Froggiemama on gatekeeping

I can remember being gatekeepered out of 8th grade algebra back in the 70's, and the memory still makes me boil. In my case, I was a year younger than the other kids, so the teachers said I wasn't "developmentally ready" for abstract mathematics. So I wasted a year in consumer math.

Fast forward to today - I was utterly shocked to find out that my kids school gatekeepers 8th grade algebra (as well as a whole slew of other "advanced" courses). I had thought gatekeepering at such a young age had been discredited in the 80's. Why are they still doing it? We end up with a school system that is as tracked as the German system. And worse yet, in my district, the tracking criteria has nothing to do with whether a kid is good at math or not. It is all based on whether they are diligent at submitting homework that is neat and organized according to teacher standards.

However, this has nothing to do with Common Core in our district. They have been doing this for eons. At parents night at our high school last spring, the principal was complaining that we don't send enough students to schools like MIT and CMU. Well, you know, if you gatekeeper out all your most talented students in 8th grade, the messy, creative, smart ones, you won't have much talent left in the 12th grade.

Froggiemama on gatekeeping, part 2

At our middle school, when Chris was there, 7th-grade kids were gatekeepered in and out of Earth Science on the basis of "maturity."

"Maturity" meant, among other things, that the student was proactive (I think that was the actual term, proactive) in "seeking extra help."

(Code for: hire a tutor.)

One of the most talented students in the school was gatekeepered out of Earth Science on grounds that she was "anxious."

Anxious!

As I recall, this student had one of the highest scores on the enrollment test. But she was anxious, so no.

Ed and I got involved in that case because we happened to know the parents, who told us what was going on. (Involved in the sense that we could figure out the relevant statutes and knew people to consult.)

What it boiled down to:

Number one, if a high-achieving student has an emotional issue so disabling that she can't take Earth Science, the school is legally obligated to "identify" her as having special needs, which the school had not done (and was not proposing to do).

Number two, if the school had identified this student as having special needs, it could not keep her out of Earth Science on grounds that she had special needs.

Basically, the building principal was wrong on every conceivable ground.

The assistant superintendent intervened and the girl was enrolled.

Unfortunately, the assistant superintendent didn't last long in our district.

The College Board is betraying our trust

From a teacher at a high-performing high school:

To teach a class called AP anything, you have to have your syllabus approved by the College Board. They want to ensure that you are covering the content that they require. This already annoys me: let my students take the test and see how they do. Their results will indicate whether I am covering the material or not.

But it's their name so it's their rules. I submit my curriculum. First try, it comes back rejected: I have not provided evidence that my course is "student centered" and that I use "guided inquiry" to develop "critical thinking skills."

So to use the AP label, you give the College Board authority to define what you teach and how you teach it.

 Fortunately (as I ranted to my students), educationists use undefined buzzwords that can mean anything we want them to. So I announced that from this day forward, my class is now 100% student-centered. Can you smell the fresh clean scent? We then continued with the lesson as planned...

We can not make "critical thinking" the goal. Whatever critical thinking may mean (and I don't really know), we better hope that it emerges as a result of the careful work that we do teaching our specific subjects. But the goal should always be to teach the subjects!

When you make "critical thinking" the goal, then someone is going to say: so math/history/French/science is not that important -- let's just teach them how to think critically. What follows from that is nearly always some inane, time-wasting idea for an "activity" that is disconnected from reality and certainly disconnected from the subject I thought we were trying to teach.

If the College Board is now simply an outpost of Teachers College, it should say so, out loud.

Is this the work of David Coleman?

And is the ACT the last man standing?

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog

I'd forgotten that!

Maria Konnikova mentions the cartoon in an interesting piece about online comments.

I've always been amazed by kitchen table math commenters. Smart, funny, and civil for years on end.

Famous last words

Steve Leinwand, principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research’s education program, also argues that America’s math teachers should embrace the shift away from right answers. “Common Core has the audacity to use the word ‘understand’ 218 times,” said Leinwand.

Why so many parents are freaking out about Common Core math

Using the word "understand" 218 times while using the words "right answer" 0 times seems a tad out of whack to me.

Speaking of right answers, I was going through a stack of Education Weeks yesterday & found this:

Ask a child to name a favorite class, and odds are you’ll hear two letters: P.E. Ask an adult which subject has been most valuable in life, and the most popular answer turns out to be math.

That’s according to new survey results by the Gallup organization. About one-third of adults (34 percent) picked math. The next in line was English, at 21 percent, followed by science at 12 percent.

"Gallup Poll Social Series: Work and Education" September 18, 2013

Dollars to donuts, every one of those respondents thinks getting the right answer is a major reason why math is valuable.

Constructivists seem to want authentic, "real-world" problems without authentic, real-world right answers.

I will never get that.

Steve Leinwand, btw, has been singing the same song for decades.

Here he is in 1994:

It's time to recognize that, for many students, real mathematical power, on the one hand, and facility with multidigit, pencil-and-paper computational algorithms, on the other, are mutually exclusive. In fact, it's time to acknowledge that continuing to teach these skills to our students is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive and downright dangerous.

[snip]

Shouldn't we be as eager to end our obsessive love affair with pencil-and-paper computation as we were to move on from outhouses and sundials?

It's Time To Abandon Computational Algorithms By Steven Leinwand | February 9, 1994

Outhouses, sundials, paper and pencil.

Now there's an analogy that hasn't panned out.

As it turns out, it was the analogy between outhouses and paper and pencil that was not only wrong, but counterproductive and downright dangerous.

Debbie Downer, Nervous Nancy, and Unprofessional Sally

From the latest installment of Barry's "Conversations on the Rifle Range":

Like many school districts, mine instituted “late-start Mondays”, in which school started an hour later and periods were shortened from one hour to 47 minutes. We reported at 7:30 (as always) and had to attend a meeting or other activities as announced. On one of my first late-start Mondays, the math teachers were told to meet for a discussion of the upcoming parents’ “math night” scheduled for later that week. The District would present and discuss the various pathways in math under Common Core and answer questions. There was growing concern among parents regarding the increased limit on the number of eighth grade students who can take Algebra 1, and questions about how students could progress to calculus in twelfth grade.

We met in the core area of the module my classroom was in—a hallway/workspace common to all the classrooms in the module. Sally, the District person I had met at the high school earlier, led the meeting. Her talk was similar to what she told us when I last heard her at the high school in the fall: Algebra 1 for eighth graders would be limited to the “truly gifted”.

“I imagine we’ll have the usual Debbie Downers and Nervous Nancies in the audience on ‘math night’. We want to make two things clear: that there’s no shame in taking Grade 8 math; under Common Core it’s equivalent to the traditional Algebra 1. And secondly, placement in eighth grade Algebra 1 will be more difficult. Fewer students will qualify—Common Core is very challenging.” Which all sounds plausible but leaves open the question of why an elite corps of students is then allowed to take the traditional Algebra 1 course in eighth grade.

Conversations on the Rifle Range 14: Late Start Mondays, Debby Downers, Nervous Nancies and a Tiger Mom

Time for a parent uprising.

Speaking of agency

Speaking of agency .....

Giving a student control over their learning has theoretical and intuitive appeal, but its effects are neither powerful nor consistent in the empirical literature base. This meta-analysis updated previous meta-analytic research by Niemiec, Sikorski, and Walberg by studying the overall effectiveness of providing learner control within educational technology, the characteristics of instruction along the continuum of learner control, and elements of the instructional environments that may play a role in the effectiveness of educational technology. The search terms identified 85 distinct articles, 18 of which met the inclusion criteria (29 effects were computed). The overall effect of including learner control within educational technology was almost zero (g = 0.05), and were also near zero when examining most characteristics of control and classroom contextual factors. Moderate effects were reported for providing learner control within social studies/history courses and for comprehensive technology instructional programs. The effects were larger for behavioral outcomes than academic outcomes, but both were small.

Updated Meta-Analysis of Learner Control Within Educational Technology
Abbey C. Karich, Matthew K. Burns, and Kathrin E. Maki
Review of Educational Research
September 2014, Vol. 84, No. 3, pp. 392–410

Yet another fruitless attempt to transfer adult authority to children.

