Don't Get That College Degree

Here’s an alarming article by Jack Hough from the New York Post that states:

“The four-year college degree has come to cost too much and prove too little. It's now a bad deal for the average student, family, employer, professor and taxpayer.”

It tracks two 18 year olds who both save the same amount of money (about $16,000) for college. One gets accepted to a college, the other does not. Both spend their lives making average incomes for their respective conditions; one with, and one without a college degree. Both set aside the same % amount of their respective salaries for their entire working lives. The grad uses the set aside for 12 years to pay off the loans and then starts saving at the same rate as the non-grad (who has been saving already for 16 years). The high school grad has all the saved up college money and a 16 year head start on investing a lesser amount of money each year.

At age 65, one person has accumulated savings of $1.4 million, the other just $400 thousand. Read the article to find out who the millionaire is.

Lest you think it’s just about money, read on…

“It's crass, you might think, to reduce education to a financial decision. An educated citizenry is healthier, more tolerant, more politically engaged and more fulfilled than an ignorant one. But I refer above to degrees, not education. The two are not the same, even if policymakers talk as though they are.”

Employers want a degree because it indicates to them that applicants have learned the “foundations of human knowledge” but here is a sampling of what passes for courses that fulfill core degree requirements at major universities.

“History of Comic Book Art (Indiana University), History and Philosophy of Dress (Texas Tech University) and Campus Culture and Drinking (Duke University)”

Couple meaningless core courses with grade inflation and you’ve got degrees that don’t mean anything. Employers are being suckered. Hyperinflation of tuitions in an age where knowledge is incredibly accessible for free, means students are being suckered. And last but not least, colleges spend huge amounts of time now doing remediation so parents too are being suckered for the 13 years preceding college.

The article proposes a fascinating concept, the ‘knowledge transcript’ to replace degrees. It’s sort of a tree diagram that describes all of the branches of knowledge components that a student has mastered as certified by standardized tests. It doesn't say a thing about how you got the knowledge, only that you've got it. Such a system would crush the elite college's ability to deliver crap at hyper-inflated rates.

I’d like to see knowledge transcripts in K-12 too. Maybe this is too much transparency to hope for but wow, does it make sense!

NCTE presents: Phonics Phacts

As risk-takers and decision-makers themselves, students make many choices about their own learning, within parameters established by the teacher.

Some Key Principles of a Whole Language Perspective on Learning and Teaching, courtesy of the NCTE

The writer is talking about elementary school children 'making a choice' about what materials will help them learn to read, write, do arithmetic, and learn science and history.

That's a risk, alright.


"Phonics Phacts"

under the banyan tree

from Paul:

Years ago, when I was an engineering manager, I had this Indian guy working for me. He was a graduate of IIT, India's equivalent to MIT or maybe Stanford. To qualify for IIT you have to be in the top 1-2% of applicants. He was incredibly smart and unlike a lot of young engineers he was also able to think out of the box. He could push the enevelope. Where his peers were better at just executing somebody elses plan, he could come up with the vision.

One day I asked him about his schooling. He said that except for IIT his entire education took place under a tree in the center of his village with a village elder/teacher/wiseman type of guy. I'm just guessing here because at the time I never thought to ask, but my bet is that this guy didn't go to a fancy ed school. We're not talking marble halls, olympic pools, or multimedia classrooms. There were no bulletin boards, reflections, projects, or discoveries. There was no group work, spiral curriculum, or state standards either. Just a smart man, a willing student, and the transfer of knowledge, probably not unlike what took place for the 10,000 years before we started education research.

Makes me go hmmmmmmmm?

I've been wondering for a while now whether you reach a tipping point: is there a point at which you're spending so much money on a school that quality declines?

I don't know the answer but the question relates to Gawande's article on The Cost Conundrum in medicine.

iatrogenic LD

Vicky S asks:

What percentage of identified learning disabilities do you suppose is inadvertantly caused by our schools, their teaching methods, and curricula?

I've been trying to suss this out for a while now. This week I found an estimate of the percent of reading problems that could be prevented:

We estimate that the number of children who are typically identified as poor readers and served through either special education or compensatory education programs (as well as children with significant reading difficulties who are not formally identified and served) could be reduced by up to 70 percent through early identification and prevention programs.

Chapter 12: Rethinking Learning Disabilities (pdf file)
Reid Lyon, Jack M. Fletcher, Sally E. Shaywitz, Bennett A. Shaywitz, Joseph K. Torgesen, Frank B. Wood, Ann Schulte, and Richard Olson
Rethinking Special Education for a New Century

I have the impression that most kids identified as having learning disabilities are struggling readers but if palisadesk or Liz Ditz are around they can let us know whether that's correct.

advertisements for myself

from a longtime member of ktm, whose high school is as good as its ranking in U.S. News:

X. and I just returned from our local Barnes and Noble. Under a sign labeled "Required School Reading" were several copies of Animals in Translation. Other books on the table included For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Great Gatsby, Blink, Night, The Cannery, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, Romeo and Juliet (and lots more). We decided it was quite an honor to have one's book included with such famous titles.

I am thrilled!

Obi-Wan on what means 'teaching'

Personally, I find the whole thing deeply insulting.

For all the thousands of years of human existence, teaching has meant one thing, and one thing alone. 

For a few years, a bunch of hippies told us that "teaching" meant the exact opposite of that, and that we couldn't do that thing that used to be called teaching. We went through the motions of their BS while they were looking, and taught our kids the right way when they weren't.

Now, they've rediscovered teaching, think they need a new term for it, and my district thinks I need to attend a week's worth of in-services to know how to do it.

I've got two words for the whole educational theory crowd, and they ain't gonna like the first one.

Obi-Wan is a math teacher, by the by.

next time, try Core Knowledge

When it opened its doors in 2006, Philadelphia's School of the Future (SOF) was touted as a high school that would revolutionize education: It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement. But three years, three superintendents, four principals, and countless problems later, experts at a May 28 panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) agreed: The Microsoft-inspired project has been a failure so far.

wow

First Michael Jackson, now this. What a week. Who could have seen this coming?

"Microsoft chose to ... assign a team of educators and technologists to work in concert with the school system and the surrounding community to create a sustainable learning environment," said Mary Cullinane, Microsoft's lead on the project and one of the school's initial architects, in 2006.

