The Problem is Who Else is Going to Think This is a Good Idea

While reading this link at Marginal Revolution, I had a nightmare vision of someone in an ed school reading it and thinking this was a great idea for younger grades.  It's got it all: technology, students "teaching" each other, problems that are above the head of most students.

the people's poems, part 2

Constructivists:
drill and kill
sage on the stage
guide on the side
chalk and talk
cells and bells

Instructivists
teach, test, hope for the best (said about constructivists)
thrill of skill
Basics outside the Matrix (CT)
Accelerate and congratulate (CT)
learn and earn
college knowledge
blame and shame
hover and discover (Grace)
abduct and instruct (Grace)
abduct and instruct (Grace)
flail and fail
open schools model = gather and blather (Anonymous)

gather and blather

I've just this moment discovered Anonymous's entry in the Poems for Instructivists thread:

Open schools model = Gather and blather

Horselaughs!

Google this

K9Sasha reports:

As a student in an occupational therapy assistant program I have to take a class called Interprofessional Education. The class is taught in a constructivist manner and is by far my most frustrating class. Before a class meeting we are told to get on the internet and research stroke, or obesity, or diabetes and be ready to discuss it. Then, during class, we're presented with a vignette (and I wish the "facilitators" would learn how to say that word properly) to discuss. We're supposed to talk about things like how the various medical professionals involved in a case can communicate and coordinate the patient's care. The answer is - I don't know. I'm not in medical care yet and I don't know how information is or could be shared. As a group of students we can come up with various blue sky ideas, but in the real world time and money constraints exist whereas in our class they don't. I would find the class more valuable, and less frustrating, if they would just tell us the best way to coordinate a patient's care among a handful of professionals in the real world.

OK, now you're scaring me.

Zig

from Michael Maloney's book Teach Your Children Well:

Direct Instruction was originally created by Zig Engelmann and his colleagues including Elaine Bruner, Jean Osborne and Carl Bereiter at the University of Illinois in the 1960s. It began as a series of programs for culturally disadvantaged children in a preschool at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In 1973, Wes Becker convinced Engelmann to relocate to the University of Oregon and become a member of its faculty. They were soon joined by Doug Carnine, who quickly became Engelmann's close associate, co-author and research partner. Direct Instruction became the preferred educational technology of the Department of Special Education at the University of Oregon It was expanded into a set of programs that became the dominant model in the Follow Through project in the seventies.

Zig Engelmann has a bachelor's degree. He never got a Ph.D., nor has he ever attempted to do so; yet he is a full professor at the University of Oregon who continually refuses tenure.

It seems that Engelmann was working for a marketing company in Illinois, doing a project to promote some publisher's reading materials. When he visited a classroom and saw how poorly them materials taught the children, he decided to write a reading program himself. He literally sat down and wrote his first teaching sequences, outlined a program and took it to Carl Bereiter at the University of Illinois.

Kent Johnson's new book is out!

Response to Intervention and Precision Teaching: Creating Synergy in the Classroom by Kent Johnson, Ph.D. and Elizabeth Street, Ed.D.

Very exciting!

Speaking of precision teaching, my friend Robyne and I are visiting Ben Bronz Academy next Thursday.

stop the multiverse, part XVII

Beverlee Jobrack (Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reforms) quotes Collins and Halverson on the subject of technology enthusiasts:

In the enthusiast's view, computer-based environments promise a revolution in schooling of the same magnitude as the revolution in our culture set in motion of the Industrial Revolution. Technology enthusiasts favor a constructivist approach to learning, where students, rather than teachers, do most of the work. . . . Technology enthusiasts envision schools where students are working on realistic tasks and adults play a supportive role to guide them to new activities and help them when they encounter problems. (Collins and Halverson 2009, 27-28)

Wake me when it's over.

help desk: scientific notation

I'm looking at the Common Core math standards, and I see the first mention of scientific notation in Grade 8.

Does that sound right to you all?

Is there any reason to teach scientific notation earlier (or later)?

(I don't have an opinion -- I'm asking.)

Perform operations with numbers expressed in scientific notation,including problems where both decimal and scientific notation are used. Use scientific notation and choose units of appropriate size for measurements of very large or very small quantities (e.g., use millimeters per year for seafloor spreading). Interpret scientific notation that has been generated by technology.
Common Core State Standards for Mathematics

Vicky S on the quota system

Speaking of quotas for reading and writing, Vicky writes:

My kids had the requirement of 25 books a year all through elementary school. Reading became a chore, and we all became tangled up in the white lies required to comply--not the kind of thing I wanted my kids to learn! The writing, too--ugh, excessive. My poor kids were totally turned off both reading and writing by this quota and quantity approach. Does it actually work for any kids?

school employment factoid

From the White House blog:

The local government education sector has now lost 339,400 jobs since its recent peak in November 2009.
The Employment situation in January

Sticky wages = job loss. (see: Why Wages Don't Fall in a Recession by Truman F. Bewley)

Meanwhile Catherine Rampell, at the Times, reports that "Getting the economy to 5 percent unemployment within two years — a return to the rate that prevailed when the recession began — would require job growth of closer to 284,984 a month."

Jobs added this month: 157k

BLS puts job growth in 2012 at 181,000 per month. At that rate, the country will return to full employment 10 years from now.

Why So Much Listening?

E.D. Hirsch has an interesting new post up at the Core Knowledge blog addressing why there is so much listening in the Core Knowledge reading curriculum.  For instance:

Many years ago, the researcher Thomas Sticht discovered the important fact that reading does not catch up with listening until late middle school or early high school.

news to me

from Michael Maloney's Teach Your Children Well, published in 1998:

Various states and provinces are now requiring more practice as part of the outcomes for reforming their schools. New York State, for example, now demands that students in elementary schools practice their reading by completing twenty-five books per year. They are expected to write 1000 words of prose per month and do an assigned amount of math.

