Charter School Lotteries

An article in our state paper today talks about how the lottery for a charter school in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood has 1380 applicants for only 68 openings, many of which are reserved for the siblings of existing students. For the whole city, there are 6521 applications for only 679 openings in 15 charter schools. This is in a city where many educators fought tooth and nail against new Achievement First charter schools.

Parents are desperate to get the kids in.

"It's like hitting the lottery," she said. "If he gets in here, it determines his whole future, including where he goes to high school. I'm praying."

This has little to do with pedagogical ideas of critical thinking and discovery. Urban parents clearly see that. What do grand ideas of democracy and public education mean when those on the lowest level are desperate to get out?

Advice Needed for Summer Math Class

My son needs to take Calc Honors next year (sr year of high school).  He took Trig Log Calc Honors as a sophomore, but it was a waste of a year.  Catherine's son had same teacher -- so it was same problems, but then add to that that he was out sick with mono for 6 weeks.

He did not take Calc this year (i.e. Junior Year) because it would have been the same teacher, and we could not live through that again.  Plus, he didn't want to take that risk for  his junior year transcript.

Instead, he took AP Stat - which is fun for him, but not really a math class.

So, I need to get him ready this summer to take Calc in the Fall.  First, I'm not sure if he should take a pre-calc class -- or take a calc class and just audit it, my thought being that he'd  pre-learn the material before school starts.

So that's my first question: Calc class vs Pre-Calc. class

Here are the 3 options I was thinking about:

1) MIT Online math class.  I haven't looked into, but I understand they have High School courses.  He loves this idea.  I wonder whether an online course could work for him.

2) Local community college (Mercy).

3) Local Private school summer course (Horace Man was recommended).  IT needs to be some place he can get to via public transportation, as I can't drive to from every day.


The other thing to add is that he has a summer job lined up (90%) -- so the most time-efficient way for him to do that is a variable too.  i.e MIT sounds appealing because it's on his own schedule.  Horace Mann sounds good because it's only 6 weeks (I think).  I haven't checked into Mercy College schedule.

CollegeVisits

I would like some advice about college visits. Do colleges like or expect to see rising juniors? Do they offer informal versus formal visits? What should I expect (or not) from a college. I would like to get started early and not wait until the spring or summer of his junior year. I think it will also get him thinking more about how important his junior year is.

What did you do with your kids? What worked and what didn't? I know that some plan trips and go to different parts of the country. It seems that this is best done in the summer, but you don't get to see the college in action, so to speak. What did you like about the visits and what didn't you like?

We were going to go to a couple of colleges last summer (not an official visit), and I contacted two professors directly because my son was interested in their work and background. Unfortunately, nothing worked out. One professor never showed up for the meeting (!) and we couldn't get to the other college.

no exit

Unless I'm mistaken, and I don't think I am, my school district finds itself in the position of being contractually obligated to fund annual above-inflation salary increases forever.^*

And since raises are figured as a percentage of current salary (I think - must fact-check), the 'miracle of compounding' is in play as well.

What's strange about this state of affairs is that:

a) smart, capable people (past school boards) created this situation without understanding that they were creating it
b) smart, capable people (voters) supported the creation of this situation without understanding what was being created
c) virtually no one, today, understands what the situation actually is

I don't understand it well myself, and I know only one person who does. (That would be the person who explained it to me.)

I'm wondering whether there's research on people's ability to comprehend trend lines over the long term. I'm sure there is.

^* Well, forever assuming the Fed continues to target 2% inflation.

value-add

“I’m definitely a lot more attuned to making my plans,” said Morgan Shinlever, a physical education and health and wellness teacher at Bearden High.

Since Mr. Shinlever knows his fate now depends on math and reading scores, he is making his classes more academic. After watching the documentary “Food, Inc.” recently, his sophomores wrote essays. Similarly, in Chester County, a gym teacher recently spread playing cards around and had students run to find three that added to 14.
States Try to Fix Quirks in Teacher Evaluations By JENNY ANDERSON
Published: February 19, 2012

Stop the multiverse, I want to get off.

why are there so many of these things? (off-topic)

In The Daily today:

The latest mind-bending show to explore the question of how we know what's real, NBC's "Awake" tells the story of LAPD homicide detective Michael Brittan, a man who has no ability or desire to distinguish between his actual life and his extremely detailed dreams.
Dual-Reality TV by Noam S. Cohen The Daily | Wednesday February 29, 2012

Battlestar Galactica, Invasion, American Horror Story, The 4400, V, Source Code, Haven (right?) .... even the theme song to Friday Night Lights, for pete's sake.