By creating a general-enrollment school that was paid for, staffed, and operated by the public school system, project organizers aimed to create a model that could be replicated easily in other districts. (See "‘School of the Future' opens doors.")

The components of the school also were considered to be progressive. From alternative school hours to laptops for every student, from a customizable school portal to campus-wide wireless access, and from a panel to design 21st-century curriculum to a new teacher hiring model, the SOF was thought to be a sure winner.

"We naively thought, I guess, that by providing a beautiful building and great resources, these things would automatically yield change. They didn't," said Jan Biros, associate vice president for instructional technology support and campus outreach at Drexel University and a former member of the SOF Curriculum Planning Committee.

That's the difference between me and Bill Gates.

When I have a naive idea, the city of Philadelphia doesn't give me $63 million dollars to inflict it on other people's children.

Microsoft's expertise was based on what the company calls the 6 "I"s: introspection, investigation, inclusion, innovation, implementation, and--again--introspection. It was up to the Curriculum Planning Committee to design the underlying principles and goals for the school, based on this framework. 



However, these principles too often seemed unclear. 



You think?

Although the technology itself was not supposed to trump basic classroom practices, Microsoft and the school's planners had decided not to allow the use of textbooks or printed materials; instead, all resources were located online through a portal designed by Microsoft. 



Yet educators frequently encountered problems accessing the internet, because the school's wireless connection often would not work. 


"This vital part of the school's technology was never stable and robust enough to make it dependable," said Biros. "There was no safety net, and it seemed like a great leap of faith--faith that these teachers, amidst so many new circumstances, would be able to develop curriculum almost on the fly and store and distribute it electronically." 



Books are good.

Another problem was that the students--most of whom came from poorer families and neighborhoods--could not use or maintain their laptops properly. Students were either afraid to take their laptops home for fear of theft, or they didn't know how to access all the programs on the machines.

Again.

Books are good.

On another front, although Microsoft eventually sent someone to the SOF during its second year to try and foster community relationships, no one realized that school-community partnerships take time, perhaps even years, to mature--leading to uninvested partnerships with no long-term sustainability. 



I say forget the school-community partnerships and have the kids read some books. Also, math is good. You could teach kids math using a math book.

At one point during the discussion, an audience member asked: "All of your resources are online, and educators have to access [them] through this portal. However, your educators don't know how to work the technology. So, exactly what did the teachers teach in class? What were the students learning?" 



"Well, honestly, I'm not exactly sure," replied Biros. 



That's not an answer.

According to Biros, the creation of assessments was problematic. 



"We all agreed that students should be evaluated qualitatively, without customary grades and standardized tests, but we did not consider how colleges would use these assessments to determine students' acceptance into their programs," she explained.

They do what they do.

"It's been three years, only three years," said Hess. "I can't say it's a failure, and I can't say it's a success. Give it another three years, and then we'll be able to say for certain."

School of the Future: Lessons in Failure
by Meris Stansbury
eSchool News

'Cause what is 3 years in the life of a high school student?


But we don't feel like a failure...
Microsoft Lesson Plans

a definition of explicit instruction

Explicit instruction is instruction that does not leave anything to chance, and it does not make assumptions about skills and knowledge that children will acquire “on their own.”

For example, explicit instruction requires teachers to directly make connections between the letters in print and the sounds in words, and it requires that these relationships be taught in a comprehensive fashion. It also requires that the meanings of words be directly taught and be explicitly practiced so that they are accessible when children are reading text. Finally, it requires not only direct practice to build fluency, but also careful, sequential instruction and practice in the use of comprehension strategies to help construct meaning.

Using Common Science and Common Sense to Teach All Children to Read by Holly B. Lane, Ph.D. University of Florida hlane@ufl.edu (pdf file of ppt presentation)

Michael Jackson does long division without a calculator

via Frederick Public Ed

interviewing Mary Hake in 3 hours

Yes, I know, this is ludicrously short notice, but I'm interviewing Mary Hake at 9:30 East Coast time - so if you have questions, let me know.

Here are some Comments at Homeschool Reviews (haven't read yet).

Also, if you have questions about portfolios & Writing Workshop / Reading Workshop, I'll ask those, too. I talked to her a bit about Writing Workshop & she may not have much experience with it - but I'm sure she'll have a lot to say about incremental teaching, aka skills taught in isolation.

Year-End Parent Survey Questions

Here are two of the survey questions I had to answer:

1. My child's school encourages me to be involved with my child's learning.

2. I have the information and knowledge to support my child's learning.

Strongly Agree
Agree
Neutral
Disagree
Strongly Disagree
N/A

At least they had a box at the end to include comments. I suggested that they ask parents about tutoring. Then I asked them how parents can support learning if everything goes into a portfolio and never comes home.

Not As Good As You Think

Catherine often writes that "it's worse than you think."

The Pacific Research Institute has a similar idea in their heads.
They have released a new movie, "Not As Good As You Think, the Myth of the Middle Class School"

From their website:

Not as Good as You Think: The Myth of the Middle Class School is a documentary that shatters the myth that “good” schools located in “nice” neighborhoods are shielded from the education crisis that pervades schools in poor, urban areas. Using available data on school performance and interviews with parents, students, principals, and school reformers, Not as Good as You Think confirms every parent’s silent fear: that their financial sacrifice and investment in an expensive home in a “good” school district is not yielding the achievement results needed to get their kids in good colleges and good jobs.

Based on the groundbreaking book Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice released by the Pacific Research Institute in 2007, the film features Lance Izumi, one of the nation’s foremost education scholars and reformers. Not as Good as You Think takes audiences on a tour of America’s best neighborhoods—from the posh areas of Orange County, California, to the hotbed of innovation, Silicon Valley, to the lush green hills of Tennessee—to reveal that schools in America’s middle class and affluent neighborhoods are not adequately preparing kids for higher education, or even operating under widespread corruption. The documentary also explores freedom and choice in public schools by venturing to Sweden, a socially progressive country that has successfully established school choice for all children, no matter the family’s income.

This is a different film than The Cartel, which Catherine posted about here.

You can buy the DVD for $19.95 from the above website.

Maybe we should all try to help set up a screening of the two films? A double feature? I'll bring the junior mints.