We moved here 14 years ago, here being New York state. Never heard tell of a 1000-word-a-month writing requirement. As to books, I remember C. reading 1 or at most 2 books a year in middle school. The kids were assigned The Outsiders -- reading level 5.1 -- in 7th grade. C. had read it two years earlier.

These days middle school kids are all supposed to read 25 books a year.

The news

sigh

Watching ABC World News. The big story tonight: "surging" home prices!

So is it time to sell your house!!??! Diane asks her colleague, beaming.

The colleague speaks with authority. If your house has regained its value, then yes. Time to sell.

I despair.

The increase year-over-year is 5.5%. Given that house prices dropped at least 27% from peak (was it closer to 33%?) and then flatlined for 6 years, a 5.5% gain cannot properly be called a "surge," and it doesn't put anybody back where they were. (With the possible exceptions of Denver, Dallas, Charlotte, and maybe Cleveland, if I'm reading the chart right.)

If you're Diane Sawyer and you're determined to call a 5.5% gain after 6 years a "surge," then you need to include the 6-year figure for context, along with the 27% figure. Also for context.

Why is this not happening?

Why am I hearing "surging home prices"?

Can our national news programs not hire someone who can read a graph?

Meanwhile Debbie S tells me everyone says "housing is back" except two people: me, and her realtor.

I remember Diane, a couple of years ago, joyously announcing jobs were back. That wasn't true, either.

Housing’s Rise and Fall in 20 Cities Last updated 9/25/2012
Case-Shiller: House Prices increased 5.5% year-over-year in November
December Employment Report: 155,000 Jobs, 7.8% Unemployment Rate

1 down

I have eliminated one of my desk piles! (At least my desk has piles...)

Only 5 more to go! (Distributed across one desk, one table, and one printer stand....)

Then on to the wire mesh hanging file folder bins.

[pause]

Yikes.

I don't think they even make those bins any more. (This is one. Most of mine are bigger.)

the college tour done right

K9sasha on her son's college tour:

When we went looking at colleges, we had the option to arrange ahead of time to spend time with a professor at University of the Pacific. Once on campus, Dr. Saviz spent a couple hours with us telling us about the engineering program, showing us her lab, and answering all our questions. We left there with a good feeling about the school, and it is where my son decided to go. He's been happy with his decision.

All colleges should do this. All colleges, bar none.

buy this book!

For a year and a half now, I have been sending people who ask me whether I think the economy is "getting better" to Marcus Nunes' What does a downloaded economy look like?

Now Marcus and Benjamin Cole have written the first book on "market monetarism." I've read it, I've highlighted it, and I've blurbed it --- it's terrific!

Market Monetarism: Roadmap to Economic Prosperity

10 days between AP exams versus 1 day

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

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

"College as Country Club"

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates whether demand-side market pressure explains colleges’ decisions to provide consumption amenities to their students. We estimate a discrete choice model of college demand using micro data from the high school classes of 1992 and 2004, matched to extensive information on all four-year colleges in the U.S. We find that most students do appear to value college consumption amenities, including spending on student activities, sports, and dormitories. While this taste for amenities is broad-based, the taste for academic quality is confined to high-achieving students.....

In line with the human capital framework developed by Becker (1964), economists typically model education as an investment wherein individuals forgo current labor market earnings and incur direct costs in return for higher future wages. While this framework does not rule out that education may also provide immediate consumption, such consumption aspects have received little attention in the literature.1 Recently, however, there has been increasing attention devoted to the recreation that accompanies investment in higher education, as illustrated by the newspaper headlines above.2 The media attention coincides with an accumulation of evidence on limited student learning (Arum and Roksa, 2011), diminished study effort (Babcock and Marks, 2011), and declining graduation rates (Bound, Lovenhiem, and Turner, 2010).

While the evidence on whether colleges today devote a greater share of resources to consumption and recreational amenities than they have in the past is inconclusive, it is clear that there is substantial heterogeneity in the emphasis that institutions place on amenities (Jacob, McCall and Stange 2013a).3 In 2007, for example, the average ratio of amenity to academic spending was 0.51 across the roughly 1,300 four-year public and private non-profit postsecondary institutions in the United States. The ratio varied tremendously, from .26 at the 10th percentile to .80 at the 90th percentile. Thus different institutions make very different choices about the optimal level of consumption amenities to offer their students. While there are several systematic patterns to this heterogeneity – for instance, public institutions spend relatively less on consumption amenities– the sources of these patterns have not been previously explored.
COLLEGE AS COUNTRY CLUB: DO COLLEGES CATER TO STUDENTS’ PREFERENCES FOR CONSUMPTION?
Brian Jacob
Brian McCall
Kevin M. Stange
Working Paper 18745

I got soooooo tired of looking at amenities.

I don't think we saw a single professor on any of the campuses we visited.

We did see some books.

pop quiz: fill in the blank

from Tom Friedman's column today:

LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in ____________. Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty....Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. 

No peeking.

1966 Film of Zig Talking and Demonstating DI Math

Barry G sends this link to this film of Siegfried Engelmann working with children at the Engelmann-Bereiter Preschool.

Open SUNY at Cost of College

‘SUNY to boost online offerings, push early graduation’

Grace's post reminds me of something a student in one of my classes told me. It was very sweet.

I teach in a small, non-selective college that has no campus life whatsoever and is short on dorm space to boot. So a lot of the kids live in a large chain hotel and are bused back and forth.