There've been so many of these stories that new shows with the same premise aren't new any more but merely "the latest" variant. Characters who are dead and don't know it, or they're aliens and don't know it, or they're pregnant with aliens and don't know it, or they're asleep (or awake) and don't know it -- the possibilities are endless.

I date this meme to 9/11, but I don't know whether that's right.

B.F. Skinner and the magic writing room

habit, part 1

Shortly after writing habit, part 1, I realized I have no business writing posts about habit. I'm supposed to be writing something else about habit, not blog posts.

So, for the time being, I'm going to re-recommend Piers Steel's The Procrastination Equation, which is revelatory, and post a passage I tracked down on the subject of B.F. Skinner's magic writing room:

Meanwhile I had set up a pigeon laboratory in which Charles Ferster and I worked very happily together for more than five years. It was the high point in my research history. Scarcely a week went by without some exciting discovery. Perhaps the behavior we dealt with most effectively was our own. Near the end of our collaboration we found ourselves with a vast quantity of unanalyzed and unpublished data, and we proceeded to design an environment in which we could scarcely help writing a book. In it we both worked as we had never worked before. In one spring term and one long hot summer we wrote a text and a glossary and prepared over a thousand figures, more than 900 of which were published.
B.F. Skinner: An Autobiography (in Festschrift)
p. 15

We worked slowly at first, but the need to finish before my scheduled departure in June 1955 led us to organize our environment and to develop several ways of self-management. All our work was done in a room dedicated to writing and not used at other times. Interruptions were the first problem, which we handled by a decision not to take phone calls. When visitors appeared at the door, we routinely stepped in the corridor to speak with them briefly. The frequency of interruptions became very low and the writing room came to control our behavior. Usually we began before nine and stopped by lunch time. There was frequently a temptation to continue in the afternoon when we were working especially well or when the data was especially interesting, but our recently acquired data on fixed-ratio performances convinced us to seek a work schedule that kept our performance at maximum frequency for the period we were actually writing. The procedure worked very well. There were no warm-up or inactive periods in the writing room. Naturally we did not write elsewhere nor did we converse about outside matters nor do anything but work on schedules of reinforcement so long as we were in the writing room. At times the pace of the writing was so intense, and rewarding, that we began to control our outside activities in the fear that they might compete with or decrease the frequency of writing and graph-making. Bridge, chess and late social evenings were out.
Festschrift for B.F. Skinner by P.B. Dews
p. 45
Ardent Media 1970
“Schedules of Reinforcement with Skinner” by C.B. Ferster American University

The way I heard this story, back in college, was different.

The way I heard it, Skinner was alone in his magic writing room, and he systematically left the room any time so much as a stray thought crossed his mind. Eventually, by dint of heroic self-discipline and his rigidly adhered to exit strategy, he worked his way up to -- and maxed out at -- 45 minutes of sustained concentration without extraneous thoughts.

Forty five minutes was the outer limit, we psych students were told, the pinnacle of human attentional capacity: 45 minutes was to concentration what 120 years was to lifespan.^* I have believed this to be true for my entire adult life.

Come to find out it wasn't 45 minutes, and making a magic writing room wasn't hard. It was 3 hours, or possibly 4, and when the 3 or 4 hours were up, Skinner and Ferster had to force themselves to stop.

So .... number one.... damn. Sure wish I'd gotten the straight story the first time around.

And, number two, I'm putting myself under stimulus control.

Actually, I think I already did.

more anon

^*Possible but not bloody likely. 

Question about teacher seniority

I was talking with a girl who is finishing up her education degree (music) and asking her whether she will have to look out-of-state for a job. She said yes, but she was not sure what school level she wanted. I asked her about trying to find the best location right away because I heard that seniority doesn't transfer between states. She said that seniority doesn't transfer between school districts! Is this true everywhere? I know that we lost a good math teacher because he didn't want to lose his seniority moving from one state to another. Why would unions agree to that? Is it because the contracts are by district? Is tenure transferred, but not seniority? What happens with pay? Isn't it tied to seniority, or is pay step separate from seniority?

