the decision - full text

The Honorable Julie Spector

IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON IN AND FOR KING COUNTRY

DA-ZANNE PORTER, MARTHA MCLAREN, and CLIFFORD MASS,

Plaintiffs,

v.

SEATTLE SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1, IN KING COUNTRY, STATE OF WASHINGTON, BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF SEATTLE SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1, and MARIA GOODLOE-JOHNSON, Superintendent and Secretary of the Board,

Defendants.


NO. 09-2-21771-8 SEA



FINDINGS OF FACT, CONCLUSIONS OF LAW, AND ORDER


THIS MATTER having come on for hearing, and the Court having considered the pleadings, administrative record, and argument in this matter, the Court hereby enters the following Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Order:


FINDINGS OF FACT

1. On May 6, 2009, in a 4-3 vote, the Seattle School District Board of Directors chose the Discovering Series as the District’s high school basic math materials.

2. In making its decision, the Board considered:

a. A recommendation from the District’s Selection Committee;

b. A January, 2009 report from the Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranking High School math textbooks, listing a series by the Holt Company as number one, and the Discovering Series as number two;

c. A March 11, 2009, report from the Washington State Board of Education finding that the Discovering Series was “mathematically unsound”;

d. An April 8, 2009 School Board Action Report authored by the Superintendent;

e. The May 6, 2009 recommendation of the OSPI recommending only the Holt Series, and not recommending the Discovering Series;

f. WASL scores showing an achievement gap between racial groups;

g. WASL scores from an experiment with a different inquiry-based math text at Cleveland and Garfield High Schools, showing that WASL scores overall declined using the inquiry-based math texts, and dropped significantly for English Language Learners, including a 0% pass rate at one high school;

h. The National Math Achievement Panel (NMAP) Report;

i. Citizen comments and expert reports criticizing the effectiveness of inquiry-based math and the Discovering Series;

j. Parent reports of difficulty teaching their children using the Discovering Series and inquiry-based math;

k. Other evidence in the Administrative Record;

l. One Board member also considered the ability of her own child to learn math using the Discovering Series.


FINDINGS OF FACT, CONCLUSIONS OF LAW, AND ORDER - 2

3. The court finds that the Discovering Series is an inquiry-based math program.

4. The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.

CONCLUSIONS OF LAW

1. The court has jurisdiction under RCW 28A.645.010 to evaluate the Board’s decision for whether it is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law;

2. The Board’s selection of the Discovering Series was arbitrary;

3. The Board’s selection of the Discovering Series was capricious;

4. This court has the authority to remand the Board’s decision for further review;

5. Any Conclusion of Law which is more appropriately characterized as a Finding of Fact is adopted as such, and any Finding of Fact more appropriately characterized as a Conclusion of Law is adopted as such.


ORDER

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED:
The decision of the Board to adopt the Discovering Series is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Dated this 4th day of February, 2010

THE HONORABLE JULIE SPECTOR
KING COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE

full text of ruling (pdf file)
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math wars

comment left on Numbers Wars: School Battles Heat Up Again in the Traditional versus Reform-Math Debate in the March issue of Scientific American:

Sad but true. I was at a fast food drive thru when the computers were down. They had to make change the old fashioned way. But the girl could not figure out how much change to give me. She seemed lost as she tried to calculate the difference between what I gave her and what the food cost. She had to call in the manger, who took way to long to compute the change (eventually she found a hand-held calculator).

Apparently even simple arithmetic is no longer well taught, learned and/or retained. Reliance on machines to "teach math" is only good if one has a machine when it is needed. My daughter had these classes where the calculator was required. The problem was that after smacking the keyboard a few times, she could come up with an obviously nonsensical answer. She would just write it down and move on. I asked her one time how she could multiple two numbers that each were less than one and come up with an answer that was greater than ten. The blank stare said it all (fyi - she failed to enter the decimal points correctly).

Want to terrify a teen-ager? Ask them to multiply 12 times 12. Is the answer immediate or not? Forget adding simple fractions. And we expect these kids to learn algebra and higher mathematics?

Are kids today less proficient even in arithmetic than in the past? Surely we can tell if these newer teaching methods are getting better results or not. As for me, I think my daughter did better in arithmetic in elementary school. After middle and high school, she seems to have "lost" the ability to easily do the arithmetic she learned earlier in life. I blame the calculator.

Twenty years of reform math.

That's a long time.

for immediate release

Statement by Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers, In Support of Campaign to Combat Childhood Obesity

I feel much better about childhood obesity now that we've got Randi Weingarten on the case.

I'm sorry.

I had to say it.

rightwingprof: "I Would Like an Answer Now"

Clay Bond posted this to rightwingprof on March 29, 2006. It's a keeper.

'Yes, I posted this some time ago. However, the questions are not rhetorical. I really would like an answer from my colleagues in the primary and secondary school system — particularly those in the education union establishment. And I’d like an answer because I really do want to know why I have to do your job as well as mine.

Thanks ahead of time for your response. Here it is:

I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I’ve had many extremely bright students. Many. Some had the necessary knowledge for the class, and some did not; of those who did not, most worked their butts off and did well. I also don’t want you to think smarts are what I care most about.

My favorite students are the ones who aren’t that bright, but work their tails off to do as well as they can. My least favorite students are the ones who are extremely sharp, but don’t work.

Sometimes, however, there’s too much missing knowledge, so much that the best thing the student can do is drop the class. It breaks my heart when I get a student like this.

I had a student some time back I’ll call Mark. Mark was bright, though his high school had cheated him, and he was lost almost from the first day. He worked hard, and came to my office hours. But … well, there was too much missing, as I discovered early in the semester when he was in my office.

I asked him what he wanted me to clarify, and he said he didn’t understand the 68-95-99 Rule. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “In a normal distribution, 68% of the data fall within one standard deviation in either direction of the mean. So here’s our distribution,” I drew a bell curve on the whiteboard, “And here’s our mean,” I drew a dashed line bisecting the curve. “Our mean is 50, and our standard deviation is 2, so 68% of the data fall between 50-2 and 50+2, 48 and 52.” I drew lines and arrows, and a 68% beneath.

Mark: “I don’t understand. Wouldn’t it be 75?”

Me: “Wouldn’t what be 75?”

Mark: “The mean.”

Me: “Why would it be 75?”

Mark: “That’s what you said in class.”

Ah. He was stuck on the example — and being a firm believer in introducing concepts in contexts familiar to students, I introduce basic descriptive stats in terms of grades, since what else are students more familiar with?

Me: “The mean could be 75, sure. In this particular distribution,” I pointed to the curve on the whiteboard, “the mean is 50.” I then erased the 50. “But let’s say the mean is 75,” and I wrote 75 after the x-bar, “then 68% of the data falls between 75-2 and 75+2, 73 and 77.”

Mark: “How do you know if the mean is 50 or 75?”

One of the difficult parts of teaching is diagnosing the problem. Students have questions, but the problem may actually be more fundamental than what they are asking about, as I was beginning to understand here.

Mark was having two basic problems: He didn’t understand what a mean was, and he was having trouble abstracting the idea out of the example. The former is easy to fix; the latter is not.

Me: “Can I erase this?” I pointed to the whiteboard, and he nodded. I erased the curve, and wrote a series of numbers on the board in a vertical column: 90, 85, 70, 65, and 50. “These are test scores,” I said, “How do you calcualate the mean, or average?”

Mark didn’t volunteer an answer.

Me: “Okay, let’s say the whole class takes an exam, and these are the scores. An average, or mean, tells me how well the class did overall. To calculate the average, I add all the scores, then divide by the number of scores. Here, you do it.” I have him the marker.

Mark added the numbers, then stopped.

Me: “How many scores are there?”

Mark: “Five.”

Me: “Okay, divide the total by five.”

Mark complied.

Me: “What’s the mean?”

Mark: “Seventy-two.” He looked at the numbers for a minute, then smiled. “I get it!” he said.

That’s when I realized what I’d suspected: Mark was a university freshman who had not, until just now, understood the concept of an average. I found that disturbing, but Mark was on a roll.

Mark: “So what’s a median?”

Me: “The middle score.” I pointed to the five numbers. “Half of the scores will fall above the median, and half will fall below the median. What’s the median of these scores?”

Mark: “Seventy.”