Meme alert

Agency is the new thing.

The Windward School on "self-determination" and direct instruction

My copy of The Beacon, The Windward School's newsletter, arrived today. Here's what the heads of school have to say on the subject of grit, resilience, self-determination theory, and the like:

Autonomy in the classroom does not necessarily mean students roaming at will between workstations, working in groups, and self-directing their own learning. Autonomy, more essentially, is seen in the student who attends to her work with a personally chosen sense of purpose and self-agency. (In this context, we refer to agency as the power taken by an individual to make "decisions regarding their preferences and actions.") Although not obvious, the direct instruction methodology that guides the Windward classroom is fundamental to the development of autonomous learners.

Every direct instruction lesson begins with three elements:

• the presentation of an aim for the lesson;
• the review of prior lessons, clarifying how the current instruction connects to knowledge and skills already learned; and
• a motivation that gives students an anticipation and incentive for the day's lesson.

By ensuring that every lesson has a purpose, builds upon prior knowledge, and engages the motivation of the students, teachers invoke a volitional engagement of students with the curriculum. Students attend to their work and stick to their work with grit, not as a result of fear or dread or the promise of extrinsic rewards, but because they discern and embrace the purpose of their learning.

The Windward School costs ... at least $40K/year, I think. Somewhere in there.

It's incredible, when you think about it.

The only children in Westchester County who can count on receiving direct instruction every day at school are kids who a) have a learning disability and b) have $40K to spend on tuition at The Windward School.

What happened to Khan Academy?

I wasn't a delighted fan of Khan Academy. Every time I wanted to watch, I found an uncorrected error in his video, or a mess on the blackboard. But at least it allowed you to look up a technique for how to compute something.

Salman Khan became a darling of the ed establishment, which only made sense if they were sure they could co-opt his product.

Well, yesterday, I looked at Khan Academy. And the only redeeming feature it had, that it let you just look up whatever technique you needed to see, is gone. Now you must sign in. Now it tells you how to do the whole third grade Common Core standards, it seems, and you can work your way through.

I haven't had time to look to the Wayback Machine, so maybe it's still accessible there.  But really, is what's offered now any different than what IXL and ALEKS and the rest of them claim to do?

Am I missing something? Wasn't there once a whole set of Singapore math problems he was supposedly doing and tracking for you? Is that gone, too?

I keep trying to warn schools that parents are going to revolt against this kind of big-data nonsense. They don't believe me. But I think Khan's complete change into yet another of the same-old-same-old will be another nail in that coffin.

Mark your calendar

According to the Hamilton Jobs Gap Calculator, at the current rate of job creation, we will be back to the level of employment we had before the crash in June 2017.

It seems to me that, on the present course, we'll never be "back to trend." Or, rather, the slope of the trend line will continue to decline:

source: Quantitative Easing Is Ending. Here’s What It Did, in Charts.

That is one lousy recovery.

A real recovery is a V-shaped curve. Growth spurts up above the trend line, averaging out the dip, and the trend line remains the same. Back to trend.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say on the subject of L-shaped recoveries:

"An L-shaped recession occurs when an economy has a severe recession and does not return to trend line growth[citation needed] for many years, if ever. The steep drop, followed by a flat line makes the shape of an L. This is the most severe of the different shapes of recession. Alternative terms for long periods of underperformance include "depression" and lost decade; compare also "malaise"."

An L-shaped recovery is a bad thing, but the Federal Reserve has signed off on it, so that's what we've got. Where is Milton Friedman when we need him?

While I'm on the subject of desperately seeking Milton Friedman, is it not possible for journalists and pundits and economists and the like to recall the principles of supply and demand when discussing inequality?

As far as I can tell, the single best medicine for income inequality (if you're concerned about income inequality) is a tight labor market. (The other competitor for single best medicine is closing the trade deficit, also unmentionable in polite punditry, it seems.) Ed has finished a draft of his European history textbook, and has been writing about decades when income inequality plunged because countries were experiencing labor shortages.

When lots of employers are bidding on janitors, the price of a janitor goes up.

I'm in favor of labor shortages myself, but we're not going to see another one in my lifetime, not with the Federal Reserve in charge.

The Federal Reserve believes in a little thing called Nairu. Nobody knows whether the Nairu exists or, if it does, what its value is, but the Fed believes in it, so there is nothing to be done.

I ask myself, not infrequently, whether things would be different if the country at large knew that the Federal Reserve fights inflation by raising unemployment.

Debbie's book is in Amazon's nonfiction top 20!

Steven Pinker, Atul Gawande, and ..... Perfect Score Project!

Fantastic.

I did the polish.

(I have to say that!)

Pronouncing "zoonoses"

I see Google Master has a question about students pronouncing "zoonoses" -- I still cannot, to this day, remember how to pronounce zoonoses ... and I'm pretty sure I've been pronouncing it wrong since the day I first encountered the word in Arthur Whimbey's book.

Plus now, on top of that, I have no idea how to pronounce "zoonotic."

The most recent pronunciation look-up I've done for "zoonoses" tells me to pronounce it ZOH-noh-sus (sort of like Jonas's except with a Z), but I can't bring myself to pronounce "zoonotic" ZOH-nah-tick.

How is "zoonotic" pronounced, anyway?

Proposition 3 sails through...

Post at the Parents Forum. (I borrowed Terri W's line about the number of kitchen tables $2B will buy!)

I realized recently that "technology" has three constituencies:

1. Education reformers who believe in technological "disruption" 
2. Technology companies (for obvious reasons)
3. Constructivists - students look at the device, not the teacher

Mobile devices in the classroom may finally accomplish what progressive education has been trying and failing to accomplish for over 100 years.

A line for the ages

"Binge-spending on technology has a poor track record."

Vote No on New York State Propositions 1 and 3, No on Both Suffolk County Propositions

Stop making sense

From Andrew Cuomo's campaign ad:

I want to invest $2 billion dollars to build the new technology classrooms of tomorrow. And I still believe the best education equipment is the kitchen table, and the best teacher is the parent.
-Andrew Cuomo

Needless to say, I will be voting 'No' on Proposition 3.

CDC writing lesson & expert raters using holistic rubrics

I've been meaning to correct the flu-shot post & am doing so now because Linda Seebach has given me a nudge.

When the CDC writes:

"Over a period of 30 years, between 1976 and 2006, estimates of flu-associated deaths in the United States range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people."

...What they mean is:

Over a period of 30 years, between 1976 and 2006, estimates of annual flu-associated deaths in the United States range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people.

It's funny. I think of writing as 'fuzzy' compared to math, but lately I've realized there's a precision to writing, too.

The first sentence means 3,000 over 30 years.

The second sentence, the one the CDC should have written, means 3,000 per year, in some but not all years.

I still question universal flu shots (although I certainly don't object to people getting flu shots if they like), especially given the fact that flu shots aren't particularly effective. Flu vaccine isn't like measles or mumps vaccine; the composition of each year's shot is an informed guess as to which viruses will be making the rounds this year.

As I think I mentioned in the earlier post, I recall a time when health authorities recommended flu shots only for vulnerable populations, not for the entire country. Vulnerable populations included the elderly (for whom vaccine isn't as effective), small children, and, I think, people with respiratory ailments (hence: flu-associated deaths).

Reading between the lines on the CDC page, I wonder whether the universal flu-shot campaign is intended to reduce exposure of vulnerable populations to the flu by reducing the incidence of influenza in non-vulnerable populations.

The elderly don't respond particularly well to flu vaccine.

Their best protection comes from other people not getting the flu, and thus not exposing them.

Thinking about flu shots, I'm reminded of my friend in LA who refused to get flu shots because the only time she ever lost any weight was when she got the flu.


Speaking of precision

Speaking of precision, I'm reading a fascinating study of college writing quality as defined by "expert raters ... using a holistic rubric."

(And, yes, that construction does give me pause. Expert raters using a holistic rubric are the people who decided that my SAT essay on freedom and macroeconomics was worse than my son's SAT essay citing Martin Luther King.)

A major finding: good writing, to an expert rater using a holistic rubric, isn't any more cohesive than bad writing.

