertently wandered into inside a castle. Players must use puzzle-solving skills to gather keys that open the gearlike combination locks on the cages, while avoiding hazards.

Puzzle solving? As I argue in my last post on math games, existing games already offer some version of this, and it isn't math. This, indeed, is one of the other problems with so-called math education software.

Devlin suggests his software is different:

Unlike the majority of other casual games, it is built on top of sound mathematical principles, which means that anyone who plays it will be learning and practicing good mathematical thinking—much like a person playing a musical instrument for pleasure will at the same time learn about music.

Wuzzit Trouble might look and play like a simple arithmetic game, and indeed that is the point. But looks can be deceiving. The puzzles carry star ratings, and I have yet to achieve the maximum number of stars on some of the puzzles! (I never mastered Rachmaninov on the piano either.) The game is not designed to teach. The intention is to provide an “instrument” that, in addition to being fun to play, not only provides implicit learning but may also be used as a basis for formal learning in a scholastic setting.

If you say so. But I wonder how much it will cost schools (and society) to find out whether this latest incarnation of "math education" software helps prepare students to become mathematicians, scientists, engineers--or Brazilian street vendors.

Educational malpractice for the sake of Reform Math

A couple of weeks ago, James Milgram, an emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University, updated me on some recent developments in the controversy over Jo Boaler's "Railside Study." It was only after I reviewed the various critiques, accusations, and rebuttals that I remembered what an enormously consequential case of educational malpractice is afoot here--one that deserves much wider attention than it's gotten so far.

Professor Milgram is known in the education world for his comprehensive critique of a study done by Jo Boaler, an education professor at Stanford, and Megan Staples, then an education professor at Purdue. Boaler and Staples' paper, preprinted in 2005 and published in 2008, is entitled Transforming Students’ Lives through an Equitable Mathematics Approach: The Case of Railside School. Focusing on three California schools, it compares cohorts of students who used either a traditional algebra curriculum, or the Reform Math algebra curriculum The College Preparatory Mathematics (CPM). According to Boaler and Staple's paper, the Reform Math cohort achieved substantially greater mathematical success than the traditional math cohorts.

In early 2005 a high ranking official from the U.S. Department of Education asked Professor Milgram to evaluate Boaler and Staples' study. The reason for her request? She was concerned that, if Boaler and Staples' conclusions were correct, the U.S. department of education would be obliged, in Milgram's words, "to begin to reconsider much if not all of what they were doing in mathematics education." This would entail an even stronger push by the U.S. educational establishment to implement the Constructivist Reform Math curricula throughout K12 education.

Milgram's evaluation of Boaler and Staples' study resulted in a paper, co-authored with mathematician Wayne Bishop and statistician Paul Clopton, entitled A close examination of Jo Boaler's Railside Report. The paper was accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journal Education Next, but statements made to Milgram by some of his math education colleagues caused him to become concerned that the paper's publication would, in Milgram's words, make it "impossible for me to work with the community of math educators in this country"--involved as he then was in a number of other math education-related projects. Milgram instead posted the paper to his Stanford website.

This past October a bullet-point response to Milgram's paper, entitled "When Academic Disagreement Becomes Harassment and Persecution," appeared on Boaler's Stanford website. A month ago, Milgram posted his response and alerted me to it. I have his permission to share parts of it here.

Entitled Private Data - The Real Story: A Huge Problem with Education Research, this second paper reviews Milgram et al's earlier critiques and adds several compelling updates. Together, the two papers make a series of highly significant points, all of them backed up with transparent references to data of the sort that Boaler and Staple's own paper completely lacks.

Indeed, among Milgram et al's points is precisely this lack of transparency. Boaler and Staples refuse to divulge their data, in particular data regarding which schools they studied, claiming that agreements with the schools and FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) rules disallow this. But FERPA only involves protecting the school records of individual students; not those of whole schools. More importantly, refusals to divulge such data violate the federal Freedom of Information Act. Boaler's refusal also violates the policies of Stanford University, specifically its stated "commitment to openness in research" and its prohibitions of secrecy, "including limitations on publishability of results."

Second, Milgram et al's examination of the actual data, once they were able to track it down via California's education records, shows that it was distorted in multiple ways.

1. Boaler and Staple's chosen cohorts aren't comparable:

It appears, from state data, that the cohort at Railside [the pseudonym of the Reform Math school] was comprised of students in the top half of the class in mathematics. For Greendale, it appears that the students were grouped between the 35th and 70th percentiles, and that the students at Hilltop were grouped between the 40th and 80th percentiles. [Excerpted from Milgram; boldface mine]

2. Boaler and Staple's testing instruments are flawed:

Our analysis shows that they contain numerous mathematical errors, even more serious imprecisions, and also that the two most important post-tests were at least 3 years below their expected grade levels.  [Excerpted from Milgram; boldface mine]

3. The data comparing test scores on California's standardized tests (STAR) comes from a comparison of test scores from students not involved in Boaler and Staple's study:

The students in the cohorts Boaler was studying should have been in 11th grade, not ninth in 2003! So [this] is not data for the population studied in [Boaler and Staple's paper]. This 2003 ninth grade algebra data is the only time where the Railside students clearly outperformed the students at the other two schools during this period. There is a possibility that they picked the unique data that might strengthen their assertions, rather than make use of the data relevant to their treatment groups.   [Excerpted from Milgram; boldface mine]

4. The most relevant actual data yields the opposite conclusion about the Reform Math cohort's mathematical success relative that of the traditional math cohorts:

o The most telling data we find is that the mathematics remediation rate for the cohort of Railside students that Boaler was following who entered the California State University system was 61%
o This was much higher than the state average of 37%
o Greendale's remediation rate was 35% o and Hilltop's was 29%.