My student was from Staten Island and had chosen to live in the hotel instead of commuting to school because, he said, "I wanted to have the college experience."

Meanwhile C. tells me he's not getting the "college experience" because he attends a university with neither a campus nor a football team.

He has a point.

Wisconsin introduces competency exams!

From College Degree, No Class Time Required:

David Lando plans to start working toward a diploma from the University of Wisconsin this fall, but he doesn't intend to set foot on campus or even take a single online course offered by the school's well-regarded faculty.

Instead, he will sit through hours of testing at his home computer in Milwaukee under a new program that promises to award a bachelor's degree based on knowledge—not just class time or credits.

"I have all kinds of credits all over God's green earth, but I'm using this to finish it all off," said the 41-year-old computer consultant, who has an associate degree in information technology but never finished his bachelor's in psychology.

Colleges and universities are rushing to offer free online classes known as "massive open online courses," or MOOCs. But so far, no one has figured out a way to stitch these classes together into a bachelor's degree.

Now, educators in Wisconsin are offering a possible solution by decoupling the learning part of education from student assessment and degree-granting.

Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor's degrees from a public university system.

By CAROLINE PORTER
January 24, 2013, 6:32 p.m. ET
Wall Street Journal

Wow.

I'm thinking....all those disruptive technology people may turn out to be right for the wrong reason.

The coming Disruption won't be courses going online.

The coming Disruption will be courses going away altogether. (Some of them, anyway.)

The tests go online, not the courses.

I don't believe in making predictions, but even so I have simply never been able to see how MOOCs save the day. I can't stand online courses myself, my students don't like them, and I don't know any grownups who like them, either. The people touting them (and investing in them) don't seem to have taken any coursework via MOOCs themselves, as far as I can tell.

So while the logic of the MOOC -- put the best professors online so thousands can learn! -- often seems unassailable, I just don't see it. Put it this way: I don't believe in making predictions, and I continue to wonder what I'm missing, but I will not be investing my pennies in Udacity, Coursera, or edX.

I have always thought, though, that there is a major use for the internet when it comes to assessment.

Maybe college competency exams are the missing piece?

Such a scenario -- MOOCs fail as a means of making college affordable, but competency exams succeed -- strikes me as possible.

First, according to the Bain/Sterling Partners report, one-third of U.S. colleges and universities are in financial trouble.

Second, the economy continues to be depressed and, absent "regime change" at the Federal Reserve,  will remain depressed.^*

Given a depressed economy, I assume some colleges will close.

College closings will put pressure on state universities to expand, but state colleges are also in financial stress and have been raising tuition. They are in no position to grow.

At some point, it seems to me, political pressure will build on state legislatures to find another way to provide college diplomas.

In short, I can imagine Wisconsin's move attracting a lot of imitators, and sooner rather than later. I can also imagine a circular effect, with college closings leading to the introduction of competency exams,  and the introduction of competency exams then leading to more college closings.

That's disruption.

We'll see.

If competency exams begin to take hold, I can imagine a number of other developments that might be very interesting.

^* The economy is growing but is not going back to trend as it always has done in the past, including the Great Depression. I know people hold out hope that a housing recovery will lead to a real recovery, but since I am persuaded by Scott Sumner's analysis, I don't see housing as the white horse.

chart from: historinhas
and see:
Lawyers without Law School
proposal for a national baccalaureate
why college costs so much
US News: 2-year law degrees

on the other hand

follow on to Why you don't want your child to be popular

Last October, the National Bureau of Economic Research distributed a study showing a compelling correlation between high-school popularity—measured by how many “friendship nominations” each kid received from their peers—and future earnings in boys. Thirty-five years later, the authors estimated, boys who ranked in the 80th percentile of popularity earned, on average, 10 percent more than those in the 20th. There are obvious chicken-and-egg questions in all studies like this; maybe these kids were already destined for dominance, which is why they were popular. But Gabriella Conti, an economist and first author of the paper, notes that she and her colleagues took into consideration the personality traits of their subjects, measuring their levels of openness, agreeableness, extroversion, and so forth. “And adolescent popularity is predictive beyond them,” she says, “which tells me this is about more than just personality. It’s about interpersonal relations. High school is when you learn how to master social relationships—and to understand how, basically, to ‘play the game.’ ” Or don’t.

So...you want your child to be well-liked but not popular?

Is that it?

Maybe so. Another study found that 10th grade girls who self-identified as brainy fared well compared to "princesses":

At 24, the princesses had lower self-esteem than the brainy girls, which certainly wasn’t true when they were 16.

Why You Never Truly Leave High School
By Jennifer Senior Published Jan 20, 2013 | New York Magazine

why you don't want your child to be popular

More from Why You Truly Never Leave High School:

In 2007, for instance, Steinberg and two colleagues surveyed hundreds of adolescents in two midwestern communities, asking them to decide which category they most identified with: Jocks, Populars, Brains, Normals, Druggie/Toughs, Outcasts, or None. They also asked a subsample of those kids to make the same assessment of their peers. Then they compared results.

Some were predictable. The kids who were identified as Druggies, Normals, or Jocks, for example, tended to see themselves in the same way. What was surprising was the self-assessment of the kids others thought were popular. Just 27 percent in one study and 37 in a similar, second study in the same paper saw themselves as campus celebrities. Yes, a few declared themselves Jocks, perhaps just as prestigious. But more were inclined to view themselves either as normal or none of the above.

