anonymous on what administrators want

I just lost my position.... I wish I knew what they wanted. When students are silent in rows, they prescribe groups. When they are talking too much, they prescribe quietly sitting in rows.

Steven H on soccer games & grocery stores

I see KTM as more than a kitchen table; it's a web-based extension of a grocery store or soccer sideline where we can discuss with other parents and teachers without having to rush home to cook dinner. There are always new parents coming into the grocery store. Hopefully they will realize that they aren't "the only one who's complained."

I think parents are very interested in any information they can get. This is the kind of information that many people won't talk about in a letter to the editor. It's also information that schools really don't want to discuss publically either.

For many discussions, there is a niceness factor that gets in the way of critical analysis. If a waiter asks if you liked your meal, most will probably say it was just fine, still tip 15%, but then go to another restaurant. For schools, you can't go anywhere else and you have to worry about consequences. Besides, I really like the teachers at my son's school. Since there is no process for parental input on curriculum or things that go on behind the veil, I would have to become a real pain in the ass to try and make changes. So what happens? parents smile and say that everything is fine, but then go out and hire a tutor.

KTM works to remove the veil (and sometimes the niceness factor) to try to get to the core of issues. In math, this means the details of mastery and the meaning of understanding. Things are happening at schools and parents have to pick up the pieces at home. These aren't always nice, happy, constructive discussions because they involve fundamental beliefs and assumptions.

dialogue of the deaf

Here's Robert Pondiscio:

[O]ne of my frustrations is the silence of the “reform community” on curriculum, as if what children learn doesn’t matter. Too often, those of us who support a rigorous curriculum feel as if we’re talking to ourselves.

“Teacher quality is the most important thing!”

“Sure, it’s important that kids have great teachers. But don’t you think curriculum matters?”

“Of course, as long as it’s taught by a great teacher! Preferably in a charter school!”

“OK, but what about the curriculum?”

“Oh, that’s very important. Did I mention teacher quality?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well good, because that’s the most important thing. And we should have merit pay, to align the teacher’s interest with the students’, just like we align executive and shareholder interests in business.”

You know it might help improve teacher quality if we had a national curriculum. Then teachers could focus on differentiating instruction and honing their craft. They could focus on how to teach instead of what to teach.”

“Now you’re getting it. You agree that teacher quality is the most important thing!”

“Well, that’s not really what I was saying…”

“The problem is we have too many teachers who really should be looking for other jobs. And they’re being protected by people who are more concerned with protecting adults than what’s best for children.”

“Be that as it may, you know there are lots of good reasons to support a national curriculum. Student mobility, for example. And background knowledge is fundamental to reading comprehension. You care about boosting reading test scores, right?

“Absolutely. And that can’t happen unless there’s a high quality teacher in every classroom.”

You’re not listening to a single word I’ve said are you? I’m trying to talk about curriculum, and you’re only talking about charters, and unions and firing bad teachers.”

“Fire bad teachers? I couldn’t agree more! Teacher quality is the most important thing!”

“Never mind.”

I sympathize.

Yes, yes: the crying need for Good Teachers.

Good teachers teaching what, exactly?

Actually, I would go so far as to say I would prefer bad teachers if the subject being "taught" is 21st century skills.

Paolo Freire at Core Knowledge

Mention the name Paolo Freire at a gathering of educated people and you’re likely to get blank stares. Unless members of that group went to ed school, where the Brazilian theorist is nothing less than a rock star, and his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Opressed is part of the canon.

Freire is Foul and Foul is Freire

Who is Paulo Freire?

KTM as keeper of the flame

We go on a lot about whether government money can fix things, if vouchers can work, what the future innovations can look like, what would make them possible. We don't reach consensus very often, and it's unclear whether or not we should. It makes me wonder if I'm doing any good by participating on this blog if I just go back again over the same arguments, returning to the same points we've made before. Even when I agree with others, I've found I am busy negating arguments instead of finding new solutions. So, what then, am I doing that's valuable? What is KTM doing that's valuable?

One big way in which KTM is valuable was so obvious to me that I overlooked it. KTM is a keeper of the flame of What Works. When everyone else has forgotten what curricula worked, what methods worked, what subjects were supposed to be taught, and how they were taught, this blog will recall.