Mark was in my office three hours. No wonder he’d been lost. He didn’t understand an average. He didn’t understand sampling or distributions. We didn’t get to the 68-95-99 rule that day, because there was too much he didn’t understand.

I worked with him twice every week, and he got a B in the class. He worked harder than nearly any other student I’ve had. But if he had not come to my office every chance he got, he would never have passed.

Mark had no sense of entitlement. He wanted to understand, and he wanted a good grade, and he worked for both. He was bright. The thing is, I pretty much ran him through a high school math program in the office during the course of the semester.

I’m a teacher, so I can ask the obvious question, and some other teacher can’t come back with any of the usual non-answers.

I did it. Why couldn’t you, when Mark was in high school? It’s not money. I got no extra pay for helping Mark. It’s not time. I spent many hours in the office working with him. It’s not his intelligence or ability to learn. He’s smart, and he learned quickly, once we got started.

So I’ll ask again: Why couldn’t you do your job? It wasn’t my job to teach Mark high school math, but I did. Why did I have to? How did Mark get through all the required high school math courses without understanding what an average is? How did Mark get through all the required math courses without ever having seen y=mx+b? How did Mark get through all the required math courses and not understand that each flip of the coin is independent of all others? Most of all, how did you, his teachers, let such a bright, hard-working, motivated student slip through the cracks?

What’s going on there?

rightwingprof at ktm

here

speaking of rightwingprof

I've just seen this posted on the Clay Bond Memorial Facebook Page:

warning to Clay's Internet friends: Central Pennsylvania Orthodox will probably stay up for awhile because it runs on freeware. Right Wing Nation will vaporize at some point because there is a monthly charge for the blogspace. Cut and scrape things you want to keep, ok?

I'm going to save I Want an Answer now, but there must be a zillion other keepers on his site--does anyone have any ideas?

why can't U teach me to read?

Years ago, I asked a special needs attorney when it would be possible for parents of general education students to sue schools. He wasn't encouraging. (scroll down) In fact, he wasn't even interested.

I had thought such a case finally existed, but now that I've looked at Jennie's links (thank you, Jennie!) I see we're not there yet.

That's fine. I'm patient.





I miss rightwingprof.


Why can't U teach me 2 read?: Three Students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test by Beth Fertig
due process for parents of general education students
diagnosis diagnosed
crack in the wall (educational malpractice)
status quo la-la-la

Laurie Rogers on the Delphi Technique

I remember, back when I started writing ktm-1, somebody mentioning the Delphi technique. At the time, I thought: that's a little far-out.

Now I think: what a helpful explanation!

My own district has been using a variant of the Delphi technique in its Budget Forums, but we seem to be past that now. I'm told that, at the last forum, someone stood up and suggested that employees take a pay cut in order to prevent further tax increases and the room burst into applause.

Laurie Rogers on the decision

I would like to think if we stuck central office administrators in a reform math classroom and forced them to endure the torture they call K-12 math instruction, they would come to see the light, but I fear they would just get out their color-coded sticky notes, their pens and highlighters and happily spend the rest of the day muddling in herds, getting nowhere, certain that their talking, scribbling and checking for group consensus means "real learning" is going on.

Very droll.

I like droll.


Betrayed

Barry on the Seattle decision

Barry clarifies the question of whether the court ordered the Seattle school district to adopt a particular curriculum (which is what I assumed when I read the news):

....the court did not rule on the textbook or curriculum. Rather, it ruled on the school board’s process of decision making—more accurately, the lack thereof. The court ordered the school board to revisit the decision. Judge Julie Spector found that the school board ignored key evidence—like the declaration from the state’s Board of Education that the discovery math series under consideration was “mathematically unsound”, the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction not recommending the curriculum and last but not least, information given to the board by citizens in public testimony.

The decision is an important one because it highlights what parents have known for a long time: School boards generally do what they want to do, evidence be damned. Discovery-type math programs are adopted despite parent protests, despite evidence of experts and—-judging by the case in Seattle—-despite findings from the State Board of Education and the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Skydiving without Parachutes

Ed says he heard on NPR of a successful court case in which a parent successfully sued a district for failing to teach her child to read -- apparently someone has written a book about the story.

Has anyone heard anything about this?

Singapore Math at Hackley

here

One question: I don't remember a lot of focus on manipulatives in Singapore Math -- ?

How do Singapore schools handle struggling students?

Hackley School

momof4 on college planning

momof4 says...

I have always felt that the preparation for high school is too little and too late, both in terms of academics and of advance planning. Especially in a system where APs have prerequisites, kids and parents need to know that so they can plan coursework accordingly.

All of the schools my kids attended waited until 8th grade - usually spring -to address the HS plan. Parents need to know the critical nature of the usual sixth grade test, which determines who gets on the top math path, which will also determine eligibility for AP Physics BC (calculus is a co-requisite). There is just far too much mush and wasted time; kids without aware parents who are able to supplement are hosed before they hit 7th grade.

BTW, I've found it fairly common for a shared MS-HS campus, so taking some classes at the HS may be possible. Also community colleges, universitites etc - whatever is available.

SAT scores predict grades in individual courses

contra FairTest....

Individual Differences in Course Choice Result in Underestimation of the Validity of College Admissions Systems
by Christopher M. Berry1 and Paul R. Sackett2

ABSTRACT—We demonstrate that the validity of SAT scores and high school grade point averages (GPAs) as predictors of academic performance has been underestimated because of previous studies’ reliance on flawed performance indicators (i.e., college GPA) that are contaminated by the effects of individual differences in course choice. We controlled for this contamination by predicting individual course grades, instead of GPAs, in a data set containing more than 5 million college grades for 167,816 students. Percentage of variance accounted for by SAT scores and high school GPAs was 30 to 40% lower when the criteria were freshman and cumulative GPAs than when the criteria were individual course grades. SAT scores and high school GPAs together accounted for between 44 and 62% of the variance in college grades. This study provides new estimates of the criterion-related validity of SAT scores and high school GPAs, and highlights the care that must be taken in choosing appropriate criteria in validity studies.
Psychological Science
Volume 20—Number 7

pull:
Thus, to the degree that prediction of grades is a goal of college admissions systems, SAT scores and high school GPA are clearly useful tools for deciding which college applicants will achieve the greatest levels of academic performance.

Inside the same class, the student with higher SAT scores/h.s. grades does better than the student with lower SAT scores/h.s. grades. High school grades were a slightly stronger predictor than SATs.

palisadesk on Direct Instruction and Whole Brain Teaching

(Part 1) Coming back to Liz's question at the end of her post, How congruent is [Whole Brain Teaching] with Direct Instruction, I would have to answer: Not.

The WBT people have adapted some ideas from DI and other sources (Peer-Assisted Learning, Kagan's Cooperative Learning, Fred Jones' Positive Classroom Instruction, Precision Teaching and still more). However, they have put their own spin on all of these so their variants differ in essence as well as in details from the originals.

Take unison responding -- something that is a prominent feature of DI programs at all levels. It is never used in DI as a "management" tool, nor as a rah-rah way to "pump up" the kids or manipulate them. The script, with its unison responses, is carefully researched to ensure clear presentation -- the exact wording, examples and non-examples to ensure than 95% of students will grasp the concept or skill being taught the first time, with practice to mastery built in over a spaced continuum of lessons. Unison responses are an empirically validated way of ensuring participation of all students, instant feedback to the teacher as to hope well the students understand or remember the presentation (if there are errors it is the teacher's responsibility to loop back and re-teach an item until all students can respond correctly. Individuals who make an error are not singled out, but are monitored closely and if additional practice is required for one or two, that is arranged separately so that the dignity of the student is always preserved.)

This I found an important distinction between true DI and WBT -- Engelmann (in his writings, his presentations, and his videoed interactions with children in all settings) is extremely respectful of the dignity of the learner. While he can be funny and show a humorous side (mostly at his own expense), I cannot imagine him ever presenting a task to students and then (as in the 4th grade critical thinking video) asking them to "beg me to let you do it." Even if in jest or in a good-hearted spirit, I found asking students to plead and beg en masse to be disturbing and degrading, however well-intentioned. The kids seemed to go along with it, which is even more disturbing. Why should children have to beg their teacher to engage in a valuable learning activity?

Another fundamental difference between DI and WBT is the principle of parsimony. Engelmann is very explicit in emphasizing the need for instruction to be parsimonious--- to contain nothing extraneous, to include the minimum verbiage needed for clear communication, to require only the amount of practice needed to mastery -- no more and no less. Extraneous yakkety-yak, whether by teacher or students, is a no-go.

