Speaking of Scarsdale (warning: bad language)

Recording Of Angry Chaperone On Edgemont Bat Mitzvah Bus Hits YouTube

Here's the tape: https://soundcloud.com/scarsdale10583/barmitzvahrant

This reminds me of Mary Damer telling me that the single biggest challenge for a new teacher is classroom management, and that includes a teacher just coming out of the Marines.

On top

The top earner in Westchester County and the region, Scarsdale's Michael V. McGill, earns $372,006 in total compensation.
Source: Demand for quality school superintendents fuels high salaries

Top-earner Scarsdale superintendent Michael V. McGill on our top students:

If you listen to people like Richard Elmore, who’s a teacher at Harvard, he says the very top top American kids are scoring about the 75th percentile on international studies. So we know our top performing kids are doing very well.
Source: A bully pulpit for the Superintendent of the Year | lohud blogs

Our very top students should be performing on par with Europe and Asia's very top students.

If they're not, then our very top superintendents are overpaid.

Superintendent salaries

in Scarsdale

Speaking of the SAT, my Scarsdale friend told me the other day that more than a few parents there are spending $25K for one year of SAT prep for one child, one test. They use Advantage Testing, she said.

Which looks great.

Scarsdale runs amok

A Scarsdale Education for the Future (pdf file)

It's getting to be time to tell my Holland story.

Scarsdale tutors

I was just talking to a guy who is related to a Scarsdale grade school teacher.

Scarsdale teachers start tutoring Scarsdale students for pay as early as second grade.


Scarsdale tutors, part 1

pick one

Lynn G and I watched the debate between Lisa Graham Keegan & Linda Darling-Hammond two nights ago, and now you can, too. The last 6 minutes are worth the time.

The debate was terrific, I thought, though the fact that curriculum and pedagogy, the twin issues that have driven my own family from the public schools, were barely mentioned goes quite a ways towards explaining to me why I've become an "Independent." I put "Independent" in quotation marks because I wasn't planning to become an Independent and don't consider it a badge of honor to be one. I am a believer in two-party politics, as a matter of fact; I just don't happen to have a party to believe in.

Of course, having become a person without a party and a parent without a public school, I'm thinking maybe now's the time to morph from small-l libertarianism to the real thing.

But I think I'll hold off on that. I can't be a libertarian; I have to carry on supporting NCLB if only to be the one parent in all of leafy suburbia who does.^* It's my job.

Speaking of leafy suburbia, on the video you'll hear Linda Darling-Hammond giving a shout-out to Scarsdale superintendent Mike McGill and his strategic use of resources or some such. That is horsepucky. The secret to Scarsdale Mike McGill's success is tutors. Lots and lots and lots of tutors.

And don't you forget it.



^* Me, and the hardy band of commenters and readers around these parts.

Scarsdale adopts Singapore Math

Scarsdale looks to Singapore for the new math
By Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy • The Journal News • October 9, 2008

...[T]he Scarsdale school district adopts Singapore math in kindergarten through fifth grade, replacing Trailblazers, used in the district for a decade.

The textbook series, written by the Ministry of Education of Singapore, is called Primary Mathematics, and Scarsdale is the first public school district to use it in New York as its core curriculum.

Until last year, the district used Trailblazers, textbooks aligned with the so-called reform mathematics - often derided as fuzzy math - based on recommendations originally published in 1989 by the influential National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

That approach called for a de-emphasis on manual arithmetic in favor of students' attention to the process leading to the answer. Math texts following the reform philosophy also have been criticized as covering too many topics in a haphazard sequence.

"The mainstream U.S. math curriculum is often seen as being a mile wide and an inch deep," said Nancy Pavia, the district's math helping teacher.

In 2006, the math council released the Curriculum Focal Points report, which identified important mathematical topics in each grade - from kindergarten through eighth - that students need to understand deeply and thoroughly for future mathematics learning.

This report was, at least in part, the result of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, an international assessment of the mathematics and science knowledge of fourth- and eighth-grade students around the world. The study found that students from many Asian countries outperformed their U.S. counterparts.

