‘Discovery Math’ is Weird but a Good Idea Nonetheless

This was brought to my attention by Jerry Becker

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From thestar.com, Saturday, September 3, 2016. SEE

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/09/03/no-teaching-math-the-old-fashioned-way-wont-work-wells.html

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No, teaching math the “old-fashioned way” won’t work: Paul Wells

In response to the latest EQAO report, many parents insist that “discovery math” is the cause of low test scores in Ontario.

By Paul Wells  (National Affairs)

According to the latest EQAO report, half of Ontario Grade 6 students don’t meet the curriculum standard in math. That’s a problem. But it’s not the only one.

What worries me is that only 13 per cent of students who didn’t meet the provincial standard when they were in Grade 3 manage to catch up so they meet the standard for Grade 6. That’s the lowest number on that indicator in five years.

If you fall behind in math you stay behind. That’s why it’s important to get it right, not just at some vague moment in the future, but for kids who are in Ontario schools right now.

Fortunately, every parent in Ontario is sure they know how to teach math. Many parents want to get rid of “discovery math,” broadly defined as “doing it weird.” If only that loopy Liberal government would teach math the way we learned it when we were kids, the theory goes, there’d be no problem.

Sure, great, except for one thing. Very few parents I’ve met can perform more than the most rudimentary arithmetic for themselves. If you all learned math so well, why do you inch toward Junior’s algebra homework with a cross and a bulb of garlic?

Discovery math, to the extent it means anything, is an attempt to apply in a formal setting the insights about numbers that good mathematicians use routinely. People who are comfortable with numbers use all sorts of strategies to work with them. Confidently, through a kind of learned intuition.

So subtracting 272 from 836 is an altogether different proposition from subtracting 998 from

1,002. In the first case, you’re likelier to write it all out, solve the ones column first, carry 100 to the 10s column so you’re subtracting seven from 13, and so on. In the second case, I’d count up four from the lower number to the higher. It’s a really big drag on a kid to make her do the second problems the same way as the first. And parents who read “add to subtract” on a homework sheet, chuckle and roll their eyes, are committing malpractice.

This summer I made my stepson spend some time on Khan Academy, an educational website, to brush up his math before he enters Grade 8. He was briefly baffled by questions that asked, say,

6 1/4 – 3 3/4. One way to do it is to convert both sides to improper fractions. But it’s easier if you simply recognize that 6 1/4 is the same as 5 5/4. You can do the differences in your head in about two seconds.

The question is, how do you produce the kind of students who will make that insightful leap? All I know for sure is that you don’t do it by teaching a bunch of rules students will learn by rote – the beloved “old-fashioned way.” That may work for basic math facts. I did make our son practice his basic addition, subtraction and times tables one summer until he knew them from memory. I wish schools would take more time to nail those basic facts down. Since our school wouldn’t take the time, I did.

But very quickly, math becomes so complex you can’t have a rule for everything. Khan Academy teaches and tests 111 different skills at the fifth-grade level alone. You’d go crazy learning a rule for each skill. You must be able to intuit a useful method for each situation.

Modern curricula recognize, and try to teach, that flexibility. I refuse to say that’s a mistake. There is even empirical evidence it’s not. A March report from PISA, the international testing organization, found that in countries where students say they rely heavily on memorization, they scored starkly lower on complex advanced math questions than students who memorize less. “To perform at the very top,” the report concludes, students must learn to do math “in a more reflective, ambitious and creative way.”

What’s to be done about those declining EQAO scores? First, Ontario should support teachers by sharing best teaching practices more widely. In some countries, like Japan, teachers spend far more time mentoring younger newcomers to the profession, and sharing techniques among colleagues. Ontario schools should follow suit.

Second, support students by giving them more practice time. The only way to learn how numbers work together is by tackling incrementally more difficult questions, lots of them, over time. Kids need to practice insight just as their parents practiced times tables. If they do, they may just grow up knowing how to do math, not just how to complain about math teachers.

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Paul Wells is a national affairs writer. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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ALSO THIS RESPONSE TO THE EARLIER POSTING, FROM Michael Paul Goldenberg:

It never appears to occur to either journalists or educational conservatives (or political ones) or to those deeply invested in undermining public education in the interest of turning it into a for-profit investment that curricula come and go due to fluctuations in standardized test scores, but the one sacred cow that is NEVER seriously interrogated is the testing process or its concomitant methods. Give me control of the tests and how they are scored and I ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEE that I can make results fluctuate to suit any political agenda and outcomes one might wish to see.

