go to video

Dr. M,

In regard to your request for Dempsey & McLaren to define themselves. For the purposes of this discussion we can do a reasonable job in 6 minutes:

Seattle excluded all evidence provided by the public in making the decision to adopt "Discovering" for HS math on May 6, 2009

This was a virtual replay of May 30, 2007 when directors decided to trust their hired professionals instead of using evidence in adopting Everyday Math.

The six minutes is our response to the SPS board on May 20th to their decision to adopt "Discovering" on May 6th.

Let this play past the 4 second intro. Then move the slider to find us from minute 22:15 to minute 28:30

SPS Board meeting video of May 20, 2009 part I:

http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=4538

Now please define traditionalist.

Thanks,

Dan

Dan Dempsey on the Seattle case

The SPS responded in court that "Discovering" was not an inquiry program but a "Balanced" Program. The Judge noticed that all the texts had "Discovering" in the title and on page four the publisher claimed this was an investigative approach to mathematics. She also noticed that every lesson began with an investigation.

Numbers Wars
by Linda Baker

pop quiz, part 3

from:
A Parent’s Guide to Education Reform (pdf file)
By Dan Lips, Jennifer Marshall, and Lindsey Burke
Heritage Foundation
p. 10

How much do American public schools spend per pupil?
American public schools spent an average of $9,266 per pupil during the 2004–2005 school year.19

How much does the U.S. Spend on K–12 education as a nation?
The United States spent $600 billion on K–12 education in 2006—about 4.5 percent of our gross domestic product.20

How many students are in K–12 public schools?
About 50 million students attend American public schools.21

What is the average public school teacher salary?
In 2004, the average public school teacher’s salary was $44,400.22

Who earns a higher hourly wage—public school teachers or mechanical engineers?
Public school teachers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005. BLS estimates that mechanical engineers earn $31.93 per hour.23

What percentage of public education funding is spent on classroom expenditures?
61 cents out of every dollar currently spent in American public schools is for instruction.24

What is the average class size in American public schools?
There are 16 students for each teacher in the average public school.25

What percentage of all public school staff are non-teaching employees or administrators?
Non-teaching employees and administrators account for 49 percent of all public school staff.26

What percentage of government funding for education comes from the state, federal, and local governments?
46.9 percent of public school revenue comes from state government. 44 percent of funding comes from local government. Only 9.2 percent comes from the federal government.27

What percentage of American 8th graders cannot read?
26 percent of 8th grade students scored “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading exam.28

What is the percentage of American adults who are illiterate?
The U.S. Department of Education’s 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that 14 percent of American adults scored “below basic” in literacy, meaning that they could not perform simple everyday tasks that required reading or writing.29

=================

19 U.S. Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics: 2007, Table 171, at http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_171.asp?referrer=list.
20 Ibid., Table 25, at http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_025.asp?referrer=list.
21 Ibid., Table 33, at http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_033.asp?referrer=list.
22 Ibid., Table 72, at http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_072.asp?referrer=list.
23 Jay P. Greene and Marcus Winters, “How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid?” Manhattan Institute Civic Report No. 50, January 2007, at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_50.htm.
24 Author calculations based on average spending on instruction divided by total current expenditures. U.S. Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics: 2007, Table 172, at http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_172.asp?referrer=list.
25 Ibid., Table 60, at http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_060.asp?referrer=list.
26 Ibid., Table 80 at http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_080.asp?referrer=list.
27 Ibid., Table 162, at http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_162.asp?referrer=list.
28 U.S. Department of Education, Reading Report Card, 2005.
29 U.S. Department of Education, NCES, “2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy,” at http://nces.ed.gov/naal/index.asp.

Multicultural approach to polar coordinates

Real world math at its best.

back to the future

West Ashley High ninth-grader Erika Wesolek works on a grammar lesson Thursday.

A reading program given a trial run last year at West Ashley High School has been so successful that other Charleston County and neighboring Dorchester 2 high schools have taken notice and may begin using it.