It would be completely alien to DI to have the teacher explain a new concept to the class, then ask the STUDENTS to explain it to each other. It's the teacher's responsibility to ensure the students grasp it, not the responsibility of the student's partner. All the scripted cheers and call-and-response stuff in WBT is totally foreign to the DI principle of parsimony, and to the concept of respect for the learner as well.

Only the instructional language in DI is scripted; the teacher is trained to give lots of positive feedback (at a ratio of 5:1 or better), and to teach in an animated and engaging manner, but how he or she does so is an individual matter. This means the teacher can adapt praise and encouragement to his/her own style and the culture of the community or classroom.

Also, DI has the scripted unison-response component to every lessons, but that is only a part of the lesson. All lessons also include individual work, sometimes partner work, sometimes small-group work, so children are not being overwhelmed by all the noise and demands to produce a response. DI makes tracking points an optional feature, but does not suggest extrinsic rewards for these (it suggests they could be tied into normal student evaluation), although teachers may use them in this way if they feel it is necessary, as is sometimes the case.

Finally, DI fundamentally differs from the example of WBT that I saw in several videos, in that it regularly monitors progress in an empirical manner so that the teacher knows what every child is learning, and ensures mastery through a research-based set of criteria at multiple points.

Although the program itself is very tightly crafted and leaves no room for "creativity," the teacher's creativity can blossom in its application and in response to the needs of the individual learners as the program moves along. In fact, it frees the teacher to be more attentive to kids' responses and to devise ways to help them overcome whatever hurdles present in their path. Not needing to re-invent the wheel in every lesson, the teacher can truly engage with and pay attention to each individual student s/he teaches.

(part 3) To be fair to WBT, some of the videoed activities I saw were pretty well done and are based on sound precedents. The one on the Speed Read 100 or something was a good example of peer-assisted learning under a teacher's direction, with children encouraged to help each other (within a pre-trained format), to aspire to beating their own record and to celebrate small steps forward.

If it weren't for the other accoutrements, I would have given this activity two thumbs up, but it was pretty good. I would recommend Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (see Sopris West for some examples for the primary classroom) as it has a positive effect in several areas, including achievement, student motivation, building classroom community, student self-confidence, and so forth. Similarly, some of the Kagan strategies, such as Think-Pair-Share and Turn and Talk are also well-validated empirically but do not need to be carried out in the chaotic manner we saw in the videos.

Another point: attention signals, such as Class-Yes! are a valuable tool in any classroom. What bothered me was not that they used it, but how it was used -- in a theatrical, almost buffoonish, hyperdramatic way. Learning can be fun and engaging, but it shouldn't be a joke, a circus or a day at the football stadium.

For primary kids, a good attention signal is (teacher says, in calm rhythmic voice) "1,2,3, eyes on me!" Children stop where they are, turn and face the teacher and clap. "1,2, eyes on you!" This is used in a purposeful manner, when something needs to be said to the whole group but it is not necessary for everyone to go back to their seat as if for a lesson. There's nothing manipulative about it, either. Class-Yes! in a straightforward way would be fine for older students, I think. I myself would not allow yelling and silliness to accompany it. We want to keep the focus on learning.

To that end, gestures can be very useful. A popular and effective program for K in the UK, Jolly Phonics, uses hand signals (called "actions") to teach the letter-sound correspondences. I can imagine similar applications at other levels. These have at least two positive benefits: they give the wiggly, energetic student an opportunity to engage in a physically active way, and they provide the teacher with instant formative assessment data on how well the lesson is progressing.

.....I doubt there are any videos out there that show DI and WBT and contrast the differences. WBT is a recent development and that explains why ... there isn't any longitudinal data on how effective it is in ensuring student learning. As for videos exhibiting DI, most that I have seen consist exclusively of video of the teacher presentation (the scripted part) since that is the most difficult to learn to do well. Signaling, pacing and knowing when to loop back and review are the hardest elements to master....

Since basic differences between the two lie in underlying philosophy and curriculum design, those wouldn't be apparent anyway. However, I did note that none of the WBT videos I saw consisted of a teacher presentation that appeared "scripted," i.e. specific language from the teacher, requiring a specific instruction-related response from students, over a period of several minutes. The "scripting" in the WBT videos consisted of management call-and-response practices, not scripted presentation of concepts and content.

Also, I don't know of any DI videos that include the whole lesson -- the non-teacher-directed parts. They don't depict the independent work period, student partner work, or small group/team work. These are an essential element of every lesson, as is the "work check:" students and teacher review and correct the independent work at the end of the lesson, to ensure students can clarify any misunderstanding before going on to the next step.

As for preschool, DI does offer specific programs for that level, most notably in language skills and verbal reasoning. They don't recommend moving on to reading instruction until children are proficient in the language skills, which include making comparisons, understanding and using if/then statements, applying a rule (if all birds have feathers, and Paco is a bird, what else do we know about Paco?).

(2 of 2) The early phases of the reading program for this level teach a lot of the phonological processing skills (blending and segmenting sounds, sequencing,left-right progression) needed for successful reading later on, and introduce only very regular grapheme/phoneme correspondences, in a special orthography modified to be less confusing to very young children whose visual perception and visual efficiency skills are less well-developed.

The letters are darker, bigger and "fatter," with distinct differences between the u and n, the p and q, the b and d, so as to prevent children's confusing them. Visually similar letters are not taught together, but presented one at a time, and when one of the pair is introduced, it is taught to mastery before the other is introduced. The program for 4-year-olds moves quite slowly, and many elements are taught in a playful or gamelike way, with lessons expected to take only about 15 minutes. So it is unlikely a child would be "unready" (after completing the language sequence), and s/he would not be pressured to move too fast.

There is very little written component at this stage; the seatwork consists often of coloring, tracing or making discriminations, such as crossing out an item that doesn't belong. These provide short, frequent opportunities to develop graphomotor skills, but not to the point of frustration.

DI is most valuable at the preschool level for children with a less-advantaged language background, though in Engelmann's early work his comparison group of "middle class" kids took off like a rocket with DI and were able to do very advanced work in reading and math by age 6, as well as verbal reasoning skills that Piaget thought impossible before age 11 or 12. He talks about that in one of his books; I'll see about finding an appropriate link....

remembering what you understand

Reading through the whole-brain thread I've just come across this observation by Tracy W:

Understanding is good, but it's only momentary. In my work I often spend hours trying to understand a problem, and then finally getting the flash of insight. And I've learnt that when the flash of insight comes I need to write it down and store it somewhere I can find it again, because otherwise I forget.

There's a terrific scene in Mad Men built on this premise. One of the copy writers stays up all night working on a brilliant idea for an ad campaign, and then, the next morning, he can't remember what his brilliant idea was.

The punchline: with Don Draper glowering and Peggy Olsen nervously trying to cover for her colleague, the guy finally cracks and says, "I had a brilliant idea, but I don't remember it."

There's a beat while the audience waits for Don to blow up.

Then Don says, "I hate when that happens."

College Application & Class Rank

I know that GPA (class rank) is one of the key factors in college applications, but applications have to be sent in before much of anything is known about the senior year. Does this mean that the courses you take in the senior year and grades you get don't matter so much? I know that colleges check to see if you crash in the senior year, but exactly what do they know about the senior year? Does this mean that the class ranking at the end of the junior year is all that the college knows? If so, does this mean that students should try to get more AP classes in before the senior year?

I was also looking at the course catalog for the high school my son will enter next year. It finally (!) struck me that if he wanted to take an AP science course, it has to come after taking the regular honors version. Is this typical? Do some kids get authorization to go directly to the AP version? This relates to the senior year issue. If colleges can't base their decisions on the results of the senior year, then do some kids relax their schedules a little in the senior year - perhaps not cram in every last AP class they can?

Register for 5OSME PLUS! and school visits....

Hello,

Early bird registration for 5OSME PLUS! is open through 1 March 2010: www.origami-usa.org/5osme_registration

Registration price increases on 2 March 2010.

Why are we calling it 5OSME PLUS!?

