pick one

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

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

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

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

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

And don't you forget it.



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

dumb question

Does anyone know, offhand, how I post my contact info where it's easy to find?

If not, I will have to RTFM.

portfolio assessment and grade deflation

I've left a comment at Flypaper re: portfolio assessments used to deflate high achievers' grades.

Grade deflation is a topic near and dear to my heart.

questions for Lisa Graham Keegan and Linda Darling-Hammond

• Do you believe that knowledge of the liberal arts disciplines is a form of intellectual capital?

• What is your opinion of the banking theory of schooling?

• Can children whose parents are committed to providing them direct instruction in the liberal arts disciplines be served by public schools? Or must these parents resort to homeschooling or enrollment in private and parochial schools?
  

• Can you name the 7 liberal arts?

I'm emailing my questions to Susan Fuhrman at: SusanF@tc.columbia.edu

children don't like group learning

a comment left by Jane re: how did you get 3?---

I think I now understand why the first words out of my seven year old after school yesterday were "Mom, I don't want to be in any group in my class."

She is a second grader in a class with a range of skills from preK to 3rd grade. She has the 3rd grade skill.

It got worse last night when my fifth grader commented about wonderful it was that she wasn't in a group.

Where exactly was the fifth grade level math in the video?

As I understand it, teachers in the 4-5 school here are now required to teach children in groups. It's against the rule to seat the children in rows.

education debate tonight

Lynn G filled me in:

Education and the Next President

I can't for the life of me figure out why Barack Obama appears to be sticking with Linda Darling-Hammond, assuming that's what is happening. Flypaper has predicted she'll be gone, and I've been assuming the Flypaper people know what they're talking about in these matters. But perhaps not.

Here is Darling-Hammond twinkling her way through eight and a half minutes of blather re: [S]ocial and emotional learning is a crucial part of teaching the whole child. Darling-Hammond and her legions of colleagues, students, and disciples in the business world are the reason why parents like me who want a classical education in the liberal arts disciplines for their children are having to pay the Jesuits to provide one.


The word "parents" does not cross Ms. Darling-Hammond's lips.


snippets:

When you think about how you want to educate the whole child, it’s critical to be sure that you’re helping kids be able to engage with one another, understand themselves and how they think, be able to handle the stresses and challenges in their lives which are increasing all the time.

We are still struggling to get past the factory model school that we inherited in the early 1900s, which adopted age-grading so that students go to different teachers every year. ... [M]uch of the environment, particularly in big, urban factory model schools is punitive and coercive because it’s about control of large numbers of people being asked to do things that are not natural.

Interesting, that.

Punitive and coercive are precisely the words I would choose to describe public schools in which children are forcibly enrolled in emotionally invasive project-based, experiential learning activities and graded on the outcome.

[snip]

If you think about the ways we have to be functioning adults, it’s in context where we have to work in groups on hard problems that need creative solutions, that require problem solving, and it’s getting to do that work well that is really part of the major goal of education in the 21st century. So when you think about project-based learning, learning that results in demonstrations of performance, exhibitions of what kids can do in real tasks that have brought these kind of novel challenges to them to solve, you can see that when an individual student or a group of students come together to solve a hard problem to figure out how to do research how to do inquiry, how to investigate, how to put their ideas together, how to figure out which ideas have the most grounding, how to present what they’ve done, they have to do a lot of social, personally intelligent work. They have to be able to figure out how to relate to one another, how to divide tasks, how to solve problems, how to probably run into dead ends, pick up the pieces, reorient, and go in a different direction — all of that develops children’s abilities to be socially capable, emotionally capable and grounded, and, in the long run, also intellectually capable. And those pieces all come together when you’re working on project-based, experiential learning activities.

All your children are belong to us.

A constructivist approach to ratios and proportion

This is a video that purports to show how questioning can be used in teaching. In it, a teacher has a series of one-on-one conversations with a boy who is working on a math problem. I recognized the problem as coming from Connected Math. There are four recipes for an orange drink, with various ratios of orange concentrate to water. The problem is to find out, for each of the four recipes, how many cups of orange concentrate and water are required to make enough drink for 240 campers. Each camper is to have 1/2 cup.