Faris’s research on aggression in high-school students may help account for this gap between reputation and self-­perception. One of his findings is obvious: The more concerned kids are with popularity, the more aggressive they are. But another finding isn’t: Kids become more vulnerable to aggression as their popularity increases, unless they’re at the very top of the status heap. “It’s social combat,” he explains. “Think about it: There’s not much instrumental value to gossiping about a wallflower. There’s value to gossiping about your rivals.” The higher kids climb, in other words, the more precariously balanced they feel, unless they’re standing on the square head of the totem pole. It therefore stands to reason that many popular kids don’t see themselves as popular, or at least feel less powerful than they loom. Their perch is too fragile.

"sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents"

Two people have told me about this article now: Why You Never Truly Leave High School

I love this line:

“Ironically, one of the reasons many of us have chosen to educate our own is precisely this very issue of socialization! Children spending time with individuals of all ages more closely resembles real life than does a same-age school setting.”

More:

Casey and two of her colleagues, Francis Lee and Siobhan Pattwell, were part of a team that co-published a startling paper last year showing that adolescents—both mice and humans—were far less capable of dialing back their fear response than children or adults.

[snip]

...if humans really do feel things most intensely during adolescence, and if, at this same developmental moment, they also happen to be working out an identity for the first time—“sometimes morbidly, often curiously, preoccupied with what they appear to be in the eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are,” as the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote—then it seems safe to say this: Most American high schools are almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents.

Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults. They were not sequestered as they matured. Now teens live in a biosphere of their own. In their recent book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse.

Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and priorities. James Coleman, a renowned mid-century sociologist, was among the first to analyze that culture in his seminal 1961 work, The Adolescent Society, and he wasn’t very impressed. “Our society has within its midst a set of small teen-age societies,” he wrote, “which focus teen-age interests and attitudes on things far removed from adult responsibilities.” Yes, his words were prudish, but many parents have had some version of these misgivings ever since, especially those who’ve consciously opted not to send their kids into the Roman amphi­theater. (From the website of the National Home Education Network: “Ironically, one of the reasons many of us have chosen to educate our own is precisely this very issue of socialization! Children spending time with individuals of all ages more closely resembles real life than does a same-age school setting.”)

In fact, one of the reasons that high schools may produce such peculiar value systems is precisely because the people there have little in common, except their ages. “These are people in a large box without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status,” says Robert Faris, a sociologist at UC Davis who’s spent a lot of time studying high-school aggression. “There’s no natural connection between them.” Such a situation, in his view, is likely to reward aggression.

By Jennifer Senior
Published Jan 20, 2013
New York Magazine

Ed on Stephen Colbert

talking about Mali

I love the "back yard" line.

update: full episode here (Ed is the first guest after the monologue, which is hilarious.)

Ed on Stephen Colbert tomorrow night

Talking about Mali.

He'll be the straight man.

Stephen Colbert. On Comedy Central.

from 2008: Phil Holmes in Los Angeles

I have been meaning to get this story posted for years now. In fact, I've been meaning to track down Phil Holmes to ask whether he'd be willing to share his unpublished textbook with me.

Phil Holmes, one of the great English teachers of his generation, is standing before a class of high school seniors, trampling all over their self-esteem.

It is a Thursday in October, not long into the school year. Holmes gazes out at his class, his proper prep school face set off by white hair and rimless spectacles, and tells his students, all of them black kids from South Los Angeles, that the first grading period is ending "and most of you will be getting Fs."

The students stare, dead silent. For perhaps the first time today, he has their full attention.

"This is not a good start," Holmes continues, his tone stern but even. "But on the other hand, it's not unusual."

Class dismissed.

Holmes spent 35 years building his reputation at Harvard School for Boys and its successor, Harvard-Westlake, which attracted some of the best, the brightest and the richest students in Los Angeles. His teaching methods, his curriculum, his empathy, his intensity, his relentless demand for clear, well-ordered thought, changed kids' lives.

More than that, he shaped wave after wave of young teachers, many of them now working at some of the most influential educational institutions in America.

But when he and a colleague wrote a book describing their teaching method, publishers scoffed. Of course their method worked! Their classes were filled with bred-for-success overachievers! Who couldn't teach them?

So in 2002, at a time when most people his age were sliding toward retirement, Holmes accepted a teaching job at View Park Preparatory High School, at Slauson and Crenshaw boulevards.

[snip]

View Park Prep is no blackboard jungle. For many View Park parents, the choice was not between the charter and a traditional public school -- say, Crenshaw or Dorsey High -- but between the charter and a private school.

Still, the 15 miles that separate View Park from the rolling Coldwater Canyon campus of Harvard-Westlake might as well be 15,000.

More than 96% of the students at View Park are African American, and studies show that even middle-class black students tend to do worse in school, on average, than comparable students of other races. Moreover, roughly half of the students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

"At first, it was a shell shock," Holmes said, "because of three things. I wasn't prepared for the students to be so far behind in their reading development. . . . We were reading "The Odyssey," and within one or two days I knew we couldn't move through it like we did at Harvard-Westlake. Second, these students had no training in classroom discipline. At Harvard-Westlake, I could ask kids to start writing an essay in class, and I could go upstairs, get my mail and come back and they'd just be quietly working. If I walked out of class at View Park Prep, it would be total pandemonium.

[snip]

At the center of Holmes' teaching is a slender red-bound book titled "The Uses of Argument," first published in 1958 by British philosopher Stephen Toulmin, which sets out a steel-trap method for structuring an argument.

Creative writing, Holmes believes, is a frill for most high school students. How many, after all, will become poets or novelists? But virtually all will need to write some form of persuasive essay, in college and in their careers. That is Holmes' central focus.

By midyear, Holmes' students were showing progress.

"Can you state," Holmes asked his class one day in January, "what is the writing goal for the whole View Park Prep curriculum?"

Mister Searcy raised his hand.