Cohesion, pretty much the sine qua non of good writing outside of college, has no bearing one way or another on an expert rater.

Instead, what matters are:

1. Using lots of words before getting to the main verb (more is better)
2. Using lots of different words
3. Using low-frequency words (aka big words) 

If you've spent any time in academia, you already know this, and it's been a conundrum for me, speaking as an instructor of freshman composition.

Good writing as defined by composition textbooks and style guides isn't good writing as defined by the people grading papers.

Unstoppable

Digitopoly on the TI-84

I share his pain.

Does the 21st century have a shortage of software amateurs?

I have absolutely no way of evaluating whether the following is good or bad advice:

“Software developers” is one of the job categories expected to grow the most over the next decade.

But in addition to many thousands of software professionals, we need far more software amateurs. McKinsey & Co. argued a few years ago that we need more than 1.5 million “data-savvy managers” in the U.S. alone if we’re going to succeed with big data, and it’s hard to be data-savvy without understanding how software works.

Even if you’ve left school, it’s not too late. There are many resources available to help you learn how to code at a basic level. The language doesn’t matter.

Learn to code, and learn to live in the 21st century.

Tom Davenport (@tdav) is a Distinguished Professor at Babson College, a research fellow at the Center for Digital Business, director of research at the International Institute for Analytics, and a senior adviser to Deloitte Analytics.

Why All Employees Must Learn to Code | WSJ

Spillover

I'm reading the new Ebola book, David Quammen's Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus, excerpted from his 2012 book Spillover.

Spillover is the Quammen's term for diseases spilling over from non-human animals to us.

Yesterday I realized that "spillover" isn't a bad term for what seems to be happening to tennis instruction: constructivism and learning-by-doing are spilling over to tennis.

At least, that's the way it looks to me. I hope I'm wrong.

I've re-upped my tennis lessons, on grounds that I need a hobby. This go-round, I've enrolled in a tennis clinic, something I'd never done before.

I've been to three clinics so far, and I'm not seeing much direct instruction.

In the first clinic, the instructor told me "not to think" and to "use your instincts."

I don't have any instincts where tennis is concerned, and the instincts I do have are wrong.

e.g.: When you hit the ball, you're supposed to keep looking at the spot where the ball was instead of following its trajectory back across the net. Looking at the spot where a tennis ball used to be is completely unnatural; every fiber of my being tells me Don't do what Roger Federer does.

Moreover, I find it extremely difficult even to know whether I've kept my head down or not. I need an instructor to tell me.

The clinic went badly enough that I actually walked out of the 2nd class (!), after becoming embroiled in an unwinnable argument with the instructor on the question of my attitude.

The class had been practicing hitting the ball back and forth across the net--no scoring--and I had opted to hit a ball on the second bounce.

I hit the ball on the second bounce because my private instructor usually had me hit second bounces if I could, and because the clinic instructor was himself hitting balls that were out of bounds.

So I thought the rule was: in bounds or out, hit the ball if you can.

But no.

The instructor, who had opened the class by telling me I "didn't belong" but I could stay for the day, told me I had erred, then said primly: "In tennis, when the ball bounces twice, it's out of play."

I said: "I know that."

He said I had no reason to take my frustration out on him.

I said "You were hitting balls that are out, I thought we were supposed to hit balls that are out if we can."

He said, again, that I was frustrated and I should not take my frustration out on him.

Naturally I denied having done any such thing; he said I had but I "didn't know it"; I said I hadn't; he said I had ---- the whole scene was ludicrous.

We were now swatting Did/Did not back and forth across our own invisible net, and the exchange was turning into a very long rally indeed, leaving the other two ladies in the class standing clueless on the opposite baseline, undoubtedly wondering what was going on and when we were going to start having a class again.

At one point I tried to end the quarrel by telling the instructor, who was young enough to be my son and then some, that in life, when you say something that has obviously ticked off another person  (especially another person old enough to be your mother), you take it back. 

That's how you get along with people. 

He swatted that one right back at me, saying, yet again, that I was frustrated, and I was directing my frustration at him.

He wasn't going to give an inch, and I certainly wasn't going to give an inch, seeing as how I'm twice the instructor's age and I'm the customer to boot.

So I left, with the instructor still calling after me "You have no reason to act like this."

~~~~~~~~~~

Back to 'spillover,' the instructor's approach to teaching tennis had a fair amount to do with the fact that our dissing war erupted in the first place.

His approach was simply to run drills: advanced drills only one student in the class was remotely equipped to do. Forehand, backhand, volley, lob. Very difficult. We were starting at the top, beginning with the 'whole,' not the component parts, and with predictable results. Nobody could maintain any form to speak of, and there were multiple mis-hits and outright whiffs.

After the drills (this was a beginner's class, by the way), we "practiced" serving, also with zero instruction. My classmates were dinking the ball across the net, and so was I.

Then we played doubles tennis for points and we were supposed to have strategy.

We were learning tennis by playing tennis.

Except nobody was learning.

~~~~~~~~~~

My third clinic, with a different teacher, was a much happier experience, and the instructor gave plenty of direct instruction. She was also responsive; as soon as she saw that I wanted  intervention and instruction, she provided it.

But still, she wasn't breaking things down.

In her class, too, we were doing the same advanced drills none of us could do .... and then, when we played a game, the instructor told us 10 Things About Doubles Strategy we were supposed to remember and use.

There's no way a beginner can remember 10 Things About Doubles Strategy, not while also attempting actually to do those 10 Things and get the ball back across the net.

More learning tennis by playing tennis.

~~~~~~~~~~

I'm told that tennis instruction used to be different. Tennis teachers worked on form & watched as their students practiced technique over and over until they had it down.

That approach seems to be fading, and I blame spillover from our public schools.

People teaching tennis or continuing education classes are teaching the way K-12 teachers teach writing and math and grammar. Via discovery.

Their experience of schooling didn't instill within them a gut understanding that memory is limited, that subjects and skills must be broken down into bite-size pieces a student can remember long enough to practice and master.

So they run drills and have students play pretend doubles.

~~~~~~~~~~

Now Ed is giving me lessons --- we are becoming an afterschooling family for tennis.

And I'll take more private lessons, the grown-up equivalent of hiring a tutor.

Talk about spillover.

Lockhart's lament redux

"The essence of mathematics is recognizing interesting patterns in interesting abstractions of reality and finding properties of those patterns and abstractions."

Everything About The Way We Teach Math Is Wrong

This strikes me as completely wrong, not that I have much confidence in my intuitions concerning the essence of math. So take this as a confession, not an argument.

"Recognizing interesting patterns" -- even "recognizing interesting patterns in interesting abstractions of reality" -- strikes me as the toolkit approach to math.

I personally -- another confession, not an argument -- can't stand the toolkit approach to math. Blech!

I have no interest -- none! -- in endless iterations of function problems designed to determine how much profit the guitar teacher will make teaching x number of students while paying y rent on the studio for 20 weeks, or whether Jim should buy the monthly contract or the annual, as useful and important as those questions are in daily living.

Nor do I relish the thought of encountering yet another roller coaster depicted as yet another instance of geometry, or another textbook with a nautilus shell splashed across the cover. Enough with the nautili.

If you want to make me hate math, real-world math will do the job.

That reminds me.

I did not, as a child, solve two trains leaving the station problems, and I wish I had. I was utterly charmed by the two-trains problems when I encountered them as an adult, working my way through "Russian Math."^*

I don't remember whether we were asked to solve bathtub problems (I think we were), and I was charmed by those problems, too.

(Speaking of the real world, the bathtub problem is all you need to know to understand why fiscal stimulus doesn't work when the Federal Reserve targets inflation. One party is putting money into the system; the other party is taking it back out.)

To be fair, I'm not at all sure that "toolkit math" is what Lockhart actually means: "That’s what math is — wondering, playing, amusing yourself with your imagination."

Nevertheless, inside K-12, the toolkit approach is what look-for-patterns turns into.

Look for patterns may be a bit out of date.

Today, with Common Core, at least here in NY, we've moved beyond look-for-patterns to modeling, for pete's sake. In my district, the entire high school mathematics curriculum, the entire rationale for the entire mathematics curriculum, is modeling.