Of the 46 countries that participated in the study, U.S. eighth-graders ranked 15th in 2003. That was the nation's best score in the three years the study was conducted (in 1997 it was 28th), but it still was behind most other industrialized countries.

Singapore topped the list every time. Math taught in Singapore is part of a national curriculum designed by the Ministry of Education. It emphasizes the development of a strong number sense, mental-math skills and a deep understanding of place value.

"The curriculum is based on a progression from concrete experience, using manipulatives, to a pictorial stage and finally to the abstract level," Pavia said.

Last year, a 30-member committee of Scarsdale teachers and administrators reviewed the district's curriculum based on the Focal Points report.

[snip]

The new textbooks will look a lot "cleaner and clearer" compared with Trailblazers, which is heavily language-based.

"There will be fewer words on the pages, and it will be less confusing to students," she said.

Trailblazers used a "spiral approach," touching upon many concepts each year and revisiting the same topics in later grades, all while not learning them to mastery.

Cadalzo explains it thus: "In second grade, for instance, the children use multiplication tables from 2 to 5, but they haven't memorized them; and when they come to third grade, we end up relearning them. But now, they will have learned them in second grade and we can just concentrate on multiplication tables for 6, 7, 8 and 9."

The lack of drills in U.S. schools might help explain the popularity of the Japan-based Kumon tutoring centers, which have sprouted throughout the states as parents look for supplements to cement the basics. The Kumon math program focuses on drilling children on basics.

There are 1,500 Kumon centers in North America, including one in Scarsdale, home to a consistently high-performing school district.

"As an Asian mother, I am very happy with the new curriculum," said Indian-born and -raised Shobha Bhatnagar, mother of an Edgewood second-grader.

[snip]

Jeffrey Thomas, president of SingaporeMath.com, the Oregon-based U.S. distributor of Primary Mathematics since 1998, estimated that 1,000 schools nationally are using the books as a supplement, with 200 using them as their core curriculum.

"Initially, most of the demand came from parents of homeschooled children and the gifted and talented programs, but now it's the mainstream schools," he said. "We are very proud to add Scarsdale to the list. They are a class act."

[snip]

"Scarsdale is not a district to rest on its laurels. We are always looking to do even better," she said. "We want to give our students every opportunity to learn math to their full capacity because, ultimately, they will be competing in the global economy."

In the past, Cadalzo's students came to their own understanding of math through guided exploration, which he conceded they were more "likely to forget." But this year he planned to teach the basics until his students can "feel it in their bones."

Sofia Lacagnina sat at her desk flipping through the pages of the slim Primary Mathematics, and said, "Trailblazers was fatter and heavier. This book is thin. I love this book."

Reach Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy at svenugop@lohud.com or 914-694-5004.

So.

Scarsdale gets Singapore Math.

Irvington gets Project Lead the Way.

That should prop up housing values in a crashing world economy.

the homework gap

from Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us by Daniel Koretz --

...these critics usually miss the flip side of the coin: ignoring noneducational causes of variations in scores--that is, assuming that scores are a direct indication of school quality--lets some high-scoring schools off the hook. Some schools have high test scores because of the students they serve rather than the quality of the education they offer, but those who are convinced that scores most reflect educational quality consider them good schools regardless. My own children attended some of the highest-scoring schools in our state. They did indeed have some truly superb teachers, but they also had some mediocre ones and a few I thought should not have been allowed to teach at all, including one English teacher whose grammatical and vocabulary errors during parents' visiting day were so egregious that they sparked repeated and audible protests from the parents sitting in the back of the room. Test scores were nevertheless always high, a reflection in part of the very high education level in the community, which was full of attorneys, physicians, academics, economists, foreign diplomats, biomedical researchers, and the like...Not only did these parents provide--on average--environments highly conducive to academic achievement, but many also provided supplementary instruction, either by reteaching material themselves or by paying for the services of neighborhood tutoring firms.