We're now at least two generations into an education establishment that has eradicated the idea of direct instruction of students in subject areas. Two generations now means no one knows that reading or literature used to be rigorous; that grammar was once taught to schoolchildren. Two generations where no one knows the simplest algorithms for helping children master basic math facts. Two generations of no direct knowledge of the value of a comprehensive liberal arts education.

Ed schools are busy burning every copy of every wheel left in existence. The teachers themselves have never heard of this odd invention, because they've been taught by ones who never used it.

Someday, parents, teachers, school administrators, whomever, are going to start looking again for the wheel. They are going to start asking "What subjects should be taught? How can they be taught efficiently?" This blog has done more to promote the answers to those questions in every subject than anything other institution. KTM is a living museum, in the best sense of the word. Who else out there is performing this service? KTM is a virtual monastery that doesn't need to cloister itself to keep the truth alive. We need more of them, but having even one will be a necessity for parents in the future. Every time we find another answer, another subject that was taught, can be taught, and find references to the materials themselves so we can teach it again, we're saving a kid in a future generation. Even if we never can find a way to save them from the schools we've got now.

Empirical evidence math education isn't necessary declining

Here's a story that should bring a bit of perspective to us: in this town, neither the city officials nor the journalists know a stitch of math at all, so we may not be worse off than we ever were after all. Catherine needn't work through Dolciani to surpass this!


Here is the original story most of which is excerpted below:


Truro zoning decision hinges on single vote
By Mary Ann Bragg
mbragg@capecodonline.com
April 30, 2009

TRURO — Voters narrowly approved one of four zoning amendments late Tuesday night at the annual town meeting. But town officials were still looking at the exact vote count on that article yesterday.

In a vote of 136 to 70, voters passed a new time limit on how quickly a cottage colony, cabin colony, motel or hotel can be converted to condominiums. The new limit requires that those properties be in operation for three years before being converted to condominiums.

The idea behind the zoning amendment is to slow the pace of condominium development in Truro and preserve more affordable accommodations for tourists, according to citizens proposing the warrant article.
...

The exact count of the vote — 136 to 70 —had town officials hitting their calculators yesterday. The zoning measure needed a two-thirds vote to pass. A calculation by town accountant Trudy Brazil indicated that 136 votes are two-thirds of 206 total votes, said Town Clerk Cynthia Slade.

Brazil said she used the calculation of .66 multiplied by 206 to obtain the number.

But using .6666 — a more accurate version of two-thirds — the affirmative vote needed to be 137 instead of 136, according to an anonymous caller to town hall and to the Times.

Slade said that she called several of her colleagues to see how they calculate a two-thirds vote, and the answer varied widely. In Provincetown, Town Clerk Doug Johnstone uses .66. But Johnstone said he'd never had a close vote where it might matter.

A spokesman from the Secretary of State's office was not available to comment yesterday.

Slade said she will let the state Attorney General's office decide on the correct count, as part of their normal review of town meeting decisions.
...

Honestly, it makes me feel bad for Ms. Bragg.

Hat tip to Eugene at Volokh.com, who lists 9 problems with this article, not all of which are mathematical in nature. Can you find them all?

NOW on PBS

I'm getting emailed press releases these days & thought I'd pass this one along:

I wanted to alert you to this weekend's episode of NOW on PBS this
Friday night looking squarely at public education reform. The big
question: How is Secretary of Education Arne Duncan going to spend $100
billion in stimulus money - almost twice the education budget -- to fix
our nation's schools?

During his seven years running Chicago's public schools, Duncan went
head to head with the teacher's union and skeptical parents by closing
down low-performing schools, getting rid of all the teachers,
principals, even the janitors, and reopening them with new staffs as
"turnaround schools." It's a drastic step, but the results have been
promising. On Friday, May 1 at 8:30 pm (check local listings), NOW
travels to Chicago to investigate the collateral damage of a
top-to-bottom school makeover, and to get a glimpse of what the future
of education might look like for the rest of the country.

"We have to be willing to experience a little bit of pain and
discomfort, but our children desperately need it and deserve it,"
Secretary Duncan tells NOW. "Just as we have to do it, unions have to
change, principals have to change, teachers have to change, parents have
to step up... business as usual is not going to get us there."

Do we need to gut our public schools in order to save them?

The NOW on PBS website at www.pbs.org/now will feature this video online
immediately following broadcast. It will also feature a head-to-head
"issue clash" on the contentious subject of merit pay.