Mathematics itself has changed almost not at all when it comes to the content of K-12 curricula in most countries (and certainly in the US and Canada). Blaming decreasing test scores entirely on a teaching approach to math that is politically unpopular misses almost entirely that if assessments are skewed away from the kinds of thinking that teachers are trying to help students develop, it’s a slam dunk that scores wlll go down. And when assessments are developed to reflect more conceptual understanding (and scores go up), the conservatives and nay-sayers scream that the tests are “fuzzy.”

Once this sort of politicization of education is allowed to dominate the conversation, as it clearly is doing in this article and in many of the accompanying comments, there’s no chance for thoughtfu educators to pursue anything but lock-step, computation-dominated “math” teaching. Only that’s not math, and my Smart Phone does all of that vastly quicker, more accurately and more easily than nearly every human who has ever lived or ever will. If you want

 kids to be adept at replicating donkey arithmetic, so be it, but no one I teach will be encouraged to limit herself in that way.

Math and Sex

You may not think that math and sex don’t mix, but I show here that they really do:

https://guysmathastro.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/sex-and-math-the-zero-to-two-percent-of-our-actual-lives-that-rules-our-lives/

What if we gave all American kids the type of education that was given to the Clinton, Obama and Trump children?

This is an excellent question, one that begs being asked every time I pass by places like Sidwell Friends, The Bullis School, or Saint Albans School in and around DC, and mentally compare those wonderful facilities with the DC public schools that I and my children attended, and in which I taught and continue to volunteer.

Bottom line: tuition and fees at those tony private schools is about three or four times what we as citizens spend on kids attending DC public or charter schools. For example, the middle school nearest my house (Brookland MS) has no playground…

I took this article from Education Week. It’s behind a paywall.

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What if America Spent Per Student What Clinton, Trump Paid for Private Schools?

By Andrew Ujifusa on July 27, 2016 7:22 AM

Philadelphia

In his speech last week at the Republican National Convention, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. noted that he and his siblings were fortunate to have options for their schooling: “We want all Americans to have those same opportunities.”

Fair enough. But Donald Trump Jr., along with his siblings and Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea, went to private schools that weren’t cheap. And so have several other presidential hopefuls’ children, for that matter.

So we thought about the educational opportunity in monetary terms: How much would it cost to spend the same amount per public school student what it costs to send children to the same private schools attended by the offspring of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton? And what if we tried to match the basic outlines of their children’s private school experience when it comes to teachers?

Fortunately, Michael Griffith, an independent school finance consultant, did his own analysis to try to answer those questions.

Outliers Out of Reach

First, Griffith compared the candidates’ private school tuition costs for the schools from which their children graduated to average per-student expenditures in public schools in the children’s home state: New York in three of the four Trump children’s case; California, in Tiffany Trump’s case; and the District of Columbia, in Chelsea Clinton’s case.

Average per-student spending at those schools attended by the five presidential candidates’ kids is $38,464. Nationwide, public school funding is $12,251 per student.

For the purposes of Griffith’s calculations, he used tuition costs at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., for Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.; Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn. for Ivanka Trump; Viewpoint School for Tiffany Trump; and the Sidwell Friends School in the District of Columbia for Chelsea Clinton. (More on that somewhat tricky issue below.) Correction: We originally misidentified where Choate Rosemary Hall is located, although the error didn’t impact our description of Griffith’s analysis.

But let’s think long term about how that plays out over a child’s time at the elementary and secondary levels. The costs below would cover students’ entire educational careers at their respective schools.

The figures above are based on current annual costs, and not what Clinton and Trump actually paid themselves in tuition costs. And Griffith’s work requires some extrapolation: The private schools’ grade spans don’t necessarily match up with those in public schools. The Hill School, for example, where Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. went, enrolls grades 9-12. But Sidwell Friends enrolls pre-K-12.

We should also point out that Chelsea Clinton attended public school in Arkansas before Bill Clinton was elected president and she moved to Washington, where she enrolled in the Sidwell Friends private school. Given security and logistical concerns, it might make sense for a president to send his or her school-age child to private school. President Barack Obama’s daughters also enrolled in Sidwell Friends.

Even when it comes to tony private schools, the ones attended by Clinton and Trump’s children are up in the financial stratosphere. As of 2011, less than a fifth of all U.S. private schools charged more than $15,000 annually per student in tuition, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Here’s some more context for that $38,464 figure: In 2014, the U.S. Census reported, the median income of a family with two or more school-age children (like Trump’s family) was $53,989. That’s the same as $54,970 in inflation-adjusted 2016 dollars. So the average private school tuition for the five children of the candidates would eat up 70 percent of such a median family’s budget.