"Writing a sustained case, free of mechanical errors, in a readable style," he said, repeating the mantra that Holmes has been chanting all year long.

By this time, everyone in Holmes' class knew the formula for a sustained case: Claim, clarification, evidence and warrant, cemented by "backtracking," a practice in which the writer re-reads and challenges his own work and answers any questions that arise.

The method works, as any number of View Park graduates can attest.

Skye Williams, now at Clark University in Atlanta, said Holmes' lessons "really helped us in college -- in history, biology, anything."

Teacher instills a love of words, but the lesson is about life
Los Angeles Times
By Mitchell Landsberg
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 21, 2008

Susan S tells me that her high school uses some version of Toulmin's method, but it's been extremely confusing to deal with. I have yet to read Toulmin myself, sad to say, though I've read several  explanations of Toulmin posted at various college sites over the past two years.

I'm thinking Richard Nordquist's explanation at about.com is probably the place to start if you're curious. George Hillocks' book on teaching argument writing has a section on Toulmin, and Joseph M. Williams' The Craft of Argument (there are 2: a long version and a short one) may be an adaptation of Toulmin's method (not sure).

I find it horrifying that Holmes could not find a publisher for his textbook.

This passage from the article is very nice:

That Thursday in October began with students filing into the 12th-grade English composition classroom that Holmes shares with a younger View Park colleague. He was dressed in a suit, green dress shirt and tie, black loafers, his hair neatly trimmed, his bearing attentive.

Just before the bell, one of his students poked her head in, hoping to get excused from class. "We're taking a makeup test in AP history today," she said. "Do you mind?"

"Yes, I do mind," Holmes said. "We're doing something very important in here."

Holmes had nothing unusual planned. He considers every lesson, every minute of class time, to be important, and, at age 66, he often stays up past midnight preparing for the next day's lessons. There are 26 students enrolled in this class, which was designed to give them the skills they would need to write college papers. All were dressed in some variation on View Park's uniform: khaki pants, a maroon sports shirt.

Holmes asked them to take out a homework assignment -- a critique -- that was due.

The assignment called for the class to analyze a student's college application essay. In the course of the next 90 minutes, Holmes led the class in dismantling not just the essay, but one student's critique of it, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word.

There's a hanging detail, he said at one point -- why is it a problem?

"It's too vague," a boy answered.

"What's vague about it?" Holmes demanded.

The boy couldn't answer at first, but Holmes was relentless, forcing him to think. In the end, they hammered out an answer.

At another point, a single word -- resourceful -- launched Holmes into a discussion of Odysseus, and how his resourcefulness ("He found a way to blind the giant") could be a source of inspiration for the students.

The entire class was like this, Holmes leading a discussion in which no point, no word was insignificant. He could be brutal, dismissing one student's argument as "mindless." And he could be generous, if guarded, with praise.

Outside after class, Khadijah McCaskill said the students don't mind the tough talk, or the tough grades. This is her second class with him.

"His toughness helps the class concentrate and makes it easier to learn," she said.

"He's a phenomenal teacher," she added. "He's phenomenal because everything he does connects together. And even if you don't know it then and there, it will . . . be connected to a larger thing later on."

Authoritative teacher ("his toughness helps the class concentrate"), coherent curriculum (everything he does connects together).

That's the magic.

why college costs so much

They're paying the adjuncts too much.

sources:
Moving Beyond Grade 12
By Lynn Olson
Published: January 4, 2007
Education Week


Health Law Pinches Colleges
By MARK PETERS and DOUGLAS BELKIN
Wall Street Journal
Updated January 18, 2013, 7:53 p.m. ET

the people's poems

Thinking about cells and bells, I realized that instructivist types actually do have 3 rhymes to our name:

• learn and earn
• college knowledge
• sage on the stage 

I like sages on stages, so I'm claiming that one for us.

news to me

from Education Week:

We hear it all the time. "Students should take ownership of their school."

7 Ways to Increase Student Ownership
By Jennifer Barnett
January 8, 2013

That reminds me.

Back when C. was in middle school, all the students were required to pick up trash strewn around outside by one small group of students. The assistant principal told parents the reason for the policy was that when some students are required to pick up other students' trash, they "take ownership of the school."

When I shared the rationale with C, he said, "But if it's our school, then it's our trash, too, and we don't have to pick it up if we don't want to."

In the edu-world words never mean what you think they mean.

I believe it was Glen who pointed that out.

I can answer that

Trying to catch up on old copies of Ed Week....and I find....

Good news!

Harvard Education School has partnered with Survey Monkey to create a PARENT SURVEY.

All about parent involvement in the schools!

Very exciting.

Reading right along .... I have a suggested revision for Item 10 under Parent Engagement:

I answered a couple of others as is...

AND SEE:
do not press send
Harvard, SurveyMonkey Offer Tool to Weigh Parent Engagement By Michele Molnar January 15, 2013

Cells and bells, the video

I've just watched the "open spaces" video a couple of times. I don't see a single adult in any of the images. No classrooms, either. Just "think tanks" and "breakout rooms" and "wide hallways" and the like.

From the video:

LIBRARIES evolve into vibrant extensions of classroom space.
THINK-TANKS or breakout rooms support individual or group work space.
OPEN COMMON AREAS allow students to meet and gather informally.

And this:

When it comes to building proposals, as opposed to curriculum and teaching methods, citizens actually have a vote.

Mine is No.

Cells and bells

That's a new one on me.

Cells and bells.

Meaning: old-timey school buildings with old-timey teacher-dominated classrooms (sage on the stage) and old-timey bells:

A building alone does not create a school culture. But research shows that school buildings can affect students' morale and academic performance. Now, school officials are moving away from the "cells and bells" design marked by long, locker-lined hallways of windowless classrooms, and toward more open, flexible buildings aimed at creating a sense of community and collaboration.