I think this focus will be of great interest to your readers and
audience, so please consider posting and placement in your newsletters,
blogs, tweets, and other communication avenues.

Thank you for your attention and consideration,

Joel

Joel Schwartzberg
Director of New Media
NOW on PBS
www.pbs.org/now
schwartzbergj@thirteen.org
212-560-2858

NOW on PBS...
On Television: http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html
On the Internet: http://www.pbs.org/now/
On Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/9jbq52
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/now_on_pbs
On iTunes: http://tinyurl.com/a93m8k

fly-over

dumb

Democrats for Education Reform: letter to Arne Duncan

here (pdf file)

foiled again

I was cruising through the word problems at the end of Section 5-8: Problem Solving Using Fractional Equations in Mary Dolciani's Algebra and Trigonometry Structure and Method Book 2, congratulating myself on the fact that not only can I now do what I consider to be reasonably difficult word problems, I enjoy doing them.

Then I hit this one:

19. A commercial jet can fly from San Francisco to Dallas in 3 h. A private jet can make the same trip in 3 1/2 h. If the two planes leave San Francisco at noon, after how many hours is the private jet twice as far from Dallas as the commercial jet? (page 246)

I couldn't do it, and I didn't enjoy not being able to do it.

I'm not even going to look at #20.

Until tomorrow.

High Schools Too Obsessed With College

This was the title to a letter to the editor that caught my eye.

"The examinations for high school graduation now sound like a college-entrance exam instead ..."

"Keep business math and general math plus general science in the curriculum for those students not planning careers in math and science."


It struck me that schools are screwing it up at both ends of the spectrum. They don't provide the needed education for those who want a technical career as an engineer or scientist, and they don't provide a proper education for those not wishing to go to college. All kids are told that they will earn so much less money if they don't go to college. Somehow, technical schools and trades get lost in the discussion. Even the Achieve organization is doing workplace studies that show that everyone needs Algebra II.

I don't agree.

The workplace studies were based on a self-serving evaluation of what kinds of tasks each job needed. These tasks were translated into a specific course in a traditional math curriculum. They did not look at exactly what math was needed to get the certification or degrees required for each job.

Schools want more rigor, but they get it all screwed up. Instead of fixing up and adding rigor to basic K-8 math, they try to impose some sort of false rigor in high school, which is usually translated to algebra I or algebra II for all. (not to mention capstone projects and portfolios) The more capable students don't get what they need and the rest get courses designed to prepare them for community college. Many just drop out of school. I can easily see why many kids think that high school is a joke.

We have a well-regarded technical school in our area and if kids can survive high school, they will find a wonderful sense of reality there; something that is completely missing at our community colleges.

I'm all for setting a goal of a proper course in algebra I for all by 8th or 9th grade. This keeps all doors open. After that, the math curriculum needs to offer courses based on specific educational needs, not vague concepts of rigor or workplace analysis. Educators love real world problems, but they can't seem to apply it to themselves.

knowledge is good, part 3

Text just pointed me to this comment left at the end of Tom Friedman's column Swimming without a Suit. 174 readers have "Recommended" it thus far, as have the Editors, and you may want to do so as well.

In fact, I Recommend you do.

April 22, 2009 9:23 am
Link

I spent the vast majority of my teaching career in the States, but have been teaching abroad since 2003. In my opinion, the problems with the US educational approach are legion, but the most serious among them can't be fixed with money. That problem is the lack of understanding of the fundamental goals of education.

One gets an education not just to make more money and grow the economy. One gets an education in order to have a foundation in real knowledge about the subjects that have evolved over centuries and have a direct bearing on our society today: not only math and science subjects but also history, one's own and foreign languages, and yes, even philosophy, or the history of ideas. All of this knowledge constitutes the essential property held in common by the citizens of a society, a common bond, and must never be taken for granted but rather continually renewed.

Over the past several decades in the US, the unifying body of knowledge, and the discipline required to attain it, has been deemphasized. Education has become 'student-centered', in an effort to stay 'relevant' and continually innovative so that students are never out of touch with the purpose or usefulness of their learning. Ironically,or perhaps naturally, this emphasis on the student has led to the alienation of said student from his own learning process because he becomes less receptive to input, less respectful of the expertise of authorities in their subjects, ie his teachers, and less likely to meet challenges when they require a cooperative effort.