In Charleston, the curriculum had been used exclusively with special education students. School Principal Mary Runyon saw those students' reading scores improving and decided to experiment and see whether it also would work for students who didn't have a disability.

The research-based curriculum, Language!, teaches English as if it were a foreign language; it breaks down its rules and explains them to students. The class focuses on the five components of reading -- from identifying sounds in words to developing vocabulary -- and the goal is to give students the foundation they need to become better readers.

[snip]

Dorchester 2 Deputy Superintendent Barbara Stroble took a group of her high school teachers to West Ashley High last week to observe the program and get a better understanding of the way it works. Although Dorchester 2, which includes Summerville area schools, is one of the state's higher-performing districts, nearly 13 percent of its freshmen can't read better than a fourth-grader, according to an analysis requested by The Post and Courier.

[snip]

"It's the old way we used to teach English," Stroble said. "A kid who's having difficulty in reading and he or she doesn't know the rules of the game, they get lost."

Freshman Amber Armstrong is in the West Ashley High program this year. She always thought her reading was fine, but after being in this class, she said she feels more confident because she's learning skills that none of her previous schools taught her.

She used to skip words she didn't know, but now she tries to figure out what they mean. It's easier for her to skim through notes and pick out important points, and vocabulary isn't as much of a challenge, she said. She doesn't use slang and she uses correct verbs when speaking. She said she'd like to take the course again next year.

Giant strides
by Diette Courrege
The Post and Courier
Monday, February 22, 2010

Here in my town, it's common knowledge that the kids are gaining all their knowledge of grammar from foreign language classes.

Not from "ELA."

Australian school answering machine

Making the email circuit ----- no idea whether this is real. As much as I should disapprove of this message, I have to say: it's pretty funny.

I would be the person pressing '5.'

snow day

No math on the picnic table today. But soon.

thinner

Speaking of Randi Weingarten and the Campaign to Combat Childhood Obesity, I weighed myself the other morning and the scale said 125.5. Since September 25, I have lost 11 pounds.

11

That's a lot.

That's more than I've lost on any diet, ever, and I lost it during the fall & winter, which is to say I lost 11 pounds at the same time of year (the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year's-Valentine's Day time of year) when normally I'm regaining the 5 or 6 pounds I managed to lose by dint of determined calorie counting & food logging in the spring and summer.

So, doing my bit for the Campaign, here's my story:

• the diet: plant-based, whole-food, no added fat, sugar, or salt
  
• and: calorie counting via LoseIt (see: "Dose This Pencil Skirt Have an App?")
• not essential but terrifically helpful: Get Running - I have kept up a running program through the depths of winter, thanks entirely to this app along with iAchieve
• still working on incorporating the glycemic index
  
  

The diet is almost bizarrely easy. Most of what people say about it was true for me, e.g.:

• you lose your taste for meat &, to a much lesser degree, fat, over time (but see below)
• minimal hunger
  
• more energy
• so far, going back on the wagon has been as easy as going off the wagon, knock on wood
• sounds dreadful going in but your tastes change
  

I deviated from the true path in two respects: I eased into the diet instead of going cold turkey, and I calorie-counted. Thanks to Magic iTouch, I plan to carry on calorie counting. Fuhrman, Barnard, and Esselstyn all say there's no need to count - or restrict - calories if you're following the diet closely, but given that I'm not following it as closely as I ought, I count calories. Also, I'm guessing that calorie restriction in and of itself is probably going to be as good for me as it is for yeast cells and mice (haven't read that article, fyi).

The hitch: I ended up having problems with the no-added-fat part. First I got cranky, then I started waking up in the middle of the night feeling despairing and grim. So now. . . now, I'm not sure. My plan at the moment is to a) add some walnuts & avocados to my salads and b) cheat more.