In addition to the 5th international conference on origami in science, mathematics and education (5OSME; 13-15 July 2010), there will be

• a folding convention (PLUS!: 15-17 July 2010),
  
• an origami exhibition (14-17 July 2010),
  
• a cross-country collaborative student origami building project,
  
• two viewings of Between the Folds,
  
• opportunities to visit many sights in Singapore as well as in neighboring Malaysia and Thailand,
  
• an eclectic and infinite array of delicious foods that are very reasonably priced!, and
• more shopping malls than you can count!
  

We have an exciting lineup of presentations from many countries for 5OSME (list of accepted abstract titles will be uploaded to the 5OSME website soon), ranging from the frontiers of research to creative fields in design!

The 5OSME website (www.origami-usa.org/5osme) contains lodging information and forms for teaching and volunteering.

We recently learned that 5OSME PLUS! has been selected by the International Conference Support Program to receive 10% discount for conference participants who make hotel reservations through http://www.hotelscombined.com/Conference_Support

Please read the information at the above link carefully. To receive your 10% rebate, the name on your reservation receipt must match the name registered at the conference.

Should you have any questions/comments/suggestons, please feel free to contact 5osme.queries@gmail.com

I will be leading a small group of individuals (maximum number of 20) to visit schools the week of 19 July 2010. Please contact me if you are interested: pwangiverson@gmail.com

We look forward to seeing you in Singapore in July!

Best regards,

The 5OSME Organizing Committee

Student Names and Addresses

Yesterday, my son had to fill out some sort of science survey that was supposed to collect data to find out how to get more kids to look towards careers in science. He is in 8th grade. It asked about what he wanted to do when he got out of school and even what colleges he was interested in. (What!?) I asked him a lot of questions, but that's the best understanding of the survey I could figure out. However, he had to include his name, address, telephone number, and email. He also said something about perhaps being sent some information. !!?? Is this normal; collecting personal information and sending it off to a third party without parental consent?

onward & upward

more is more

Surprise! Lack of Mastery of Earlier Math Makes Mastering Algebra Difficult

From Today's EdWeek

'Algebra-for-All' Push Found to Yield Poor Results

Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced “algebra for all” policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier.

A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek.

[snip]

“There’s no question that taking advanced courses boosts student achievement,” said Adam Gamoran, a professor of education policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His 2000 study on algebra and tracking helped catalyze the interest in expanding access for all students to algebra courses.

“Where the area of disagreement comes,” Mr. Gamoran added, “is what should we do with students who performed poorly previously. In my judgment, the reason studies like mine show that students even with low levels of achievement do better in advanced classes is because the low-level classes are practically worthless.”

“And there’s no simple solution to this problem,” he added, “because we also know that when tracking is eliminated, students at high levels don’t gain as much as they do in high-level or [Advanced Placement] classes.”

[snip]

Tom Loveless, the author of the report from the Washington-based Brookings Institution on “misplaced” math students in algebra, said the issue is even more complex.

“No one has figured out how to teach algebra to kids who are seven or eight years behind before they get to algebra, and teach it all in one year,” said Mr. Loveless, who favors interventions for struggling students at even earlier ages.

Nationwide, research findings may diverge because testing content varies—the TIMSS test has more algebra content than many state exams taken by 8th graders—and because course content varies from classroom to classroom.

“If you take what’s called algebra class, and you look at the actual distribution of allocated time, you find that many of those teachers spend a very large portion of that year on basic arithmetic,” said Mr. Schmidt, who is a distinguished university professor of education at Michigan State’s East Lansing campus. His research on U.S. classrooms has found, in fact, that nearly a third of students studying algebra are using arithmetic books in their classes.

Yet another thing our education experts may have backwards

Besides their confusion of that which is largely development and shouldn't factor into grades (e.g., organization skills) with that which isn't (e.g., math skills), and their confusion of that which most children learn implicitly without deliberate classroom interventions (e.g., social skills) with that which most children do not learn implicitly (e.g., reading, foreign language) and their confusion of that which is best done outside of school (e.g., board games and movies) with that which is best done at school (e.g., the multiplication tables), there's the issue of text-to-self connections in reading.

Text-to-self connections are highly personal connections that a reader makes between a piece of reading material and the reader’s own experiences or life. An example of a text-to-self connection might be, "This story reminds me of a vacation we took to my grandfather’s farm."

So explains the Florida Online Reading Professional Development site, a site dedicated "to providing quality professional development services and support to Florida educators in effective reading instruction through its online course, expert staff, quality resources, and other professional development services."

The ability to make text-to-self connections, FORPD states, is part of what distinguishes good readers from poor ones (emphasis mine):

Good readers draw on prior knowledge and experience to help them understand what they are reading and are thus able to use that knowledge to make connections. Struggling readers often move directly through a text without stopping to consider whether the text makes sense based on their own background knowledge, or whether their knowledge can be used to help them understand confusing or challenging materials. By teaching students how to connect to text they are able to better understand what they are reading (Harvey & Goudvis, 2000). Accessing prior knowledge and experiences is a good starting place when teaching strategies because every student has experiences, knowledge, opinions, and emotions that they can draw upon.

The cognitive science literature, however, suggests that text-to-self advocates may have it exactly backwards.

Consider, for example, a paper by Courtnay Norbury and Dorothy Bishop entitled "Inferential processing and story recall in children with communication problems: a comparison of specific language impairment, pragmatic language impairment, and high functioning autism." This paper finds inferencing difficulties characterizing all poor readers with the above conditions. What Norbury and Bishop find, however, isn't that these readers weren't able to make inferences, but that they made the wrong ones. For example, when asked, in reference to a scene at the seashore with a clock on a pier, "Where is the clock?", many children replied "In her bedroom."

Norbury and Bishop propose that these errors may arise when the child fails to suppress stereotypical information about clock locations based on his/her own experience. In support of this hypothesis, they cite Morton Gernsbacher's book Language Comprehension in Sentence Building, which provides evidence that adults with poor reading difficulties are less able to suppress irrelevant information. As Norbury and Bishop explain it (emphasis mine):

As we listen to a story, we are constantly making associations beween what we hear and our experiences in the world. When we hear "clock," representations of different clocks may be activated, including alarm clocks. If the irrelevant representation is not quickly suppressed, individuals may not take in the information presented in the story about the clock being on the pier. They would therefore not update the mental representation of the story to include references to the seaside which would in turn lead to further comprehension errors.

Text-to-self connections, in other words, may be the default reading mode, and not something that needs to be taught. What needs to be taught instead, at least where poor readers are concerned, is how not to make text-to-self connections.

I'm neither a reading specialist nor a cognitive scientist, but my gut feeling is that, while accessing general background knowledge helps with reading comprehension, accessing personal background knowledge does indeed lead you astray. Text-to-world, OK, fine; but not text-to-self.

Especially, I imagine, for those most entrenched in the self, for example, children on the autistic spectrum.

Seattle School District Loses Lawsuit over Discovery Math Program

News report from Seattle Post Intelligencer is here.

From the article:

Those suing to stop Discovering Math in court were Martha McLaren, a retired Seattle high-school math teacher; Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington; and Da-Zanne Porter, mother of a Cleveland High School student.

Mass, a well-known local meteorologist, has said college students' math abilities have been decreasing over the past 10 years.

"I've been giving a math diagnostic exam in my 101 class, and the results are stunning; stunningly bad," Mass said in a story that appeared last month before the lawsuit was argued.

This is stunning news. Every school board should be made aware of this decision. That the ruling was based--in part--on the widening achievement gap attributable to the "discovery" series, raises the spectre of civil rights.

Congratulations to Cliff Mass, Martha McLaren, and Da-Zanne Porter.

The court decision goes a long way in giving parents the credibility they need to stand up to school boards across the country.

Special Education Thoughts and Budgets

Here a few recent comments here at KTM, in which the commenters say things such as:

It doesn't cost much to educate my children. It costs a great deal to educate a few children. Our district is reputed to be good with special needs students, thus it draws more sped kids to us. The "cost per student" reflects overall spending, and no longer breaks out sped costs.

So, it's possible to educate students privately for much less than the public cost, because the school has the freedom to avoid heavy sped costs.....

I'm not advocating that sped kids not receive an education. I think that requiring each school district to pony up for unlimited sped burdens in isolation is bad policy. It leads to a poisonous atmosphere between parents and teachers. The school district has a clear conflict of interest between providing an education and balancing the budget. In our state, everything else in the school budget is subject to cuts, but not sped. That builds resentment.

and

This is not PC, but some kids have such severe handicaps/medical conditions that they should not be in the education system at all. I know of a 7-12 school that spent 4 years trying to remove one kid; not toilet trained, unable to speak, mental age about 2 years. Highly disruptive, of course.