5. School officials at "Railside" report that the results of the reform math curriculum are even worse than Milgram et al had originally indicated:

A high official in the district where Railside is located called and updated me on the situation there in May, 2010. One of that person's remarks is especially relevant. It was stated that as bad as [Milgram et al's original paper] indicated the situation was at Railside, the school district's internal data actually showed it was even worse. Consequently, they had to step in and change the math curriculum at Railside to a more traditional approach.

Changing the curriculum seems to have had some effect. This year (2012) there was a very large (27 point) increase in Railside's API score and an even larger (28 point) increase for socioeconomically disadvantaged students, where the target had been 7 points in each case.

6. Boaler’s responses to Milgram et al provide no substantiated refutations of any of their key points

In response to comments on an article on Boaler's critique of Milgram, Boaler states:

"I see in some of the comments people criticizing me for not addressing the detailed criticisms from Milgram/Bishop. I am more than happy to this. [...] I will write my detailed response today and post it to my site."

However, as Milgram notes in his December paper:

As I write this, nearly two months have passed since Boaler's rebuttal was promised, but it has not appeared. Nor is it likely to. The basic reason is that there is every reason to believe [Milgram et al's paper] is not only accurate but, in fact, understates the situation at "Railside" from 2000 - 2005.

In a nutshell: under the mantle of purported FERPA protection, we have hidden and distorted data supporting a continued revolution in K12 math education--a revolution that actual data show to be resulting, among other things, in substantially increased mathematics remediation rates among college students. Ever lower mathematical preparedness; ever greater college debt. Just what our country needs.

Nor is Boaler's Reform Math-supporting "research" unique in its lack of transparency, in its lack of independent verification, and in its unwarranted impact on K12 math practices. As Milgram notes,

This seems to be a very common occurrence within education circles.

For example, the results of a number of papers with enormous effects on curriculum and teaching, such as [Diane Briars and Lauren Resnick's paper "Standards, assessments -- and what else? The essential elements of Standards-based school improvement"] and [J. Riordan and P. Noyce's paper, "The impact of two standards-based mathematics curricula on student achievement in Massachusetts"] have never been independently verified.

Yet, [Briars and Resnick's paper] was the only independent research that demonstrated significant positive results for the Everyday Math program for a number of years. During this period district curriculum developers relied on [Briars and Resnick's paper] to justify choosing the program, and, today, EM is used by almost 20% of our students. Likewise [Riordan and Noyce's paper] was the only research accepted by [the U.S. Department of Education's] What Works Clearinghouse in their initial reports that showed positive effects for the elementary school program ``Investigations in Number, Data, and Space,'' which today is used by almost 10% of our students.

As Milgram notes:

Between one quarter and 30% of our elementary school students is a huge data set. Consequently, if these programs were capable of significantly improving our K-12 student outcomes, we would surely have seen evidence by now.

And to pretend that such evidence exists when it doesn't is nothing short of educational malpractice.

"topic progression" in new and old history textbooks

I've just read Katharine's post comparing a 1914 history textbook to a textbook published in 2005. The difference is staggering.

What jumps out at me are the many distinct grammatical subjects in the modern text compared to the older book:

Published in 2005:
The German States Remain Separate 
German kings after Frederick, including his grandson Frederick II, continued their attempts to revive Charlemagne’s empire and his alliance with the Church. This policy led to wars with Italian cities and to further clashes with the Pope. Conflicts were one reason why the feudal states of Germany did not unify during the Middle Ages. Another reason was that the system of German princes electing the king weakened royal authority. German rulers controlled fewer royal lands to use as a base of power than French and English kings of the same period, who, as you will learn in Chapter 14, were establishing strong central authority. 

Five main clauses, 5 different grammatical subjects.

Compare to:

Published in 1914:
In his lifelong attempt to maintain what he thought to be his rights as emperor he met, quite naturally, with the three old difficulties. He had constantly to be fighting his rivals and rebellious vassals in Germany; he had to face the opposition of the popes, who never forgot the claims that Gregory VII had made to control the emperor as well as other rulers. Lastly, in trying to keep hold of northern Italy, which he believed to belong to his empire, he spent a great deal of time with but slight results. (1914)

Four main clauses, 1 grammatical subject.

I'm wondering whether I can improve the 2005 paragraph just by tinkering with the subjects...