In our lower schools, if there is a reduction in force, teachers with higher seniority who have lost their class can bump a teacher out of any other class if they have lower seniority. This isn't true for 7th and 8th grades where you have to be certified in the area you teach. This bumping has been a big problem for us. A reduction of one class can cause a chain reaction of bumping. The school has no say over whether they think the teacher would be appropriate for that grade. Parents are angry because of the wholesale change and how many kids will have a teacher just getting up to speed for that grade. I think we now have a back-room battle between the administration and the union over this one.

She also said that the biggest demand is for teachers who teach material that is tested. She was resigned to the fact that music is the first to be cut. We then talked about finding towns that have a history of support of music. However, that's probably not where the job openings are.

I'm confused

What Do the NAEP Tests Really Measure?by David Klein | January 2011

The answer is green, right?

Or is there some aspect of this item I don't understand?

Maybe there's a right triangle hiding in there somewhere. Speaking as a veteran of SAT prep.

can elite students do arithmetic?

Looks like the answer is no. (pdf file)

After a conversation with a "well respected mathematician who was heavily involved with K-12 mathematics education," W. Stephen Wilson re-analyzed the results of the arithmetic test he gave his Calculus III students at Johns Hopkins in 2007. The unnamed mathematician had told Wilson that fewer than 1% of college students would be unable to work a multiplication problem by hand, so Wilson took a look:

He was a little off on his estimate.

In the fall of 2007 I gave a 10 question arithmetic test to my 229 Calculus III (multi-variable calculus) students on the first day of class. Among other things, this means they already had credit for a full year of Calculus. The vast majority of these students were freshmen and ... and the average math SAT score was about 740.

[snip]

Seven of [the problems involving multiplication] were each missed by 8% or more of my students and 69 students, or 30%, missed more than 1 problem.

These are high achieving, highly motivated students (remember the 740 average SAT math score). These are disturbing numbers for them, but I suspect the numbers are much much worse among college freshmen with an average math SAT of 582, and, from Table 145 of Digest of Education Statistics 2009 we see that the average SAT score for the intended college major of engineering is 582 in 2008-2009.

Anyway, there is no real purpose to this paper except as a resource for me. It does suggest, very strongly, to me, that we have lost the pro-arithmetic war. This is a revelation to me and it calls into question what I will do next year with my big service course. I now feel compelled to assume that [my students] are chronically accident prone or they really are arithmetically handicapped. It isn’t clear that there is a difference. The question remains, how can I teach serious college level mathematics to students who are ill-prepared?

For passers-by, here's a quick run-down of Wilson's original observations:

As another experiment, Wilson gave a short test of basic math skills at the start of his Calculus III class in 2007. The results predicted how students later fared on the final exam. Those who could use pencil and paper to do basic multiplication and long division at the beginning of the semester scored better on the final Calc III material. His most startling finding was that 33 out of 236 advanced students didn’t even know how to begin a long division problem.
Back to Basics for the "Division Clueless"
DECEMBER 6, 2010 | BY LISA WATTS

Mooping the lady (& children with ADHD)

Two-year olds can tell the difference between "the lady mooped my brother" and "the lady and my brother mooped!" (pdf file)

I love that.

Meanwhile, people with Parkinson's can have trouble understanding sentences like:

"The king that is pulled by the cook is short." (pdf file)

The words "That is pulled by the cook" are a "center-embedded" relative clause.

I'm intrigued by the Parkinson's research because Parkinson's and ADHD both involve dopamine deficits and problems in "set-shifting"— and impaired set-shifting appears to be the stumbling block for Parkinson's patients reading about the king and the cook. All of a sudden, mid-sentence, they have to shift off their expectation that what they are reading is a standard Subject-Verb-Object affair. That's where they stumble.

Do kids with ADHD also have trouble reading such sentences?

I wonder.

I gave Arthur Whimbey's zoonoses test to my class two weeks ago. Around 40% of my students got the answer wrong, which is what I've seen in my other classes.