Typical of CMP, the student in the video has received minimal instruction on ratios and proportions. What's more, the problem is a multi-step one, that requires one to figure out the total amount of cups needed of orange drink, given that of 240 campers, each receives 1/2 a cup. This is not in itself hard, but given that he has minimal instruction, it is all one big jumbled mess of a problem in his mind. He has four such recipes and therefore four problems to do, but as is evident from the first dialogue, he has mushed all four recipes into one.





This problem is not difficult to teach with a systematic direct approach. Singapore Math approaches it using bar s. As an example, if the recipe is 2 parts orange concentrate to 3 parts water, the 2:3 ratio is illustrated as follows:

[ ][ ] Orange drink
[ ][ ][ ] Water

There are a total of five parts that make up the orange drink. If there are 120 cups needed (1/2 cup for 240 campers = 1/2 x 240, which Singapore Math students have learned how to do in 4th grade), then each part is 120/5 = 24 cups, and then it is easy to see that the amount of orange drink is two parts, or 2 x 24 = 48 cups, and water = 3 x 24 = 72 cups.

It doesn't take a long time to teach this, and based on my experience with my daughter, the Singapore approach is quite effective and leads to extensions of the concept whereby students can set up ratos between amount of orange concentrate and total amount of orange drink.

When you view the video it is apparent that it is taking this boy quite a while, through quite a few one-on-one dialogues with the teacher. Personally, I don't know of many classrooms where a teacher is going to have that kind of time to have a one-on-one like that.

technology I'm willing to pay for

laptop smackdown

synchronicity alert: I just bought a new Neo for Andrew a month ago. I liked it so much I kept it for myself & gave him my old AlphaSmart. Now he has two & his teacher can keep one at school, thus eliminating the daily scramble to locate the thing & put it in his backpack before his bus arrives at 7:12.

Be sure to click on the photos of kids at the bottom of the screen.

re: photos of kids at the bottom of the screen ---- I am constantly amazed that school districts apparently want students to spend more time on the internet than they already are. Of course, when you're being heavily lobbied by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, then I suppose it's inevitable you're going to be buying 4000-dollar SMARTBoards & 1000-dollar laptops instead of 219-dollar Neos.

After all, when the business community, education leaders, and policymakers want you to do something, you better do it.

how did you get 3?

excerpts:

In any classroom anywhere you go, you’re going to have an incredibly broad range of kids, socially, academically, all across the spectrum. And so how does a single person as a teacher, as a manager, teach 20 to 30 kids in a single classroom when that ability range is so wide. I personally believe that the social skills and more importantly the students building social skills to help them work together to talk about math, to explain their thinking, to offer help when another student is struggling, and just as importantly for that child to be able to accept help — that’s a really difficult part of that equation. All of those skills are part of the social arena that we’re working in and without them I don’t know how you could teach a classroom with such a broad range of abilities.

[snip]

5th grade girl: “How did you get 3 when if you did the half of 8? That’s 4.”

5th grade boy: “I don’t know how I got 3.”

[snip]

Say we provide a math problem. Many students can find the answer very quickly. But can they explain the process that was happening in their mind? Can they explain it to somebody that doesn’t understand it? Take a really gifted kid, for example, and you have them try to explain a multiplication problem, a very basic one. They know the answer like that. And try to have them explain it to somebody that it doesn’t come so quickly to. It’s an amazing activity to watch, to see them think through the process. Oh well I know that 3 x 4 is 3 groups of 4 or 4 groups of 3 and here’s how I see it and here’s what it looks like visually and that’s how I get to this answer. It’s an entirely different skill to be in tune with your own thinking. And so in order to do that in the classroom, those social skills need to be in place.

brought to you by The George Lucas' Educational Foundation

(If the video doesn't load, you can watch it at edutopia.)

update:

Here's the Singapore Math 4B placement test, which is the test kids take after completing 4th grade. (pdf file)

Here's the second part of the 1st question on the test:

1. (b) Arrange in increasing order.