Lots and lots of function problems modeling stuff nobody cares about.

This is always the conundrum with constructivism and progressive education.

Progressive educators think the real world is fun and motivating.


^* Mathematics 6 by Enn Nurk and Aksel Telgmaa

Famous last words

Mayor Bill DiBlasio in this morning's Times:

"Ebola is an extremely difficult disease to get."^*

Ed read that out loud to me and said, "That's why medical personnel are wearing hazmat suits."

Interestingly, the Times seems to have cut the line. At least, I don't find it on the site now. Found it in the Daily Mail.

I take his point .... which is, I assume, that Ebola is hard to get from a subway seat. (Let's hope so, seeing as how practically everyone I know has been on the subway this week.)

But still.

If you're the mayor, try to get it right.

And stop telling me to remain calm.

Please.


^*'There is no reason for New Yorkers to be alarmed': De Blasio in desperate appeal for calm over Ebola case... despite news that patient spent a week roaming New York
By ASSOCIATED PRESS and MIA DE GRAAF FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 22:25 EST, 23 October 2014 | UPDATED: 04:19 EST, 24 October 2014

"If you're over 60, drink up"

Told ya.

Rote understanding

Late to the party ---- I've just read Barry's "Undoing the ‘Rote Understanding’ Approach to Common Core Math Standards"!

I love that phrase: rote understanding.

Exactly.

I was interested to see that Barry was taught "making ten" when he was in grade school:

The “making ten” method is included in the math program used in Singapore—a nation whose fourth and eighth graders have consistently obtained the highest scores in international math tests. Specifically, in Singapore’s Primary Math textbook for first grade, the procedure for adding by “making tens” is explained. Of particular importance, however, is that the procedure is not the only one used, nor are first graders forced to use it. This may be because many first graders likely come to learn that 8 + 6 equals 14 through memorization, without having to repeatedly compose and decompose numbers in order to achieve the “deep understanding” of addition and subtraction that standards-writers—and the interpreters of same—feel is necessary for six-year-olds.

“Making tens” is not limited to Singapore’s math textbooks, nor is it by any means a new strategy. It has been used for years, as it was in my third-grade arithmetic textbook, written in 1955...

I have a question about the teacher's explanation of the number 6:

“So if we can partner 9 to a number and anchor 10, we can help our students see what 9 plus 6 is. So we’re going to decompose our 6, and we know 6 is made up of parts. One of its parts is a 1 and the other part is a 5. 

How do mathematicians think about whole numbers?

Do they see them as "made up of parts"?

Or as decomposable into parts?

(Or both --- ?)

To me, "made up of" and "decomposable into" seem like two different things.

Another question: if 6 is "made up of parts," is 6 one of the parts?

Is 0?

I bet right this minute there are kids all over America who are royally confused by the ramifications of making ten.

Ireland

We've been to Ireland!

First time ever.

Five days in Dublin --- incredible.

On the way back to the airport, our taxi driver explained the euro, the Germans, and the Irish people's bailout of the banks: "The German banks were in here handing out loans to people they knew couldn't pay them back. It was like going to the races and betting a thousand dollars, and if you won you got $1,040, if you lost you got $1,000."

Neuromyths I have known and loved

In one study Dr. Howard-Jones cites, 48 percent of British teachers agreed with the statement “We mostly only use 10 percent of our brain.” Ninety-three percent believed that “individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style (for example, visual, auditory or kinaesthetic)” (research actually doesn’t support this), and 29 percent believed “drinking less than 6 to 8 glasses of water a day can cause the brain to shrink” (it can’t). Sixteen percent thought that “learning problems associated with developmental differences in brain function cannot be remediated by education.”

How Brain Myths Could Hurt Kids

I was able to pull the paper, and the data on teacher belief in learning styles is hilarious.

Percentage of teachers who believe individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style:

93% of teachers in the UK
96% of teachers in the Netherlands
97% of teachers in Turkey
96% of teachers in Greece
97% of teachers in China

Pretty much the entire planetary teaching force.

Arithmetic for the ages (Ebola v. influenza edition)

Ed and I were chatting about op-eds urging people to forget about Ebola & go get their flu shots, when it occurred to me to wonder how many people actually die of the flu. (Ed had just read an article estimating that with early diagnosis & full supportive care in a Western hospital, the fatality rate for Ebola would be somewhere in the vicinity of 10%.)

Turns out practically nobody dies from the flu:

"Over a period of 30 years, between 1976 and 2006, estimates of flu-associated deaths in the United States range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people."

Key Facts about Influenza (Flu) & Flu Vaccine

Somebody should check my calculator skills, but using 250,000,000 as the figure for U.S. population I get:

Estimated number of flu fatalities per year: 100 to 1,633
Estimated percent flu fatalities per year: 0.00004% to 0.0007%

I don't know whether the CDC publishes an estimate for how much these numbers were affected by flu vaccine. I'm guessing: not much, seeing as how flu shots aren't particularly effective.

Does anyone know the history of flu shots & the flu shot campaign?

Is there a good reason the entire population is urged to get a flu shot every year?

What am I missing?

For the record, I stopped getting flu shots a few years ago. It's not at all convenient for me to get a flu shot (I used to have to persuade the kids' pediatrician to give me a flu shot, too); the shots hurt; and I always get slightly sick from the shot.

Plus I usually ended up with a wicked case of the flu anyway.

I haven't had the flu since I stopped getting the shot.

Either I'm free-riding on other people's flu shots, or I'm just not getting the flu.

UPDATE: CDC writing lesson & expert raters using holistic scoring rubrics

Success desk in a library without books

I'm looking through my queue, trying to remember my favorites of the many things I've wanted to post over the past month .... pretty sure this is one of them.

Without stacks to organize, librarians staffing the main reference desk, which is called a success desk, will steer students to tutoring resources and train them in managing digital materials.

While the library is not paperless, students are discouraged from using its printers too much, Miller said. They can buy traditional textbooks in the bookstore, or digital texts when available.

Old-fashioned books can be requested on loan from libraries at Florida's 11 other public universities.

Only in a library with no books will you see a reference desk called a Success Desk.

Turf, again! and how my District chooses a math curriculum

We're voting on turf.

Again.

grassrootsirvington

Related: how my town picks math curriculum.

Still swimming upstream, back as soon as humanly possible - I miss you!

I really want to get back to ktm -- right this minute.

The big news, now somewhat old big news, is that we've sold our book!^*

The book about the basal ganglia.

Which I have been working on for --- is it 5 years?

(My 5-year quest to write a book about the basal ganglia is proof positive that just-in-time learning is poppycock, but that's a story for another day.)

Hudson Press is the publisher.


^*The lead author is Eric Hollander.

Catching up - off-topic

Number one: Surfer.

For passers-by, a year and a half ago one of our dogs, Surfer, was diagnosed with stage 3 mast cell cancer.

For a dog, Stage 3 mast cell cancer is the Big One. The statistics I found had 80% of dogs diagnosed with Stage 3 mast cell cancer dying within eight months, and the younger of the two vets in the office we take our dogs to told me Surfer's diagnosis was the "pancreatic cancer of dogs."

Bummer.

As it happened, there was, at that very moment, a new miracle drug on the market that looked to be pretty effective, but Surfer nearly keeled over dead after just 2 weeks on Kinavet, which would have had to be taken for the rest of his days to work.

So I forgot about chemotherapy & just took palisadesk's dietary advice.

And it worked.

Surfer is completely fine. Beyond fine, he's fabulous. He's thin, energetic, tuned-in, and .... not sick. At least not as far as anyone can tell. The young vet, who likes to argue & pooh-pooh, actually said to me, a few weeks ago: "Whatever you did, it worked."

I did whatever palisadesk told me to do, so there you go.

Meanwhile Abby's the one I'm worried about; she's suddenly old, losing control of her back legs, deaf, and not looking good.

Here's hoping Palisadesk has more tricks up her sleeve.

Surfer is 13 years old. We got him 2 months after 9/11. Pit bull/Rottweiler/hound mix.

Abby is 12. Yellow Lab.

Hello!

I've been Swallowed Up by Events (a story for another day) ---- and now, I aim to be back.