Here are a couple of other statistics to consider:

• Combined costs at the private schools attended by all four Trump children and Chelsea Clinton for some or all of their lives, in Griffith’s analysis, clocks in at $2.5 million over the course of their educational careers.
• Combined costs for three New York state public school children (to match their Empire State counterparts Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka Trump), a California public school student (to match Tiffany Trump), and a District of Columbia public school student (to match Chelsea Clinton) clocks in at $1 million over their educational careers.

You can call that a gulf instead of a gap if you want.

Bring On the Teachers?

OK, but let’s think really big. What if we spent $38,464 on each public school student in the nation? What would be the total annual cost, and how much of a change would it be from current per-student spending levels?

Griffith has answers for that, too.

He has America spending $595 billion on K-12 from federal, state, and local sources. How much more would it be if we spent $38,464 on each student, instead of $12,251?

e of $1.2 trillion. Does that dollar amount sound familiar? It might. That’s because in 2014, the entire student-loan debt of 40 million Americans was also estimated at $1.2 trillion. We’re not talking a few lint-covered quarters here.

Finally, Griffith looked at the average student-to-teacher ratio in the four private schools attended by Clinton and Trump’s children. It came out to about 7.4 students per teacher on average.

By contrast, the national ratio of students to teachers is about 16:1—there are 48.5 million public school students, and 3.1 million public school teachers. The sources for these figures are given below.

However, those ratios are not the same thing as average class size.

So how many more teachers would the nation have to hire to achieve that 7.4 students-per-teacher ratio like the one the Trump siblings and Chelsea Clinton enjoyed?

The nation would have to increase its teacher workforce by 120 percent, or add nearly 3.8 million new teachers, to match what the Trump children and Chelsea Clinton experienced, on average, in their schools. (Each figure in the graphic above represents about 48,420 teachers.)

Money and Opportunity

Griffith’s analysis is quantitative and not ultimately qualitative. And as you might expect, Griffith doesn’t say how that additional $1.2 trillion would be redirected to schools and added to their budgets. It’s pure theory.

For fiscal 2016, the Department of Defense’s budget is $573 billion. A President Clinton or Trump could zero out the Pentagon’s budget, redirect that entire pot of money to schools, and it would stillcover slightly less than half of the total new money needed to match the average per-student spending figure in the private schools we’ve discussed. That’s assuming, of course, that state and locals don’t pitch in at all.

There are a lot of other questions.

• Many might want parents to have direct control over that new flood of money through vouchers or education savings accounts. How would redirecting some or all of those dollars straight to parents shake up the educational landscape?

Voucher programs and ESAs mostly, if not universally, aren’t large enough to cover tuition at the Hill School or Sidwell Friends—if many parents could use the $38,000 for a local and (likely) much cheaper private school, what could and would they do with the leftover cash?

School choice is certainly an issue Donald Trump has emphasized, on the few occasions when he’s spoken about education:

• Where would the money go? Would much or most of it go towards hiring new teachers and drive down those student-to-teacher ratios we’ve discussed? Or there’s educational
  technology—would millions of students suddenly get handed a laptop, smartphone, tablet, and (what the heck) Google Glasses courtesy of his or her public school?
• And as one would expect, the facilities at those private schools attended by the Clinton and Trump children are different than what studentsexperience in Detroit public schools. Per-student spending figures often don’t include school construction costs, but what if some districts wanted to create leafy, spacious campuses with swimming pools and amphitheaters?

Look at the campus map of the Hill School to the right. There’s a building for squash courts, an arts and crafts center, and a music house. The campus covers 200 acres.

• Here’s a related issue: the enrollment size of the private schools in question. Sidwell Friends, for example, enrolls 1,149 students in pre-K-12. You can easily find public high schools alone where the enrollment matches or exceeds that figure. In 2010-11, the average enrollment of an American high school was 847 students, NCES reported, but California’s average high school enrollment was 1,463 students.
• And some of the most straightforward yet crucial questions we can ask about this issue are: Would spending over $38,000 per student in public schools create a lot of progress, some, or not at all? And would that be an efficient use of taxpayer dollars?

That kind of per-student spending amount would truly test the arguments about whether inadequate school funding is what’s preventing better experiences and outcomes for students.

Of course, many in the K-12 field argue that creating strong educational opportunities for children is not solely, or even largely, about the financial resources provided to those children from their parents or government. But others say, particularly after the Great Recession, many districts and states don’t provide what their schools need, particularly for schools with large shares of students of color and those from relatively poor households. How would this kind of influx of money impact debates about socioeconomic and racial integration in schools?