What follows is an essay by my friend Lea, who is making herself an expert in funding in our local k-8 school district, Redwood City School District in California. She has a child with special needs. As I'm sure you have all read, California is in a budget crisis. Another piece of the puzzle you may not know is that California school funding is...really, really complicated. District A may be under one kind of funding rules, and District B, contiguous and for all intents and purposes, identical in demographics, may be under a second and more restrictive set.

Special Needs Children and Public Education

by Lea Cuniberti-Duran

Raising and educating children with special needs is expensive. That's just a fact.

I have attended many school district budget meetings in which officials blurted to their audience, "We cannot pay for XYZ because of our financial responsibility toward children with special needs: to educate one special needs student can cost the district $100,000 a year." I also hear about how the district has "an unfunded mandate to educate children with special needs, and how this results into an encroachment to the general fund."

As one can imagine this argument is not always well received by parents of typical kids who want a great education for their children, and are lead to believe that "all those quirky kids" are in the way. It is easy to believe the encroachment argument: how can one argue with the fact that our district has to transfer $7M from general fund to the special education department?

The school district's argument has been so effective that a good friend recently confronted my husband and me. She said she couldn't see why the district had to spend so much money to educate special needs children. She resented spending $100,000 for a child who will may never be a fully contributing member of our society. Why not spend that money toward the education of all the other children, those who will be able to contribute, go to university, and have a career?

Don’t Be Fooled By the Numbers

Districts use children with special needs the way a magician uses props: as a distraction, a way to divert attention from schools underperforming because of problems that have nothing to do with special needs. Just look at the numbers: Redwood City School District spends about $10,000 per student (according to the latest data released by the district). RCSD is rated a 5 out of 10 based on State and Federal tests results for the school year 2008-09

If we look at districts around the Bay Area that, like Redwood City, are revenue-limit (meaning, they rely heavily on state funding), have the same proportion of students with special needs, YET are rated higher by GreatSchools.net; we will see that these districts spend less money per student. From this we can infer that special needs students are not the reason why school districts underperform:

• Cabrillo Unified (in Half Moon Bay) is rated 7 out of 10; per-pupil spending* = $7,477


• San Mateo-Foster City is rated 7 out of 10; per-pupil spending = $7,917


• Mountain View is rated 7 out of 10; per-pupil spending = $8,433


• San Francisco is rated 7 out of 10; per-pupil spending= $8,357


• Millbrae is rated 8 out of 10; per-pupil spending = $7,203


• Novato is rated 8 out of 10; per-pupil spending = $7,203


• Walnut Creek is rated 10 out of 10; per-pupil spending = $7,281

====
*Lea crunched these numbers before the real per-pupil spending paper was available to her. So just assume that the real costs are higher.

A Good Investment
Allowing people with disabilities to reach their full potential is a good investment. With appropriate services and support, people with disabilities can lead full and productive lives. And helping those who may never be fully independent reach their full potential costs taxpayers less than funding 24/7 assistance for the rest of their lives.

We, as society, need to move away from thinking that people with a mental or physical disability cannot be contributing members of society. Just look around in your daily life, and notice some examples of people who have gone and beyond those simple expectations: my children’s occupational therapist who is missing an arm, or a tax accountant who happen to be dyslexic, or one of my personal heroes, Dr. Temple Grandin, PhD, who is a leading expert in livestock management as well as an advocate for the autism community.

Work programs can specialize in employing individuals in areas where they excel, like complex but repetitive tasks that a neurotypical person cannot perform with consistent precision. I was told of a woman with Down syndrome whose job is to prepare all the instruments for the surgeons in a mid-west hospital. Educating and teaching skills to a person with a disability may require extra resources, but it leads to more independence – so it’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s the least expensive approach.

We Are Not Sparta
We, as society, value life, and have laws to protect it. We also value diversity. Long gone is the time of Sparta when people with differences were thrown off a cliff. But in the not-so-distant past, American children with disabilities were taken away from their families and put in institutions, where they were often left in very desperate conditions: with minimal food, clothing and shelter and terrible unhygienic conditions. In 1967, for example, state institutions were homes for almost 200,000 persons with significant disabilities. Some of these institutes still exist, like the NAPA State Hospital outside Sacramento, California which has been investigated by the State as recently as 2005 for abuses and infractions against patients.

The birth of IDEA

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Federal government, with the strong support and advocacy of family associations, such as The ARC, began to develop and validate practices for children with disabilities and their families. These practices, in turn, laid the foundation for implementing effective programs and services of early intervention and special education in states and localities across the country.” (From the US Department of Education)

This lead to the creation of IDEA (Individual with Disabilities Educational Act), which gives children with disabilities the right to a free and appropriate public education, in the least restrictive environment, with accommodations, modifications and support so that children can access their education. This law benefits ALL children with an IEP, no matter how few services he or she is receiving.

What Has IDEA Accomplished?
A few examples from the US Dept of Education:

• The majority of children with disabilities are now being educated in their neighborhood schools in regular classrooms with their non-disabled peers.


• High school graduation rates and employment rates among youth with disabilities have increased dramatically. For example, graduation rates increased 14 percent from 1984 to 1997.


• Today, post-school employment rates for youth served under IDEA are twice those of older adults with similar disabilities who did not have the benefit of IDEA.


• Post-secondary enrollments among individuals with disabilities receiving IDEA services have also sharply increased, with the percentage of college freshmen reporting disabilities more than tripling since 1978.

In Conclusion

In a year like 2010, when schools are squeezed by a state in financial disarray, when budgets and programs are slashed with a hatchet; when the panic feeling of saving money makes people cut corners; special needs children will be the easy target for blaming and the victims of further cuts. As a parent and an advocate for my children, I have pledged to stay involved, informed and calm; attend as many school board meetings as I can, and share information with other parents.

.....

I am committed to push further and follow in the footsteps of the parents and advocates before us, who fought for their children to have a more appropriate education and a dignified life.

Power Teaching Revisited, now Whole Brain Teaching

The other day I was over at Tahirih Bushey's excellent site, Autism Games. She had posted Power Teaching and Followup to Whole Brain Teaching.

The name "Whole Brain Teaching" set my skeptical sense tingling -- there is so much "brain" ... (searching for polite word) bushwa... out there, especially in professional development for teachers.

But I thought I'd go look.

Power Teaching was the brainchild of three instructors, Chris Biffle (college), Jay Vanderfin (kindergarten) and Chris Rekstad (4th grade). They called it Power Teaching until sometime last year, when they reorganized into Whole Brain Teaching. They are using the power of YouTube to spread their ideas.

Here's a kindergarten lesson (the video is about 7 minutes). I'm impressed by the engagement of the students, the explicitness of the teacher's presentation, and the number of repetitions she gets in.

The website http://wholebrainteaching.com/ has a lot of resources, and Chris Biffle has posted a lot of video clips showing examples of Whole Brain Teaching at various grade levels and subjects.

I haven't poked around the site enough to know if it is truly congruent with Direct Instruction. I'd like to hear what you think.

Previously, here:

Exo on Power Teaching

Power Teaching from redkudu

Susan Engel's revolutionary new proposals for education reform

In an Op-Ed in yesterday's New York Times, Susan Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams college, makes the bold proposal that "if we want to make sure all children learn, we will need to overhaul the curriculum itself." Almost as original as Engel's proposals is her original use of language, some of which I've put in bold face.

"Our current educational approach," Engel argues, "is completely at odds with what scientists understand about how children develop during the elementary school years and has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and teachers alike."

In particular, students shouldn't be spending "tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run."

Engel proceeds to enlighten us on the following things that "scientists know" and that "research has shown unequivocally":

-children "construct knowledge; they don't swallow it."

-"the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment"

-"the second [step to literacy] is to read a lot and often."

-"people write best when they use writing to think and to communicate rather than to get a good grade."

-"children learn best when they are interested in the material or activity they are learning."

-collaboration is "a skill easily as important as math or reading."

Based on these astonishing new insights from science, Engel boldly proposes the following paradigm-shattering changes to classrooms:

-every child should be given "ample opportunities to read and discuss books."

-children should "spend an hour a day writing about things that have actual meaning to them--stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another."

