national PTA gets tough on parents

Don't Politicize the Common Core State Standards!
By Eric Hargis, Executive Director of the National PTA

update: National PTA gets $1 million from Gates Foundation

again with the critical thinking

Well, thanks to Texas Republicans including the words "critical thinking" in a statement no one outside a tiny group of public school obsessives actually understands (or cares to understand, apparently), we now have precious NYTimes real estate going to the celebration of non-memorization in schools.

Here, courtesy of the Times, we have the thoughts of a recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching and the Distinguished Fulbright Award in Teaching:

I’ve worked for many years with students of varying demographics and learning abilities and what I’ve learned over and over is that nearly all kids love to learn – even those who would like us to believe they hate school. But what they need from their education is more than the memorization of facts – they need great teaching, foundational knowledge, problem solving skills, and the understanding of current issues.

What is a Good Teacher Worth?
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
July 6, 2012, 10:03 AM

So they're going to acquire "foundational knowledge" but they're not going to memorize any facts. Or not many.

How exactly do you pull that off?

And please don't tell me 'they construct their own knowledge.'

Speaking as a writer, I have constructed knowledge any number of times -- and then promptly forgotten what it was I constructed. For nonfiction writers, forgetting your own ideas is a common occurrence and an occupational hazard. That's why writers keep notebooks.

I do recall, I think, Willingham once saying that we remember knowledge we've figured out for ourselves somewhat better than we do knowledge we've been told by someone else. Assuming that's the case, I surmise that the mechanism is the amount of time you spend trying to figure something out, which amounts to a form of practice or rehearsal as well.

I know for a fact that 'discovering' and 'constructing' your own knowledge is absolutely no guarantee that you will recall your own knowledge later on.

Not even close.

There's only one route to Carnegie Hall.

instructivist weighs in
think

smoke

The real horror, however, was on a one-page sheet – this was not on the agenda and was meant to be buried — titled, “Summary of January 2011 Regents.” The sheet had a very simple chart showing results of the Regents Exams — the tests taken by all New York State high schoolers, many of which have to be passed for graduation. Easy to read: Exam subject, number of students who took the exam, number of students who passed: 41 kids took Integrated Algebra and only 10 passed; 27 took Global History, 5 passed. Of the ten exams given that fateful January day, only 34 of the 129 students who took them (26%) passed. And this was before any budget crisis. “We’ll look into it,” said the Super.

Field Notes: Wake Up and Smell the Smoke - or Not
by Peter Meyer

shouts and murmurs

As I would learn in my five years on the board, there are no absolute victories and no deafening defeats in the land of education governance; just the constant hum of the bureaucracy trying to control the flow of information and—if you’re lucky—the shouts and murmurs of the “the people” complaining.

Five Lessons from Five Years on the School Board
by Peter Meyer

being there

At some low point in my tenure on the board of education in my small school district, a friend advised, “Don’t worry. You are like gravity. They always know that you are there.”

Five Lessons from Five Years on the School Board
Peter Meyer

comments needed

No Comment Necessary: Texas GOP’s 2012 Platform Opposes Teaching “Critical Thinking Skills”
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

I say it's time for somebody out there to think critically about thinking critically.

AND SEE:
Critical Thinking Not Possible Without Content Knowledge

Our schools do ruin Singapore Math

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

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

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

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

I've now seen schools ruin PLCs, too.

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

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

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

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

Starting over

Long-time readers & writers here at ktm know that for the past 6 years I've been politically involved in an effort to move my district off the classic high-SES suburban model: Teach, Test, and Hope for the Best Have the Parents Hire Tutors.

It hasn't been easy.

The single best observation anyone ever made about my district came from a woman who has put 4 children through the system: 

We're great because 10 kids do spectacular things by senior year. The other 150 will get by and there are no glaring inadequacies.

Today is a new beginning.

UPDATE 7/19/2013:

OK, it's not a new beginning.

Gymnastics and Ed Reform -- something in common

Just wanted to let you know about a new post on Throwing Curves.