We'll see how that goes. Maybe Gerald Reavan is right that what some of us need is a relatively high-fat diet? Dunno.


other:

• apples & soup
• apparently, vegetables actually do consume more calories than they contain
  
• plant foods plants seem to increase metabolism (that may not be the right way to put it: Campbell found that rural Chinese peasants, who are essentially vegetarian, consume more calories than we do but weigh less - see here)
• Campbell also found that animal protein promotes cancer growth (terrific summary)
  

I came across my cholesterol reading from 2006: 190.

Last month I had total cholesterol of 131, LDL (bad cholesterol) 62, HDL (good cholesterol) 60. (I know those figures don't add up.) Triglycerides: 43 (normal is below 150).

So that's it.

For me, adopting a don't-get-diabetes diet means placing a bet -- or, at this point, placing a bet on plant-based/whole foods/no added fat, sugar, or salt and hedging it with plant-based/whole foods/somewhat more fat & somewhat less carb. I don't know and can't guess which expert is right.

But there's no question this works brilliantly for weight loss.


books & blogs

blog: Happy Healthy Long Life

Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman (for diabetes: "beans and greens")
blog: diseaseproof
Emily's Postmodern Transformation

The China Study by Thomas M. Campbell
20-year study of Chinese diet & health – “this project eventually produced more than 8000 statistically significant associations between various dietary factors and disease...”
Introduction (pdf file)

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Caldwell B. Esselsstyn - all plant food all the time, "not one drop of added fat"
Chapter One

The Engine 2 Diet: The Texas Firefighter's 28-Day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Pounds by Rip Esselsstyn (haven't read - Rip Esselstyn is Caldwell Esselstyn's son - 28-day before & after photos!)

Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes by Neal D. Barnard
Neal D. Barnard

The Calorie Restriction Experiment by Jon Gertner New York Times October 7, 2009 - people undereating for two years straight
Calerie study: Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Energy Intake
The "i" Diet by Susan Roberts (haven't read but it sounds great - Roberts is part of the Calerie study)

Just to confuse everyone: Syndrome X: The Silent Killer by Gerald Reaven, Terry Kirsten Strom, and Barry Fox

Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber "All of us have cancer cells in our body. But not all of us will develop cancer."
David Servan-Schreiber

Volumetrics Eating Plan by Barbara Rolls - "Eat big food."
Barbara Rolls

And: Younger Next Year

scared straight
the Ed diet
Barney adopts a healthy new eating style

the decision - full text

The Honorable Julie Spector

IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON IN AND FOR KING COUNTRY

DA-ZANNE PORTER, MARTHA MCLAREN, and CLIFFORD MASS,

Plaintiffs,

v.

SEATTLE SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1, IN KING COUNTRY, STATE OF WASHINGTON, BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF SEATTLE SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1, and MARIA GOODLOE-JOHNSON, Superintendent and Secretary of the Board,

Defendants.


NO. 09-2-21771-8 SEA



FINDINGS OF FACT, CONCLUSIONS OF LAW, AND ORDER


THIS MATTER having come on for hearing, and the Court having considered the pleadings, administrative record, and argument in this matter, the Court hereby enters the following Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Order:


FINDINGS OF FACT

1. On May 6, 2009, in a 4-3 vote, the Seattle School District Board of Directors chose the Discovering Series as the District’s high school basic math materials.

2. In making its decision, the Board considered:

a. A recommendation from the District’s Selection Committee;

b. A January, 2009 report from the Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranking High School math textbooks, listing a series by the Holt Company as number one, and the Discovering Series as number two;

c. A March 11, 2009, report from the Washington State Board of Education finding that the Discovering Series was “mathematically unsound”;

d. An April 8, 2009 School Board Action Report authored by the Superintendent;

e. The May 6, 2009 recommendation of the OSPI recommending only the Holt Series, and not recommending the Discovering Series;

f. WASL scores showing an achievement gap between racial groups;

g. WASL scores from an experiment with a different inquiry-based math text at Cleveland and Garfield High Schools, showing that WASL scores overall declined using the inquiry-based math texts, and dropped significantly for English Language Learners, including a 0% pass rate at one high school;

h. The National Math Achievement Panel (NMAP) Report;

i. Citizen comments and expert reports criticizing the effectiveness of inquiry-based math and the Discovering Series;

j. Parent reports of difficulty teaching their children using the Discovering Series and inquiry-based math;

k. Other evidence in the Administrative Record;

l. One Board member also considered the ability of her own child to learn math using the Discovering Series.