A concrete example: when my son was in seventh grade, took a math class that was not well taught. (I went and watched, to confirm my hunch.) One evening he told me that he was confused by his math homework, which was part of an introduction to probability and statistics. I first tried to clarify the homework, but I soon realized that he was missing a few key notions. I asked him for his class materials, looked them over, and retaught him some of the core concepts, and after that he was able to handle the homework. I went back to the kitchen to clean up from dinner, but he soon called me upstairs again. He had just auditioned successfully for the school's jazz band, and he was having trouble counting out rhythms in the piece he was supposed to practice. I counted them out for him, but he still found them confusing (as I had too, many years earlier, when I first tried playing jazz). So I fetched my own horn and played the music at about half tempo while he counted it out. That worked. As I resumed scrubbing pots, my wife turned to me and said, "There you have it: social class differences in educational achievement."

[snip]

Disappointing scores can mask good instruction, and high scores can hide problems that need to be addressed.

p. 119-120

There is a phenomenal amount of tutoring going on in affluent school districts. Phenomenal. One of the tutors working in my town told a friend of mine that she estimates half of the kids in Scarsdale are tutored.

I believe it. When I met with the assistant admissions director at one of the local private schools, she told me she had been a Scarsdale tutor for several years. She along with many others.

I've come to think it was inevitable that matters would develop in this way.

First of all, public schools are built to provide inputs, not outputs: instruction, not achievement.

That may not have been so deadly when schools grouped kids homogeneously. With homogeneous grouping the classroom teacher probably had a decent chance of knowing where the kids were and of being able to teach to their level.

Along comes the de-tracking movement, and now you've got heterogeneously grouped classrooms with kids all over the map in terms of readiness. The inputs model hasn't changed, so teachers are told to teach to the middle, or they're told to differentiate instruction, and when teaching to the middle or differentiating instruction work for some of the kids but not all of the kids, you assume the problem is the kid, not the school. After all, the school's job is to provide opportunities to learn, and as long as you've put PowerPoints on the SMARTBoard, you've done that.

Then add to this set-up school districts in which the vast majority of parents are college-educated and affluent enough to hire tutors, and what do you get?

You get "high-performing" schools where the kids are being retaught by parents and tutored by tutors.


can a parent sue for educational malpractice?
Galen Alessi's "Diagnosis Diagnosed"

it is important that Trailblazers is not put down

Scarsdale to try new elementary math programs
by Carrie Gilpin

In an effort to "see what's out there,” Scarsdale is trying out four math programs in 30 K-5 classrooms this year, according to assistant superintendent Paul Folkemer, and will settle on one of them, or remain with the existing program, Trailblazers, by spring. A few teachers at Scarsdale Middle School will also participate in the pilot math program.

"We have been very happy with Trailblazers and it has served us well for 10 years, but change is healthy and we want to see what is out there," said Math Committee chairman Nancy Pavia.

“The process is energizing, and puts the subject area on the front burner," said Folkemer. "It is good for us, and at the end, we could come out of this staying where we are with Trailblazers."

Implementing any new program next fall would also be "a budget issue," said Folkemer. "We don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but we won't be able to make any decision until a draft of the budget is completed. We will go in under the assumption that we have the funds to move forward by fall."

Each of the 30 volunteer teachers will test two of the four programs, substituting units of Trailblazers for similar units of one of the test programs. The district is awaiting materials and will begin the first of the pilot program trials at the end of this month, said Pavia.

Pavia said the timing of the pilot is excellent since Trailblazers' second edition is out and needs to be purchased by the district. or a different program purchased.

"This has been very thoughtfully done," she said, stressing there is broad representation of teachers within all five elementary schools and in all six levels from K-5.

A few teachers in middle school will also participate in the pilot. "Increasingly, we have been trying to invite them into conversations with us about elementary school math," said Folkemer.

Some teachers involved in the pilot program announced it to parents at the elementary schools' open houses. Folkemer said he is scheduled to give a report on the pilot program, as well as other district initiatives, to the Scarsdale Board of Education on Tuesday, Oct. 9, during the board's regular business meeting at 8 p.m. The board will meet that night at Edgewood School.