I recognize the difficulty of creating an educational program that can provide foundation knowledge and serve to unify so vastly diverse a population as ours, but lowering expectations is no way to avoid misunderstandings between ethnic groups. In fact, as I know from my personal experience of teaching in the US, the young members of the ethnic minorities in my state were desperate for a denser, more packed curriculum in all subjects as they felt this was the only way to attain any kind of equality with more established Americans.

Thus I think that we should pursue a national initiative to return teachers to their role as experts and students to their role as learners. This will not threaten our national strength as independent thinkers but only restore it. Lately we have become too fragmented and preoccupied with surface effects to think at all.

KP, Secondary school teacher presently working in Europe
— Michaela, Portland Maine

Goldin & Katz!

The White House cites Goldin & Katz!

The same folks I've been citing for lo these many months!


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been
the golden age: a NYC teacher remembers
the White House cites Goldin & Katz

stimulus jobs

Sorry I've been missing in action -- lots of goings-on here in town. Good news on that front.

And tonight is Jimmy's birthday party, so I may not be back in the swing of things 'til sometime tomorrow.

In the meantime, I've just this moment stumbled across a New Yorker post about President Obama's "stimulus jobs":

It is common to say that we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The structure of the economy in which that crisis is occurring is very different than during the nineteen-thirties, of course. Just how different is highlighted in this chart (pdf file) from research by Anthony Carnevale, Jeffrey Strohl, and Nicole Smith, of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. They estimate that the Obama Administration’s stimulus bill will create about 3.7 million jobs—and that just over half of those jobs will require some college education. A remarkable fourteen thousand eight hundred jobs, they estimate, will require post-doctoral work.

[snip]

Jamie P. Merisotis, of the Lumina Foundation for Education, dropped by our offices the other day and mentioned this Georgetown research. Lumina seeks to drive the rate of college completion in the United States from its current level of just under forty per cent to sixty per cent. The U.S. once led the world in this area; now, among rich industrialized countries, we are tenth. The current leaders (over-achieving Finland among them) put about fifty-five or so per cent of their populations through college.

[snip]

In general, much of the education spending in the bill is delivered as direct transfers to states to help them retain teachers and administrators at a time when local and state tax revenues (from which our school K-12 public-school systems are funded) are collapsing. Even this block transfer money is being used to coerce prospective reform—in particular, by forcing states to develop new plans to collect information on school, teacher, and pupil performance. This information in turn will presumably be used to strengthen the “No Child Left Behind” law if and when it is renewed over the next couple of years.

Schooling the Stimulus
Steve Coll

Middle-school Math Classes Are Key To Closing Racial Academic Achievement Gap

ScienceDaily (Apr. 22, 2009) — More challenging middle-school math classes and increased access to advanced courses in predominantly black urban high schools may be the key to closing the racial academic achievement gap, according to a University of Illinois study.


"Although we've poured a lot of money and resources into trying to reduce inequalities between black and white students, we've mainly focused on test scores and that hasn't been successful," said Christy Lleras, a U of I assistant professor of human and community development.

Why target middle-school math? Lleras said there's a feedback loop between math placement, student effort, and academic achievement.

"Over time, these three factors affect each other. Students who take more advanced math courses in middle school lengthen their lead over time, and the positive school-related behaviors developed in those advanced courses lead to even higher achievement.

"But the opposite is also true. Lower math placement in middle school significantly lowers a student's chances of getting into higher-level math courses in high school, which translates into fewer skills and behaviors and greater achievement gaps in high school," she said.

These gaps are largest in high-minority urban schools. "For kids in predominantly black urban schools, the biggest predictor of the math course they took in high school was the math course they took in eighth grade. For all other students, the biggest predictor was their prior achievement, not the course they took," she noted.

Lleras used data from the U.S. Department of Education's National Educational Longitudinal Study to follow the effects of math placement, school-related behaviors, and achievement in more than 6,500 public school students as they progressed from the eighth to the tenth grade.

Transcript data indicated the highest-level math course the student had taken at these levels. Math achievement was measured via tests given at the end of these school years. And engagement and effort were measured by teachers' evaluations of the student's attentiveness, disruptiveness, and homework habits.

Lleras believes that increased access to more advanced and rigorous math classes in high-minority urban schools can have a significant direct effect on all students' achievement and particularly that of African American students.

"Being in a classroom where the expectations are higher, the course work is more rigorous, and the climate is more academic has huge effects on student effort," she said.