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, Clinton’s pick for vice president, addressed school integration in his own experience during a speech last Saturday:

Additional Facts and Figures

A few more notes about Griffith’s data:

• The private schools’ cost information comes from their websites. Per-student spending figures on public schools come from the National Education Association’s cost rankings and estimates for2015 and 2016.
• He didn’t include private school tuition information for Barron Trump, Donald Trump’s youngest child—Griffith said this is because Barron is a minor.
• Griffith used tuition information from the schools which the Clinton and Trump children graduated from, but as we noted above regarding Chelsea Clinton, the candidates’ children did not necessarily attend those schools all through their elementary and secondary careers. For example, Griffith used costs for Choate Rosemary Hall for Ivanka Trump, but noted that she switched to Choate from the Chapin School when she was 15. And Eric Trump also attended the Trinity School in New York City.
• The tuition amounts in Griffith’s calculations are based on the cost for day students, not boarders.
• Tuition for Viewpoint Schools, which Tiffany Trump attended, varies from student to student. Griffith calculated an average of the various tuition costs, assuming a student attended from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Assistant Editor Sarah D. Sparks contributed to this post.

 

Bob Schaeffer’s Weekly Roundup of News on Testing Mania

This is entirely from Bob Schaeffer:

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With public schools closing for the summer, many states are reviewing their 2015-2016 testing experience (once again, not a pretty picture) and planning to implement assessment reforms in coming years.  You can help stop the U.S. Department of Education from promoting testing misuse and overuse by weighing in on proposed Every Student Succeeds Act regulations.

National  Act Now to Stop Federal Regulations That Reimpose Failed No Child Left Behind Test-and-Punish Policies

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-department-must-drop-proposed-accountability-regulations

Alaska State Preps for Implementing New Federal Education Law
http://skagwaynews.com/school-preps-for-phasing-out-no-child-left-behind-policies/

Delaware Teacher Evaluations Could Be Less Focused on Test scores
http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/education/2016/06/20/test-scores-evaluations/86134396/

Florida Legal Fight Looms Over Third Grade Retention Based on Test Participation
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/palm-beach/fl-opt-out-retention-20160619-story.html
Florida Parents Pressure School Board on Test-Use Policies
http://www.bradenton.com/news/local/education/article84734742.html

Georgia School Chief Addresses Testing Meltdown
http://getschooled.blog.myajc.com/2016/06/17/state-school-chief-on-milestones-meltdown-were-fixing-it/

Indiana Panel Unclear on Vision for New Assessments
http://indianapublicmedia.org/stateimpact/2016/06/14/istep-panel-unclear-vision-assessment/

Kansas State Testing Time Will Be Reduced
http://www.kake.com/story/32231184/state-test-time-to-be-reduced

Kentucky Feds Respond to State’s Accountability Plan Concerns
http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/education/2016/06/16/us-ed-dept-responds-accountability-concerns/86010782/

Maryland State Commission Passes Buck to Reduce Testing to Schools
http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/testing-commission-wraps-asking-local-school-systems-finish-work/2016/06/15
Maryland Students Say Too Much Testing
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/readersrespond/bs-ed-testing-letter-20160617-story.html

Massachusetts Schools to Help Map Assessments of the Future
http://www.capenews.net/bourne/news/bourne-to-help-map-future-of-school-assessments/article_4048811d-eddc-5195-ad20-eec61eb86a60.html

Missouri Schools Are More Than Test Scores
http://ccheadliner.com/opinion/local-viewpoint-jtsd-is-more-than-its-test-scores/article_0c9d7b60-3305-11e6-a685-cf3e9a4ffb56.html

New York Test Flexibility for Students with Learning Disabilities is Step in Right Direction
http://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/editorials/2016/06/15/regents-disabilities-graduation-rule-change-editorial/85885818/
New York Families Fight Back Against Opt-Out Punishments
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/06/16/how-some-students-who-refused-to-take-high-stakes-standardized-tests-are-being-punished/

Ohio State Eases Some Test Score Cut Offs
http://www.mydaytondailynews.com/news/news/state-eases-some-test-score-levels/nrgQZ/

Oklahoma Legislature Ends Exit Exam Graduation Requirement
http://www.tulsaworld.com/homepagelatest/what-last-minute-change-in-student-testing-law-means-for/article_f69102e3-97c2-52bc-b616-4fcab147a186.html

Tennessee State Comptroller Finds Computer Testing Problems Widespread
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2016/06/20/tennessee-comptroller-lists-online-test-issues-every-state/86137098/
Tennessee Testing Is “In a Transition Phase”
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2016/06/14/theme-of-junes-testing-task-force-meeting-were-in-a-transition-phase/