Pavia said parents would see different materials coming home in their child's backpack during the year, and that nothing would be sent home for homework that hasn't already been covered in class.

Will pilot program math students be confused? "I don't think so at all," Pavia said. "The methodology is slightly different but that shouldn't make it confusing. If parents have questions, of course they should address them with the teacher," said Pavia, stressing that naturally it will not be "perfect."

Both Pavia and Folkemer said it would not be possible to test out a new math program without actually teaching it to students.

Pavia said teachers have been discussing a change in program for several years. They considered many possible programs and came up with the following four: Everyday Mathematics, a program from the University of Chicago; Think Math!; Scott Foresman"s Investigations; and Singapore Math. The programs all have slightly different approaches and the National Council of Teachers of Math has endorsed the first three.

“Singapore Math is the one that is slightly out of the box. It is very rigorous and is written by the Ministry of Education there. It is structured slightly differently and has many positive aspects,” said Pavia.

Folkemer said that many teachers “really like” Trailblazers, a program felt by many parents to be heavily language-based.

“Any program we use must have a balance of a strong skill base with conceptual and problem-solving elements,” said Folkemer.

“Language is all around us, and mathematics requires language. But to calculate accurately is critical. Algorithms and fact work is just as important,” Pavia said.

Trailblazers functions on a "spiral” method, where a unit of say, fractions, is touched upon, then students move to another topic, and then com around to fractions again.

“Math by its nature is a spiral, but Trailblazers is a very tight spiral. The programs we are looking at are not quite as structured. Whatever program we use, we will modify it to match it with our own curriculum,” said Pavia.

Folkemer said a presidential commission on math teaching led the NCTM to come up with a list of “Curriculum Focal Points”—important math topics for each grade level, pre-K through grade 8. Focal points are areas of emphasis that serve as organizing structures for curriculum design and instruction at and across grade levels.

“When we Trailblazers years ago, we adopted it as our curriculum,” said Folkemer. “Now, we have written our own math curriculum and any program we use will be modified to fit within our curriculum.

So why does the district need to purchase any program if it has written its own curriculum?

Pavia said it would not be a good idea to teach math without a purchased program. “Teachers are generalists. I’ve always had a program, which is critical for consistency among the schools. It is a foundation upon which we will build and teach our own curriculum,” she said.

“I think it is important that Trailblazers is not ‘put down,’” said Pavia “Change is forward movement and we are looking and learning if there is a better way to teach math,” said Pavia.

Scarsdale Inquirer 10-5-2007

onward and upward in Scarsdale

News flash.

Scarsdale is going to abandon TRAILBLAZERS it seems. Nothing bad should be said about TRAILBLAZERS, however! TRAILBLAZERS isn't bad! Scarsdale is merely continuing ever onward in its eternal journey of excellence. (My friend is sending the article; I'll have the actual quote shortly.)

In its place, they are considering:

• Everyday Math
• Think Math
• TERC Investigations
• Singapore Math

That's quite a lineup.

experimenting with students' lives

The proposed changes to Scarsdale High's curricula (pdf file) are, admittedly, an experiment:

Second, for at least the first five years after SATP is initiated, the school will solicit feedback from college and university admissions officers during and following each admissions cycle, with the aim of determining how the program has affected student access to the colleges and/or Scarsdale students’ attractiveness as candidates.

Third, the school will conduct cohort studies of students for at least the first five years after the SATP is initiated, in order to understand the program’s impact on their success in college and on their college experience more generally.

I served on the board of the National Alliance for Autism Research for seven years. The IRB process is stringent, intricate, and time-consuming. I don't know whether it's correct to say that this is as true of research involving animal subjects as it is for human subjects, but I do know that animal research is also closely scrutinized by IRB boards. As I recall, we rejected at least one project due to animal welfare issues. (I could be remembering this incorrectly; it's possible we sent it back for revision. My memory, however, is that we decided not to fund.)

question:
How much time and energy has the administration of Scarsdale devoted to meeting IRB requirements?

answer:
None.