[pause]

OK, here's a rewrite:

Revision with "consistent grammatical subjects":
The German kings after Frederick, including his grandson Frederick II, continued Frederick's efforts to revive Charlemagne's empire and his alliance with the Church, but they did not succeed. Like Frederick, they incited fruitless wars with Italian cities and further clashes with the Pope, and the constant conflict undermined their ability to unify Germany's feudal states under one king. The kings were further weakened by the German political system, which allowed German princes to elect the king, and by their relative lack of royal lands compared to the large territories controlled by French and English kings of the same period, who, as you will learn in Chapter 14, were establishing strong central authority in their own countries. Frederick's successors succeeded neither in reviving the empire nor in unifying their country.

Six main clauses, only 2 different grammatical subjects, with 5 of the six subjects being the same ("German kings").

So I guess the lesson is: if you're going to engage in excessive summary, be sure to keep your sentence subjects consistent!

We need a Writing Renaissance, not a "Writing Renaissance"

Here is is! (Cross-posted from Out in Left Field.)

According to an article in this past week's Edweek, K12 writing instruction is undergoing a renaissance:

Teachers are focusing on writing instruction like never before. More and more, they're asking students to write about what they read, helping them think through and craft their work, and using such exercises as tools not only to build better writers, but to help students understand what they're studying.

This renaissance, the article claims, includes a shift towards explicit instruction:

The shift is still nascent, but people in the field are taking notice. It marks a departure from recent practice, which often includes little or no explicit writing instruction and only a modest amount of writing, typically in the form of stories, short summaries, or personal reflections, rather than essays or research projects on topics being studied.

In fact there appears to be little or no increase in explicit instruction, but simply a shift in quantity and genres. For example, rather than taking inspiration from Dr. Seuss to write their own whimsical stories:

First graders in South Strafford, Vt., are reading Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, for fun, then for greater understanding, and then to hunt for evidence. They look for events in the plot that illustrate how the whimsical protagonist tries to protect the Earth and assemble examples into a simple paragraph to support the theme of the story.

In keeping with the new Common Core standards for English and Language Arts, the article notes, "these kinds of projects are unusual for the way they connect writing and reading." But the ultimate goal seems not to be to improve writing, but reading:

"Now we're seeing a lot more attention to the idea that writing about a text can improve reading about that text," said literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, the chairman of the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The article cites a 2010 study:

a meta-analysis of 93 studies of writing interventions, which found that writing had consistently positive effects on students' reading skills and comprehension. Writing about what they read was particularly helpful to students' comprehension, but so were taking notes on what they read, answering questions about it, and simply writing more often.

In other words, despite the fact that ever since No Child Left Behind, as the article itself notes, concerns about reading comprehension have eclipsed concerns about writing, the ultimate goal of the "Writing Renaissance" continues to be reading.

Worse, this emphasis on writing for comprehension has become yet another excuse to water down math class:

A math teacher in Brighton, Mich., found that writing had a powerful effect on helping her 6th grade students understand algebra concepts. Julie Mallia and a colleague from the English department, Don Pawloski, teamed up in spring 2009 to have students write 10-page "how to" books for the next fall's 6th graders. Drawing both on math and on writing instruction, students had to explain concepts such as solving a problem with x.

What goals the article does mention that pertain specifically to writing are about quantity and argumentation rather than technique. Students should be writing more, and they should be writing pieces that shift from:

"opinion untethered to evidence" and "decontextualized" writing—writing not based on the reading of a text—in favor of writing that requires students to read, comprehend, and respond to text, grounding their interpretations in evidence found there.

As for writing strategies, we find nothing here about corrections and revisions. Instead of rewriting, there's rereading:

They read a text again and again, first to make sense of it and note their questions, as the teacher works the room to help,... A second round of annotating focuses on looking for elements of the genre and how it works. They read again to spot structural decisions the writer made to create meaning, she said. The students then use what they learned in their own writing.

There's something to be said for "spotting structural decisions" and trying to emulate these. Indeed, the one instance of direct writing instruction the article cite pertains to organization:

When Ms. Leddy teaches The Lorax, she walks through the text repeatedly with students, discussing it from a different angle each time. When they're through, students learn to write short "hand paragraphs," with the thumb as the topic sentence—the Lorax cares for the Earth—followed by three examples of how he does that and a "pinky sentence" restating the interpretation.

But none of this addresses a much more fundamental problem that affects all types of writing--no matter whether it's fiction, nonfiction, personal writing, summaries, or more involved, reading-connected writing assignments. This problem, which has become the talk of professors at campuses all around the country, is the problem that growing numbers of students have with the basic building blocks of all writing: phrases and sentences.

In none of the many Edweek articles on English and Language Arts do we find any mention of the steep decline in students' ability to write well-formed sentences. But this is arguably the greatest problem with today's writing, which, even at the college and graduate levels, is riddled with comma splices, dangling modifiers, subject-verb agreement problems, and the kind of garbling that results from a dearth of direct instruction and feedback from teachers and a failure by students to review and revise. Here are just a few examples from my growing collection:

1. Comma between subject and verb: Children who experience the world in a more rigid and narrow manner, will have difficulty with social inferences.