Congratulations, Karen H!

I think we've have our first kitchen table math wedding!

Karen H's daughter.

I'm pretty sure Karen was reading ktm from the very beginning....

I feel I've watched her children grow up from afar.

Congratulations!

Trick sentence

Still on the clock, so I've only time to admire some sentences in the morning paper before I go write some of my own. Here's today's:

"With an insinuating pose and a seductive, throaty voice — her simplest remark sounded like a jungle mating call, one critic said — Ms. Bacall shot to fame in 1944 with her first movie, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel “To Have and Have Not,” playing opposite Humphrey Bogart, who became her lover on the set and later her husband."

That sentence is a little essay unto itself: a sentence-combining tour de force!

The September before last, I gave a department talk on precision teaching, and when I distributed a handout showing the number of subject-verb-[object] propositions a Times reporter had stuffed into just one fully readable sentence (17, as I recall), a couple of people were appalled. 

One said the Times has....hmmm. I'm forgetting the story now. 

Something like: the Times has some kind of widely circulating internal memo that lists the day's bad sentences so as to subject them to public shaming.

He said my 17-proposition pick should have made the list.

Jibber-jabber

Off-topic ---

I'm sitting here at the breakfast table reading the paper, and I've come across this fabulous sentence in an op-ed by Daniel Levitin:

"Every day we're assaulted with facts, pseudofacts, news feeds and jibber-jabber, coming from all directions."

Wonderful!

I must say, that pretty much describes a normal day for me, inveterate information-consumer that I am. 

Of course, I like jibber-jabber.

Speaking of which, I have a guillotine deadline on Thursday -- so back with more education jibber-jabber after that.

1st major study of reform math: epic fail

In the August 2014 issue of Economics of Education Review:

Abstract

We investigate the impact of an ambitious provincial school reform in Canada on students’ mathematical achievements. It is the first paper to exploit a universal school reform of this magnitude to identify the causal effect of a widely supported teaching approach on students’ math scores. Our data set allows us to differentiate impacts according to the number of years of treatment and the timing of treatment. Using the changes-in-changes model, we find that the reform had negative effects on students’ scores at all points on the skills distribution and that the effects were larger the longer the exposure to the reform. [emphasis added]

[snip]

In this paper, we estimate the impact of Quebec’s (the second most populated province in Canada) ambitious and universal school reform implemented in the early 2000’s on children’s mathematical ability throughout primary and secondary school. At the time of the reform, the performance of students in the province of Quebec was comparable to that of students from the top performing countries in international assessments. Nonetheless, the educational system in Quebec was still subject to severe criticism at home due to its alarmingly large high school dropout rate, especially among male students.6 To ensure the success of all students, the province decided to implement an ambitious reform introducing a new program in each and every school across the province which drastically changed the way teaching was delivered to all children in primary and secondary schools. The Quebec education program (MELS, 2001, 2003, 2007) relied on a socio-constructivist teaching approach focused on problem-based and self-directed learning. [emphasis added] This approach mainly moved teaching away from the traditional/academic approaches of memorization, repetitions and activity books, to a much more comprehensive approach focused on learning in a contextual setting in which children are expected to find answers for themselves. [emphasis added]

. . . . More specifically, the teaching approach promoted by the Quebec reform is comparable to the reform-oriented teaching approach in the United States. As of 2006, this approach was widely spread across the United States (although more traditional approaches remained dominant) and it was supported by leading organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Research Council, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Yet few studies in economics have addressed the impact of various teaching approaches, let alone the approach promoted by the Quebec reform.

[snip]

[The] approach was designed to enable students to ‘‘find answers to questions arising out of everyday experience, to develop a personal and social value system, and to adopt responsible and increasingly autonomous behaviors’’ (MELS, 2005).

In the classroom, students were expected to be more actively involved in their own learning and take responsibility for it. Critical to this aspect was the need to relate their learning activities to their prior knowledge and transfer their newly acquired knowledge to new situations in their daily lives. ‘‘Instead of passively listening to teachers, students will take in active, hands-on learning. They will spend more time working on projects, doing research and solving problems based on their areas of interest and their concerns. They will more often take part in workshops or team learning to develop a broad range of competencies.’’ (MELS, 1999). This centralized approach in providing the program and training with a school-based execution is in many ways comparable to the current approach taken within the comprehensive school reform (CSR) models at the national level in the United States (Borman et al., 2003). The main differences are that in Quebec, implementation was mandatory in each and every school, funding was not tied to the implementation, and training packages and support are centralized in many ways. These differences are critical: they imply that the reform had to be implemented in all schools, and that the resources and training was not tied to individual school characteristics. Whether private or public, English speaking or French speaking, all schools across the province were mandated to follow the reform according to the implementation schedule. This implies that all children in Quebec were treated according to same timeline, and that parents were not able to self-select their children into or out of the reform, except by moving out of the province which they did not.

The school reform was planned at the highest level by civil servants at the Department of Education (MELS). The MELS imposes the program to be followed in each grade by every school. The 69 School Boards (60 Francophone and 9 Anglophone) responsible for all public schools, their superintendents and the school principals, are the channels and drive belts between the MELS and school teachers and students.

[snip]

Conclusion

We find strong evidence of negative effects of the reform on the development of students’ mathematical abilities. More specifically, using the changes-in-changes estimator, we show that the impact of the reform increases with exposure, and that it impacts negatively students at all points on the skills distribution. . . . Students from the lower end of the distribution do not seem to be in a better position to successfully complete their schooling. Mathematical abilities are strongly related to school attainment and labor market outcomes, and for lower performing students they are at best equivalent post reform, but most likely lower.

The teaching approach dictated by the reform is based on socio-constructivism. According to Pinker (1997), proponents of this method believe that children must construct mathematical knowledge for themselves with the teacher only guiding the discussion on the topics and that repetitions and practice are seen as detrimental to learning. He argues that constructivism is not appropriate for mathematics. For him, ‘‘. . . without the practice that compiles a halting sequence of steps into a mental reflex, a learner will always be building mathematical structures out of the tiniest nuts and bolts’’. Certain skills for mathematics may be very difficult to ‘‘construct’’ at a young age and can possibly be better attained by old-fashioned practice and a more mechanical approach. Pinker suggests that the poor performance of the United States in mathematics could be linked to the teaching approach, which is mainly contextual with no teaching of mathematical concepts. The evidence presented in this paper supports this argument.

The distributional impacts of a universal school reform on mathematical achievements: A natural experiment from Canada by Catherine Haeck, Pierre Lefebvre *, Philip Merrigan

Well, well, well.

Contra Elizabeth Green (again), history does not fold itself meekly into a Bill Gates-approved narrative in which "the traditional approach we take to teaching math — the one that can be mind-numbing, but also comfortingly familiar — does not work."

Using the traditional approach, Quebec schools produced students whose achievement "was comparable to that of students from the top performing countries in international assessments."

Using constructivism, they produced students whose achievement suffered at every grade level, and at every skill level to boot. Good students did worse, bad students did worse, in-between students did worse. Everyone did worse in constructivist math.

Because constructivism doesn't work. 

As to the teachers, whom Green cites as the source of Reform Math failure, the article notes that "Extensive training was provided to support the new program."

Does anyone remember the math wars?

The New York Times is out with yet another entry on the failure of traditional teachers to teach math to Americans:

My hunch is that how we learn math in America has very little to do with best practices and a lot to do with how teachers remember learning math when they were children.

Can you spell Weltanschauung?

Free advice: Never trust a "hunch" when your hunch is identical in every respect with the worldview of a Most Emailed story in the New York Times.

If your hunch is identical in every respect with the worldview of a Most Emailed story in the New York Times, it's not a hunch. It's conventional wisdom and nobody needs to hear it again.

Contra Elizabeth Green, we do not have to accept that the traditional approach we take to teaching math — the one that can be mind-numbing, but also comfortingly familiar — does not work. It should be obvious to anyone who actually looked at our history that "the traditional approach to teaching math" worked perfectly well for many American students.