Parents and Coaches -- An interesting interaction.

You do not need to be particularly interested or knowledgeable about gymnastics to appreciate the similarities.

Two new Education Blogs

Two new education blogs have joined the fray. Full disclosure: I'm helping create the "Throwing Curves" blog. Throwing Curves is a project between a friend and I that are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but find a lot of common ground when we start to talk about education. I hope you'll join us. We have a Connecticut focus, but are known to take on national issues whenever the whim strikes us.

The other is "Education Quick Takes" and is giving us lots of short blurbs about education news and policy. It's worth the click. I have no connection to Education Quick Takes, other than as a reader.

Revolutionizing Math at the School of the Future

(Cross-posted at Out in Left Field)

A front page article in Monday's Local News section of the Philadelphia Inquirer profiles a math class at Philadelphia's Microsoft-funded High School of the Future, whose teacher, Thomas Gaffey, placed second in Microsoft's U.S. Innovative Education Forum and was a semi-finalist in its Worldwide Innovative Education Forum. In Gaffey's ninth-grade algebra class there are:

No textbooks, no paper, no chalk, no desks, and no assigned seats.

Instead, students use laptops while sitting in rolling chairs at trapezoidal tables spaced out in hexagonal classrooms.

Just how newsworthy this sounds to you depends on whether you think chair mobility and table shape have a big influence on learning, on whether you've been following current trends in education over the last 50 years, and on how unusual you think it is for a teacher to "encourage his students to find answers to their own questions" and engage with them in exchanges like these:

"Is this an obtuse triangle?" one student asks.

"Well, what can you tell me about an obtuse triangle?" Gaffey replies.

"One of the angles has to be more than 90 degrees," the student answers.

"Are any of the angles here like that?"

"Yeah. Oh, I get it now!"

As the Inquirer explains:

This snippet of student-driven discussion is a glimpse of the style and approach that have earned Gaffey national and international recognition.

Student-driven? Who's asking most of the questions? But I'm splitting hairs here. What I should be asking is: Why does this kind of exchange warrant international recognition?

To fair, it wasn't this, specifically, that earned Gaffey his honors. Rather:

Les Foltos, one of the judges who reviewed Gaffey's work, was impressed by his emphasis on "actively engaging students in solving real-world problems." As Gaffey puts it, "If we want to teach math to learners, we should teach math how it is actually used. It doesn't matter how much you know. It matters what you can do."

Ah yes, "real world problems." Again, only if you've been out of touch with the last half century of educational reform, and with today's Reform Math in particular, will this strike you as revolutionary. Here is Gaffy's version of real world math:

In his classroom on a recent Tuesday, Gaffey's challenge to his "learners" - as students in the Parkside public school are called - was to estimate Earth's land area.

To solve the problem, the class first covered basic concepts about area and polygons - shapes with three or more straight sides.

Gaffey then asked, "If a shape has four sides, is it always a polygon?"

Learners who answered yes (the wrong answer) were asked to redefine what a polygon is, while those who answered no were asked to draw a four-sided shape that was not a polygon on the class "smart board."

Gaffey drew a shape with three straight sides and one curved side.

"Is this a polygon?" he asked.

"No," the class responded.
...

The class drew lines through each of the continents, chopping them up into complex polygons, then simple polygons.

The final phase was to derive formulas for the areas of the simple polygons, and add up the areas.

This sort of problem is not particularly new, as a quick survey through now-standard textbooks like Everyday Math and the Interactive Math Program makes clear. And it's been around long enough to have garnered some serious criticism--specifically in what Barry Garelick calls its "just in time" approach to teaching.

Among other things, "just in time" often means serious delay. For example, one would hope that students would already know the formulas for the areas of simple polygons, and how to derive them, well before they hit 9th grade.

But because so many students are so far behind where they should be, there is one thing in which I and Gaffey are in whole-hearted agreement. In Gaffey's words, as cited by the Inquirer:

"Math education, more than any other subject, is in need of drastic reform."

factoid

Spotted this in the Times Book Review last night:

Town, county and state governments no longer have much independent political identity. They are mere “conduits for federal mandates,” as Codevilla puts it. He notes that the 132 million Americans who inhabited the country in 1940 could vote on 117,000 school boards, while today a nation of 310 million votes in only 15,000 school districts.