Schools are not required to obtain permission from parents or undergo IRB review in order to conduct research using their students as human subjects.

A ktm commenter left this link a couple of weeks ago:

Committee on the Use of Human Research Subjects: Exemptions

Research that is

• conducted in established or commonly accepted educational settings, and
• involves normal educational practices.

Generally applies to the study of teaching methods, strategies, and curricula in the process of education. If individuals may be identified directly or indirectly, file for Expedited Review.

FERPA and PPRA also regulate research in school settings and limit information that may be gathered from schools and minors without subject or parental consent.

FERPA

Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment

These 19 curricular projects have essentially been experiments.

thinking, not teaching, in Scarsdale

Tex reminded me of this line from the Trailblazers implementation story:

Teachers are continuing to shift their emphasis from teaching material to focusing on children's thinking and learning.

constructivist coup in Scarsdale

Proposal for Advanced Topics Implementation

Ed is reading it now: "This is an unbelievably radical document."

It's also, for my money, one of the most fatuous.

Here's Jay Mathews.

The middle school model comes to Scarsdale High.

more later

help with homework

I've just found an amazing statistic:

In kindergarten through grade 12, 95 percent of children had parents who reported they assisted with homework (table 4).

source:
Parent and Family Involvement in Education: 2002-03 (pdf file)
NCES

Table 4 reveals that only 16% of students in grades 11 and 12 have parents who report giving no help with homework at all.

Even more incredible, parents who did not themselves graduate from high school report spending more time helping with homework than parents who have attended graduate or professional school. (Don't know whether the difference is significant.)


parents helping w/homework 1-5 days a week, by education level

Less than high school: 74%
High school grad or equivalent: 73%
Vocational/technical education
after high school or some college: 71%
College graduate: 68%
Graduate or professional school: 67%


Ed went to school in Levittown, PA. He had no help with homework, and yet somehow managed to acquire an education good enough to prepare him for Princeton.

Steve H has said many times that he received an education good enough to major in science and math in college (first physics, as I recall, then computer science?)

No help with homework in Steve's case, either.

The bad gets normal.


reality show

Ed says he'd love to see a student body swap.

Send all the Yonkers kids to Scarsdale; send all the Scarsdale kids to Yonkers.

Keep the teachers, principals, and superintendents in place.

What happens to the scores?


meet the parents

"When Progressiveness Leads to Backwardness"

Amity Shlaes' op ed on the history of progressive education (posted at NYC HOLD) is the best very short piece explaining how we got here that I've seen.

Progressive education, by which I mean forsaking content for utility and a child-centered focus on creativity, also has a strong tradition in Britain. A. S. Neill, the famous progressive educator, founded Summerhill, the progressive school, in Suffolk, England, not Suffolk County, New York. But the progressive movement has not touched most British schools to anything like the degree it has penetrated in America. As Diane Ravitch, the academic and former assistant secretary of education, points out in Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, a history of progressive education, America is now a nation of Summerhills. Most American teachers and principals frown on traditional schooling. Rote learning is out, as are American and European history and demanding math. Instead educators impart things they find fun or politically appealing. The attitude has become so ingrained that anyone challenging it risks being labeled elitist, even un-American. The New World, the message is, has never liked or needed Old World–style learning.

This, as Ms. Ravitch shows, is a myth. American schools were not always anti-intellectual. As recently as 1910, half of those in high school studied Latin—even though many were immigrants who were also learning English. As recently as the 1930s, eight-year-olds in Philadelphia’s public schools routinely memorized biographies of Alfred the Great, William Tell, and Florence Nightingale. Grammar schools demanded that small children demonstrate a skill today not required of even Ivy-bound 18-year-olds—to answer questions such as “A harness was sold for three-quarters of four-fifths of what it cost. What was the percentage loss?”