A model school's selling points: everything but the math

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

A year of activities: Spelling Bee | Talent Shoe | Musical | Science Fair | Fall Festival | 100 Days | Opera Company | Reading Buddies | Spring Concert | Valentine's Dance

So goes the text along the margin of the glossy school newsletter that came home yesterday on the last day of school--along with color photographs of smiling students and staff, and articles about the school and the community.

You'd never know that one of the school's activities was the Continental Math League club, run by yours truly and another parent volunteer, and attended 1 1/2 hours a week from October to March by 20 eager 2nd and 3rd graders.

Especially since, despite the principal's earlier assurances, the information sheet about next year's Continental Math League club (and ways to practice for it over the summer) somehow didn't accompany the above newsletter into students' backpacks.

Concerned that this might happen, I had sent said principal an email reminder the day before the last day. Then, when I bumped into her on the morning of the last day, I'd asked her about the email.

"I deleted it," she said, a big grin on her face.

I guess she's happy it's summer vacation.

-----

For those who are interested in ways to polish up their math skills for Continental Math League, or for any other reason, here's what I spent several hours compiling for students at our school. Perhaps other schools and other principals will find this more worthwhile than ours did:

MATHPRACTICELINKS

Middle Class Entitlement

Children can't survive in our modern world without shoes. It would be a catastrophe to be in a child growing up in the 21st century without shoes. These children would be deeply impoverished, backward, and their futures would be horribly limited.

That's why the government makes and distributes childrens' shoes, because how else would children all be able to have shoes?

What? You suggest that companies should make and --gasp-- SELL shoes? How could you? You must be against the children having shoes to wear! And WHO would supply children shoes if the govt stopped doing so? Which people? How many shoes stores? How would the shoes stores be capitalized? How many brands would there be? What materials would they use? What pricing arrangements would be in place? WHO WOULD REGULATE THE SHOES TO MAKE SURE THEY MET OUR STANDARDS? How would those stores be sure to meet our requirements on sizing and stitching and hiring of shoemakers! How would poor children ever get a pair of shoes?! Suppose a poor person didn't have the money to buy a pair!

I'm paraphrasing and borrowing from Murray Rothbard in For a New Liberty. He isn't speaking of public education per se at this point, but just what happens when someone tries to suggest that the government should get out of a certain services and let the private sector handle them. These questions are absurd about shoes. We KNOW that we have more shoes now, at lower prices, than ever before, and that WalMart, Costco, and Target alone mean that even the poor can afford to buy comfortable stylish shoes for their children.

But what if we applied this to education?

Children need an education! They can't survive without it, and how else would all kids get an education?
What??? You suggest companies could SELL education? Private schools? Private tutors? Who? Which people? How many schools? How would they capitalize them? But but but...what standards would they have? How would we be sure they were teaching what the govt says should be taught? Who would regulate them? How could a poor person ever get an education then! You want to deny the poor an education!

Public schools were created in an era of industrial growth and immigration when a) states wanted to inculcate certain values into all of their populace, including the immigrants' children; b) parents by themselves, particularly poor parents, were viewed as not valuing education on their own enough to educate their children out of poverty; and c) there was an interest in stopping or discouraging the use of child labor (thereby remove competition from the workforce for adults); and d) there was no other entity (but the Catholic Church) massive enough to be able to create a system to educate as widely and deeply as was desired.

The public schools of the current middle class have nothing whatsoever to do with that model. We don't need them to inculcate values--or the values being inculcated don't match up anyway. We absolutely, positively, value education without question. We have moved as a culture to a place where child labor is practically unthinkable. And there are dozens? hundreds? thousands? of entrepreneurial and technical resources now in the private sector that could educate children, even on a massive scale.

Why then do we need public schools at all?

We don't. They are middle class entitlements. The middle class doesn't want to pay for schools, and doesn't feel it should have to. Yet, of course, some of them ARE paying for them, to the tune of 20k plus per student in Irvington and St. Paul, MN, but exactly who bears that burden is probably disproportionately those without school aged children. For others, it's simply the daycare issue--they want taxpayer funded daycare, and schools provide that. How else would they manage? How else could we all conceive of functioning!

The existence of the govt schools at such a low cost drives out the private money. It drives out low cost private schools, and in the end only leaves the boutique ones standing. The same as govt shoes drive out any competition, and leave only the Fendis of the world to purchase. If we had no govt schools, the private sectors--the Green Dots, the Kumons, etc. would still exist, and would expand. The religious schools would exist, and be affordable, too.

But but but! The poor! Who would educate the poor! We need vouchers, see!

No, the private sector could educate the poor; the Church did it in the past; other orgs could do it now. WalMart has done more for the poor getting good shoes than welfare vouchers ever did. If WalMart taught math and reading in DC, do you think poor kids would learn better than they do now? Even so, vouchers for the POOR are a vastly different claim than vouchers for EVERYONE. There is no place else except medicare healthcare, another entitlement for the middle class) where everyone gets covered.

The main argument of school vouchers boils down to this: the government is bad at making shoes that I want! They have the wrong style and they fit badly. They are ugly to boot. I want better choices in shoes!

I know! let's have them still make shoes and give them away, and then also have vouchers so I can buy real private market shoes that aren't ugly and aren't terrible but make the taxpayers pay for them, because they are SOOO expensive, I don't want to do it on my own!

I'm not suggesting we can actually abolish govt schools. And I'm willing to give DC vouchers just because they've got nothing else, even though I see general vouchers as a middle class entitlement that needs to die. But recognizing that the reasons public education was needed in the past have little to do with our current culture can help us to see the real problems we create for ourselves when we come up with convoluted solutions that leave the govt in charge of schools, and keep them in charge of the funding.

Charter schools are a different issue. Charter schools are more like Medicare. More on that later.

21st century skills

Flypaper has decided to try videos ---

Speaking of...school turnarounds from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.

I'm sold!

I've gotten to know Debbie Stier a little bit, and this is what she does at HarperStudio. She sits her authors down on the couch, takes out her Flip camera, interviews them, et voila.

Enjoy the Good Things in Your Life: A Conversation with An Oncology Nurse

Random House Sales Rep, Ann Kingman, Talk about Blogging, VEA, and her Favorite New Book

Debbie sent me off the the board meeting the other night with 4 Flips & a tripod so I could tape the proceedings in a form all of us could actually use,^* but I chickened out.