2. Comma splice: Generalization is a tough skill for ASD students to learn, teachers are sometimes baffled that they act a certain way in one subject and completely different in other.

3. Failed subject verb agreement: Two of the defining characteristics of autism includes impairments in social interactions and communication.

4. Failed preposition agreement: There are three types of aphasia to which a child can be diagnosed.

5. Dangling modifiers: In thinking about students transitioning from high school to college, the issues of accepting the disability and self-advocacy are crucial.

6. Wordiness: By providing direct instruction, this assists the students with improving their ability to give examples.

7. Awkwardness (and wordiness): Because of these results, it suggests that “object and subject relative sentences” need different amounts of working memory to be understood by the reader.

8. Displaced modifier: I first inquired about this young man’s high school experience, who I will call RC.

9. Incoherence (and wordiness): Due to the fact that these children with autism are unable to proper engage in social situations eliminates the knowledge base that they would normally acquire.

None of the above-described elements of the so-called "Writing Renaissance" will solve these problems. For this, we need direct, sentence-focused writing instruction. Yet, for all the empirical support there is for this kind of instruction, the tide shifted away from it long ago, and it will take a true Writing Renaissance to bring it back.

thumb paragraphs and other

When Katharine has time, she'll repost to ktm, but go read now!

It's time for me to re-read Robert Connors Erasure of the Sentence. (Katharine's post on Connors.)

What matters most in "The Writing Revolution"

Peg Tyre’s recent article in the Atlantic, "The Writing Revolution,” provoked controversy among educators, many of whom find direct instruction in writing, particularly at the level of sentences, to be unnatural, ineffective, joy stifling, and creativity-crushing (despite compelling evidence to the contrary).

The article should instead have provoked controversy among linguists.

It implies, among other things, that:

-Many under-privileged children, even in high school, don’t know how to use basic conjunctions like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, and basic connectors like although and despite, and that the remedy includes teaching them the parts of speech.

-Such students also don’t understand that “the key information in a sentence doesn’t always come at the beginning of that sentence.”

The problem is that, except for severely language impaired children (and non-native speakers), these basic facts about the English language are among the things that children do pick up incidentally, without formal instruction, and master well before high school. (Mastering the written aspects of language, including the conventions that are specific to writing, is a different story).

Does anyone seriously think that typically developing native high school students, however socio-economically underprivileged, don’t know how to use and and or?

As for although and despite, while it’s possible that these specific words don’t figure much in the everyday speech of socio-economically underprivileged children, how likely is it, if you said something like “Although the hurricane won’t hit for a couple of days, you should start getting ready for it now” or “Despite the fact that we haven’t lost electricity yet, we might still lose it later,” they wouldn’t understand what you meant? Has anyone even bothered to test this?

The notion that the students in question don’t know these crucial function words comes partly from observations about their written language: “the students’ sentences were short and disjointed” and deficient in function words; partly from their performance on a “quick quiz” that required them to use these function words; and partly from their performance on a task that combined reading comprehension and writing: reading a passage from Of Mice and Men and then writing a sentence based on the passage that began “Although George...”

In this last task:

Many were stumped. More than a few wrote the following: “Although George and Lenny were friends.”

As a linguist who specializes in grammar, reading comprehension, and the mechanics of writing, I’d like to suggest an alternative explanation for what Tyre and others are observing here: these students are showing a combination of difficulties with reading comprehension, difficulties with writing conventions, and difficulties sustaining attention.

These high school students know perfectly well what for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so, although and despite mean, and how to use them. And, as the article observes, “the students who couldn’t write well seemed capable, at the very least, of decoding simple sentences.”

However, the article provides no evidence about their reading comprehension—and how many of them, for example, comprehend at the level of Of Mice and Men. While they surely understand the basic function words of their native language, perhaps they don’t understand all of nouns and adjectives used by Steinbeck. Perhaps (especially if they encounter words they don’t know) they aren’t able to sustain attention across some of his longer, more complex sentences. And while they surely could use the word “although” correctly in oral speech, perhaps they haven’t been instructed in the basics of punctuation and sentence fragments vs. complete sentences. All this could result in a fragment like Although George and Lenny were friends. when what the teacher was looking for instead was Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream.

And all this is consistent with the efficacy of the remediation program adopted by the school that the article profiles:

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children … are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so. They are instructed on how to use appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin. Later on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own.

Prompting children to use certain function words, and also appositives, prompts them to practice writing longer, more complex sentences. Helping students comprehend paragraphs improves their ability to write responses to reading passages.

By fall 2009, nearly every instructional hour except for math class was dedicated to teaching essay writing along with a particular subject. So in chemistry class in the winter of 2010, Monica DiBella’s lesson on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen was followed by a worksheet that required her to describe the elements with subordinating clauses—for instance, she had to begin one sentence with the word although.

Although ... “hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion,” Monica wrote, “a compound of them puts out fires.”

Unless ... “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and dangerous.”  

If …  

This was a hard one. Finally, she figured out a way to finish the sentence. If … “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being explosive and supporting combustion.”