The State of Conservatism
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Published: October 21, 2010

A couple of years ago, when busing costs were at issue here in Irvington, we learned that at some point in NY history the state 'incentivized' (hate that word) districts to consolidate by picking up some of the transportation costs. I no longer recall the details, and the story doesn't make sense given the fact that the town is paying transportation costs, not the state.

But I'm pretty sure the state-incentivizing part is correct in some way, and it's interesting in light of Codevilla's statistics.

Waiting for Superman

cross posted to the Irvington Parents Forum

Waiting for Superman

Tue, October 12 5:10 || 7:25 || 9:40
Wed, October 13 5:10 || 7:25 || 9:40
Thu, October 14 5:10 || 7:25 || 9:40

Jacob Burns Film Center Theater
364 Manville Rd., Pleasantville, NY 10570
Info-line: 914.747.5555
914.773.7663

============

Hi everyone -

Waiting for Superman is incredible. So moving. Entertaining, too; Geoffrey Canada in particular is riveting. The title comes from a story he tells about the day his mother told him Superman doesn’t exist.

The film follows 5 or 6 children whose families are trying to find good schools for their kids, including one mom who can no longer afford the Catholic school her daughter has been attending. The lottery scenes at the end are excruciating.

Amazingly, the film does **not** give wealthy, white suburban schools a pass. About three quarters of the way in, the film tells us that suburban schools have the same underachievemement problems urban schools do; then we see data showing that the top 5% of U.S. students rank far below the top 5% of students in other countries. Which is true.

Here’s a picture of the suburban girl waiting to see if her number will be called:

Here’s the trailer.

Catherine

What about the US's better students? When asked, Schmidt replied, "For some time now, Americans have comforted themselves when confronted with bad news about their educational system by believing that our better students can compare with similar students in any country in the world. We have preferred not to believe that we were doing a consistently bad job. Instead, many have believed that the problem was all those 'other' students who do poorly in school and who we, unlike other countries, include in international tests. That simply isn't true. TIMSS has burst another myth - our best students in mathematics and science are simply not 'world class'. Even the very small percentage of students taking Advanced Placement courses are not among the world’s best."

TIMSS - Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies

autonomy, mastery, purpose

Dan Dempsey just left a link to this fantastic YouTube on the Irvington Parents Forum ---

$100 million to Newark public schools

I'm against it.

Seriously.

Public schools need the things money can't buy.

how the unions lost the media, part 2

Union leader calls on L.A. teachers to boycott Times

part 1

grass roots

Some of you know that I've been writing citizens' op eds for a Yahoo Group called the Irvington Parents Forum for some time now.^* I've been saying there what I say here.

In the past two years, the town has elected 4 new members to our 5-member school board:

Robyne Camp (elected 2009)
John Dawson (2009)
Bob Grados (2010)
Jim McCann (2010)

If you're interested in grass roots politics, it's worth reading these 4 candidates' "Answers to Forum Questions," because you'll notice that all 4 sound more alike than different: all 4 tell us they embrace academic excellence and accountability.

That is a far cry from the 2007 election, when we had 2 candidates who told the public: 'I don't know anything about education so I'll leave that to the experts, the people we've hired to run the schools.' That is very close to a direct quote.

In 2007, the 2 candidates who promised the public that, where academics and achievement were concerned, they would not provide independent oversight of the executive, defeated the 1 candidate who promised that he would.

This year, their terms up, they retired. Four candidates ran for their seats, 1 as a write-in; 3 of the 4, including both winners, ran on accountability platforms.