^* long story

Customer Review

Just left this review of Work Hard. Be Nice. on Amazon:

By the end of Work Hard. Be Nice., I found myself weeping in every chapter. I think this book may become a classic.

I hope teachers will include Work Hard. Be Nice. on summer reading lists for upper middle school and high school students. Boys especially may cherish this book given how feminized our public schools have become.

Mike Feinberg and David Levin are teachers, yes, but they are fighters, too. They broke rules and they crossed lines. In this era of character education and "collaborative learning environments," the story of two young men who refused to collaborate with a failed system is strong medicine.

I need to get my Amazon review of Dan Willingham's book written, too. (Preview: 5 stars)

a beautiful book

Work Hard. Be Nice.

It's incredible. By the end I found myself weeping in every chapter.

This book may become a classic.

palisadesk on private schools for the poor

Any idea what the % of students in poor and developing countries go to private v. public schools?

In some "poor and developing" countries" it is 100%, for the simple reason that public schools are a) not available at all, or b) not available in that region, or c) not affordable.

In those cases, however, families often have to select only one child to educate, and that child may have to leave school if the family needs his (it's usually a he) wages or cannot afford the fees.

Many families in my school population have immigrated from countries where public education is not available, period. If available, it is in the cities and not in rural or mountain villages.

An uplifting read on one American's campaign to change this situation is Greg Mortensen's Three Cups of Tea.

private schools for the poor

Allison on trusting schools and doctors

I would say we've reached a point in society that parents should not be willing to simply trust the teacher or school as they would have a generation or more ago.

Fundamentally, there are too many people in the system claiming to be experts who aren't; too many people claiming their credentials give them knowledge they don't have; too many people in the system working at cross purposes with parents; all told, the authorized people can't be assumed to know more about your child's needs than you do.

This is my experience. I would add, too, that while there are some very good public schools (Karen H's high school, for instance) even there I would 'trust but verify' for my own children. I say that because even very good public schools are set up to teach and succeed with cohorts of children, not each individual child across the board. The measurement of success is the group mean.

I believe that "professional learning community" schools -- real ones -- have rejected this model, and I'm planning to get some posts written about "PLCs" soon.


doctors & patients

This isn't just a phenomenon related to schooling. We've reached the same point in medicine--we no longer trust doctors as we once did, or that they are our advocates. We have to be our own advocates. Our model has really shifted--we're expected to partner with our doctors in our healthcare outcomes; we're expected to "partner" with our kids educational outcomes. We've reached it in most of parenting too--we're expected to be far more responsible for our childrens' outcomes than any prior generation of parents; we're supposed to be deeply engaged in their molding (regardless of how possible that is), and we're supposed to be highly active in all levels of their universe. We're not really supposed to leave this stuff up to others anymore.

Now this is interesting because I am old enough to have lived through this history, and I often use the shift in the doctor/patient relationship as a model for what I'd like to see happen between teachers and parents (or administrators and parents).

When I was a child, the relationship between doctors and patients was fantastically hierarchical, and doctors were arrogant - or were certainly seen as arrogant by the grownups around me. "Doctors think they're God," people said. Or: "Doctors aren't God." And: "Doctors shouldn't play God. They're not God."

In short: they do what they do. (I have the sense nurses might still say this, but that's an impression so correct me if I'm off base.)

The most egregious case was that of the terminal cancer patient. Doctors would make the diagnosis, would know that the patient was dying, and would elect not to tell the patient because, in the judgment of the physician, he or she couldn't handle it. As I recall, family members weren't necessarily told, either.

I have no idea how often this kind of thing actually happened, but it was talked about constantly, and it was seen as the ur-case of doctors thinking they were God. Doctor Gods were in the movies, too. I remember a couple of years ago, flipping through channels, coming across an old war movie, maybe from the 1940s. The scene was a military hospital. The doctor comes into the ward, takes a quick look at a soldier's leg, and orders it removed. The soldier screams and begs. "No! No! Don't take my leg! Pleeeease!" Tough luck. Doctor's orders. The leg comes off.

Watching that scene, I marveled. How long has it been since anyone has heard the expression, "Doctor's orders?"

Doctors don't give orders any more. Doctors make diagnoses and prescribe treatment. Patients make the decision whether to comply.

I wish I understood the history of how this changed. I had always assumed that some kind of 'patients' rights' movement came into being and succeeded in changing the relationship between doctors and their patients. However, I'm pretty sure that's wrong; it seems more likely that, as I once read, there was a war between doctors and lawyers and the lawyers won. Which isn't what I would have wished; in a conflict between doctors and lawyers, I'm on the doctors' side. (I don't say that to attack lawyers! Or to imply that malpractice should not exist. It should. I think.)

In any event, the upshot is the partnership Allison describes. Having raised two children with autism, Ed and I have been deeply involved with doctors for many years now; we've been on the cutting edge of psychiatry and, at times, neurology.

Our doctors invariably, with perhaps one exception in lo these many years, treat us as partners in our children's treatment. Moreover, our respective roles are flexible. Any number of times I've come to one of our doctors with studies that have just been published or informal opinions from researchers and our doctor has immediately agreed to a medication trial. Other times, I've raised the possibility of trying a treatment based on something I've read, and our doctor has explained why it doesn't make sense.^* And there have been perhaps two occasions on which Ed and I have decided not to give our kids a test our physician recommended. The tests would have been expensive, difficult to administer, and would not have made any difference to the treatment plan so we decided against. That was not a problem for the physician. In one case, we didn't pursue an experimental med that cost thousands, wasn't covered by insurance, and I think had to be specially ordered from Europe (?) Something like that. That was also not a problem because the relationship is a partnership: our physicians make the recommendations and we decide whether to follow their recommendations -- which we almost invariably do, or we would not be working with that particular physician.

This relationship works. The doctor is the professional; we are the clients and the ultimate deciders. It would be unthinkable for a doctor treating our kids -- or any kids -- to give 'orders.' The doctor's authority is based in his or her knowledge and expertise, not in power to force compliance.