Notice that what’s hard about this task isn’t the meaning of the function words and how to use them, but understanding the chemistry of hydrogen and oxygen well enough to know their relevant causal and contrastive properties. The issue is both reading comprehension and subject-specific mastery. But the task is still a good one, because what the although, unless, and if prompts do is to prompt Monica to review the lesson with the specific goal of finding the causal and contrastive relationships it discusses.

As her understanding of the parts of speech grew, Monica’s reading comprehension improved dramatically. “Before, I could read, sure. But it was like a sea of words,” she says. “The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.”

When you’re prompted to look in a text for the kinds of relationships expressed by although and if, you know that you should specifically be looking for words like although and if. This kind of focus may help students overcome difficulties sustaining attention, such that complex texts become something more meaningful than a “sea of words.”

The Hochman method is a great antidote to the current fads in writing instruction, but not for most of the reasons suggested in Tyre’s article.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

Computerized teaching: the feedback gap

Yet another breathless account of the wonders of computerized learning appears in this weekend's New York Times Magazine in an article entitled "The Machines are Taking Over: advances in computerized tutoring are testing the faith that human contact makes for better learning."

The article opens with a scene of an actual human being tutoring a fellow species member. While her tutee works on a problem (calculating average driving speed), the tutor provides lots of interactive feedback. Neil Heffernan, the tutor's fiance, catalogued the various different types of feedback she gave under such categories as “remind the student of steps they have already completed,” “encourage the student to generalize,” “challenge a correct answer if the tutor suspects guessing”). According the the article, Heffernan then "incorporated many of these tactics into a computerized tutor," which he spent nearly two decades refining. Now called ASSISTments, it is used by by more than 100,000 students "in schools all over the country." The article describes the experience of one of these 100,000 students with the program's interactive feedback:

Tyler breezed through the first part of his homework, but 10 questions in he hit a rough patch. “Write the equation in function form: 3x-y=5,” read the problem on the screen. Tyler worked the problem out in pencil first and then typed “5-3x” into the box. The response was instantaneous: “Sorry, wrong answer.” Tyler’s shoulders slumped. He tried again, his pencil scratching the paper. Another answer — “5/3x” — yielded another error message, but a third try, with “3x-5,” worked better. “Correct!” the computer proclaimed.

In other words, it's the same old binary right-or-wrong feedback that nearly every educational software program has been using for decades. As the article notes:

In contrast to a human tutor, who has a nearly infinite number of potential responses to a student’s difficulties, the program is equipped with only a few. If a solution to a problem is typed incorrectly — say, with an extra space — the computer stubbornly returns the “Sorry, incorrect answer” message, though a human would recognize the answer as right.

True, the program is still a work in progress. But what's being refined, according to the article, isn't the feedback. Rather, it's the program's ability to detect when a student is getting bored, frustrated, or confused (via facial expression reading software, speed and accuracy of responses, and special chairs with posture sensors "to tell whether students are leaning forward with interest or lolling back in boredom."):

Once the student’s feelings are identified, the thinking goes, the computerized tutor could adjust accordingly — giving the bored student more challenging questions or reviewing fundamentals with the student who is confused.

Or "flashing messages of encouragement... or... calling up motivational videos recorded by the students’ teachers."

Also being refined is the "hint" feature, which users click on when stumped. Human beings (particularly teachers) track common wrong answers and have other human beings (particularly students) come up with helpful hints. These hints are then incorporated into the next generation of ASSISTments.

Cognitive Tutor, a more established software program that is "used by 600,000 students in 3,000 school districts around the country," also limits its feedback to hints and right-or-wrong responses.  And it, too, is being refined based on data from human users:

Every keystroke a student makes — every hesitation, every hint requested, every wrong answer — can be analyzed for clues to how the mind learns.

Ultimately, this data will be put to use not to refine feedback on particular student responses, but to help decide how to space out material and schedule periodic reviews.

But it's carefully tailored feedback on particular responses by particular students that makes human tutoring--the inspiration for all these programs--as powerful is it is.

In my earlier post on Cognitive Tutor, I wrote that programming sufficiently perspicuous feedback for mathematical problems "strikes me as even more prohibitive" than the feedback I labored for years to provide in my GrammarTrainer program. Last night I ran this impression past a mathematician friend of mine who cares a lot about effective math instruction. She emphatically concurs.

When it comes to educational software developers--as opposed to educational software users--there is some somewhat perspicuous feedback on whether their answers (answers to students' educational needs) are on track. As I write earlier, that feedback isn't particularly encouraging.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

Being Tough on Tough

Though I haven't read it, I honestly don't get what the big deal is about Paul Tough's new book, How Children Succeed. From what I gather from various reviews and interviews, Tough's Big Idea is that persistence and curiosity matter more than IQ does for success. But was there ever a time or place when this statement wasn't obvious? Of course IQ means little if you don't apply yourself; of course intelligence leads nowhere interesting if you lack curiosity. Does anyone--especially in this Emotional Intelligence-obsessed world of ours--really think that the successful people out there--even the genuises--achieved what they did primarily because of their IQ scores? Didn't Malcolm Gladwell already write a book back in 2008 on the findings that what makes an expert is 10,0000 hours of practice? What is it about Tough's book that's garnering so much attention?