5/8 0.602 3/5 0.66

I really want to see that one done with plastic squares.

OK, here's the first word problem on the test:

6. A meter of lace cost $0.40. Mrs. Jacobs bought 5.5 m of lace. She used 1.3 m to make a dress. She used the rest to make 4 cushions of the same kind.
(a) How much change did she receive if she paid for the lace with $10?
(b) How much lace did she use for each cushion? Give your answer in meters and centimeters.

Compare that to the problem tackled by the 5th graders in Alaska:

Mike has $8.00. Kelly has twice as much as Mike and Joe has half as much as Kelly.

The teacher's sole intervention, in the video, is to ask one of the students:

“Do you know what that word twice as much means?”

tripping up the gifted kids

It seems to be a big win for the teacher, figuring out a way to trip up a "gifted" kid on a simple multiplication fact. I wonder if this teacher forces the gifted students to define "twice" for their less able peers along with teaching them multiplication?

Of course, the idea that a 5th grade child who can answer "What is 3 x 4?" just like that is gifted may be the central Decline and Fall moment in this video.

Which is coming to us from George Lucas.

Parents have to get their kids out of the public schools if they can. Sauve qui peut.

Parent Involvement

Parental involvement has real staying power as a catch phrase in education-speak. Possibly because it assumes that parents can always be counted on to take the blame (or blame each other) for most anything going wrong. But there are a few schools that take parent involvement seriously, and could possibly serve as role models. One of the local public schools in my town has taken a few simple steps to move past rhetoric; and I offer it as an example.

1) last May, a Parent's evening was held for parents of 6th graders. The principal, VPrinc, and Guidance Counselor answered questions and gave information. I found this typical and not terribly helpful -- a lot of general information on middle school organization, lockers, classes, blah blah blah. Nothing specific on curriculum, which is what I'd like to hear about.

2) a week before school starts -- a picnic on the lawn for families then about an hour for kids and families to wander the school, find the classrooms they'd be in, lockers, talk to administrators. The event ran past the scheduled end time, but no one was hurried to the door.

3) the second full day of classes -- parents are invited to come immediately after classes to meet teachers for an hour in the cafeteria (although it ran late, again, and nobody threw the parents out). Every teacher was there, all were willing to discuss curriculum and expectations

4) Two weeks into the year -- an open house is held in the evening. We got copies of our child's schedule and followed their day class to class for 2 hours. Every teacher was there, curriculum was discussed, some teachers had detailed syllabi available.

5) 3rd week of classes -- a morning parent open house is held -- from 7:30 to 9:30 parents are invited to attend classes with their child. Parents park all over the lawn. The Principal takes pictures -- the more parents the better. He's told us repeatedly at the first 4 events how he wants to blanket the front grass with parent cars. Yes it's disruptive, but he wants parents to see what their kids are actually doing in class.

The point of all of the events at various times of the day make it easier for parents to find at least one time when they can make it in to the school. The principal asks parents to come to school. He makes it easy to get them there by making the times flexible. No topic is off-limits.

Having sat through two classes with my daughter's teachers (with students present) has given me a far greater understanding of what is happening in my child's school day. I may not like everything going on there, but there is no doubt that transparency is more than empty talk. There are things I will continue to fight to change (still too much emphasis on the child taking responsibility for their own learning), but with transparency and an attitude of openness towards parents, I feel I am involved (for the first time ever in this school district) WITH and NOT AGAINST the school my child attends.

advertisements for myself

A starred review in Publishers Weekly!

Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Houghton Mifflin, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-0-15-101489-7
Grandin (Animals in Translation), famed for her decades-long commitment to treating livestock as humanely as possible on its way to slaughter, considers how humans and animals can best interact. Working from the premise that “an animal is a conscious being that has feelings,” the autistic author assesses dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, poultry, wildlife and zoo animals based on a “core emotion system” she believes animals and humans share, including a need to seek; a sense of rage, fear, and panic; feelings of lust; an urge to nurture; and an ability to play. Among observations at odds with conventional wisdom: dogs need human parents, not alpha pack leaders, and cats respond to training. Discussions of why horses are skittish and why pigs are arguably the most intelligent of beasts—raccoons run them a close second—illuminate the intersection of people and more domesticated animals; chapters on cows and chickens focus more generally on animal welfare, particularly the horrific conditions in which they are usually raised and slaughtered. Packed with fascinating insights, unexpected observations and a wealth of how-to tips, Grandin's peppy work ably challenges assumptions about what makes animals happy. (Jan.)

PW will run an interview with Temple in the 10/20 issue.




(I've just noticed that Jay Mathews' new book on KIPP is listed on the same page!)

Tactics Used to Maintain the Status Quo

Tactic #1: Tell parents that “You are the only one who complained.”

O-M-G ! ! ! !

How many times did I hear that one?

Moving right along:

Tactic #2: Claim that “The research shows that what we are doing is best.” CHECK

Tactic #3: “We are the experts. You should trust us to know better than you.” CHECK

Tactic #4: Claim that children will suffer if the budget is not significantly increased. CHECK

Tactic #5: Accuse critics and parents who ask too many questions of being “against public education.” Hah! They don't dare try that one around here. Too many folks already sending kids to private school and too many other folks who would if they could scrape together the money after paying the highest property taxes in the known universe.

Tactic #6: Claim that FCPS is prevented from making changes by the No Child Left Behind act. No one has used this one around here, and that is to the district's credit.

Tactic #7: Avoid taking actions to change the system by ignoring good ideas. CHECK ^*

Frederick Education Reform briefings

^*I'm adding this one to my list of "Signs that your child is attending a public school." Actually, I could add all 7 of these to my list of Signs that your child is attending a public school.

sticky note

Max got stuck again on a history paper last night.

Max got stuck because he got home at 8 p.m.
Max got stuck because he had a shitload of other homework as well.
Max got stuck because he was so tired.
Max got stuck because history papers are sticky.

Max got home at 8 p.m. because I was doing errands and didn't call to
grill him about his homework.
Max got home at 8 p.m. because he was hanging out with friends.
Max got home at 8 p.m. because his dad was working in his studio and
assumed I'd call him.

Max had a shitload of other homework because he's in high school now.
Max had a shitload of other homework because he's a slow reader, so
even not much homework can amount to a shitload.
Max had a shitload of other homework because he probably saved some
for the last minute—when you do that, even a "small shit" becomes a
"load."

Max was tired because he couldn't get to sleep the night before.
Max was tired because he was bored.
Max was tired because instead of taking a nap, he hung out with his
friends.

History papers are sticky because some CocaCola spilled on them.
History papers are sticky so that even your dogs won't eat them.
History papers are sticky so students will adhere to them without
escape.

the winner is

This is the poll I was waiting to see.

Forum for School Board Candidates

How can parents be involved in their child's public school education?

Check out the CANDIDATE FORUM in the "briefings" section here:

Frederick Education Reform

and the winner is

This is the poll I was waiting to see.

MathCounts

Has anyone been through the MathCounts competition for middle school? Any comments? I've been asked to do it at our school.

how can I talk my parents into homeschooling me?

Just ran across this blog....

Ted Nutting on the math mess

I'm a high-school math teacher in Seattle. When I hear Mark Emmert, president of the University of Washington, say that this state is "at the bottom in the production of scientists and engineers," and warn that our graduates "will be washing the cars for the people who come here for the best jobs," I know what the problem is. It's math. We are failing to educate our children in mathematics. I know how that came about, and what we can do about it.

The problem is national in scope, but in Washington state our difficulties can be traced principally to Terry Bergeson, superintendent of public instruction for the past 12 years. She oversaw the writing of our state's weak, vague math standards, basing them on a "reform" idea to promote "discovery" learning. This has turned teachers into "facilitators" who "guide" children in learning activities. It has promoted "differentiated instruction," placing students of wildly differing abilities together where some students cannot do the required work, often to the detriment of those who can.