For years, now, I've longed to have the same relationship with my kids' schools that I do with my kids' doctors -- and in fact, in special education, I do have that relationship here in Irvington. My kids' teachers see us as experts on our particular kids; we see them as experts in teaching autistic kids. And, because teaching autistic children, like treating autistic children medically, is not remotely a science, our kids' teachers here have always been interested in what we're doing at home that works. (ha!)

My take on Allison's observation is that she's right: the model has changed. We're supposed to partner with the professionals and experts in our children's lives.

The problem in the education realm is that parents aren't partners. We are subordinates who are expected to work up the chain of command.

That doesn't work.


^* I'm sure patients bringing in stuff they found on the internet is a problem for plenty of doctors. And, of course, from the patient's perspective arrogance hasn't disappeared, either. Recently a young physician contemptuously dismissed my mother when she tried to tell him that whopping big doses of Acai juice had dramatically reduced her blood pressure and thus her need to take blood pressure medicine, a statement easy to confirm with a quick check of her medical history or a phone call to her internist. Or a phone call to her children, for that matter. Hearing her story, her new cardiologist rolled his eyes, turned on his heel, and walked out of the examining room. He didn't come back.

She changed doctors and wrote to Medicare about another problem that occurred on her visit to his office. I got a kick out of that. My mother has diabetes and heart failure; she's come back from the brink of death at least 3 times now. And on her good days she's watchdogging the medical profession. I applaud that.

private schools for the poor

Schools for the poor are the obsession of James Tooley's book, "The Beautiful Tree." An education specialist with a severe case of wanderlust, Tooley had always believed that in developing nations, the upper classes attend private schools while the poor rely on public ones. But during a drive through the slums of Hyderabad, India, in 2000, he came across an unexpected phenomenon: an unending line of small, no-frills private schools catering to poor kids.

Tooley began seeking out and finding private schools for the poor across the developing world, interviewing students, principals, parents and officials in China, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Somaliland and beyond. Parents everywhere cited similar reasons for paying the small fees for private schools rather than sending their kids to state schools. For some, especially in rural areas, the public schools were too far from their homes. To others, teachers and administrators in private schools seemed more attuned to their concerns. And despite the foreign aid and state spending on public school facilities, many parents simply felt that their children learned more in private schools. "What's the point of having such nice buildings," asked a mother in a fishing village in Ghana, "if learning doesn't go on?"

The officials Tooley encountered in his travels often denied the existence (much less the superiority) of private schools for low-income children. "There are no private schools for the poor," a bureaucrat in China's Gansu province told Tooley, "because the People's Republic has provided all the poor with public schools. So what you propose to research does not only not exist, it is also a logical impossibility."

Undeterred, Tooley spent years surveying private schools across the developing world. He found that, on average, they had smaller class sizes, higher test scores and more motivated teachers, all while spending less than public schools. With the zeal of a convert, Tooley invokes the market's "invisible hand" to explain why private schools perform better: When parents pay the fees that keep a school afloat, he reasons, the school becomes more accountable to them. Tooley blasts development experts for recognizing the problems with public education and still insisting that more investment in public schools is the way to go. "Why wasn't anyone else thinking that private schools might be part of a quicker, easier, more effective solution?" he asks.

Schools, Weddings and Funerals on $2 a Day
By Carlos Lozada
Friday, June 19, 2009 8:27 PM

via Cato

The Arlington Algebra Project & e-math instruction

These look like terrific resources:

The Arlington Algebra Project

eMath Instruction


Thanks to Kate!

Fear of Knowledge

Of the three constructivist theses before us, the most influential is the thesis of fact-constructivism—which is somewhat surprising given that it is also the most radical and the most counterintuitive. Indeed, properly understood, fact-constructivism is such a bizarre view that is it hard to believe that anyone actually endorses it. And yet, it seems that many do.

According to fact-constructivism, it is a necessary truth about any fact that it obtains only because we humans have constructed it in a way that reflects our contingent needs and interests. This view stands opposed to fact-objectivism, according to which many facts about the world obtain entirely independently of human beings.

[snip]

Fact-constructivism would seem to run into an obvious problem. The world did not begin with us humans; many facts about it obtained before we did. How then could we have constructed them? For example, according to our best theory of the world, there were mountains on earth well before there were humans. How, then, could we be said to have constructed the fact that there are mountains on earth.

One famous constructivist, the French sociologist Bruno Latour, seems to have decided to just bite the bullet on this point. When French scientists working on the mummy of Ramses II (who died c. 1213 BC) concluded that Ramses probably died of tuberculosis, Latour denied that this was possible. “How could he pass away due to a bacillus discovered by Robert Koch in 1882?” Latour asked. Latour noted that just as it would be an anachronism to say that Ramses died from machine-gun fire so it would be an anachronism to say that he died of tuberculosis. As he boldly put it: “Before Koch, the bacillus had no real existence.”

Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
by Paul Boghossian

Barry on retrofitting a bad curriculum

However, the question still remains: if you've got a 'lemon,' in the form of an ineffective school or curriculum, then what?

Well, what did you do? You taught your son at home. That's reteaching but can also be called tutoring. I did the same with my daughter. Was it effective? I think so, but I resented having to do it. I got spoiled when my daughter had good teachers in 7th and 8th grades in math. I felt guilty not going through the work with her until I realized that "normal" mean the child understands it by going to school and learning it.

When things are abnormal, after a while it gets to be too much. If there's a good private school around and the parents can afford it, that's the option some seek (as you did).

In terms of other students I tutor, as Anne Dwyer said, if you can identify weak areas that are holding up learning, yes it's effective. In terms of retrofitting a bad curriculum, it's just about impossible as an independent tutor. The parents would have to be willing to have their child take an alternative course. In essence, that's what parents are doing when they send their children to Kumon or Sylvan, etc. Those are schools. So the child is put in the position of going to school twice, and the parents penalized by having their taxes go to waste, and having to shell out more money for the learning centers.

retrofitting a bad curriculum: that is a fantastically useful phrase.

That's a basic public school concept: we'll spend millions on this lousy math curriculum the parents can't stand and we'll "supplement."

Win - win!


Welcome to Grand Canyon

how many tutors in Palo Alto?

Anonymous posts a link:

Almost 60 percent of Palo Alto parents supplement their children's math education through private tutors, extra workbooks and other means, mostly because they feel Palo Alto classes aren't challenging enough, according to results of a district survey released this week.