Texas Scrapped STAAR Scores Add to Standardized Testing Frustration
http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/06/15/scrapped-staar-scores-add-frustration-standardized-testing-texas/
Texas Legislator Says State Should Not Pay for Flawed Tests
http://amarillo.com/news/local-news/2016-06-13
Texas Study Panel Not Yet Ready to Ditch State Standardized Exams
http://keranews.org/post/study-panel-not-ready-ditch-staar

Utah State Residents Give Failing Grade to Common Core Standardized Testing
http://www.sltrib.com/news/4001870-155/tribune-poll-utahns-give-failing-grades

Wisconsin Test Changes Render Year-to-Year Comparisons Useless
http://www.wiscnews.com/baraboonewsrepublic/opinion/editorial/article_8b7bf9a8-5825-5791-a621-d02ed86c3b63.html

International Nine Out of Ten British Teachers Say Test Prep Focus Hurts Students’ Mental Health
https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/nine-10-teachers-believe-sats-preparation-harms-childrens-mental

University Admission If High School GPA Is Best Predictor of College Outcomes, Why Do Schools Cling to ACT/SAT
http://getschooled.blog.myajc.com/2016/06/15/if-gpa-is-the-best-predictor-of-college-success-why-do-colleges-cling-to-act-and-sat/

Worth Reading Opt-Out Movement Reflects Genuine Concerns of Parents
http://educationnext.org/opt-out-reflects-genuine-concerns-of-parents-forum-testing/
Worth Reading Study Finds More Testing, Less Play in Kindergarten
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/06/21/481404169/more-testing-less-play-study-finds-higher-expectations-for-kindergartners
Worth Reading Test Scores Are Poor Predictors of Life Outcomes
https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/test-scores-poor-indicator-of-students-life-outcomes-and-school-quality-new-consensus/

Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director
FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing
office-   (239) 395-6773   fax-  (239) 395-6779
mobile- (239) 699-0468
web-  http://www.fairtest.org

Different DC middle schools gave their students totally different PARCC math tests

Digest that: some DC middle schools gave a general math PARCC test to their students. Others administered an Algebra 1 PARCC test. Others gave a PARCC geometry test.

And not even Superintendent Hanseul Kang seems to know which schools administered what test.

This all comes from Valerie Jablow’s blog.

But all schools will be held ‘accountable’ to the same standard.

Right.

 

Education in India and China

Perhaps you recall the alarming ads from a few years ago about the millions of Chinese and Indian students who weren getting better educations from their system’s schools and wildly out-performing American students. The threat, of course, is that these Asians were about to eat the collective lunches of American students, and that we evil, lazy, stupid, unionized American teachers were to blame.

Lloyd Lofthouse has a column about how lousy the Chinese and Indian school systems are, in fact. I recommend reading it, but, unfortunately, he didn’t cite any of his sources, so I decided to dig around a bit to try to verify his figures.

So far, so good, and let me share a few things I discovered:

Take a glance at this table that I copied and pasted from a survey of Indian education by some group called CLSA. Notice that by  the high school level (grades 9-12), only thirty-two percent of the children in India are still in school. 

That means that 68% of the children in India have dropped out of school by the time they reach high school.

Wow.

And according to Hindu Business Online, not probably a hotbed of wild-eyed Marxists, the typical Indian child only spends about 5.1 years in school. Five years!

And while it is true that China has done an amazing job of opening up opportunities for its youth and reducing the illiteracy rates from about 80% to about 5% (mostly the aged), and while it is true that many Chinese students study very hard and do very well on tests, this should be taken with some grains of salt. According to James Fallows in the Atlantic,

“it is certainly arguable the Chinese educational system and culture leads the world in training students how to take tests. But it is not clear whether this type of training prepares students for much else other than taking tests. Certainly I have seen much evidence for this proposition in the Chinese graduate students that I have worked with. My favorite examples were the Chinese students with perfect TOEFL scores who could neither read nor write English in any meaningful way.”

[TOEFL used to mean Test of English as a Foreign Language]

I have not yet been able to nail down figures for what percentage of Chinese students actually make it to middle school or to high school or to college. But from what I see so far, you can rest assured that these numbers are much, much less than 100%!!

Apparently it doesn’t matter to that nearly every other nation has close to 100% union membership among its teachers, notably Finland — another nation whose students appear to be eating our lunch, too, according to the same international tests. It also doesn’t matter that in the USA, states where teacher union membership is high tend to have higher test scores than states where union membership is low.

Remedial College Courses and Real Problems

From a recent discussion on the Concerned4DCPS list about a recent NYT article on the numbers of students taking remedial courses at the college level. I have taken the opportunity to revise and extend my remarks. If you want to read these in chronological order, start at the bottom.