Assuming I'm reading (make that skimming) the Parkinson's article right, the answer for ADHD kids having trouble with center-embedded relative clauses would presumably be to give them lots of practice reading sentences with center-embedded relative clauses.

On the other hand, I can also imagine practice with center-embedded relative clauses making it more difficult for kids with ADHD to read any sentence....?

Is there research on this?

Lingua Links: What is a relative clause?

to do

So I was thinking of actually writing a post, or possibly reading a post (I'm behind)...when I decided I would check my course enrollment first, to see whether the two absent students are absent or no longer enrolled. The other students were bugging me about it on Wednesday, so I figured I'd get that taken care of.

But no. Turns out I can't check class enrollment because my user name and password no longer match. I don't know why.

I was semi-taking that news in stride (I say "semi" because last semester's brush with IT took two days to resolve) when I opened up my scanned copy of the sheaf of papers that came with my contract and discovered that - lo! - I have to re-take my college's online Sexual Harassment Training Unit and send a paper copy of the training certificate to Human Resources. Which I can't very well do if I can't log on, now, can I?

Moving right along....I see my college has undergone significant planning for responses to potential health or other emergencies to guarantee continuity of instruction, resulting in adoption of a new 16- or 17-step process for temporarily suspending a scheduled in-class meeting. Well, OK, the instructions don't actually say 16 or 17 steps; the instructions say 2 steps. We have a new 2-step process. But the 2 steps come with a whole lot of sub-steps, bullet points (2 kinds of bullet points: solid and hollow), add-ons, and admonitions, and the time it's going to take me to talk to the IT person, fail to fix my user name and password, talk to the IT person's supervisor plus take the Sexual Harassment Training Unit (at least an hour last year, as I recall), and master the intricacies of canceling class should the need arise is starting to make me feel a tad...pressed.

Back soon!

The achievement gap: how our schools are working hard to make it go away

If you're concerned about achievement gaps of the sort recently reported on by the Times, you could either (re)instate rigorous, structured, direct instruction in line with the latest findings in cognitive science research, teaching each child in his or her Zone of Proximal Development, i.e., at his or her instructional level, with proper scaffolding, and furnishing each classroom with teachers who've mastered both their content areas and these best practices. Or you could:


I. Eliminate the ability of academically advanced students to get ahead in the classroom by:

1. implementing low level, one-size-fits-all instruction (for which there's no better model than Investigations math)

2. eliminating grade acceleration and individualized instruction

3. eliminating gifted programming or making it about time-consuming projects that supplement existing assignments rather about academic challenges that replace these assignments.

II. Reduce the ability of students to get ahead on their own time by:

1. assigning tons of homework of the low-ratio-of-learning-to-effort variety 

2. including massive summer projects and one-size-fits all reading lists.

III. Reduce the ability of grades to reflect achievement differences via"grade compression" and inflexible "rubrics" that:

1. employ subjective grading standards (elevating "creativity" and "engagement" over correct answers, clarity, articulateness, and solid analysis) 

2. take points off for unexplained answers, however correct 

3. give partial credit for "explained" incorrect answers 

4. keep the purely academic demands/expectations of assessments and assignments as low as possible 

4. minimize the opportunity for students to demonstrate work that exceeds those demands/expectations 

5. even if students find a way to demonstrably exceed expectations or go above and beyond academically, don't give them any extra points for it 

6. deploy "wild card" variables that partially randomize who gets what grade (e.g., trick questions; unclear directions; trivial requirements like including today's date on the title page of your report or using the word "I" in your science project abstract; rather than collecting homework, leaving it up to the students to turn it in and giving out zeroes for things not turned in on time) 

7. assign heterogeneous-ability group projects and give everyone in the group the same grade

IV. Reduce the ability of NCLB tests to reflect achievement differences, via:

1. low academic ceilings 

2. partial credit for explained incorrect answers; points off for unexplained correct answers (as above) 

3. wild card variables (as above)

V. Lobby colleges to pay less attention to high-ceiling standardized tests like the SATs and the Achievement Tests, and more attention to grades and "leadership" activities.