The district conducted an online survey of about 1,200 elementary school parents, and will compare its results with another survey taken next spring, after students have spent a year learning the district's new Everyday Mathematics curriculum.

During the debates over the controversial Everyday Math program, adopted as the district's new curriculum in April, many parents said Everyday Math is confusing and doesn't teach basic math skills. Parents frequently said they would have to supplement their children's math education.

Under the current curriculum, 62.8 percent of parents said their children don't need extra help in math, the survey says. But 57.2 percent said they provide supplemental math work anyway, mostly in the form of extra practice materials like workbooks or software, or regular math tutoring by a sibling or parent.

About 6.5 percent of parents said they hired a private math tutor, and 21.6 percent said their children attend a private math program like Kumon or Score.

A majority of parents who supplement their children's math education — 51 percent — said a "main reason" they do so is because their child needs to be more challenged in math, and 42.9 percent said a main reason was because their child enjoys math.

Former school board member Mandy Lowell, who has been critical of the district's adoption of Everyday Math, said boredom with math has been a "perennial problem" here. Palo Alto students are the sons and daughters of engineers and scientists who enjoy math, and have passed their love for the subject on to their children, she said, but the program focuses more on "supermarket math."

Most Palo Alto parents supplement kid's math, saying subject is too easy

They do what they do.

Anne Dwyer on what tutoring can achieve (& who needs tutoring & why)

Ok, here's what I see from the trenches.

First, I think I see the big picture because I:
have a special ed student in pre algebra
have a daughter in regular 6th grade math
teach remedial math in college
tutor bright but struggling high school boys in math
have just finished 8 credits of graduate mathematics

I could write a whole long post, but I'd get bored in the middle and delete it. So here goes with the conclusion:

1. Certain school districts (mine) believe in good curricula and qualified teachers. (see the exception below) This combination makes all the difference in the world. The highly qualified teachers know what the students need to learn in math, and will find a way to do the direct instruction. (The exception in my district is, of course, elementary school.)

2. I have tutoring students in other districts who use good curricula but have poorly qualified teachers and students in districts with highly qualified teachers and poor curricula. The boys I am tutoring had a very solid foundation in basic math and are still struggling. The good news is a good tutor can fill in the holes quite easily.
very small.

3. All of my professors at the university that I attend use the direct instruction method. They go over every proof in the book in detail (even though the proof is in the book) and they give solutions to every problem they assign.

Former Public School Teacher

Non-renewed, forced out.

This means that you are made to feel so uncomfortable in your position that you look for another job and you are unable to even get an interview at another school in one of the 15 largest districts in the country. So you move to another district, lose the "tenure" and then are non-renewed due to budget cuts and mostly disagreement with teaching fuzzy math.

I taught at one of the states way down there on the list of funding. I think it's 49 or 50. I was doing fine until I had a daughter. Then I started looking at every kid like she was my own. I'm not proud of that fact, but at least I finally saw the light. That's when things started going wrong. It also coincided with Everyday Mathematics being adopted by the district. I saw gifted kids in the 6th grade who couldn't multiply and divide. Kids who should have been able to move up to algebra in the 7th grade. I had work to do. I had to re-teach them everything from 4th and 5th grade and do 6th and pre-algebra so they could be where they should be.

When I was anonymous at school I wasn't bothered, but I got so excited by the changes that I started talking about it. The beginning of the end was the first week of October 2006.

I wish that I had quit first instead of them "quitting" me. I am starting to realize that I don't want to work in the system anymore. My daughter does Kumon, because I want other teachers for her besides me. Her Kumon teacher is from India. We will begin ALOHA abacus training, another teacher from India, next month. I hope to begin teaching abacus in the near future.

I know that the emotion and frustration you are reading here are not very productive, but I have been dying inside for a long time.

Signed
Former Public School Teacher

This is an atrocity.

chemprof on what tutoring can achieve

I'll semi-agree with Kate. A few years ago, we implemented tutoring by the course TAs for students who were really struggling, usually because of inadequate preparation or miserable math skills. We found we had to put in a "miss two sessions and you lose your slot" policy, as struggling students also often blew off the tutoring session, partly I suspect because it was free.

Tutoring can work really well for a student who needs to see the material again, and who comes to the session having looked over her notes and with questions. There, I've seen 30-60 minutes with the tutor each week changing a low C into a mid-range B (or even in one extreme case, a student who had failed twice ending up with an A!) It can be nearly useless for a student who comes with nothing, hasn't looked at anything, and isn't even sure where to start. Of course, I'm also talking about college students, where "taking responsibility for your own learning" is actually appropriate!

I'm very interested in this question - thanks so much for taking the time to comment.

Based entirely in personal experience, I've come to the conclusion that tutoring is 'bad' -- i.e. it's a bad model for learning (& teaching). It's like buying a lemon and then taking it to the shop a whole lot.

However, the question still remains: if you've got a 'lemon,' in the form of an ineffective school or curriculum, then what?

How well can tutoring work when there's no other option?

Kate on teaching & tutors in an affluent district

I teach in a district with many wealthy families.

Some of the teachers at my school drive very nice cars. They are all married to someone who makes alot more than we do.

Some parents would hire a tutor whether their child needs it or not. They feel like if they don't, they're not doing everything they can. 

I don't think tutors are particularly helpful, for several reasons.

In my experience the main benefit of a tutor is that it compels students who tend to blow off/copy assignments to sit and focus on math for at least an hour a week.

I prefer my students not get tutored because they sometimes cop an attitude in class like they don't have to pay attention, because the tutor will teach it to them later. (This is not very many students...just an obnoxious, overprivileged few.) Overall it sends a message that parents don't trust teachers to get the job done.

All that being said, most of my students don't have tutors. They participate in learning activities and complete the work I ask them to, and we get good results.

Thanks, Kate!

(Back in a bit - I promised myself I would do "first things first" this morning. Sure, I've already broken that promise, but that's why God invented the mid-course correction.)

Scarsdale runs amok

A Scarsdale Education for the Future (pdf file)

It's getting to be time to tell my Holland story.

are parents rational?

Steve H. needs to hie himself over to Dan Willingham's blog right this minute and share his wit and wisdom re: parents and their ability to think as clearly as a person who has obtained a professional administrative services credential.  