The main publicly-stated difference between the 2 winners (Grados & McCann) had to do with "politics," with Grados saying consistently throughout the campaign that he does not like politics, is not a politician, and has no "political agenda." In practice, this means he will vote to keep Math Trailblazers because the administration wants to keep Math Trailblazers. (scroll down)

So in truth, the 2 winners are divided on the question of whether parents and the broader public should have a voice in the education our children receive. However, I think the fact that both sounded like members of the reform camp is probably important.


opinion and fact

The Forum has been taking fire from the administration all year. During the Singapore Math meeting, our Interim Director of Curriculum and Instruction told the board that misinformation about Math Trailblazers was being spread around town. The foolishness making the rounds was the kind of thing, she said, that she once referred to as chatting "over the laundry lines in the back yard."

'But I can't call it that any more,' she said. (words to that effect)

In the last board meeting prior to the election, the Forum was openly denounced by the board president, one candidate (who told the audience that henceforth he would never again read the Forum), and one parent.

Post-election, Ed wrote the statement below in response to complaints by Grados supporters that the Forum is not "balanced":

It’s no secret that this list was created by people concerned about the leadership of our school district, aspects of its educational philosophy, budgetary issues, and a perceived unresponsiveness to community concerns. The list began, that is, as an agent of change. But it has always been open to all comers, and as the husband of the list’s co-founder, I know that essentially all posts are put through. The point of having moderators is not to establish any particular political line but to guard against vulgarity and ad hominem attacks and to prevent our inboxes from being overloaded with spam.

The Irvington Parents’ Forum is as “balanced” or unbalanced as its contributors make it. If we avoided controversy, it would become dull and unreadable. Ditto if all contributors did was state unadorned facts, genre: “The Irvington school district has an enrollment of approximately 1,800 students.”

Contributors express points of view, preferably with facts to back them up. That’s what democracy is all about—taking positions, attempting to support them, and trying to convince others that you’re right. And since we’re fortunate to live in a democracy, everyone is free to take issue (again preferably armed with appropriate evidence) with anything that anyone says.

So, the distinction between “facts” and “opinion” is a red herring. Facts mean very little unless framed by an argument, viewpoint, or philosophy. By the same token, opinions baldly stated and innocent of any factual evidence don’t do the speaker or writer much good. So, for example, if I state the fact that the United States entered World War II in December 1941, that’s not very interesting. But if I go on to opine that we should have gotten involved a year or 18 months earlier and that we didn’t because isolationism still reigned—then my statement, a combination of fact and opinion, becomes more interesting. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s necessarily right. Someone might reasonably respond that the United States didn’t have the military capacity to intervene effectively in Europe in 1939 or 1940, and that even in early 1942, we were woefully unprepared.

It’s as a result of this kind of argument that knowledge advances, new policies are framed, political alliances established, reforms enacted, and the like. Here, at the local level, the Irvington Parents’ Forum clearly fulfills a need. Otherwise, it wouldn’t attract new members almost every day of the week. If you disagree with something that’s been posted—as I’m doing now—go ahead and post a response. The chances are that there will be a response to your response, but again, that’s the beauty and privilege of free speech, especially at the local level. To intervene effectively in the national discussion, it helps to have power, position, and money. Here on the Parents’ Forum, anyone can add her or his two cents for free.

As for the idea that contributors are somehow sacrificing our kids’ education on the altar of local politics, I disagree. We’re creating a dialogue whose goal is to make a good school district better, to give our students the best education we can provide. I’m glad “Kris10why” had a world-class education here in Irvington, but we’ve had posts from recent IHS grads who don’t feel the same way. And, for me, every student counts.

^* Since October 5, 2006, to be exact.

endorsement (academic excellence)
endorsement (politics & community sentiment)
McCann!
the Kumbaya statement

the Kumbaya statement

for all you David Kaplan fans out there:

unity, yes, but not yet time for Kumbaya

McCann!

from the Department of Good News:

McCann/Grados -- Budget Passes

And, from the Department of Freudian Slips:

District figures different from Parents Forum figures

Forum figures correct

next generation

Sorry to have been AWOL - election day is today, so I'll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, read this endorsement of two candidates running today. I've never met the author, who I'm told is a freshman in college.

Amazing.