Here's Barry Garelick:

From the 1940′s to the mid 1960′s, at a time when math and other subjects were taught in the traditional manner, scores in all subjects on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills increased steadily. From 1965 to the mid-70′s there was a dramatic decline, and then scores increased again until 1990 when they reached an all-time high. Scores stayed relatively stable in the 90′s.

TRADITIONAL MATH MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY (BARRY GARELICK)

The decline in SAT scores doesn't fit the narrative, either.

Do we know when state legislatures passed laws requiring teachers to have degrees in education?

I'm trying to track that down.

Speaking of the math wars, it's been a couple of decades now since the NCTM, an organization whose membership consists almost entirely of public school math teachers, accepted that the traditional approach we take to teaching math does not work.

Chris is turning 20. Neither he nor any of his peers learned their math facts at school.

Disclosing relationships at The New Yorker

Since reading Elizabeth Green's endorsement of Common Core in a Times excerpt of her book, I've been trying to remember how other newspapers and magazines handle disclosure.

I'm pretty sure the Wall Street Journal always includes a disclosure about ownership in any stories mentioning Murdoch, but I need to check.

I've just this moment found a good model for disclosure in a blog post at The New Yorker:

An earlier version of this post did not disclose the author’s relationships with some sources whose research he cites. Gabriele Oettingen is a professor at New York University, where the author also teaches. Heather Barry Kappes is a former student of the author’s, with whom he has collaborated. The post has been updated to reflect this.

"The Flipped Classroom" at CUNY's Idea Lab

I have a piece on flipped classrooms at Idea Lab!

Does it matter if writers are funded by Bill Gates?

Back when I was first writing ktm, and was just discovering constructivism, I watched an Oprah Winfrey special on a Bill Gates-funded school in San Diego (I think it was). High Tech High.

The camera followed Oprah around the school for what seemed like a very long tour. The rooms were strikingly different from standard academic classrooms. For one thing, there were no books. No desks, really, either. Just groups (teams!) of kids building stuff. Every class looked like shop class, only with plastic and metal instead of wood.

Finally Oprah said, "I don't see any books. Don't you have books?"

The tour guide, who may have been head of school, said rather proudly that, no, they didn't have books.

I expected the guide to add that all their books were on computers because they were high-tech-high (e-books weren't around yet), but she didn't. The answer was just a simple 'no.' The school didn't have books. Because technology, I guess.

The look on Oprah's face was priceless. She more or less wrinkled her nose, then said, "I don't think I'd like this school very much."

A fabulous moment.

Naturally, I was aghast, and I wanted to write a post about the show.

But I didn't.

My co-creator of ktm, Carolyn, along with her husband, Bernie, had just taken jobs at Microsoft; they'd pulled up stakes and moved to Seattle.

Given Carolyn's professional situation, I didn't think I should write a post sharply criticizing Bill Gates.

I had no idea whether blasting a Bill Gates-funded school on a blog I shared with Carolyn would bother her, and I didn't ask. I didn't want to put her in the position of having to express an opinion one way or the other. Nor did I know whether blasting a Gates-funded school on our blog would bother anyone she worked for. I was pretty sure no one at Microsoft would see anything I wrote, but you never know.

So I said dropped the idea.

I didn't change my views.

I didn't become an advocate for schools without books.

I just let it go.

That's how social influence works.

Bill Gates is funding too many think tanks, schools, unions, interest groups, politicians, journalism projects, politicians, etc. In the world of education, you can't turn around without bumping into the guy.

We need writers to point this out.

Invisible gorillas I have known and loved

Seeing as how there are about 5 other things I'm supposed to be doing right now, I am instead cruising the abstracts for Psychological Science articles.

The Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again
Sustained Inattentional Blindness in Expert Observers
Psychological Science July 17, 2013

Trafton Drew
Melissa L.-H. Võ
Jeremy M. Wolfe

Researchers have shown that people often miss the occurrence of an unexpected yet salient event if they are engaged in a different task, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. However, demonstrations of inattentional blindness have typically involved naive observers engaged in an unfamiliar task. What about expert searchers who have spent years honing their ability to detect small abnormalities in specific types of images? We asked 24 radiologists to perform a familiar lung-nodule detection task. A gorilla, 48 times the size of the average nodule, was inserted in the last case that was presented. Eighty-three percent of the radiologists did not see the gorilla. Eye tracking revealed that the majority of those who missed the gorilla looked directly at its location. Thus, even expert searchers, operating in their domain of expertise, are vulnerable to inattentional blindness.

I'm going to have to tell my story about sitting on a subway with a knife pointed almost directly in my face (or my boyfriend's face, at any rate) & not noticing.

I did notice that my boyfriend (I was maybe 20-years old at the time) was looking anxious as all get out.

That, I noticed.

I also noticed the couple standing immediately beside him, arguing over something to do with an apartment they were going to. As I recall, they were ticked off at its resident--they agreed on that--but they seemed to disagree on what to do about it. So they were arguing.

Didn't see the knife one of them was brandishing.

Or the gorilla.

Bill Gates is likely not just a funder but the major funder of Elizabeth Green

In the comments section, Hainish writes:

I checked, and Gates is one (two?*) out of over 25 contributors! It seems very misleading to say that she's "funded by Gates." One of the other donors on the list is the Walton Foundation . . . Can you imagine someone cherry-picking that particular donor to smear Green by association? (I can!)

I should explain.

I believe that I'm not cherry-picking when I cite Bill Gates, and only Bill Gates, as Chalkbeat's backer. I assume that Green's major donor --by far -- is Gates (or possibly Gates/Walton).

Unfortunately, I don't have easy access to Chalkbeat's 990 forms, so I haven't fact-checked.

In terms of bias, the presence of multiple donors on the donor page doesn't matter if one donor is providing most of the funding. I'm a member of a list that recently dealt with the multiple-donor issue re: Thomas Fordham Institute. Fordham, too, has a list of donors, but Gates is the big one:

Based on their 2012 990 there, Fordham had a total $2.8M income from grants in 2012. Given that Gates gave Fordham $1M in April 2013 (and $1.5M in 2011), clearly Gates is a major contributor. Gates' grants are probably split over 2 years or more in Fordham's tax forms. Other grants seem to be on the order of $100k-$300K. [email excerpt

Bill Gates is in a category unto himself. (Chalkbeat has been taken to task for the Walton funding, by the way.)

From a Chalkbeat story written by Green in 2008:

One of the world’s most expansive philanthropies, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, emerged yesterday from a year-and-a-half-long silence on one of its major investment areas, releasing a plan to dramatically alter the foundation’s approach to improving American schools.

[snip]

In the crowd were some of the most important names in education: the presidents of the two major American teachers unions; the current U.S. Education Secretary, Margaret Spellings; at least one former Education Secretary, Dick Riley, who served under President Bill Clinton; and several people named as possible Education Secretary in the Barack Obama administration now being formed. That group includes Schools Chancellor Joel Klein of New York City; Arne Duncan, the superintendent of schools in Chicago; the former chairman of Intel, Craig Barrett; and the co-chairs of Obama’s education advisory board, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond and the New York City-based education entrepreneur Jon Schnur.

The education A-list crowd flocked to the Seattle conference because the direction the Gates Foundation takes will undoubtedly have a significant impact in schools across the country. In the last eight years, the foundation has invested $4 billion in education projects, and that is not counting its investments in scholarships and libraries.....

The size of Gates’ investments is expected to continue apace in this next phase, a foundation spokesman said.

As a result, some observers said Gates’ new direction is more important to the future of American schools than the identity of the next U.S. Education Secretary.

“In a way, being Secretary of Education is less significant than being Bill Gates,” the education historian Diane Ravitch said, guessing that the foundation gives more money annually to education than the U.S. Department of Education has available in annual discretionary funds. “I’d rather be Bill Gates.”

I don't have a firm view on the issue of donor-backed, one-issue journalism.

I like think tanks, which exist to produce reasonably solid research and opinion papers devoted to a particular political or policy view. I'm a big consumer of think-tank white papers.

I'm not sure I'm sold on donor-funder journalism, which is what Chalkbeat purports to be.

At a minimum, I think Chalkbeat should disclose funding sources within any reporting on their donors. I had no idea Chalkbeat was funded by Gates (or by the Walton Foundation, for that matter). I was reading their stories 'straight,' not suspecting a bias toward charter schools or Common Core. Whether or not that bias is present is neither here nor there. Disclosure is good form.