FINDINGS OF FACT, CONCLUSIONS OF LAW, AND ORDER - 2

3. The court finds that the Discovering Series is an inquiry-based math program.

4. The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.

CONCLUSIONS OF LAW

1. The court has jurisdiction under RCW 28A.645.010 to evaluate the Board’s decision for whether it is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law;

2. The Board’s selection of the Discovering Series was arbitrary;

3. The Board’s selection of the Discovering Series was capricious;

4. This court has the authority to remand the Board’s decision for further review;

5. Any Conclusion of Law which is more appropriately characterized as a Finding of Fact is adopted as such, and any Finding of Fact more appropriately characterized as a Conclusion of Law is adopted as such.


ORDER

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED:
The decision of the Board to adopt the Discovering Series is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Dated this 4th day of February, 2010

THE HONORABLE JULIE SPECTOR
KING COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE

full text of ruling (pdf file)
support the cause: donate here

math wars

comment left on Numbers Wars: School Battles Heat Up Again in the Traditional versus Reform-Math Debate in the March issue of Scientific American:

Sad but true. I was at a fast food drive thru when the computers were down. They had to make change the old fashioned way. But the girl could not figure out how much change to give me. She seemed lost as she tried to calculate the difference between what I gave her and what the food cost. She had to call in the manger, who took way to long to compute the change (eventually she found a hand-held calculator).

Apparently even simple arithmetic is no longer well taught, learned and/or retained. Reliance on machines to "teach math" is only good if one has a machine when it is needed. My daughter had these classes where the calculator was required. The problem was that after smacking the keyboard a few times, she could come up with an obviously nonsensical answer. She would just write it down and move on. I asked her one time how she could multiple two numbers that each were less than one and come up with an answer that was greater than ten. The blank stare said it all (fyi - she failed to enter the decimal points correctly).

Want to terrify a teen-ager? Ask them to multiply 12 times 12. Is the answer immediate or not? Forget adding simple fractions. And we expect these kids to learn algebra and higher mathematics?

Are kids today less proficient even in arithmetic than in the past? Surely we can tell if these newer teaching methods are getting better results or not. As for me, I think my daughter did better in arithmetic in elementary school. After middle and high school, she seems to have "lost" the ability to easily do the arithmetic she learned earlier in life. I blame the calculator.

Twenty years of reform math.

That's a long time.

for immediate release

Statement by Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers, In Support of Campaign to Combat Childhood Obesity

I feel much better about childhood obesity now that we've got Randi Weingarten on the case.

I'm sorry.

I had to say it.

rightwingprof: "I Would Like an Answer Now"

Clay Bond posted this to rightwingprof on March 29, 2006. It's a keeper.

'Yes, I posted this some time ago. However, the questions are not rhetorical. I really would like an answer from my colleagues in the primary and secondary school system — particularly those in the education union establishment. And I’d like an answer because I really do want to know why I have to do your job as well as mine.

Thanks ahead of time for your response. Here it is:

I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I’ve had many extremely bright students. Many. Some had the necessary knowledge for the class, and some did not; of those who did not, most worked their butts off and did well. I also don’t want you to think smarts are what I care most about.

My favorite students are the ones who aren’t that bright, but work their tails off to do as well as they can. My least favorite students are the ones who are extremely sharp, but don’t work.

Sometimes, however, there’s too much missing knowledge, so much that the best thing the student can do is drop the class. It breaks my heart when I get a student like this.

I had a student some time back I’ll call Mark. Mark was bright, though his high school had cheated him, and he was lost almost from the first day. He worked hard, and came to my office hours. But … well, there was too much missing, as I discovered early in the semester when he was in my office.