She has moved away from rigorous testing. The "reform" math she champions encourages such things as journals, portfolios and group projects that tend to form large parts of classroom grading systems, while test results are relegated to a lesser role. The math portion of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), aligned to her faulty standards, tests math skills at a low level. Even so, about half our 10th-graders fail it.

She has wasted millions of dollars on "professional development" to encourage teachers to put "reform" theories into practice. These theories are supposed to make it possible for all students to learn math. But few students know significant mathematics, and most know very little. About half of our students entering college now have to take remedial math. Many of our students who do succeed use private tutors, and the racial achievement gaps have widened. "Reform's" emphasis on equity and fairness has been revealed to be empty talk.

My experience tells me that we can fix this, and quickly. I am the Advanced Placement calculus teacher at Ballard High School. I don't teach Bergeson-style. I tell my students what they need to know, they do problems to understand how it works, and they demonstrate their knowledge and understanding through testing. Up until this year, we've insisted that our students who take AP calculus actually be able to do the work.

We at Ballard have by far the best AP calculus program in Seattle Public Schools, based on AP test scores. I have no special magnetism or charisma; I'm not a cult figure for teenagers. I have high standards and I require the students to work. If they don't work, they know they will probably flunk. But they do work, and I am proud of them. I also have the benefit of having an older textbook that doesn't fit the "reform math" model, and most of my students have had an excellent pre-calculus teacher the year before.

In most of our other math classes (and I doubt that Ballard is unique in this), we've tended to follow a "reform" model. We've passed students on from class to class; there is no meaningful threshold they must cross to enter a more-difficult class. Since we find that many students in our classes cannot do the work, we dumb down the courses. We say we are admitting unprepared students into our classes in order to "challenge" them.

But students should be challenged in the classes that they are qualified to take, not sent on to classes where they cannot do the work. Unfortunately, things are changing, even in our school's AP calculus classes: We're starting to admit unqualified students, and our program will soon begin to deteriorate.

It's not just Ballard's AP calculus program that is successful, and it's not just the top students. North Beach Elementary in Seattle [was this Niki Hayes' school? will find out] switched its math curriculum to Saxon Math in 2001. This excellent series teaches real math and does not follow Bergeson's fuzzy, reform-oriented ideology. North Beach did this with reluctant agreement from Seattle Public Schools because the PTA paid for the books and because the superintendent supported site-based decision-making. North Beach's passing rate on the WASL rose from 68 percent in 2000 to 94 percent in 2004 — and yet, every year parents worry that real math will be scrapped. Recently, the school has had to seek waivers to avoid having to teach the district's "reform" math.

Legislators have begun to understand the problem. At the Legislature's direction in 2007, the state Board of Education reviewed our state's math standards, finding they were failing. The Legislature set up a system to fix the problems, but that system gave Bergeson the opportunity to sabotage the process. She stacked the committees selected to rewrite the standards with like-minded ideologues. The results were so bad the Legislature refused to accept the rewritten standards, sending them to the Board of Education to fix.

Bergeson then stacked the committees set up to select curricula for state approval. That process is not complete, but the first results are discour-aging. The Legislature had required that the new mathematics standards be based on (among other things) the standards of Singapore, consistently a leader on international tests, but Bergeson's initial submission of texts ranked Singapore Math, that country's official curriculum (and a superior one), dead last out of 12.

Most school-district administrations have gone along with Bergeson and share responsibility for this mess. Even as an uproar arose nationally against the programs Bergeson promotes, Seattle started using two of them in elementary and middle schools.

None of this is necessary. Students can learn math. My students learn it. If our education leaders would follow the lead of our Legislature, stop ignoring obvious successes and support what actually works, we would see major improvements in just a few years.

Ted Nutting is the Advanced Placement calculus teacher at Ballard High School in Seattle.

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company

A formula for lifting Washington out of its math mess

Students should be challenged in the classes they are qualified to take.

one more reason to homeschool

Parents Say the Darndest Things

(Susan S via Joanne Jacobs)