-children should "spend a short period of time practicing computation" and once they are "proficient in those basics they would be free to turn to other activities that are equally essential for math and science: devising original experiments, observing the natural world and counting things, whether they be words, events, or people." (Children love such activities, Engel argues, "if given a chance to do them in a genuine way").

-children should engage in playful activities "from building contraptions to enacting stories to inventing games," which will "help them acquire higher-order thinking skills like generating testable hypotheses, imagining situations from someone else's perspective and thinking of alternative solutions."

-children should have ample time "to collaborate with one another."

Clearly Engel not only knows her cognitive science, but has spent countless hours observing what happens in today's classrooms: all that futile phonics instruction; all those tedious math and science drills; all that dearth of collaborative learning, game playing, letter writing, and cartooning.

But I must reserve my greatest appreciation for the New York Times for deeming it fit to publish this courageous piece, with its original criticisms of today's classrooms, its revolutionary proposals for reform, and its pioneering attempts to bring science into classroom teaching (Dan Willingham, please take note!).

when is a demographer not a demographer?

answer: when he is a retired superintendent of schools

no vendor left behind

hurricane

Martin was quoted as saying: "What's amazing is New Orleans was devastated because of Hurricane Katrina, but because everything was wiped out, in essence, you are building from ground zero to change the dynamics of education in that city."

Duncan was quoted as replying: "It's a fascinating one. I spent a lot of time in New Orleans, and this is a tough thing to say, but let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that 'we have to do better.' And the progress that they've made in four years since the hurricane is unbelievable. They have a chance to create a phenomenal school district. Long way to go, but that -- that city was not serious about its education. Those children were being desperately underserved prior, and the amount of progress and the amount of reform we've seen in a short amount of time has been absolutely amazing."

Education Secretary Duncan calls Hurricane Katrina Good for New Orleans Schools
Washington Post Saturday January 30, 2010

Barry G on exercises vs. problems

By way of introduction, I am neither mathematician nor mathematics teacher, but I majored in math and have used it throughout my career, especially in the last 17 years as an analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My love of and facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. The teachers I had in primary and secondary school provided explicit instruction and answered students’ questions; they also posed challenging problems that required us to apply what we had learned. The textbooks I used also contained explanations of the material with examples that showed every step of the problem solving process.

I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.

Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students’ lives, I decided to teach math when I retire. I enrolled in education school about two years ago, and have one class and a 15-week student teaching requirement to go. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for with respect to educational theories, I was still dismayed at what I found in my mathematics education courses.

In class after class, I have heard that when students discover material for themselves, they supposedly learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. Similarly, I have heard that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms, it is allegedly ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking. Throughout these courses, a general belief has prevailed that answering students’ questions and providing explicit instruction are “handing it to the student” and preventing them from “constructing their own knowledge”—to use the appropriate terminology. Overall, however, I have found that there is general confusion about what “discovery learning” actually means. I hope to make clear in this article what it means, and to identify effective and ineffective methods to foster learning through discovery.

To set this in context, it is important to understand an underlying belief espoused in my school of education: i.e., there is a difference between problem solving and exercises. This view holds that “exercises” are what students do when applying algorithms or routines they know and the term can apply even to word problems. Problem solving, which is preferred, occurs when students are not able to apply a mechanical, memorized response, but rather have to figure out what to do in a new situation. Moreover, we future teachers are told that students’ difficulty in solving problems in new contexts is evidence that the use of “mere exercises” or “procedures” is ineffective and they are overused in classrooms.

As someone who learned math largely though mere exercises and who now creatively applies math at work, I have to question this thinking.
Discovery learning in math: Exercises versus problems
by Barry Garelick

Me, too.

authentic 21st century teaching tool

The Inner Life of the Cell

BioVisions at Harvard University

More here.

what is skill?

Skill is a level of performance in any given task that can be acquired only through practise. Indeed, one can consider any skilled professional as a person who has had the motivation to practise one thing far more (for approximately 10,000 hours extended over more than 10 years²⁰) than most people could endure (BOXES 2,3). Across a wide range of tasks, the relationship between one measure of skill, the speed of task completion and the number of practise trials is well approximated by a power law²¹ (FIG. 1). This implies that performance continues to improve with task-relevant practise indefinitely, although the rate of improvement declines over time. Of course, most of the relevant data comes from tasks learnt for short periods of time in the laboratory. However, it is worth highlighting one classic study that reported performance of an industrial cigar rolling task²². The study included workers who had produced in excess of ten million cigars over seven years of work and they were still getting faster!

Inside the brain of an elite athlete: the neural processes that support high achievement in sports
Kielan Yarrow, Peter Brown and John W. Krakauer §
Nature Reviews Neuroscience Volume 10 | AugusT 2009
p. 587

Cool!

Project M3 Mentoring Mathematical Minds

I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with this gifted math program:
Project M3
From the Overview:

* 12 units of mathematics for talented students in grades 3, 4, and 5
* 4 units per grade level: Number, Algebraic Reasoning, Geometry and Measurement, and Data Analysis and Probability based on NCTM content Standards
* Emphasis on mathematical discourse within the classroom
* Emphasis on problem solving and spirit of inquiry
* Differentiation of selected units for use with all students in years 4 and 5
* All materials to implement the curriculum will be provided including manipulatives and supplemental resources

I'm unfamiliar with it and am working with a school that is considering Singapore Math along with this Project M3 or MathLand. I don't believe MathLand is in print anymore, so I'm not sure where the school found textbooks to review. I seem to recall it was a highly constructivist program approved, then rejected in California.

What Works Clearinghouse on CMP

CMP was found to have no discernible effects on math achievement.

Improvement index- 0 percentile points (average)

Read the full WWC report here.

Engineer's Guide to Drinks

right here

here's the post

revolutionaries, architects and education systems

Do people at ed schools study the history of educations systems and paradigms, since they study the philosophy of education so much? It's just kind of amazing when you look into it, how much the course of education for so many has been steered by so few. Some people here have made hints to it before, but I discovered an article that made more intrigued.

Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary." Against School (Harper Magazine), John Gatto.

Gatto, the author of The Underground History of American Education, is not against education, though his view of school (as in the typical public school) is pretty extreme. He is against school the institution the compliance factory, the social engineering tool of architects attempting to construct society according to their vision. If Gatto's metaphor sounds pretty extreme, the idea isn't very new -- in his article he quotes 1924 satirists lamenting the anti-intellectualness of public schooling. The public has been fairly exposed to it since Pink Floyd's Another Brick In the Wall; the song isn't the revenge of a dropout-turned-musician. PF was composed of fairly good students -- competitive students of architecture and art -- yet they too, were "against School".
Some of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell's inspirations for their dystopic novels came from School. Probably for good reason.

There is often talk with this "reform vs. traditionalist" rhetoric as though it were that simple. What tradition, anyway? Has there ever been a golden age of education? I argue not really. The more you investigate the history of school (school anywhere!), the more it seems like the pages out of the history book of Latin America: revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups and counter-coups.

Of course, I don't totally agree with Gatto's picture, though I suppose he simplified the history for rhetorical purposes. If the political spectrum is to be brought into it, public education was a strange alliance of progressive and conservative (in the strictest sense of the word), bringing forth a system that was both radical yet reactionary. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Progressive activists pushed for public education of course, but reactionaries, were faced with the era of populism: ever-increasing mass literacy rates, a politically-awakened population and all of the things that come with small-d democracy.

I am reminded of the one time that my high school world history teacher suddenly asked us -- quite randomly -- if we knew the driving force for why public education was first implemented. Most of us replied with progressive explanations. His answer: factory owners were responsible for the explosion of public education, not the progressives. "Public education wasn't created to educate citizens. It was to train workers so they could work in factories." For a while, I took this as just another fact of history, but it took quite a bit of time for me to realise what he was getting at.

In a paradoxical way, the radical progressives were so ambitious and radical, they unwittingly played into the reactionaries' own hands. School wasn't just to be the place for academic lessons -- it was to be a tool of social engineering to create a more progressive society, a free and enlightened populace and unrestricted flow of ideas. For the reactionaries -- why not social engineering as well? You could also create a more manageable populace this way: disciplined, differentiated, divided, docile. What is "reform education," then? It is an attempt to reverse this early coup d'éducation and restore the original progressive objectives, like Sun Yat-Sen attempting to reverse the coup of Yuan Shikai after he had taken control of the First Chinese Republic. Perhaps not very well -- the reformers are not only divided, they have saboteurs within their ranks, much like the warlords who diverted Sun Yat-Sen's restoration objective.