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

(From me:)

Hi, KPW,

First of all, thanks for at least posting something. I’ve gotten lazy and somewhat discouraged, myself and have posted very little of late.

.

But as Virginia Spatz  has already written, when posting a link on something you think is significant, it would be helpful if you wrote a sentence or two explaining what it is that’s important (and whether you agree or disagree in part or completely with whatever is at the other end of the link))

.

As we all know there is simply so much information out there that nobody can keep up with even a tiny part of the important stuff, so digesting it at least and passing on the essence can be a real service.

.

Following some other links posted by I-forget-whom, I read up on the article you linked to,  and found that there are in fact a lot of distortions in the article.

 .

Yes, it is a scandal that lots of kids are taking on huge loans to take courses that are called ‘remedial’ and which earn no credit hours towards their graduation is a real scandal, but those ‘remedial’ courses of today were once upon a time courses that only a tiny, tiny fraction of students would even have taken before graduating high school back in my parents’ day. They were considered college-level work 80 years ago!

 .

(My dad, who earned degrees in history at Bowdoin and Columbia in the late 1930s and the early 1940s (he also worked summers in a defense plant in WW2 until he got polio — but that’s another story) once told me that “college algebra” was generally taken by bright undergrads. I have an old ‘college algebra’ textbook on my shelf.)

 .

(I have books that contain letters written by farmers who were removed from what’s now Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, complaining about their treatment and asking for help. Many of those mountain folks were illiterate, so the letters we do have are the very best writers, and the grammar, punctuation , spelling  and overall composition in many of the letters would embarrass most 6th graders today. There are no letters from any of the displaced black residents, but given that many of the adults had grown up as slaves and were only freed as a result of the defeat of the Confederacy and teaching slaves to read was illegal, and given that as far as I can tell there was not a single pre-National Park school for black kids in side the park boundaries, I guess that’s not to surprising)

 .

But guess what: nowadays, we routinely teach “college algebra” to seventh and eighth graders. Even here in DC’s public and charter schools.

 .

A very large fraction of the millions of kids who begin their freshman year at a 4-year university or college have already taken CALCULUS and got passing grades in both their HS but ALSO on the Advanced Placement Calculus exam – of which there are now two types: the very difficult one (Calculus AB) and then the f*^£-ing unbelievably difficult one (Calculus BC). On my blog I have stats and graphs that show that the growth in AP test completion in the US is, in fact, a striking example of exponential growth . See, for example, here: When I took my single AP test back in 1967, I was one of only 42,000 students who did so. But in 2011, there were nearly TWO MILLION students taking AP exams! (Yes, that is roughly a FIFTY-FOLD increase!)

Oh yeah – ‘exponential growth’ is a topic we teach to just about every HS student in America nowadays, and not just for compound interest problems involving bank accounts!

 .

Sure, the students don’t all learn all of it. Some kids at some schools instead run and chase and curse each other out in the halls when they are supposed to be in class, and if they do finally enter a classroom, some of them pay no attention whatsoever, and carry on loud conversations as if the teacher weren’t giving a lesson. It’s my impression that gradually any power or authority to maintain order and discipline has been taken away from teachers at many, many schools in DC – I don’t know about elsewhere. And while the total number of AP tests being passed in DC is on the rise, a lot of data is being kept secret, Erich Martel has discovered that at some high schools in DC, almost every person who sits for any AP exam earns the very lowest possible score – a “1”.

 .

Some schools of course do have consequences for misbehavior, class cutting and doing no work that really mean something, up to and including removing the child from the class or school either temporarily or permanently. Statistics show that certain schools (public and charter both, but largely charters) are permitted to use this remedy a LOT. Other schools are basically forbidden to do anything of the sort: there are no consequences for any misbehavior or lack of study. In some schools, no child is actually failed and held back, or required to transfer out, or anything else, no matter how many classes they cut or are tardy to. It matters not at all that they did absolutely no classwork or homework, passed no tests or quizzes, did not a single required project, and wrote not a single paper, in any class. Teachers are forbidden to fail students, and if they do, the grades get changed. Only at the 9th grade in DCPS are students actually required to pass their courses.

 .

Some schools don’t allow this sort of foolishness at all. But having enormous discrepancies in suspension and expulsion rates looks bad. My understanding from some KIPP staff is that after those schools were put in the media hot seat briefly for having high suspension totals, they reduced the number of suspensions, which resulted in significant numbers of kids who cut classes and walked the halls, much like elsewhere. There has got to be some sort of balance between being completely out-of-control and being something like a prison where the inmates are not allowed to speak to each other and must have every single bodily motion within prescribed limits, all day long.