A slightly different take on Tough's Big Idea is voiced by Joe Nocera in today's New York Times:

Tough argues that simply teaching math and reading--the so-called cognitive skills--isn't nearly enough, especially for children who have grown up enduring the stresses of poverty. In fact, it might not even be the most important thing.

Notice how quickly Nocera slips from the obvious--that teaching teach math and reading isn't nearly enough--to the ridiculous. To say that learning to read and do math might not be the most important elements of success is like saying that adequate food and shelter might not be the most important elements of staying alive (after all one must also breathe oxygen). When it come to essential elements, it's pointless to quibble over what's most important.

In interviews Tough is careful to admit that, while schools need to do more to encourage persistence and curiosity, there are no clear studies on how to do this. Refreshing though this caveat is, it, too, raises the question of what this book has to offer that's new and plausible, or at least useful.

There is one disturbing answer to that last question. To the careless reader who approaches the book from the perspective of the dominant educational paradigm, it offers yet another reason to water down academics in favor of "the whole child." The connections between grit and academic rigor, and between curiosity and well-taught academic subjects, should be as obvious as the inherent importance of grit is. Indeed, I'm guessing these connections are obvious to most people. But they clearly aren't obvious to many of those wielding the greatest power over whether or not our children succeed.

Katharine on awkward student sentences

Here is Katharine on students using "it" as the subject of their sentences:

In terms of awkward sentences written by students, what I'm seeing is an avoidance of modified nouns as subjects. Instead, the would-be modified-noun subject is "factored out" of the sentence into a modifier, and then replaced by "it":

In Happe’s article it is said that this deficit is due to an autistic children’s inability to infer a communicator’s intentions.

[As opposed to Happe's article says that... Notice, btw, that the final noun phrase, the object of "due to", is heavily modified]

Or:

By discovering which parts of communication are more challenging to develop, it can help speech researchers discover where people with other language and communication challenges stumble as well.

[Instead of: Discovering which parts of communication are more challenging can help...]

Actually, only the first example ("Happe's article") is a modified noun; the second one is a sentential subject ("Discovering which parts of communication are more challenging"). So more precisely what I'm seeing is an avoidance of any syntactically complex element in subject position.

Perhaps this goes for speech as well?

in the predicate: an autistic children’s inability to infer a communicator’s intentions

in the subject: it

Interesting.

adjectives, adverbs, and "sentence modifiers"

Reading the thread about Groucho's elephant in my pajamas, I think I see what the problem is. I think FedUp may be talking about modifier clauses in general, while I am talking about adjective clauses in particular.

When I write, I follow different rules for two different kinds of modifiers: adjectives and "adjectivals" on the one hand; adverbs and "adverbials" on the other.

I'm certain I follow a (third?) set of rules for a third category -- sentence modifiers -- but I still don't consciously understand what sentence modifiers are, so I can't take that thought any further. (Katharine's explanation is at the end of this post.)

I'm going to steer clear of sentence modifiers for the time being.

Grammar books, including at least some linguistically-informed grammar books, tell us that adjectives  must be put next to the words they modify, but adverbs can go all over the place.

Hence:
The black cat is sitting on the roof.
not:
The cat is sitting black on the roof.
or:
The cat is sitting on the roof black.

Adverbs are different:
The black cat is sitting happily on the roof.
The black cat is happily sitting on the roof.
The black cat is sitting on the roof happily.
Happily, the black cat is sitting on the roof.

The same principle holds for adjective & adverb phrases & clauses:

The cat that is black is sitting on the roof. (adjective clause)
not:
The cat is sitting that is black on the roof.
or:
The cat is that is black sitting on the roof.
or:
The cat is sitting on the roof that is black.

Adverb clauses can move around:
The cat is sitting on the roof because she likes high places.
Because she likes high places, the cat is sitting on the roof.
The cat, because she likes high places, is sitting on the roof.
And even, in some cases:
The cat is, because she likes high places, sitting on the roof.
(I wouldn't write that sentence, but I'm pretty sure I've seen the occasional adverb clause dropped inside a 2-word verb.)

According to grammar books - at least according to the ones I'm reading - the words "because she likes high places" are an adverbial clause modifying the verb "is sitting."

I find that explanation confusing, but I don't find the rule confusing. I follow the rule automatically and unconsciously, and I always have. I also follow, automatically and unconsciously, the rule that says adjective clauses must go beside the nouns they modify (though dangling participles are something of a temptation, which I think is interesting.) Importantly, if we're talking about English teachers imposing artificial, made-up rules they learned in books upon captive students, I didn't learn either rule from a book.

I learned these rules from talking and reading. I'm not just a native speaker of English. I'm a native writer.


Katharine on sentence modifiers

I'm starting to think maybe the reason I find adverbials confusing is that the category grammar books call "adverbials" includes the category linguists call "sentence modifiers." I don't know.

In any event, here is Katharine on sentence modifiers and Groucho Marx, and this explanation does make perfect sense to me, which is a great relief!:

It's true that modifiers are generally placed next to the things they modify. But sometimes it's the entire sentence that is being modified, in which case the modifier can go at the beginning or at the end.