Such knowledge was then deemed the best weapon to abolish class. “The famous simile of the educational ladder, with its foot in the gutter and its top in the university,” wrote one educator, “is a fact many times verified in the knowledge of every intelligent adult.”

Then, though, came the progressives, who argued that children needed living knowledge, not dead artifacts. They started small, by throwing out the Greeks and Romans, and worked from there. By the 1940s the schools in Battle Creek, Michigan, had halved the share of students enrolled in college prep classes, while introducing health studies and “basic living” courses. Schools replaced mythology and history with the more amorphous social studies.

The youth-centered 1960s gave the trend fresh life. Now old-fashioned, content-oriented education was deemed not merely useless but dangerously authoritarian. Schools sought to cater to children and offered, as one Michigan scholar wrote, “an endless list of subjects to attract and interest students, such as Girl Talk and What’s Happening.” The schools, the scholar noted, had “simply given up on any attempt to exert any moral authority relative to education.” By 1970, Neill’s book Summerhill, which promoted his experimental methods, was required reading at 600 universities, selling 200,000 copies. What had started as a tiny war against Homer and Herodotus had turned into a siege, a watering down of every part of the curriculum for all ages. Today even basic math skills such as long division and the division of fractions are under assault. Teachers explicitly dismiss them as outdated and hand out calculators to children in the first grade.

This is the key passage:

They started small, by throwing out the Greeks and Romans, and worked from there. By the 1940s the schools in Battle Creek, Michigan, had halved the share of students enrolled in college prep classes, while introducing health studies and “basic living” courses.

Labaree on the 2 progressivisms & which one won

Progressive education wasn't just one thing; it was two things.

pedagogical progressivism (Dewey)

administrative progressivism (Thorndike)

Here's Labaree:

The second thing we need to recognize about the history of this movement is that the administrative progressives trounced their pedagogical counterparts. Ellen Lagemann explains this with admirable precision: ‘I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L.Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.’

I get the sense that more than a few ktm readers, writers, and commenters see high school as the release from progressive ed. The evidence? It's in high school where tracking begins.

For my district and I'm sure for others, that's wrong. Tracking was invented by the progressive ed movement, and at the district level it's not about high standards for teaching or content.

It's about tracking.

It's about selecting an elite from amongst an already self-selected group of students.

[T]he main thrust of the social efficiency curriculum, with its emphasis on core principles of the pedagogical progressives. It mandated exactly the kind of topdown curriculum that the latter abhorred, imposed on students in order to serve society’s need for particular skills and knowledge, and forcing them spend their time in schools becoming socialized for the adult social roles they will play. This puts priority on learning particular subject matter instead of learning to learn; it elevates the interests of society and of school administrators over the interests of students; it makes the classroom a preparation for adulthood rather than an exploration of childhood; and, in the name of these social benefits, it risks extinguishing the child’s engagement in learning and curiosity about the world. It was, in short, exactly the kind of curriculum that Dewey deplored, ‘externally presented material, conceived and generated in standpoints and attitudes remote from the child, and developed in motives alien to him’.

Not only did the social efficiency curriculum threaten the kind of natural learning process treasured by the pedagogical progressives, but it also threatened the values of social justice and egalitarian community that were central to their beliefs. This curriculum was radical in its challenge to traditional notions of academic education, but it was profoundly conservative in its embrace of the existing social order and in its eagerness to prepare students for predetermined positions within that order. It introduced tracking and ability grouping into American schools; it introduced ability testing and guidance as ways of sorting students into the appropriate classes; and it institutionalized the educational reproduction of social inequality by creating a system in which educational differences followed from and in turn reinforced differences in class, gender and race.

In our district what I think I see is John Dewey progressive ed K-5 replaced by Edward Thorndike progressive ed 6-12.

So far I prefer Dewey.