 .

When reading that NYT article, please keep in mind why Benjamin Banneker back in the late 1700s was considered to be such a mathematical genius. Not just because he was one of the few African-Americans who could read and write, but because, he could also {gasp} solve problems involving proportions, linear equations, trigonometry and logarithms!!! DOUBLE GASP!

 .

That sort of “extraordinary” mathematical prowess was extremely rare back in those days – among even among whites (it being a crime to teach slaves to read or write at all.)

 .

Nowadays, we teach proportions to every child in elementary school, not just the prodigies like BB. Linear equations are taught to every middle schooler in America. Every single recent DCPS graduate must have at least been taught about trig and logarithms.

.

Whether they actually learned those topics is a different story! Obviously, some do learn that stuff, and some don’t, and there has been lots of heated argument about the best ways of teaching those topics, but those extremely advanced topics of 1792  are taught to everybody today. At least in theory.

 .

So yeah, we do have some serious problems in our schools.

 .

On the one hand, we have widespread and amazing student accomplishments that put the past to shame, even here in DC’s public and charter schools.

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On the other hand, as today’s WaPo showed, we have much more segregation of the poor and brown in their own special schools than even 15 years ago.

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Partly as a result, there is also a really significant problem with kids who are completely and utterly turned off and feel like they can do anything they like (short of actual bloodshed) and not only get away with it, but be promoted to the next grade (unless they are a 9th grader, which many do repeat and drop out from). I think it’s worse today than it was before I retired, and I think I taught some in all 8 wards – that includes some summer school classes.

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And there is another problem: even if you do graduate from a fancy college, that bachelor’s degree just might qualify you to be a barista, a bartender, or a waiter. When I run across my really brilliant former DCPS math whiz students, only rarely do I find that they ended up going into STEM fields and staying there. I also know a bunch of science PhDs, brilliant folks, who have gotten out of science for various reasons — one is that they have to spend half their time jockeying for the right to remain employed by writing proposal after proposal, and not doing any science at all. This problem is not unique to the USA: Central America, Africa, the Middle East all put out millions of folks with all sorts of certificates and advanced degrees who can’t find work. Some come here or to Europe and end up working as drivers, parking lot attendants, and so on, a similar waste of talent, brainpower, and education.

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So again, don’t trust the source of that ‘study’, and almost everything on education from the WaPo and NYT editorial board has been amazingly wrong-headed.

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I submit that the bar for “remedial college courses” has been raised a LOT. Yes, we have some real problems, but this article completely ignores the successes. I suspect that the purpose of this article was to bash public schools and teachers, when they have actually been extremely successful in raising overall educational accomplishments.  But who are under the most vicious attack from a weird coalition of billionaires and their acolytes who have not accomplished any of the miracles that they have promised.

 .

Guy

===================================================
On May 18, 2016, at 11:32 PM, KPW  <concerned4DCPS@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

I don’t trust, I verify.  I share information for people to know what is going on and what is happening so that they can act or respond accordingly.  Information is power.  Those in the know and wise folks like you will explain what is really going on in your opinion or  based evidence.  From what I can see though, there are lots of middle class families that need a little remedial help and not all are scholars.  It’s not just the poor.

 ==================================

From: Guy Brandenburg gfbrandenburg@yahoo.com [concerned4DCPS]

First of all, don’t trust any study from “Education Reform Now”.

Sent from my iPhone

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

On May 12, 2016, at 10:16 PM, KPW <concerned4DCPS@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

From The New York Times:

Guess Who’s Taking Remedial Classes

A new study shows that schools in privileged communities are failing to prepare significant numbers of students for college.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/10/opinion/guess-whos-taking-remedial-classes.html?mwrsm=Email

–KPW

Have a Superfantastic Day!

Judge in NY State Throws Out ‘Value-Added Model’ Ratings

I am pleased that in an important, precedent-setting case, a judge in New York State has ruled that using Value-Added measurements to judge the effectiveness of teachers is ‘arbitrary’ and ‘capricious’.

The case involved teacher Sheri Lederman, and was argued by her husband.

“New York Supreme Court Judge Roger McDonough said in his decision that he could not rule beyond the individual case of fourth-grade teacher Sheri G. Lederman because regulations around the evaluation system have been changed, but he said she had proved that the controversial method that King developed and administered in New York had provided her with an unfair evaluation. It is thought to be the first time a judge has made such a decision in a teacher evaluation case.”

In case you were unaware of it, VAM is a statistical black box used to predict how a hypothetical student is supposed to score on a Big Standardized Test one year based on the scores of every other student that year and in previous years. Any deviation (up or down) of that score is attributed to the teacher.