In the ordinary interpretation of "I shot an elephant in my pajamas" (before the "How he got there, I don't know" clarification), "In my pajamas" is a sentential modifier. That is, it most obviously characterizes the circumstances of the elephant shooting. In the bizarre interpretation (which becomes obvious only after the clarification), "in my pajamas" is a modifier of object noun "elephant." As such, it cannot be moved to the beginning of the sentence. Thus, "In my pajamas, I shot an elephant." is unambiguous.

The tradeoff is between stylistic concerns (e.g. FedupMom's) and concerns about clarity. Depending on the overall context, sentential modifiers placed at the ends of sentences can be misinterpreted as verb phrase or object noun modifiers, which both tend to go at the ends of verb phrases. Since the end of a verb phrase is often also the end of the main sentence, you often can't tell what an end-of-sentence modifier is modifying from word order alone.

Cf:
With Dick Cavett, I discussed sex. (unambiguous)
I discussed sex with Dick Cavett. (ambiguous; example from Steven Pinker).

The achievement gap: how our schools are working hard to make it go away

If you're concerned about achievement gaps of the sort recently reported on by the Times, you could either (re)instate rigorous, structured, direct instruction in line with the latest findings in cognitive science research, teaching each child in his or her Zone of Proximal Development, i.e., at his or her instructional level, with proper scaffolding, and furnishing each classroom with teachers who've mastered both their content areas and these best practices. Or you could:


I. Eliminate the ability of academically advanced students to get ahead in the classroom by:

1. implementing low level, one-size-fits-all instruction (for which there's no better model than Investigations math)

2. eliminating grade acceleration and individualized instruction

3. eliminating gifted programming or making it about time-consuming projects that supplement existing assignments rather about academic challenges that replace these assignments.

II. Reduce the ability of students to get ahead on their own time by:

1. assigning tons of homework of the low-ratio-of-learning-to-effort variety 

2. including massive summer projects and one-size-fits all reading lists.

III. Reduce the ability of grades to reflect achievement differences via"grade compression" and inflexible "rubrics" that:

1. employ subjective grading standards (elevating "creativity" and "engagement" over correct answers, clarity, articulateness, and solid analysis) 

2. take points off for unexplained answers, however correct 

3. give partial credit for "explained" incorrect answers 

4. keep the purely academic demands/expectations of assessments and assignments as low as possible 

4. minimize the opportunity for students to demonstrate work that exceeds those demands/expectations 

5. even if students find a way to demonstrably exceed expectations or go above and beyond academically, don't give them any extra points for it 

6. deploy "wild card" variables that partially randomize who gets what grade (e.g., trick questions; unclear directions; trivial requirements like including today's date on the title page of your report or using the word "I" in your science project abstract; rather than collecting homework, leaving it up to the students to turn it in and giving out zeroes for things not turned in on time) 

7. assign heterogeneous-ability group projects and give everyone in the group the same grade

IV. Reduce the ability of NCLB tests to reflect achievement differences, via:

1. low academic ceilings 

2. partial credit for explained incorrect answers; points off for unexplained correct answers (as above) 

3. wild card variables (as above)

V. Lobby colleges to pay less attention to high-ceiling standardized tests like the SATs and the Achievement Tests, and more attention to grades and "leadership" activities.



But then the next question becomes how to eliminate the growing achievement gap between U.S. students and those from other developed countries.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

What Philadelphia 5th graders should know how to do

I recently came into possession of one the Philadelphia School District Parent Teacher Brochures, which breaks down the goals that each Philadelphia School District student should be able to meet by the end of each grade level.  Since I'm homeschooling my 5th grade daughter, I was particularly interested in the goals for fifth grade. And I was shocked, shocked, to find myself more baffled than enlightened after reading through these goals.

The language arts goals are all about process, purposes, and genres, with a developmentally inappropriate assignment thrown in in the form of a research project:

•Continue to build a reading, writing and speaking vocabulary
•Read to learn new information
•Read a wide range of stories, books and magazines for enjoyment
•Understand a problem or conflict in stories or books and talk or write about an appropriate solution
•Make connections between stories and texts that they have read and the world around them
•Tell and/ or write a summary that gives the main idea of what they read and the most important details or events
•Complete a research project including a written report
•Write stories with several paragraphs
•Write poems, plays, and reports

Not a word about specific reading skills (vocabulary level, sentence complexity, making deductions and bridging inferences within the context of the text) or writing skills (grammar and punctuation, sentence construction, paragraph construction).