But then the next question becomes how to eliminate the growing achievement gap between U.S. students and those from other developed countries.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

sometimes life surprises you

at the Parents Forum

This school board, my school board, has won my respect, my appreciation, and my affection forever.

All five members.

Father of Algebra assignment

From an Algebra 2 class.  Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Would you guess this comes from an IB classroom or a Classical School classroom?
Anything like this in college level math courses?

Help Desk: Forming and joining sentences

I was working with my 10 year old DS on an assignment the other day.  He wrote a sentence with the word "but" separating two independent clauses.   At first, it sounded "okay" (hard to tell sometimes because he's young and his wording is still awkward at times).  Upon further examination, I realized the second part of the statement didn't refer to the first part.  He was mimicking good sentence structure, but wasn't "connecting" the facts correctly.

So I'm wondering: Do any of you know a good curriculum we can use at home that will help him do either (or both) of these things:

1. Build solid sentences:  I would like to teach him how to take a simple sentence ("Jack ran") and "connect" elements to it to make interesting sentences that are logically correct ("Realizing the train was closer than he thought, Jack ran quickly to the end of the tunnel, diving into the bushes and avoiding certain death.").

2. Connect sentences into paragraphs that make sense and flow into the next paragraph

I'm looking for a nice, direct instruction-type approach.

Any ideas?

NYU!

Chris heard this afternoon.

He's in! College of Arts and Science.

Hard to process ----- but he's in & he's going - !

Starting over

Long-time readers & writers here at ktm know that for the past 6 years I've been politically involved in an effort to move my district off the classic high-SES suburban model: Teach, Test, and Hope for the Best Have the Parents Hire Tutors.

It hasn't been easy.

The single best observation anyone ever made about my district came from a woman who has put 4 children through the system: 

We're great because 10 kids do spectacular things by senior year. The other 150 will get by and there are no glaring inadequacies.

Today is a new beginning.

UPDATE 7/19/2013:

OK, it's not a new beginning.

NY Regents Exam: ELA edition

This year, for the first time, high schools students must score at least 65 on the English exam, as well as on four other state tests — math, science, global history and United States history — to earn a diploma.

The three-hour English test includes 25 multiple choice questions; one essay; and two short responses that are each supposed to be a paragraph long. A short response is scored 0 to 2 points. A student who gets 1’s on both responses has a pretty good shot at scoring 65 and passing the exam.

Here, from the state teachers’ scoring guide, is an excerpt from a short response written by an unnamed student. The guide says it deserves a score of 1:

These two Charater have very different mind Sets because they are creative in away that no one would imagen just put clay together and using leaves to create Art.

Theoretically, passing the English Regents would mean that a student could read and write.

Here is the topic sentence of another student’s short response that, according to the state guide, also deserves a 1:

In the poem, the poets use of language was very depth into it.

Despite Focus on Data, Standards for Diploma May Still Lack Rigor By MICHAEL WINERIP Published: February 5, 2012

There is no excuse for this. None.

Now that I'm teaching the most remedial college writing course at my local college, I see how quickly students can pick up grammatically correct and coherent writing, not to mention proper spelling, when you keep them on track and on task. Granted, it's not so easy keeping students on track and on task when you see them just twice a week for just 14 weeks, but NY public schools have these kids 40 weeks a year for 13 years.

A couple of months ago, Ed and I went to the funeral of our neighbor and close friend's father. He was a 6th grade teacher in the 1960s, I think it was, and after his death our friend's husband had discovered a box of short essays his father in law's students had written about their teacher. The children were supposed to write what they thought of his teaching.

Each of the papers was crystal clear, coherent, grammatically correct, and very dear. The children's prose was vivid and alive, and we saw our friend's father in their words. We remembered him.

In 6th grade, in the 1960s 1950s.

college admissions - news from the front

Ed just got back from giving a talk at an elite college here in the East. Astonishingly, at this particular college the faculty does admissions, or at least is actively involved in admissions.

One of the professors told Ed that if you took everything on the applications at face value, half the entering class each year would be from China. The trouble is that with apps from China, no one can tell what's true and what's not.

He didn't know what the ultimate percentage of Chinese admits is.

related: A family member who works at Bryn Mawr tells us that 12% of the student body there is from China.