Here's another Chalkbeat story on Gates I've just come across:

Gates announcement A-list, continued: So many power players! by Elizabeth Green November 12, 2008

One thing's for sure: way too much Bill Gates.

He doesn't know what he's doing, and he shouldn't be able to assemble policy "A-lists" to explain to them what comes next in public education.

Be gone, Bill Gates!

From the horse's mouth

AP courses and exams are being revised to emphasize inquiry and depth at the expense of memorization.
Trevor Packer, Senior Vice President, AP and Instruction – Senior Vice President, AP and Instruction - April 9, 2014

Oh, goody.

To be fair, AP history courses have always covered too much material. At least, that's what Ed always said. (For passersby, Ed is a historian of France & modern Europe.) Back in the day, Ed would occasionally be asked to work on AP Euro. He always said 'no' because he thought the courses crammed too much content into too little time.

He completely changed his mind once he started dealing with public schools as a parent.

He used to tell friends: 'I thought AP courses weren't great-- now I want Chris taking as many AP's as he possibly can.'

So, as much as it pains me to concede the point in our contemporary context, in theory it would be a good idea to thin out the content a bit.

Unfortunately, when thinning out content means "emphasizing inquiry and depth at the expense of memorization," you're not talking about a sensible edit.

You're talking about 12 months of DBQ-mongering at the expense of Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Dorothea Dix, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Clay, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jacob Riis, Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt, Lost Generation authors (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Lewis), and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Yes, I do realize that current AP courses engage in quite a bit of DBQ-mongering.)

Real historians don't write DBQs.

Also, you can't do proper inquiry & depth without knowledge.

Knowledge stored in memory, not on Google.

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

I've told you all (right? many times?) that Ed is one of the inventors of the DBQ.

He doesn't like me to say that because he's not positive he and his colleagues really did invent the DBQ. Somebody else might have invented it first.^*

But it's safe to say Ed and his group were the re-inventors of DBQs, and here's the thing: they invented the DBQ as a testof memorized knowledge.

Memorized, as in committed to memory and recalled later, on a test.

He and his group were writing new, rigorous, multiple-choice history tests for California. They designed the DBQ as a final and minor element of the exam, which would give advanced students a chance to show that they were beginning to be able to apply the historical knowledge they had memorized.

And note: only advanced students were expected to be able to write a DBQ successfully. All students could pass the test on the basis of knowledge stored in long-term memory. The DBQs were a bonus, so to speak.

A few years ago, in response to some folderol going on around here, in my district, I actually interviewed Ed about his work on the DBQ. Have got to dig out those notes and finally write them up.

AND SEE: Paul Horton on the new CC standards and DBQs


^*I've come across journal articles on "controlled composition," which I have yet to read, and I suspect Ed's right. Other people probably thought of DBQs before Ed and his group did, although I've never seen any indication that other people came up with the specific concept Ed's team did.

Ed-tech quiz

Ed-Tech Company or Made-Up Word?

I got 7 out of 9.

Very fun!

Elizabeth Green is funded by Bill Gates

Needless to say, I was horrified by Elizabeth Green's Why Do Americans Stink at Math?, which is the single most breathless endorsement of constructivism I've ever seen in the Times. Actually, it may be the only breathless endorsement of constructivism I've seen in the Times.

I read it this morning, just before a meeting with Ed and his editors at Oxford, and as we were rushing to get ready I joked that Green was probably funded by Bill Gates.

Then tonight it occurred to me that I should check.

Chalkbeat: About Us

The Times has no business publishing an advocacy piece, albeit an advocacy book excerpt, without disclosing the Gates connection.

UPDATE 7/29/2014: Bill Gates is very likely the major funder of Elizabeth Green

Palisadesk on violence on schools & bad principals

On the question of whether some schools are more violent than others, palisadesk writes:

I can speak to this with some assurance. I have been in 3 schools in the last decade, all within the same neighborhood (if you positioned them on a map, they would make an uneven triangle, each less than a mile from the others).

The area has a great deal of gang activity, drug dealing, drive-by shootings and vandalism, little of which is evident in the daytime; except for drug paraphernalia in the parking lot and conspicuous police cars, I rarely see any evidence of crime. We have had several lockdowns due to armed suspects in the area, and the school is locked down until police inform us it is safe. The reason they give is that they don't want an offender entering a school and attempting to take hostages.

Actual crime is really not that big a deal for the most part. Crime and violence in elementary schools has not, in my experience, ever been a big issue (I am talking K-8 elementary), and has not increased in my experience.

But, violence in elementary schools does occur and is of a lesser order than crime. It includes the usual bullying and schoolyard fights that have always been with us, occasionally punctuated by an incident of a student with a weapon. Violence and disorder are more of the disruption and uncontrolled-behavior sort, where there are kids running around unsupervised, taunting, harassment in the bathrooms, egregious swearing and opprobrious epithets, minor assaults, mostly against each other but also staff, etc.

A measurable portion (I wouldn't want to estimate an exact percentage) is due to increased numbers of mentally ill children and children with severe autism. Whereas we used to have other facilities for kids with real psychiatric disorders, most of them have been closed, and those children are in our schools, often with no support. Most children with autism are also included in general ed classes, although we do have some segregated programs as well.

Given all that, there is a huge difference among the last three schools where school climate and student behavior are concerned. The poverty level is about the same; school size about the same (550-700), demographics about the same (1-2% white, 2-3% Asian, a mixture of many black and brown subgroups). No middle class families.

Yet, school A, where I spent 8 years, was pretty well-disciplined and positive, with some good strategies for dealing with offenders and problems WITHOUT using suspension and expulsion. For one thing, suspension rewards the ones who don't want to be there in the first place, and they misbehave on purpose to get a free pass to the mall for a few days.

After a change in administration, however, things started to slide, and now, 5 years later, the place is a zoo and its academic standing is practically the lowest in the district where it was formerly respectably in the middle. School B had a lot of neighborhood issues due to being in the middle of a housing project (so non-students were often on the grounds etc), and the older students were more likely to be involved in undesirable extracurriculars. Still, the environment was relatively calm and classes orderly and children learning -- but one knew that it was a matter of constant vigilance.

Now I am at school C, a Frisbee throw away, and it is a completely different world. I am told it was pretty much like the first two some years back but a new principal came in and over time it has become a high-achieving, calm, enthusiastic place. The staff are outstanding, families love the school and support it in a variety of ways, we have lots of special activities to help kids broaden their horizons and gain background knowledge (principal is an active campaign for sponsors for different projects). In 4 years I have never seen or heard of a student fight, playground brawl or weapons issue. No drugs.

Academically, we outperform not only all the other schools in the (low-SES) area, but many of the middle-class and upper-class ones as well.

I think strong leadership of the best kind is what is needed -- and is in very short supply. An outstanding principal can transform a school (incrementally), and a bad one -- and I have worked for several -- can destroy one for years to come.

With all the yadda yadda about good teachers and bad teachers, you would think we would hear something about bad principals, the harm they do, and the need for great ones.

I've been active in reform efforts for a long time and the silence is deafening.

I completely agree, though I think NCLB focused much more on the school, as opposed to the teacher. At least from my perspective, it's been the Race to the Top era that has produced such a single-minded focus on the individual teacher.

Which reminds me....Sandra Stotsky has just posted a comparison of NCLB to RttT.

It's obvious to me we're not going to fix schools by linking teacher evaluations to Common Core tests. (Just typing those words -- 'fix schools by linking teacher evaluations to Common Core tests' -- plunges me into yet another Something happened in 1985 reverie.)

The person at the top sets the tone, and the person at the top is the principal. Individual teachers can't create a school climate. ("It's the culture, stupid.")

By happenstance, just this week I read an op-ed titled: What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools?

Agree completely with this passage:

The first [incorrect] belief is that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” This statement became known in education policies through the influential McKinsey & Company report titled “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”. Although the report takes a broader view on enhancing the status of teachers by better pay and careful recruitment this statement implies that the quality of an education system is defined by its teachers. By doing this, the report assumes that teachers work independently from one another. But teachers in most schools today, in the United States and elsewhere, work as teams when the end result of their work is their joint effort.