Which results in the educational mess you might see in your child's classroom today. All of these paradigms and plays for power have been fought by comparatively few compared to the how many people these battles affect. Revolutions? What revolutions? Who knew there could be so much dirty politics involved in your child's education? But veteran parents and veteran teachers can easily attest to how much entrenched power play goes on, of course. Toss teachers' unions and booming education companies and you get a combat theatre!

This isn't merely about the woes of American education. I have been a student of both an American high school and a Singaporean secondary school and must say I found major faults with both experiences. Oh let me say -- despite the good teachers I found in both schools -- I hated high school. In contrast, in my current school -- there are no politics over educational paradigms or standardised assessments, thank goodness. More or less, professors have a free arm to run their class; student feedback is one of "checks" in the system. No rubrics, no standardised professor reports, except of the kind they might submit to Nature. But I hear at many colleges, the edupolitical battlefield is slowly creeping into the picture. It certainly exists in community colleges; I can attest to its presence in the local university I dual-enrolled in.

It is fascinating to explore how certain educational paradigms spread worldwide. There is a certain paradigm for example, that you might find to be common among "Asian tiger" nations like Japan, South Korea, The Republic of China on Taiwan, Singapore, etc. The nationalist movements of countries under colonial or imperial influence are partially responsible for spreading them. China is an interesting case with interesting parallels. The imperial examination system -- very reactionary and conservative, arguably quite anti-intellectual -- was overhauled by a young Guangxu emperor of the reformist faction. The only way China was to progress in the world, of course, if the countless "scholars" and "officials" produced by the system knew anything about math, science, and industry and not merely Confucian rhetoric.

Young Guangxu had good intentions, but alas, he was no Queen Elizabeth and he found himself outmanoeuvred by his more politically-savvy opponents at court. One of the consequences of this drastic reform was the sudden dismissal of countless officials and bureaucrats deemed "useless" by the Guangxu emperor, their removal of power, loss of salary (no pension), etc. After all, the Qing government was facing a major budget crisis. Endemic corruption, sinecures and general parasitism were placing a major strain on Qing resources. Alas, this made the Guangxu emperor quite unpopular among the "old school" (literally) bureaucracy and support conservative Empress Dowager Cixi, who was planning a military coup. Guangxu in desperation turned to Yuan Shikai, commander of the modernised Beiyang New Army. Yuan Shikai had carried out major institutional and technological reforms with his branch of the military -- surely he backed Guangxu's reformation plans, right? Wrong. Yuan Shikai realised supporting Guangxu was too risky: he betrayed Guangxu, who was arrested and deposed from power. Cixi effectively reversed most of Guangxu's reforms.

Young Guangxus -- parents, teachers, administrators alike -- beware. The sad fact of life is that it takes political savvy to be a reformer.

It turns out Yuan Shikai eventually betrayed Cixi's faction too, allying himself with the Tongmenghui republicans, a hodgepodge coalition of various revolutionary factions. Many members were young idealists educated in the West -- France, Germany, England, the US. Oh merry that this coincided with the new progressive education movement! The republicans abolished the imperial examination system and copied the new Western trends, including unwittingly some of its reactionary paradigms. Many new members of the government were only republican in name only; provincial governors or military commanders of a different generation than the students, they had allied themselves with the republicans during the Revolution but did not necessarily have their same aims. Ah! School! What a valuable political tool anywhere.

Yuan Shikai then betrayed the republicans and then exerted his own Machiavellian influence on China's education system. The education system split into two when the Communists took the mainland of course, but once again, a strange mix of radical and reactionary across the straits. Japan and Korea's education system have their own versions of the education story, especially since Japan was under the influence of militarism even as it carried out educational reformations in the 19th century. All engineered by very few people.

The architect of Singapore's modern education system as we know it was a People's Action Party official called Goh Keng Swee. (He was also responsible for much of Singapore's economic development.) Was he progressive? Conservative? PAP politics takes a mouthful to explain. Goh was interested in social welfare as an undergraduate. His graduate studies were in the London School of Economics. He returned to Singapore at a time of great social upheaval and aligned himself with such university buddies as Lee Kuan Yew and Toh Chin Chye, joined the fledgling PAP, and following their win in the elections, became Minister of Finance. The PAP was a centre-left party and quite revolutionary in nature -- it was a dark horse upstart party at the time. In part, the PAP rode to power on the back of its communist faction.

One thing that is particularly interesting is how the PAP inherited its power structure from the Leninist tradition: it still has a secretive and selective cadre system, which still serves as the "inner guard" of the party. It still has a Politburo (since renamed), a Central Executive Committee, and all the other power institutions you might find in a normal Communist Party. It's quite peculiar because with time, the PAP swung steadily towards the right and eventually became anticommunist. (The paradox is not unprecedented: the Kuomintang Nationalists also have a Leninist structure because of an initial Soviet-KMT alliance in the early 1920s.) The cracks in the paradoxical PAP opened up in 1961: the communist faction fought with Goh Keng Swee, Lee Kuan Yew and other moderate party leaders, giving Singapore an electoral drama it has not since seen for almost fifty years. The PAP had its own right-wing faction -- but one suspects they came to an internal compromise with moderate leaders. This transition was very silent, because LKY, a great orator, opponent of sedition laws and a passionate supporter of freedom of speech for the sake of something like "principle" in the 1960s, appears to reverse his position throughout the 1970s, turning very pragmatist until he is found justifying sedition laws and the regulation of political dissent in the 1980s. The radical had become the reactionary.

What of the impact on the education system? The education system has an uncanny bearing to the politics of the time. Singapore's education story is a little more complex than the others because of the division of the schooling into Chinese schools and English schools (which were more prestigious), and there was a struggle between the Chinese-language proponents and the English-language proponents too, mirroring the split between the Chinese-educated communists and the English-educated moderates educated in London. (The moderate-right divide is more mysterious, because the right-wing never broke with the Politburo leaders publicly.) In a way, it too is a mix of radical and reactionary. Goh Keng Swee, under influence from both left-wing and right-wing ideas, divided the Singapore education system into "streams," in a system more complicated than currently is today. One of the explicit aims of the Singapore education system was to train workers for Singapore's fledgling industrialisation. Essentially, there were streams devoted to that -- at the secondary school level it is seen today with such designations as Normal (Technical) and Normal (Academic). The Express stream can be analysed as a stream to produce a bureaucratic, professional and managerial class. Finally, a Special stream to produce Singapore's next generation of leaders, e.g. party members. All very clean, orderly and disciplined -- like a factory.

Goh wasn't the only architect: experts were recruited from all over the world. Experts from countries such as Japan, West Germany, Israel and the Soviet Union joined the Singapore development project. Many features of the Soviet education system can still be seen in the Singapore education system; our HDB public housing programme was asssisted by Soviet experts, since they had the most experience in constructing affordable public housing and the West generally failed at such programmes.

In a way, these architects were extremely brilliant people. The bar model used for primary school math in Singapore was created by a single individual (not GKS however). Goh was one of the experts who chose the right economic path for Singapore, promoting economic and social development while other developing nations suffered under planned economics and property seizures. Buyers of Singapore Math books know that Singapore's education system has been successful, in a way. But I must lament his vision: such is the problem with having a few architects design entire education systems. Having set forth to write about an ideal education system, I suppose it's not a bad thing to first write a tangent about lessons from past attempts at designing education.

Paul Attewell's Winner-Take-All schools in bullet points

here

I don't think the article is available online any more. Let me know if you'd like me to email you a copy.

cijohn @ verizon.net

Rudbeckia Hirta on top-name colleges

I work with gifted high school students, and I can attest to the fierce competition for the top schools. One of the students I have worked with applied early to a well-known top tier college and was not accepted. This student had an SAT score over 2300, had an A in every single course (and they were all honors or AP except for German), and had all fives on AP exams in several social and physical sciences in 9-11 grades (including Calc BC as a junior), impressive performance in national competitions (spelling bee, science bowl, etc.), and had performed research with a professor at a local university.

This is typical of the applicants to your most prestigious name-brand colleges.