Wolfram Alpha

The long-running debate over whether students should be allowed to wield calculators during mathematics examinations may soon seem quaint.

The latest dilemma facing professors is whether to let students turn to a Web site called WolframAlpha, which not only solves complex math problems, but also can spell out the steps leading to those solutions. In other words, it can instantly do most of the homework and test questions found in many calculus textbooks.

The new tool will be a bane to teaching, some professors say—but others see a blessing.

WolframAlpha was created by Stephen Wolfram, an entrepreneur who invented Mathematica, one of the first computer math engines. His new site debuted last month to much media fanfare and, like Google, provides answers to questions typed into a simple search box. It is free and already boasts millions of searches.

A Calculating Web Site Could Ignite a New Campus 'Math War'
by Jeffrey R. Young

I need WolframAlpha for proofs.

A New Online Computation Engine Shakes Up Math

United States for World Class Math

Just in: a website for people like us who want a seat at the table when it comes to national math standards:

United States Coalition for World Class Math

Check out their Design Principles for K-12 Mathematics Standards:

1. All students should be expected to master foundational concepts and skills – especially in arithmetic – that are prerequisite to an authentic Algebra I course in a logical progression from grade to grade in the elementary and middle school years. The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP) should be the guiding document describing appropriate mathematical content.

2. The K-7 standards should be designed to prepare as many students as possible for an authentic Algebra I course in Grade 8. K-7 standards should be based on the "Critical Foundations of Algebra" described on pages 17-19 of the NMAP’s Final Report. Standards for authentic Algebra I and Algebra II courses should be based on "The Major Topics of School Algebra" described on pages 15-16 of the NMAP’s Final Report.

3. Standards-based alternatives could be written for less prepared students and alternate paths after algebra and geometry for high school students, depending on student achievement, interests, and career goals. For example:

a. The standards document could outline the possibility of a two-year course spanning Grade 7 and Grade 8 based on Grade 7 standards for students who, at the end of Grade 6, are judged to need more time to master foundational concepts and skills for Algebra I.

b. The standards document could outline a two-year course spanning Grade 8 and Grade 9 based on authentic Algebra I standards for students completing Grade 7 who are judged to need two full years to master Algebra I standards.

4. As emphasized by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, "a focused, coherent progression of mathematics learning, with an emphasis on proficiency with key topics, should become the norm in elementary and middle school mathematics curricula. Any approach that continually revisits topics year after year without closure is to be avoided." Placement of the standards should reflect the grade level at which mastery is expected, and standards should not be repeated from year to year.

a. The sequence of the standards should be logical and hierarchical, following the structure of mathematics itself and should be modeled after the strong standards in California, Indiana, and Massachusetts.

b. "Benchmarks for the Critical Foundations" (pages 19-20 in the National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s Final Report) and recommendations from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ Curriculum Focal Points should be used for grade level placement.

c. Concepts and skills, once mastered, should be used in subsequent years with a minimum of review.

5. In order to focus on building solid foundations for the more advanced mathematics – including algebra – that occurs in Grades 8-12, extraneous topics including aspects of geometry such as tessellations, nets, statistical approaches to geometric properties, much of data analysis, probability and statistics, and non-algebraic concepts such as pattern recognition should not be present in the K-7 standards.

6. In Grades K-7, the distribution of content by strand should be stated explicitly as percentages at each grade level and should change as students move up through the grades.

a. Early grades should concentrate on the arithmetic of whole numbers and measurement, with a limited amount of geometry and graphing. Certain aspects of algebra, as well as preparation for algebra, should be present from the earliest grades, as is the case with the California and Massachusetts standards.

b. Students should be expected to acquire automatic recall of basic number facts at least to 10 x 10 and 10 + 10.

c. Students should be expected to understand and use the standard algorithms of whole-number arithmetic in the early elementary grades (i.e., addition, subtraction, multiplication, and long division).

d. Students should be expected to understand and use the standard definitions for operations with fractions in conjunction with the standard algorithms of whole number arithmetic to compute sums, differences, products and quotients of fractions, including fractions expressed as decimals and percents.

e. The algebra strand gains emphasis in the middle grades, focusing on the content specified by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.

7. The organization of the standards should change at Grade 8.

a. In grades K-7, standards should include multiple strands of mathematics, with their relative weight appropriately adjusted through the grades.

b. For algebra and beyond, standards should be given for a single-subject course sequence (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-calculus, etc.) and their components re-ordered for alternative integrated mathematics courses. The standards for the Geometry course should require students to do proofs and to understand postulates, theorems and corollaries.

8. Mathematical problems should have mathematical answers.

a. In general, students should learn techniques for problem solving that can be applied to many contexts. Problems should be contextualized in the "real world" only when the context is sensible and relevant and contributes to an understanding of the mathematics in the problem.

b. Standards documents should include example problems. The level of difficulty of these problems should reflect mathematical complexity rather than non-mathematical issues.

9. K-12 math standards should meet the criteria specified by the American Federation of Teachers. They should be:

a. Clear and specific enough to provide the basis for a common core curriculum.
b. Rooted in the content of mathematics.
c. Clear and explicit about the content and the complexity students are to learn.
d. Measurable and objective.
e. Comparable in rigor to the standards of A+ countries, with grade-level specificity.

10. Standards documents should appropriately emphasize the attainment of procedural fluency. Students must be competent in performing all K-7 tasks without using a calculator.

11. Standards documents should only address mathematical content; language pertaining to pedagogy should be excluded.

12. As emphasized by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, mathematicians should be included in greater numbers, along with mathematics educators, mathematics education researchers, curriculum specialists, classroom teachers, and the general public, in the standard-setting process and in the review and design of mathematical test items for state, NAEP, and commercial tests.


CO Coalition for World Class Math
CT Coalition for World Class Math
NJ Coalition for World Class Math
PA coalition for World Class Math
United States Coalition for World Class Math
Parents' Group Wants to Shape Math Standards
Common Core Standards: Who Made the List?

Portfolios and Finals

I need to know if this is common for middle school. Work gets done, stays in portfolios at school and then comes home at the end of the year. It's too late to learn from the material or to question the result. One of those portfolios came home with my son today. It was for a thematic project that covered many subjects and was completed months ago. He had to give himself a rubric grade,so he gave himself a 4 out of 5. I'm sure his friends gave themselves a 5.