The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school. Team sports offer numerous examples of teams that have performed beyond expectations because of leadership, commitment and spirit. Take the U.S. ice hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics, when a team of college kids beat both Soviets and Finland in the final round and won the gold medal. The quality of Team USA certainly exceeded the quality of its players. So can an education system.

I had a shocking experience of this phenomenon nearly two years ago.

I had attended Morningside Academy's Summer Institute, and had student taught there.

After that experience, I visited another precision-teaching school.

The difference was shocking.

I remember reading the same thing on the DI list. Even when a school is using Direct Instruction curricula and the teachers are well-trained, school culture is still the most important factor determining whether students actually learn. (I probably can't find that email any more, but that's what I recall.)

engageny is a full curriculum, I think

I noticed in the Comments thread for Allison's post people talking about whether engageny is or is not a full curriculum.

I think it's intended to be a complete curriculum (but I could be wrong).

Last fall my district replaced Math Trailblazers with engageny and nothing else. The curriculum director told us that they'd saved roughly $100k by going with the NY state curriculum (which had not been written when they adopted it).

I mentioned in the comments thread that, a few years back, I went to a talk by David Steiner, who said that the state was going to write a complete math curriculum states would be free to use or not. He didn't say anything about writing a supplementary curriculum. The plan was to write a complete curriculum districts could use instead of a curriculum they'd purchased from a textbook company.

I think what they've posted is the result.

Here's the wording from the website:

In order to assist schools and districts with the implementation of the Common Core, NYSED has provided curricular modules and units in P-12 ELA and math that can be adopted or adapted for local purposes. Full years of curricular materials are currently available on EngageNY, for grades Kindergarten through 9th grade in Mathematics and Kindergarten through 8th grade in English Language Arts (ELA). NYSED is working with our partners to deliver high quality curricular materials for all remaining grades in both Mathematics and ELA. In Mathematics, full years of instruction will be available for all remaining grades this summer. In ELA, full years of instruction will be available in 9th and 10th grade this summer and 11th and 12th grade this fall.

Common Core Curriculum

They've posted 105 lessons for Algebra 1.

I counted.

Can you spot the error?

Can you spot the error?

This is the EngageNY 8th grade, module 7 Teacher's Guide for part of the lesson on irrational numbers.  You can find the rest here:

https://www.engageny.org/resource/grade-8-mathematics-module-7

Hint: extremely egregious error. 

School violence, suburban schools, charter schools

Followup to School violence 1940 - 1950

The 1940-1950 chart: School Survey Hoax:

I'm going to number sections of this post, just to make things quicker (for me & for people reading)

1. 

In the wake of learning, from the Comments thread (thank you!), that the 1940-1990 school chart is way too vivid to be true (I wondered about that -- should have listened to myself), I've done some Googling re: school violence.

Haven't finished, but while I was at it, I remembered this passage from Elizabeth Warren's book The Two-Income Trap:

Today's parents must also confront another frightening prospect as they consider where their children will attend school: the threat of school violence....[T]he statistics show that school violence is not as random as it might seem. According to one study, the incidence of serious violent crime--such as robbery, rape, or attack with a weapon--is more than three times higher in schools characterized by high poverty levels than those with predominantly middle- and upper-income children.[41] Similarly, urban children are more than twice as likely as suburban children to fear being attacked on the way to or from school. The data expose a harsh reality: Parents who can get their kids into a more economically segregated neighborhood really improve the odds that their sons and daughters will make it through school safely.[42]

Footnotes:
41. Thomas D. Snyder and Charlene M. Hoffman, Digest of Education Statistics, 2001, NCES 2001-130 (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, February 2002), Table 150, Percent of Public Schools Reporting Crime Incidents and the Seriousness of Crime Incidents Reported, by School Characteristics, 1996-1997.

42. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice, 2000, NCJ 190251 (December 2001), Table 2.0001, Students Age 12 to 18 Reporting Fear of School-Related Victimization.

Setting aside the question of whether school violence was significantly higher in 1990 than in 1940, the fact is that parents universally believe suburban schools are safer than urban schools.

I'm pretty sure urban parents have the same perception of charter schools.

Charter schools radiate an image of safety and calm.

I believe parents choose charter schools in part because they believe their children will be safer in a charter school than in a traditional public school.


2.

Are charter schools actually safer?

Hard to tell. They may not be.

From 2013:

Teachers' perceptions of school safety across all school levels tended to differ by sector. Private school teachers were less likely than teachers in other sectors to report being threatened with injury in the past 12 months. Among private school teachers, 3.9 percent reported injury threats, compared with 9.6 percent of traditional public school teachers. Teachers in charter schools (10.8 percent) and BIA schools (12.6 percent) were most likely to report being threatened with injury...

[snip]

Among traditional public public school teachers, reports of being threatened with injury varied by community type. Teachers in central city schools were more likely to report threats of injury in the past 12 months than teachers in urban fringe/large town schools and teachers in rural/small town schools. In central city traditional public schools, 13.5 percent of teachers reported injury threats. In urban fringe/large town schools, 7.9 percent of teachers reported injury threats. In rural / small town schools, 8.6 percent of teachers reported injury threats.

They need to disaggregate the data. I have no idea what proportion of charter schools are "central city."

One note: the fact that charter school teachers report a threat level as high as they do weighs against the idea that charters are cherry-picking the easy students.


3.

Has there "always" been violence in schools?

The answer is 'yes,' but that is neither here nor there.

There has always been violence, period, but some places and times have been more violent than others.

The question is whether schools had become significantly more violent by 1990 than they were in 1940.

At the moment, it looks to me as if the government didn't really start collecting statistics on violence in schools until around 1990. (I may be wrong about that, but so far that's what I'm turning up.)

The label "school violence" didn't really exist prior to the 1970s (which is not to say that school violence didn't exist):

Source: "The School in School Violence: Definitions and Facts" | Michael Furlong & Gale Morrison | Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders | Summer 2000, Vol.8, No. 2, p. 72

Setting the quest for school violence statistics aside, it's well established that there was a large increase in "violence-related injuries and homicides among adolescents during the late 1980s and early 1990s."(Furlong & Morrison, 2000)

That increase affected the schools:

In some ways, society has expected a protective bubble to exist between the problems of our communities and the spillover into the school setting. Schools have remained relatively safe environments for teachers and students (Furlong & Morrison, 1994; Garbarinio, 1992); however, in some areas, the community norms and behaviors regarding violence have thoroughly invaded the school (Devine, 1995). This is particularly true in urban environments where there is a commitment to subculture norms and values that endorse the use of violence in solving conflicts (Devine, 1995; Wolfgang & Ferracuti, 1967).

4.

Do some schools keep order better than others?

Yes!

Within the same city and the same demographic, some schools keep order and some do not:

The 11 (Philadelphia) schools differed significantly on all five measures of school climate. The largest between-school differences were found for planning and action; clarity of rules; and student influence. Schools, therefore differ considerably in the degree to which students perceive that the school is making any effort to implement school improvements; in the clarity of school rules; and in the degree to which students have any influence on school policies. Note, however, that sizable but smaller effects were found for the other two climate scales as well: students feel more respects and they perceive that school rules are more fair at some schools than at others. Schools are not at all identical in the rules, procedures, norms, and practices that make up school climate.

While one might expect that 11 public schools in the same large, urban school district would evidence similar levels of disorder, this was not the case at all....Schools varied to a great degree in how safe their students felt.

[snip]

Four of the five school climate variables significantly predicted victimization: respect for students, planning and action, fairness of rules, and clarity of rules. Student influence on decision making had no effect. Respect for students had the greatest influence on lower levels of victimization.

The Effects of School Climate on School Disorder | Wayne N. Welsh | The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2000 567: 88

Rules and respect (warm/strict): that is the recipe for safe schools as well as for good parenting.

We've known for decades that "authoritative" parents raise more successful kids, and yet somehow no one's ever heard of the research.

Kids need authoritative surrogate parents at school, too.


5.

Traditional public schools expel students all the time.

That includes SPED kids.