As for the math goals, most are vague ("compute" and "find the relationships"), easy (locating numbers on a number line; comparing numbers; sorting shapes), and emphasize verbal explanations over mathematical performance. Four out of the 13 goals are about data and probability. Here the developmentally inappropriate goal (especially given what isn't covered here) involves algebra:

• Compute and find the relationships using whole numbers, fractions, and decimals
• Locate positive and negative numbers on a number line (integers)
• Explain to you what prime numbers, factors, multiples and compositie numbers mean
• Compare numbers (equal to, greater than, and less than)
• Collect, organize, display, and analyze data in a variety of ways
• Find mean (average), median (middle number), mode (most frequent) and range (difference between largest and smallest) of data
• Predict or determine all possible combinations and outcomes, such as, "How many outfits can be created with six shirts and eight pants?"
• Calculate the chance of a simple event happening
• Use a variety of methods to solve for unknown quantities in simple one-step algebra equations (solve for x)
• Sort polygons according to their properties and angles, such as triangles, rhombi, and parallelograms
• Define and compare perimeter (distance around) and area (amount covered inside) of shapes
• Understand properties of a circle
• Explain how they solved a math problem in their own words.

Not a word about which computation skills the child should develop, what sorts of numbers, fractions, and decimals the child should be able to do computations on (perhaps only the "friendly" fractions and decimals), and what level of computational fluency the child should have. Not a word about multiplication tables, long division, repeating decimals, ratios and percents, and multi-step word problems.

Turning to science, only one substantive topic is mentioned (solar energy) and goals pertaining to it remain vague ("build an understanding;" "recognize"). Most the goals pertain to process rather than achievement, many of them involving developmentally inappropriate activities that wrongly assume that children can function as little scientists:

• Develop skills that will emphasize the five senses while doing science
• Use prior knowledge when making observations
• Make predictions and hypotheses based on observations
• Design investigations with a control and one or two variables
• Gather, organize and display data independently
• Build an understanding of how solar energy is transferred
• Recognize that the sun is the main source of energy for people and they use it in various ways
• Design and conduct experiments with variables. Students should be able to explain cause and effect
• Study the relationship in an ecosystem that shows the relationship of an organism to its environment
• Conduct hands-on investigations to discover and understand their world
• Record observations in science notebooks

It would seem that, "goals" aside, the Philadelphia Schools are avoiding any commitment to help your 5th grader increase his or her vocabulary, reading level, sentence construction skills, or computational fluency with "unfriendly" numbers; or learn any scientific content other than a few vague propositions about solar energy.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

Katharine Beals in the Times

Wonderful letter:

Excluding the higher functioning [autistic] children [from the autism diagnosis] means that schools will have to do more to make regular classrooms hospitable to them without the early intervention based accommodations mandated by the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. 

In particular, teachers will have to stop requiring children to work in groups, share personal reflections and do organizationally demanding interdisciplinary projects — all of which are challenging for the sort of child who, rightly or wrongly, has sometimes received a diagnosis of mild autism/Asperger. 

The new American Reform Math is also problematic for this population, since it waters down the actual math and teaches it less systematically. 

KATHARINE BEALS
Philadelphia, Jan. 23, 2012 

The writer is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the author of “Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World.”

The Day of Reckoning, brought to us from India

Together, the rise of Reform Math, the reduction in ability-based grouping and AP classes, the demise of the close reading and the analytical essay (see also this), and the growing rarity of instruction in the finer points of English grammar and sentence construction, have caused current and future American high school graduates to be decreasingly prepared for college. As more and more American college students display skills in math, writing, and reading comprehension that are way below expectations (ending up, even in some of the more selective colleges, in remedial math and writing classes), college admissions committees are increasingly looking abroad.

While much of the news about overseas applicants centers on China, with its thousands of Ivy League-aspiring applicants and their glossy, high-production value applications (and the growing suspicion that a fair amount of cheating is involved), it's India, I predict, that will bring to the American K12 education system the day of reckoning that we so desperately need it to have. First, unlike their Chinese counterparts, college applicants from India face no linguistic barriers; many speak and write a much more eloquent English than American (and even British) students do. Second, there are apparently tons of extremely well-qualified Indian applicants pinning their hopes on America's top colleges.

Indeed, as an October New York Times article inadvertently suggests, the Day of Reckoning may be close at hand:

Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.

But because of her 93.5 percent cumulative score on her final high school examinations, which are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges here, Ms. Mohan was rejected by the top colleges at Delhi University, better known as D.U., her family’s first choice and one of India’s top schools.
...

Ms. Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending American colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handful of highly selective universities are overwhelmed.

True, another reason--indeed, the only reason mentioned in the Times article--why American recruiters are seizing on this opportunity is because so many of the crème de la crème of overseas students are wealthy enough to pay full tuition, unlike many of their American counterparts. But it also helps that the K12 schools they attend aren't using Reform Math, aren't renouncing ability-based grouping, and aren't failing to provide college prep classes that are truly college preparatory. Indeed, if it were primarily her parents' pocket books that make Moulshri Mohan so attractive to Dartmouth and Smith, why are they offering her so many thousands of dollars of scholarship money?

So here are my dire predictions. In the next ten years, as the effects of Reform Math continue to percolate up the American school system, and as the number of highly qualified Indian students continues to outpace the numbers of spots at the best Indian universities, there will be a the growing displacement of American students by Indian students. Only then will a large enough proportion of the Powers that Be start realizing how urgent it is to enact actual education reform--reform, that is, that reverses the century's-long tide that has pushed our K12 schools further and further away from what's happening in the most successful school systems overseas.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)