However, our school uses a nonlinear rubric grading system where a 5 is something like an A+, or more, if you ask some teachers. He brought home a final test today where he got 128 out of 130 questions correct. He got a 4. The teacher told them that only those (one student) who got a perfect score received a 5. On top of that, they are not allowed to bring home the test, just the first page of the answer sheet showing the grade. Parents have to sign this page and send it back. In math, the teacher wasn't going to tell them their grades on the final. They had to ask. And forget about seeing the test or bringing it home. Apparently, they reuse tests. I find that astounding.

I told the principal earlier in the year, in a firm but nice way, that I want all homework and tests graded in a timely fashion and sent home. Apparently, that can't or won't happen. I also asked her about some related impossible 5 issues and grades and she said that it really doesn't matter. The high school won't know about the grades. Ha, ha, ha.

Then there are issues with teachers using grades as weapons against kids. They tell the class who got what grade. This isn't across the board, just selective. The school makes a big deal about their bullying policy, but they should add a section on bullying by teachers. My son didn't want to bring in a note for PE class due to a sore ankle because the gym teacher would call him a baby. He's seen it happen to other kids. That reminds me. That low/high ropes session he went to a while back wasn't about teambuilding. It was about boot camp work versus punishment. It was at a National Guard facility. All of the kids were given stupid names by the drill sergeants and had to do push-ups if they did something wrong. They had to do things in teams just like how new recruits have to do things in teams.

the unwritten rule

from Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, and Robert Eaker:

Education has developed its own ... tradition of unwritten rules or norms that impact the day-to-day workings of schools across the United States. Like baseball, these norms are not only unwritten, they are largely unexamined. They simply represent "the way we do things here." Someone entering the profession as a new teacher in a traditional school will soon discover the unwritten rules, the way things are to be done. If those rules or norms were written, here is what they might say:

[snip]

Our job is to teach, and the students' job is to learn. [italics mine]

Hence: tutors.


lgm on upstate NY
it's good to be rich
all things PLC

upstate New York

from lgm:

Here (upstate), the norm is that homework or classwork is checked by the teacher, but if it shows lack of concept/mastery understanding, there is no reteach unless student qualifies for specialist help. If the parent doesn't and the child is unclassified, the child will be dropped in to a lower section at the end of the unit (gr. 4-5) or the year (K-3). When he falls behind far enough he'll qualify for specialist help via RtI. The in-the-know parents just hire the tutor or do it themselves rather than let the student fall that far behind.

Also, is Scarsdale teaching for excellence or 'for the pass'? I notice here that the info needed in math to perform at the '4' level on the grade level state exams is not taught in class. One has to afterschool with a quality curriculum.

Here, 3rd graders do write a 'research paper' in class. The topic is 3rd grade friendly and most can do it. It reminds me more of a five paragraph essay than a paper.

I would like schools to teach kids how to write book reports.

Then I'd like schools to assign book reports.

Thank you very much.

if you're raising a shy and/or sensitive boy

two words: guitar lessons

Indexed (see: back cover)

Optimism

From a post entitled: Teachers can save the economy:

Barry G on learning physics in high school

We had a bit of physics in 8th and 9th grades. My first real course was as a senior in high school. The teacher was very good and I was totally amazed by the subject. Although it was not calculus-based, it did use trig which we were studying at the time, and math and science merged very nicely. I still remember the lecture on the derivation of the formula for distance of a uniformly accelerating body, relating it to the "area under the curve" which in this case was a straight line, and thus was the area of a triangle. I wondered why he called a straight line a "curve", and the next year in freshman calculus, it again all made sense, when we learned integration.

I can't wait to learn calculus.

Or physics.

Speaking of subjects I intend to learn, The Teaching Company has high school courses. I ordered the chemistry course. ^* I'm thinking of asking C. to work through as much of it as he can next summer, before he takes chemistry at Hogwarts. (He's taking AP biology next year, when he'll be a sophomore.)

I have Nature of the Earth, too, and Building Great Sentences, which is fantastic. Building Great Sentences is so fantastic that the other night, when Ed and an attorney friend were discussing the critical importance of writing short sentences, I rolled my eyes.

"You don't try to write short sentences?" Ed asked.

"No," I said curtly, leaving the men to wonder why.

While it is true that I personally have not read Strunk & White, I have listened to two lectures from Building Great Sentences, and thus feel confirmed in my view that short sentences are neither here nor there.


^*"This course was an absolute joy."

Scarsdale tutors

I was just talking to a guy who is related to a Scarsdale grade school teacher.

Scarsdale teachers start tutoring Scarsdale students for pay as early as second grade.


Scarsdale tutors, part 1

Richard on Physics First

I have a quote on my teaching room along the lines of .......

"There are three physics courses taught at most universities: physics with calculus, physics without calculus and physics without physics."

It sounds like Physics First could be a prerequisite for "physics without physics."

Speaking of physics without calculus, is this calculus without calculus?

I've been cruising this course for a long time....

Damar the starling bird

Cognition and Language Lab via Grrlscientist

I think I've mentioned a couple of times that I came out of Animals in Translation thinking if there is one critter as smart as people or smarter, it's birds. There might be others, of course. There might be lots of others. But birds were the ones that were hard to ignore.

Funny thing: The Birds was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid.

Physics First?

"To teach her students about velocity, teacher Ethel Locke set them loose in the halls of Woonsocket High School with marble launchers.
Through trial and error, the students discovered that their marbles achieved the longest arcs if they were launched at an angle halfway between the floor and the ceiling. If they set the launchers at higher or lower angles, gravity pulled the marbles to the floor at shorter distances."

Physics no longer a junior member

"Pausing from the task at hand, Devon confided that he liked physics better than he thought he would. Ordinarily, he said, it 'is not a class you would like.' "

That's because it isn't physics.

How about deriving the equations you need from g=32.174 ft/sec^2 and analytically calculating that angle.?

Does anyone have any experience with Physics First? The story claims that this order has "nearly doubled" the demand for AP science courses in physics, biology, and chemistry. They must have another senior-level AP physics course. This means that kids would take two physics courses in high school?