I asked him what he wanted me to clarify, and he said he didn’t understand the 68-95-99 Rule. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “In a normal distribution, 68% of the data fall within one standard deviation in either direction of the mean. So here’s our distribution,” I drew a bell curve on the whiteboard, “And here’s our mean,” I drew a dashed line bisecting the curve. “Our mean is 50, and our standard deviation is 2, so 68% of the data fall between 50-2 and 50+2, 48 and 52.” I drew lines and arrows, and a 68% beneath.

Mark: “I don’t understand. Wouldn’t it be 75?”

Me: “Wouldn’t what be 75?”

Mark: “The mean.”

Me: “Why would it be 75?”

Mark: “That’s what you said in class.”

Ah. He was stuck on the example — and being a firm believer in introducing concepts in contexts familiar to students, I introduce basic descriptive stats in terms of grades, since what else are students more familiar with?

Me: “The mean could be 75, sure. In this particular distribution,” I pointed to the curve on the whiteboard, “the mean is 50.” I then erased the 50. “But let’s say the mean is 75,” and I wrote 75 after the x-bar, “then 68% of the data falls between 75-2 and 75+2, 73 and 77.”

Mark: “How do you know if the mean is 50 or 75?”

One of the difficult parts of teaching is diagnosing the problem. Students have questions, but the problem may actually be more fundamental than what they are asking about, as I was beginning to understand here.

Mark was having two basic problems: He didn’t understand what a mean was, and he was having trouble abstracting the idea out of the example. The former is easy to fix; the latter is not.

Me: “Can I erase this?” I pointed to the whiteboard, and he nodded. I erased the curve, and wrote a series of numbers on the board in a vertical column: 90, 85, 70, 65, and 50. “These are test scores,” I said, “How do you calcualate the mean, or average?”

Mark didn’t volunteer an answer.

Me: “Okay, let’s say the whole class takes an exam, and these are the scores. An average, or mean, tells me how well the class did overall. To calculate the average, I add all the scores, then divide by the number of scores. Here, you do it.” I have him the marker.

Mark added the numbers, then stopped.

Me: “How many scores are there?”

Mark: “Five.”

Me: “Okay, divide the total by five.”

Mark complied.

Me: “What’s the mean?”

Mark: “Seventy-two.” He looked at the numbers for a minute, then smiled. “I get it!” he said.

That’s when I realized what I’d suspected: Mark was a university freshman who had not, until just now, understood the concept of an average. I found that disturbing, but Mark was on a roll.

Mark: “So what’s a median?”

Me: “The middle score.” I pointed to the five numbers. “Half of the scores will fall above the median, and half will fall below the median. What’s the median of these scores?”

Mark: “Seventy.”

Mark was in my office three hours. No wonder he’d been lost. He didn’t understand an average. He didn’t understand sampling or distributions. We didn’t get to the 68-95-99 rule that day, because there was too much he didn’t understand.

I worked with him twice every week, and he got a B in the class. He worked harder than nearly any other student I’ve had. But if he had not come to my office every chance he got, he would never have passed.

Mark had no sense of entitlement. He wanted to understand, and he wanted a good grade, and he worked for both. He was bright. The thing is, I pretty much ran him through a high school math program in the office during the course of the semester.

I’m a teacher, so I can ask the obvious question, and some other teacher can’t come back with any of the usual non-answers.

I did it. Why couldn’t you, when Mark was in high school? It’s not money. I got no extra pay for helping Mark. It’s not time. I spent many hours in the office working with him. It’s not his intelligence or ability to learn. He’s smart, and he learned quickly, once we got started.

So I’ll ask again: Why couldn’t you do your job? It wasn’t my job to teach Mark high school math, but I did. Why did I have to? How did Mark get through all the required high school math courses without understanding what an average is? How did Mark get through all the required math courses without ever having seen y=mx+b? How did Mark get through all the required math courses and not understand that each flip of the coin is independent of all others? Most of all, how did you, his teachers, let such a bright, hard-working, motivated student slip through the cracks?