Lleras worries that lower-performing schools will concentrate on teaching to the tests mandated by No Child Left Behind.

"Instead of focusing on test scores, we may be better able to affect educational trajectories by improving teacher quality and reducing class sizes, which helps to create school climates that foster both academic learning and student effort," she said.

Because racial achievement gaps were already significant by eighth grade, Lleras believes educators must begin to address gaps in achievement and opportunities to learn much earlier.

She argues that universal preschool and expansion of Head Start would go a long way toward reducing early racial inequalities because early-childhood programs tend to affect student-related attitudes and engagement more than achievement test scores.

"Children can't learn new material until they have the toolkit of skills and school-related behaviors to do so," she said.

"Then we have to make a sustained effort to keep these children learning over time. We need a persistent and additional effort to support urban minority students through tutoring programs and improved access to challenging material and high-quality teachers," she said.

"This study was a snapshot of three years in these kids' lives, and in just three years, they were falling farther and farther behind," she added.

The study was published in a recent issue of the American Educational Research Journal.

Feeding the Beast

Public education financing is a classic Faustian bargain. In return for allowing government's taxation authority to spread the cost of educating our children across the entire population we have largely given up the right to purchase the education of our choosing. The consequence of that deal is an unimaginably large and unresponsive gomonpoly that not only ignores its customers but has the temerity to make it illegal not to consume its services (unless you're wealthy enough to pay for both it and its replacement).

Without this deal with the devil, you could pay for your child's education and be relieved of the tax burden that spreads the cost while enabling the monster's existence. I'm not convinced most people would sign up for such a system but imagine for a moment that they did. This would restore the ability to choose your service provider but our society would be left with the one intractable problem that started the whole push for public education to begin with, what to do with the kids without the resources (parental resources) to pay their own way?

As a society we've made a clear choice that it's unacceptable to leave kids behind. Even if you accept the immorality of such a proposition you certainly wouldn't want your communities to be overrun by a subculture with zero education and no means to provide for themselves as adults. Vouchers attempt to address this by leaving the financing system in place while creating a group of people who approximate those wealthy folks that can purchase what they want because they can afford it. Vouchers, as appealing as they are, don't address the problem. They put a band-aid on it. Public education's financing scheme is the root of the tree and as long as parental control is coupled to public financing, parental control will be insignificant.

It seems an insoluble problem, to maintain public financing for equity and cost sharing, while at the same time breaking the public (government) control over the system. But is it? Governments have a legitimate interest in ensuring that all citizens have access to suitable education but they have no more legitimate interest in running the system than they have with running the local Beauty Salon that they license. The problem to be solved is how to maintain our societal interests in equity and cost sharing (a financing issue) while returning control to the consumers.

What makes capitalism work is the tension between profit and value. Companies that maximize profit, at the expense of value, don't survive. Companies that maximize value at the expense of profit, don't survive. Survival goes to those organizations that navigate their offerings to a sweet spot; enough profit to satisfy stockholders (with increasing equity or dividends or both), and enough value to satisfy customers (with high quality products that meet their needs). Public education financing today is not concerned with survival. Profitless, it grows by coercion of a few elites. Valueless, it only satisfies the elites, not the consumers.

Here's a way to solve it. Think of an ideal future point. Every consumer (parent with children in the system) has enough school cash to buy the service that meets their value proposition. Every producer must struggle to find that sweet spot (they are allowed to thrive or die). Government uses their power of taxation and regulation to ensure that the cost is spread and minimal standards are met (products are safe and perform as advertised).

In this future state all schools are private entities. They can be non-profit or profit making. Profits have no constraints. They can be used in any combination to increase equity stakes (by growing), or be distributed to share holders (as dividends). The taxing authority converts school tax revenue to school cash. School cash can only be spent on a school. Everyone who pays taxes gets school cash. There would be a range of value propositions for consumers as well as the tax paying non-consumer and there would be a range of value propositions from producers. Let a free market sort out the sweet spots and let the shareholders manage their companies.

Parents, as consumers, spend their school cash at the schools where they place their kids. Everybody else is an investor, spending their school cash to purchase a stake in a school. The 'investors' have no restrictions on which school they invest in. For a school to survive it would have to attract enough parental consumers and stake holder investors to be attractive for every round of investing. A viable school would have to satisfy both the parental expectations on education, and the investment expectations of their shareholders. Neither the parents nor the investors have enough school cash (alone) to make a school viable. Investors would have an interest in the educational value because without that value there wouldn't be enough parental consumers to make the investment work. Parents would have an interest in the investment value because without that value there wouldn't be enough investors to meet the additional revenue requirements.