Such new designs tie together a shift to a more technology-driven, collaborative, student-centered approach to education with an effort to improve students' safety, engagement, and community.

[snip]

Increasingly, the spaces themselves are designed to foster student connection. Traditional cafeterias in some schools have been replaced with more café-like areas where students might work and eat at the same time. Windows are opened to improve daytime lighting and indoor-air quality. Hallways are broadened and lockers removed to reduce clutter and chaos.

Many newer buildings also are "more learning-focused, less teacher-focused," says Craig Mason, an architect with the DLR Group, based in Overland Park, Kan. Some school buildings include breakout spaces for students to meet in small groups, or have windows specifically so a group can work outside while still being supervised.

Schools' Design Can Play Role in Safety, Student Engagement
By Jaclyn Zubrzycki
Published in Print: January 10, 2013, as Building Toward a Positive Climate

I'm asking myself: what would Gordon say?

School buildings are being intentionally designed to foster peer orientation? To minimize teacher influence?

OK, fine. One more reason to vote down bond propositions.

Meanwhile, how come the ed establishment has a lock on slogans that rhyme?

• guide on the side
• sage on the stage
• chalk and talk
• drill and kill
• cells and bells

I need a rhyme.

Citizens Weigh-IN on Common Core

Parents, teachers rally against Common Core standards in Indiana schools Lawmakers, teachers and parents rallied Wednesday at the Statehouse for a bill that would withdraw Indiana from Common Core State Standards , a national set of academic standards adopted in dozens of states. People who oppose the Common Core initiative argue decisions about educating children need to be made locally and not in Washington.

copy that

The associate director of the learning center at my college told me a fascinating story this week.

Her son was hired by a major copy editing company (I had no idea copy editing companies existed). When he took the job, he was required to copy, by hand, several well-written and well-edited articles: each one three times!

She said she'd never heard of such a thing and neither had her son, but then a friend told her that's the way the Jesuits taught writing when he was in school.

Is that true?

Did the Jesuits have students copy good works by hand?

The UK regains some sense in math

I've heard it remarked that what happens in Europe is just a preview of what's coming to our shores here in the US.  If that's true, then this makes me smile:

Pupils aged 11 will be given extra marks for employing traditional methods of calculation in end-of-year Sats tests, it emerged.

Children who get the wrong answer but attempt sums using long and short multiplication or adding and subtracting in columns will be rewarded with additional points.

Ministers insisted the changes – being introduced from 2016 – were intended to stop pupils using “clumsy, confusing and time-consuming” methods of working out.

This includes so-called “chunking” and “gridding” where pupils are encouraged to break problems down into numerous component stages before an answer is reached.

 *snip*

Elizabeth Truss, the Education Minister, will outline the plans in a speech to the North of England Education Conference in Sheffield on Thursday.
Speaking before the address, she said: “Chunking and gridding are tortured techniques but they have become the norm in recent years. Children just end up repeatedly adding or subtracting numbers, and batches of numbers.
“They may give the right answer but they are not quick, efficient methods, nor are they methods children can build on, and apply to more complicated problems.

Everything old truly is new again.

Dartmouth strikes a blow against A.P.

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

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

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

[snip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psychology Course Description

fractions, again

Wonderful post on Diane Ravitch's blog, written by a high school math teacher. The whole thing is great, but I especially love this passage:

I teach high school math. I took a break to work in the private sector from 2002 to 2009. Since my return, I have been stunned by my students’ lack of basic skills. How can I teach algebra 2 students about rational expressions when they can’t even deal with fractions with numbers?

Please don’t tell me this is a result of the rote learning that goes on in grade- and middle-school math classes, because I’m pretty sure that’s not what is happening at all. If that were true, I would have a room full of students who could divide fractions.

in the stockings this year

from Urban Dictionary

I reckon I'll pass

Susan S has conducted an inquiry into the "Writing the Essay" course C. suffered through this semester, and found this question posted to Yahoo Answers:

Essay 2
Write an essay of your own in which you reckon with the original, chosen essay and its ideas. Do this reckoning in the context of other sources (written and experiential). Do this reckoning not only for its own sake but also for the sake of developing an idea of your own. Your writing task is at least two-fold: to deepen our understanding of that original source while letting us see you reckon with it across the entire essay; and to develop your own idea along with this reckoning, an idea that emerges through your analytical reckoning. You must cite the original, chosen essay and at least three other written texts in your essay. You can also use your own experiences to help develop your idea.

[The student asks]: RECKON??? do you know how many definitions there are of reckon... can someone explain what i am supposed to do.

For Christmas I ordered three Writing the Essay mugs from Urban Dictionary, one for Ed, one for me, and one for C.

Unfortunately, the one I ordered for me has a definition of "Trailer Fraud" on the side, so now that's another whole multi-step errand to add to the list.

learning to read by learning to spell in Aruba

from the Official Tourism site of Aruba:

Language

Dutch and the local language of Papiamento are the official languages of Aruba, but most Arubans speak a minimum of four languages including English and Spanish.

In the cab back to the airport we interviewed the driver re: multilingualism in Aruba.

He told us that Aruban children speak Papiamento at home and in Kindergarten.

Then, in 1st grade (I'm pretty sure it was 1st grade, not 2nd -- but I wish to heck I'd taken notes) students move to immersion classes taught in Dutch.

The teacher speaks in Dutch (and does she write her words on the board?? I don't remember).

The children have a slate of her words at their desk, with a piece of tracing paper on top. They trace over the words as she speaks them.

They learn to hear Dutch at the same time they learn to spell Dutch.