What’s going on there?

rightwingprof at ktm

here

speaking of rightwingprof

I've just seen this posted on the Clay Bond Memorial Facebook Page:

warning to Clay's Internet friends: Central Pennsylvania Orthodox will probably stay up for awhile because it runs on freeware. Right Wing Nation will vaporize at some point because there is a monthly charge for the blogspace. Cut and scrape things you want to keep, ok?

I'm going to save I Want an Answer now, but there must be a zillion other keepers on his site--does anyone have any ideas?

why can't U teach me to read?

Years ago, I asked a special needs attorney when it would be possible for parents of general education students to sue schools. He wasn't encouraging. (scroll down) In fact, he wasn't even interested.

I had thought such a case finally existed, but now that I've looked at Jennie's links (thank you, Jennie!) I see we're not there yet.

That's fine. I'm patient.





I miss rightwingprof.


Why can't U teach me 2 read?: Three Students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test by Beth Fertig
due process for parents of general education students
diagnosis diagnosed
crack in the wall (educational malpractice)
status quo la-la-la

Laurie Rogers on the Delphi Technique

I remember, back when I started writing ktm-1, somebody mentioning the Delphi technique. At the time, I thought: that's a little far-out.

Now I think: what a helpful explanation!

My own district has been using a variant of the Delphi technique in its Budget Forums, but we seem to be past that now. I'm told that, at the last forum, someone stood up and suggested that employees take a pay cut in order to prevent further tax increases and the room burst into applause.

Laurie Rogers on the decision

I would like to think if we stuck central office administrators in a reform math classroom and forced them to endure the torture they call K-12 math instruction, they would come to see the light, but I fear they would just get out their color-coded sticky notes, their pens and highlighters and happily spend the rest of the day muddling in herds, getting nowhere, certain that their talking, scribbling and checking for group consensus means "real learning" is going on.

Very droll.

I like droll.


Betrayed

Barry on the Seattle decision

Barry clarifies the question of whether the court ordered the Seattle school district to adopt a particular curriculum (which is what I assumed when I read the news):

....the court did not rule on the textbook or curriculum. Rather, it ruled on the school board’s process of decision making—more accurately, the lack thereof. The court ordered the school board to revisit the decision. Judge Julie Spector found that the school board ignored key evidence—like the declaration from the state’s Board of Education that the discovery math series under consideration was “mathematically unsound”, the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction not recommending the curriculum and last but not least, information given to the board by citizens in public testimony.

The decision is an important one because it highlights what parents have known for a long time: School boards generally do what they want to do, evidence be damned. Discovery-type math programs are adopted despite parent protests, despite evidence of experts and—-judging by the case in Seattle—-despite findings from the State Board of Education and the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Skydiving without Parachutes

Ed says he heard on NPR of a successful court case in which a parent successfully sued a district for failing to teach her child to read -- apparently someone has written a book about the story.

Has anyone heard anything about this?

Singapore Math at Hackley

here

One question: I don't remember a lot of focus on manipulatives in Singapore Math -- ?

How do Singapore schools handle struggling students?

Hackley School

momof4 on college planning

momof4 says...

I have always felt that the preparation for high school is too little and too late, both in terms of academics and of advance planning. Especially in a system where APs have prerequisites, kids and parents need to know that so they can plan coursework accordingly.

All of the schools my kids attended waited until 8th grade - usually spring -to address the HS plan. Parents need to know the critical nature of the usual sixth grade test, which determines who gets on the top math path, which will also determine eligibility for AP Physics BC (calculus is a co-requisite). There is just far too much mush and wasted time; kids without aware parents who are able to supplement are hosed before they hit 7th grade.

BTW, I've found it fairly common for a shared MS-HS campus, so taking some classes at the HS may be possible. Also community colleges, universitites etc - whatever is available.