Jay Mathews, as it turns out, lived in Scarsdale and experienced "Westchester tracking" firsthand. More later.

spilt religion - Hirsch on progressive education & Romanticism
David Labaree on the 2 factions
Labaree on constructivism
Hirsch on Labaree
Hirsch, E.D., "Romancing the Child," Education Next, 1 (Spring 2001).
Labaree, David F., "Progressivism, Schools, and Schools of Education: An American Romance," Paedagogica Historica (Gent), 41 (Feb. 2005), 275–89. (pdf file)

teachers behaving badly

I've just discovered it's possible to post links on the Irvington Parents Forum (I think you have to join the Forum to get to the links...)

Which presents a golden opportunity to post links about Math Trailblazers.

As I was scouring the web, looking for the now-classic Trailblazers How to Public-Relation Parents support document, I discovered that The ARC Center has composed "Implementation Stories" for a number of the constructivist books.

These narratives conclude with "The Ups and Downs of this Story."

"Ups" are called "strengths."

"Downs" are called "challenges."

Scarsdale is there:

• This implementation was aided by the widespread interest and involvement of all teachers.

• Another strength is that the administration and parent community were supportive because they were continually informed and involved.

• Teachers had to adjust to the spiraling nature of the curriculum. Concepts were introduced, but mastery wasn't necessarily expected until they were revisited. This meant they had to look for new ways to assess student growth.

• Teachers are continuing to shift their emphasis from teaching material to focusing on children's thinking and learning.

Wait!

Back up.

Did they just say Scarsdale teachers are continuing to shift their emphasis from teaching material to focusing on children's thinking and learning?

I believe they did.


District 2 in Manhattan (birthplace of NYC HOLD) has clearly been a thorn in everyone's side:

Challenges

• The change was more difficult for schools that had been successful with traditional curricula. [ed.: argh!!]
  

• Principals had to learn different ways of looking at mathematics classrooms. [ed.: argh!!]

• It takes time for both teachers and administrators to internalize the changes well enough to clearly articulate them to parents. [ed.: argh!!]

• The volunteer model has positive and negative aspects. One of the negatives is that students at the same school could be getting different curricula. Parent concerns are an ongoing challenge. [ed.: profiles in euphemism]
  

• Any new program that requires new materials and significant staff development presents funding challenges. [ed.: especially when you already had a traditional curriculum that was "successful"]

Indian River in Delaware may have accumulated my favorite list of Challenges thus far:

• When Math Trailblazers was implemented, the district reacted to parent questions and concerns. Subsequently the district took a proactive stand and schools are now making a strong effort to inform parents. [ed.: inform=pacify]
  

• Teachers' concerns about the state test and its alignment with Trailblazers must be addressed by the district
  

• Principals are not active participants in on-going training.

• Teachers' beliefs about reform mathematics are stronger than their practices. Many teachers don't see the need to follow the curriculum as written, supplementing with practice instead of moving forward and giving students more opportunities in mathematics. [ed.: teachers behaving badly]

• Professional development is voluntary and it is a challenge to reach those who choose not to attend.

So what do we see here in Indian River?

We see teachers on strike, that's what we see.

Teachers and possibly principals, too.

And....it's sounding like parents could be a whole lot better informed than they are at the present time.

Things are not copacetic in Indian River.


update

NYC Educator leaves this observation:

I want a job at that district where professional development is voluntary. If you've never sat through hours of some clueless educrat pontificating about why this new program is the only one in the world that will ever work, precisely what the same person said about another program last year (now discarded), you are lucky indeed.

This is why I say teachers in Indian River are on strike.

I've never heard of teachers getting to choose whether or not to spend hours of their lives listening to edu-blah blah.

compare and contrast

Singapore:

....the top third of Singaporean students score, on average, in the top 10th percentile of students in the 38 countries tested on the TIMSS-R.

source:
What the United States Can Learn From Singapore's World-Class Mathematics System
(and what Singapore can learn from the United States):
An Exploratory Study

Scarsdale:

...the very top top American kids are scoring about the 75th percentile on international studies. So we know our top performing kids are doing very well.

source:
Mike McGill
New York state Superintendent of the Year

oldies but goodies:

more Singapore Math

Mike McGill

.