That's the way things were done in America lo these many years ago. Both Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn describe learning to read English by learning to spell English.

Aruban children commence studying English and Spanish in 5th grade. Some years back, they moved on to learn Italian, German, Portuguese, and French in high school, but that is no longer the case today.

Laura Z on parents as guides on the side

re: Gordon Neufeld's Hold Onto Your Kids, Laura in AZ said...

This is a wonderful book! One of the best I've ever read, period!

Oh, yes, when you don't go with the flow with your child. I too tried with my daughter - from Pre-school through 4th grade. Not knowing she had Asperger's - though she is very high functioning. The schools tried to make her social, tried to make my "square-peg" fit into the "round-hole" of the whole social set-up. When it didn't work, it was my fault. (This was before her diagnosis).

Then when we started homeschooling, everything became so much easier for my daughter, because she had so much less stress! But the accusations came that I was sheltering her (Er... yeah, that's kinda my job), she wasn't getting "socialized" (We were keeping it at healthier levels and not overwhelming her), etc.

It all came down to the arguments given in the book - modern society really believes that especially as children get older they should raise themselves and each other. Parents are only to be "friends" or perhaps "Guides on the Side." We have lost our place of authority. How many parents even ask little 2 or 3 year-olds what they want to wear? Or what they want to eat?

intense world and nonrandom numbers

I haven't followed autism research for longer than I care to admit....so I hadn't heard of the "intense world" theory. I'm fascinated to hear of it now because I've spent years thinking something along these lines. In fact, from time to time I've asked myself whether I would be willing to take a 'magic pill' that would cause me to spend one day being autistic, and to my horror the answer has always been 'no.'

I don't follow the reasoning in the final paragraph here, though...

You also write about neurological and psychiatric conditions that can alter consciousness, and suggest that autistic people might actually have more consciousness than others.

Autism is one of those odd-one-out conditions in the literature. The classical assumption was that most severely autistic children are mentally disabled and have low IQs, but that’s partly because they weren’t tested properly. If you test them on nonverbal IQ, they are normal or slightly better than normal. On other tests, they perform better than average for perceptual tasks. Some people are now suggesting that maybe it isn’t a deficit, that they have a different kind of [brain that has certain] advantages. With Asperger’s, which probably many prominent scientists have, whether they are diagnosed or not, it seems almost as if they have extra consciousness: they are better able to process information than normal, which I think is a fascinating idea.

The whole idea that autism is [primarily] a social disorder, I don’t think that theory is going to last into the next decade because there is increasingly successful treatment that centers on socializing that has turned very withdrawn children into very affectionate socially aware children: I don’t see that as fundamental [to autism].

Do you support the “intense world” theory of autism, which suggests that problems result from sensory overload?

I just think [the social issues] are a side effect of the way [people with autism] approach the world. They are searching for patterns and structure in the world — what they obsess over isn’t everything; it’s mainly structures, stuff like calendars and mathematical patterns.

I worked with the prodigy, Daniel Tammet. [Tammet holds the European record for memorizing the 22,514 digits in pi.] He seemed very extremely autistic as kid and has been officially diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, but if you meet him, he’s very socially aware. He maintains eye contact. He decided in his teen years to teach himself [to be social and he did].

In what context did you work with Tammet?

We did a brain scan study [where we looked at his brain after he had memorized short sequences of numbers that were either patterned or random]. It was very striking compared to normal people. He completely failed to spot the external structure [in the nonrandom numbers] and his brain activation was very different from those who were aware of the structure. I make the claim that the prefrontal parietal network is important for consciousness; in my study, the prefrontal parietal network was most active when spotting these patterns and maybe that means a lot about what consciousness is for. For Daniel Tammet, his prefrontal parietal network didn’t activate for these sequences because he didn’t spot them, but it was generally raised compared to those of normal people.

Why Solving Puzzles Is Fun: Q&A with Consciousness Researcher Daniel Bor
By Maia Szalavitz | Sept. 21, 2012

browbeating at the kitchen table!

I LOVE this Comment by Jen:

Funny, well, funny in a sad way, that I had JUST now had a quick conversation with 21 yo college kid about how it may actually come down to homeschooling his little bro (10 yo).

Oldest kid got a better than average education in an urban district. He had some truly excellent HS teachers and was in an IB program. Whatever he missed out on that suburban kids had (nicer facilities, actual guidance counselors) was, we felt, more than made up for by the diversity of his experience, the exposure to so many different kinds of people and lifestyles, his ability to get along with all sorts of people in all sorts of settings.

BUT, the quality had slipped for the brother who is only 3 years younger. It was kind of a crapshoot to leave him be and know that he was only getting maybe 60% of the quality that his brother got. (Some very good teachers' positions not offered back to them, incompetent teachers mysteriously still there as the program went through a strange move and change of name and grade levels and the like, teachers retiring rather than deal with the craziness, etc.)

Youngest -- well, the new curriculum has basically proven itself a failure for everyone that doesn't have a concerned, aware parent at home and even for many that do. You could come out of our system now knowing almost NOTHING it seems. Gaaa. There's only so much you can teach over the dinner table and through browbeating.

It's true!

Jen is right!

There is only so much you can teach over the dinner table and through browbeating.

I am living proof of that.

I spent four years browbeating math at the kitchen table (not to mention one summer browbeating SAT math)^* and my kid does not know math.

He's taking "Math Patterns in Nature" or some ungodly concoction next semester to fulfill his college math requirement.

Auuuuugggggghhhhh!

I'm thinking "There's only so much you can teach over the dinner table and through browbeating" should replace "They do what they do."