On the other hand, the university where I teach will accept just about anyone with a pulse. I run into a lot of students whose SAT scores are alarmingly low and who had two-point-something GPAs in high school. You can get a damn good education here -- if you choose your degree program and courses well.

mom of 4 on high school & college admissions

The other issue to check is whether the school/district uses a weighted grading scheme. If honors and/or AP courses are weighted, then they have a big impact on class rank and that is important. Some of my kids attended schools where a 3.0 average (with no honors or APs) was in the lower half of the class because the top kids took ALL academic classes at honors level or better. The guidance counselors told incoming freshmen that no one took more than one or two honors classes at a time, which was blatantly false. The very top also took 8-10 AP classes (all of which had honors prerequisites), so they affected the junior GPA. Also, if the school profile (which is sent to colleges with all transcripts, which include GPA and class rank) indicates that APs are offered, not taking them usually hurts. I'd say to take every possible period of REAL classes unless there's a real need for a study hall (like a swimmer/gymnast etc who trains 5 hours a day).

It is also a plus to have significant extracurriculars, especially with leadership. One or two serious commitments with leadership is better than light involvement with a long list of things, in my experience. A lot depends on the high school/community - how big, how competitive, urban/rural/suburban, etc. Of course, what kind of college is planned has a huge impact. I remember an info session (many years ago) for out-of-staters at UNC Chapel Hill where a National Merit Semi-finalist with a 4.0 GPA was told (publicly, no less) that she had no chance of admittance because she had no APs. The various college guides can be very helpful in identifying characteristics of admits.

My kids attended 4 very competitive to highly competitive high schools in three states and their experience leads me to recommend that the guidance counselor is useless until proven otherwise (see comment above). I have never met one that seemed to have much interest in or knowledge of academics; their interests were all social/emotional.

If your block schedule means that a year's course is done in one semester (with double periods), the issue of forgetting previous material can be an issue, especially in math and foreign languages. He also did extra reading in history because he didn't think they really covered a full year. Fortunately, we moved after two years.

Also, it is not necessary to take and AP course in order to take the test; just get a study guide and whatever other materials look helpful.

steering & rowing: make all schools charters

Lynn G put me onto a terrific book: The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis by David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson. Osborne and Hutchinson say governments should budget for outcomes instead of doing what governments normally do, which is to assume that next year's budget will be this year's budget plus. Next year's budget plus is called baseline budgeting.

As to how a government can go about budgeting for outcomes and make it work, they advocate separating "steering" from "rowing":

Politicians love to merge organizations, because it looks like they're taking action to save money. But simply moving boxes on an organizational chart can actually make matters worse, increasing costs while sowing confusion that hampers performance. A much more powerful alternative is to consolidate funding streams and policy authority into "steering" organizations that can purchase results from any "rowing" organizations -- public or private -- that can best produce them.

Budgeting for Outcomes by David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson

more:

"... focus on steering, not rowing – making policy and setting direction rather than producing services" (Osborne 1999)

separating steering from rowing in public schools

Osborne and Hutchinson:

Consider public education. A school board is a steering organization, but in the consolidated model we developed in the twentieth century, the board and district own virtually all the schools and employ virtually all the employees, from teachers and aides to custodians and bus drivers. The same organization--the school district--is responsible for both steering and rowing.

We have already discussed some of the problems this creates. Employees with a vested interest have the power to block changes that could help children. With all their employment contracts, regulations, sunk costs, and infrastructure, districts find it impossible to change their offerings fast enough to keep up with what their customers want and need. And those who should steer--board members and superintendents--find their energies sucked into the job of employing people and managing buildings, rather than ensuring student achievement.

A new survey of 100 public school superintendents in large urban districts illustrates these problems. Most of these superintendents, it reports, feel "the job is well-nigh impossible." Their role as employers continually overwhelms their role as purchasers of results. In large cities, school districts are among the largest employers, and as the report makes clear:

Control of the jobs is highly coveted and is never ceded lightly; the jobs themselves become central battle grounds for unions, community groups, and local politicians. No politician can afford to ignore them. And very few do. . . pressures for districts to respond to adults' financial demands rather than the children's education needs [are] a frustrating reality for many superintendents.

One superintendent was even more candid:

The real problem is that the district is a big pot of money over which adults in and out of the system fight to advance their own interests and careers. Better jobs, higher status, bigger contracts, and career advancement are what's at stake. All the public talk about teaching and learning has to be understood as secondary to that economic dynamic.

Does it have to be this way? Of course not. In the late 1990s, the Education Commission of the States--made up of governors, state legislators, state superintendents of education, and other education leaders--created a National Commission on Governing America's Schools. Its members studied the governance system of public education and issued a report recommending that states and districts make big changes in the consolidated model. The first option proposed was to introduce full public school choice, decentralization, and competition, within the consolidated paradigm. But the second was a more radical break. It said, in essence, that those in charge of education should separate steering and rowing. School boards should stop being owners and operators of schools and become purchasers of education programs on behalf of the communities they served. The board should grant charters -- five-year performance contracts to independent groups (teachers, colleges and universities, nonprofits, businesses, community organizations) to operate schools. The commission said, in effect, that every public school should become a charter school.

If this were done, the commission pointed out, school boards could close down schools in which students were not learning, replace them with schools more tailored to the needs of those students, and quickly contract for innovative new schools that embraced technology, used particular learning methods (from Montessori to computer-based learning), and/or offered specific content themes, from performing arts to math and science to community service. When the board closed a school, it would not face the united opposition of every teacher, aide, clerk, and principal; indeed, competitors would line up eagerly to replace it. The board would no longer be a political captive of its employees because it would have so few; schools would be the primary employers.

Teachers in every public school would know that their jobs were safe only as long as students were making academic progress and parents were satisfied. The door to innovation would suddenly swing open, and the size, shape, and pedagogical methods of public schools would change rapidly.

Many superintendents appear intrigued by the idea. In the survey of superintendents of large urban districts, two-thirds agreed that the "district should be able to charter all schools or enter into contracts with schools governed by accountability for education results."

Even more surprising, some districts are already moving in this direction.

[snip]

Barnstable, Massachusetts, has begun to convert each of its public schools to charter status. In California, three small districts have already done the same. San Carlos made six of its seven public schools charters. The Hickman Community Charter District has only three schools, but all are charters. And the Twin Ridges Elementary School District has two traditional schools and two charter schools within its boundaries, but has sponsored ten charter schools outside its boundaries.

The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an of Permanent Fiscal Crisis by David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson
p. 128 - 130

Sounds good to me.

I think this is the way services for developmentally disabled adults are funded here in New York. More anon.

how many people know what charter schools are?

At last night's board meeting a parent asked what a charter school is, which led me to wonder: how many people know, today, what a charter school is? I remember it was only a very few years ago that I finally figured it out, probably after I started writing kitchen table math.

I found a terrific description in the Times:

SOME things never change. For example, children still collect soda cans and box tops to buy classroom equipment. But much in K-12 public education is being turned on its head, especially in urban districts where fixing failing schools has become a national focus.

This means new education leadership jobs: running charter schools, directing turnarounds of troubled schools and founding nonprofits with creative answers to education challenges.

Such work demands educators who are more M.B.A./policy-wonk than Mr. Chips, which is why universities are unveiling degree programs that pull professors from schools of education, business and public policy. In September, the Harvard Graduate School of Education announced a tuition-free, three-year doctoral program in education leadership, the first new degree at the school in 74 years.

[snip]

Other programs are drawing people looking for high-level job training or flexibility. That’s who’s filling Central Michigan University’s online charter school leadership program, which graduated its first class on Dec. 12. One student, Patrick Kissel, 44, a retired Army master sergeant, wants to change careers, and appreciates the opportunity to earn his master’s while working as chief of business operations at Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania.

He will not graduate until August 2011 but has already been contacted by a charter school group in Canada. That’s not unusual, says David E. Whale, the program director. “People are reaching out to me saying, ‘We want to talk to your graduates,’ ” he says, noting that starting salaries for charter school directors are $60,000 to $80,000 a year.

Sergeant Kissel, who chose charter schools “because they are mission-driven,” became interested in education while serving in Bosnia and Kosovo, where he was charged with rebuilding schools and, he saw, children’s lives: “It was sort of like a passion to give these young kids skills they could actually use.”

Skills to Fix Failing Schools
By LAURA PAPPANO
Published: December 29, 2009

Mission-driven.