Would this work?

How could you get there from here?

another satisfied customer, part 2

Irvington Parents Unite

This is an arresting moment. I've never met the woman who put up this web site, nor had I met the people distributing fliers at the train station until two weeks ago, when one of them attended the same budget forum I did. Hadn't heard tell of them, either.

Come to find out, as a management philosophy, "We do what we do"^* doesn't work any better for other people than it does for me.

Particularly not when superintendents doing what they do doubles the budget in 10 years' time.


compare and contrast

budget school year 2000/2001: $24,124,756 district enrollment: 1744
budget school year 2008/2009: $50,583,424 district enrollment: 1888

Differentiated instruction doesn't come cheap.


bonus factoid

athletic teams:
2000-2001: 46 teams / 58 coaches
2008-2009: 64 teams / 77 coaches

Sixty four teams, seventy seven coaches, a $50 million dollar budget for 1900 kids --- and no intramural program to speak of.

I wonder why that is.


bonus factoid, part 2

enrollment 2008/2009:
grade 9: 150 students
Kindergarten: 127 students

projected Kindergarten enrollment 2009/2009: 119


^* or, alternatively, "The answer is no"


trouble in paradise
more trouble in paradise
another satisfied customer, part 2

more trouble in paradise

flyer from the train station

uh oh

Did you know.... (pdf file)

Petition to Reduce (pdf file)



trouble in paradise
more trouble in paradise
another satisfied customer, part 2

trouble in paradise

the natives are restless

really restless

The natives are so restless we have village residents who've composed so many letters to the editor they've developed a fan base.


trouble in paradise
more trouble in paradise
another satisfied customer, part 2

Sadly, Job Security for Me: Everyday Math Marches On

Job security as in academic remedation in the Palo Alto/Portola Valley/Woodside area -- all school districts having adopted Everyday Math.

Here's a snippet from Old Math, New Math : Everyday Math, aka Chicago Math by Roxane Dover at Silicon Valley Moms' Blog (who also blogs at Rox and Roll)

I had seen firsthand the effects of a problematic math curriculum on otherwise motivated kids. My daughter is a keen student who is interested in math and science to a surprising level. We want to encourage our daughter to stay her course – and hopefully, one day, she will be among those solving the energy crisis, curing cancer or healing the environment. Mastery of math is key to success in science. What I saw when my daughter experienced Everyday Math for three years in K-2 was a rejection of math out of frustration and a related inability to master basic mathematical concepts because of the Everyday Math approach of teaching every concept in too many different ways. This approach gives students a cursory understanding of several ways of addressing concepts at the expense of mastery.

Specifically, mastery falls victim to a concept called “spiraling.” Spiraling means that concepts are introduced but not necessarily mastered before new concepts are introduced, then the previously introduced concepts are revisited and built upon before something else new comes along, repeat. Mathematics learning, which should be progressive and built on a solid foundation, is replaced in this curriculum by a method of throwing a multitude of ideas at the kids without giving the kids time to properly internalize them to create that solid groundwork. It’s like cooking spaghetti and testing it by throwing a handful of noodles at the wall to see what sticks. Everyday Math doesn’t want it all to stick; it’s just concerned that some of it does. And that’s not good enough to build the solid mathematical groundwork that our children require.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

Critics, however, say the curriculum and its nontraditional algorithms are confusing. "Everyday Math" follows a "spiraling" method, where students move quickly through new concepts and may not necessarily learn them the first time around, but they revisit them over and over again in different formats or applications. They also say it encourages students to use calculators too often.

They never develop mastery, said R. James Milgram, a Stanford University math professor who sat on a state curriculum review committee in 2000 when the state rejected "Everyday Math."

"The mathematics these kids are seeing is hardly mathematics at all," Milgram said. "They learn a mush of things, most of which are just wrong."

Milgram said that while the program at its core makes sense, there are only 500 or 600 elementary teachers in the state with the expertise to teach it properly. He said he has seen enrollment in "Everyday Math" districts contract as parents pull out their students and send them to private schools, and said that could happen in Palo Alto.

One local preK-5 private school saw a 28% jump in admissions applications. This when local unemployment is at 11%.