^* For passersby, I should add that the actual period of browbeating was more like .... one or perhaps two years, just up to the point where I read Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog. (see: posts on positive reinforcement)

in other words, the answer is homeschooling

For some reason, I stumbled upon an Education News interview with Joshua Angrist that contains the following exchange:

[QUESTION]
School quality and human capital ARE major issues for all Americans. But we all know that some schools are failing. What can the typical parent do for their child other than attempt to home school?

[ANSWER]
Some schools are better than others. For many parents, however, this is not worth worrying about. For example, I never worried much about my kids schooling. I told them that teaching is hard, many teachers are mediocre at best, and they should try to get something out of badly taught classes as well as inspiring ones. The evidence suggests that’s a reasonable approach for children in educated families like mine. I worry most about the children of teen mothers, from families where there isn’t much adult supervision, little in the way of role models, and little hope for a middle class life. In this situation, a good school can make a huge difference.

An Interview with Josh Angrist: School Quality - Who Decides? 

For white kids, good enough is good enough.

My first reaction was exasperation. Don't worry, be happy doesn't cut it, and I am in a position to know. I am the parent of a (white) college freshman, and I teach (some) white college freshman as well as black and Hispanic students. None of them -- black, white, or brown -- are where they should be, and Ed, who occasionally teaches (mostly white) freshmen at NYU, will tell you the same.

Maybe "the evidence" used to "suggest" that graduating high school as a white 18-year old with mediocre skills was "a reasonable approach," but this interview was published just 9 months ago, and things are different now.

See, e.g., the Hamilton Jobs Gap calculator. If the economy continues to create 155,000 jobs per month, which has been the rate for the past two years, full employment does not return until after 2025. At that point today's college freshmen will be 31 years old and will have spent their first decade of employment in a buyer's market for labor. In a buyers' market, employers have more applicants than they can sort through and, often, no real need to hire if they can't find a purple squirrel.

See Urban Dictionary for the expression that covers that situation.

"Never worrying much" about your kids' schooling is a luxury white parents no longer enjoy, along with all those other luxuries that disappeared when household wealth fell by 40% in 3 years time. Assuming Angrist is right about what parents "can do" (nothing) and I'm sure he is, then homeschooling is the answer.

That was my first reaction.

My second reaction was: jeeeeeezzz.

"...many teachers are mediocre at best..."

"...the children of teen mothers, from families where there isn’t much adult supervision, little in the way of role models..."

In one short paragraph, he's managed to insult both teachers and a fair share of minority parents, while dismissing afterschoolers and math warriors out of hand.

Pretty efficient, I'd say.

mom of 4 fills out a survey

A classic school story from mom of 4------

the edworld (among others) doesn't give up its stranglehold easily. Our old district was apparently required to send out parent surveys to find out if the HS cluster wished to continue the 7-8 JHS format or move to the MCPS-proposed 6-7-8 MS format. The vote was something over 90% wishing to keep the JHS format, but we got the MS anyway. Apparently, there was no requirement that anyone read the results or follow the parent wishes. All of the best things (academics) about the JHS while my older kids were there had been lost and all of the worst things (artsy-crafty, touchy-feely, non-academic) came from ES to the MS. My younger kids hated it. Sigh

I'm laughing!

Not one hour ago, I finally worked up the energy to track down this year's "Student Performance Review"...which I find has, once again, failed to disaggregate the 3s from the 4s!

Surprise!

I spent six years of my life trying to get my district to disaggregate the 3s from the 4s. Before that a parent who works at CUNY and was involved in the standards movement here in New York state spent a lot of time and energy doing the same.

Now it's 2013, C. is in college, and the 3s and the 4s are still one.

update 1/18/2013: No! I'm going blind! The 3s and the 4s are disaggregated! (I thought I remembered LJ - the CUNY dad - having finally prevailed on that one ---- )

[pause]

I've just searched the Irvington Parents Forum for the word "disaggregate." I find a post dated 10/10/2007 that notes the 3s-and-4s issue but points out that a combined 3s-and-4s category is an improvement on what came before.

You should all take a look at that post if you have a moment. It includes a note from the then-principal of the middle school refusing to tell Ed and me how the black and Hispanic students are doing on the state tests. The year before, I think it was, not one black or Hispanic 8th grade student had passed. So we were asking for data.

No Child Left Behind was supposed to spark that kind of behavior, and in our case it did.

Reading that old post, I think we did make a bit of progress. There was a time, not too long after, when the administration-slash-board required people to FOIL everything. (Which we did.) The only documents you could get from the school without a FOIL request were a school calendar and your child's report card. Things were so bad that my friend Robyne, who had been elected to the board in a landslide vote, had to FOIL district documents.

Today we have disaggregated 3s and 4s!

Jo Boaler should release her data

background: Educational malpractice for the sake of reform math

FERPA protects the identities of individual students, not schools.

If FERPA protected the identities of schools, No Child Left Behind would be illegal. Clearly it is not.

Ms. Boaler should release her data.

equator therapy

Back from Aruba --- and wow!

I am in good spirits.

Equator sun.

I recommend it!

help desk – online instruction for New York Regents geometry course

Any ideas on an online course that might be appropriate for a student who has been struggling with New York State Regents geometry? The course would have to prepare the student to pass the NYS geometry Regents exam. What about online tutoring options? While this student is self-directed in some ways, he is not one to “teach himself” from a book or other resources. He probably needs direct instruction, with targeted feedback and guidance on his progress. Should online even be an option in this case? Does he simply need a traditional tutor? Maybe a blended learning option would work well? Any other alternatives?

Any and all ideas would be welcome.

Educational malpractice for the sake of Reform Math

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, as Milgram notes in his December paper:

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Milgram notes:

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

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