Gary Rubinstein and I have looked into how stable those VAM scores are in New York City, where we had actual scores to work with (leaked by the NYTimes and other newspapers). We found that they were inconsistent and unstable in the extreme! When you graph one year’s score versus next year’s score, we found that there was essentially no correlation at all, meaning that a teacher who is assigned the exact same grade level, in the same school, with very similar  students, can score high one year, low the next, and middling the third, or any combination of those. Very, very few teachers got scores that were consistent from year to year. Even teachers who taught two or more grade levels of the same subject (say, 7th and 8th grade math) had no consistency from one subject to the next. See my blog  (not all on NY City) here, here, here,  here, here, here, here, here,  here, here, and here. See Gary R’s six part series on his blog here, here, here, here, here, and here. As well as a less technical explanation here.

Mercedes Schneider has done similar research on teachers’ VAM scores in Louisiana and came up with the same sorts of results that Rubinstein and I did.

Which led all three of us to conclude that the entire VAM machinery was invalid.

And which is why the case of Ms. Lederman is so important. Similar cases have been filed in numerous states, but this is apparently the first one where a judgement has been reached.

(Also read this. and this.)

Charter, Alternative, and On-Line Schools Have Lowest On-Time Graduation Rates, Study Finds

 

(This article is normally behind a paywall at Education Week.)

Charter, Alternative, Virtual Schools Account for Most Low-Grad-Rate Schools, Study Finds
By Catherine Gewertz on May 9, 2016 6:00 AM

Charter, virtual, and alternative schools account for a disproportionate share of U.S. high schools with low graduation rates, according to a study released Monday. Even though they enroll only a small slice of students, they account for more than half of the U.S. high schools that graduate 67 percent or less of their students in four years.

“Building a Grad Nation,” the seventh in an annual series of reports on U.S. graduation rates, concluded that regular district high schools make up 41 percent of those that didn’t surpass the 67-percent threshold in 2013-14. Charter, virtual, and alternative schools—a small sector, representing only 14 percent of the country’s high schools and 8 percent of its high school students—account for 52 percent of the schools that fell short of that mark. (The remaining 7 percent are vocational and special-education schools.)

The findings offer a challenge to a country that’s renewing its focus on graduation rates through the newly revised Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Known now as the Every Student Succeeds Act, the law requires states to report four-year graduation rates for schools that enroll 100 students or more, and districts to provide research-based help for schools that graduate fewer than 67 percent in four years.

With that new law in mind, the organizations that issue the “Grad Nation” reports annually—Civic Enterprises, the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, the Alliance for Excellent Education and the America’s Promise Alliance—shifted their focus for this year’s report, from schools that enroll 300 or more students (about 13,400 schools) to those that enroll 100 or more (about 18,100 schools).

That change nearly tripled the scope of the study of schools with graduation rates of two-thirds or less: from 1,000 schools enrolling 924,000 students to 2,397 schools enrolling 1.23 million students. In a foreshadowing of the work that states face under ESSA, the Grad Nation researchers looked for patterns among the schools with low graduation rates. (Note: This paragraph reflects corrections made to the Grad Nation report.)

The contrast between “regular” district high schools, and alternative, virtual, and charter schools showed the starkest pattern. Here are the shares of U.S. high schools of each type, and their shares of schools with low graduation rates:

Regular high schools:

84 percent of U.S. high schools

7 percent have graduation rates of 67 percent or less

Alternative schools:

6 percent of U.S. high schools

57 percent have graduation rates of 67 percent or less

Charter schools:

8 percent of U.S. high schools

30 percent have graduation rates of 67 percent or less

Virtual schools:

1 percent of U.S. high schools

87 percent have graduation rates of 67 percent or less

The Grad Nation researchers called attention to the preponderance of low-grad-rate schools among charter, alternative, and virtual schools in part because the numbers of those schools have been rising in the last 15 years. Additionally, they enroll large shares of low-income, black, and Hispanic students.

“In many states, these various high school options have become popular pathways for students that have struggled to stay on track in traditional high schools,” the study says. “Therefore, it is critical that issues surrounding these schools be addressed.”

The report also pinpoints a bigger problem with low-graduation-rate schools in some states than in others. In Alaska, New Mexico, and Florida, 30 percent or more of the high schools have graduation rates of 67 percent or lower.

Robert Balfanz, the-co-director of the Everyone Graduates Center, told reporters in a conference call that state variability is a key force in the numbers of low-grad-rate schools. For instance, of all the low-grad-rate schools in Hawaii, 100 percent were charter schools. In Arizona, the number was 73 percent, and in Indiana, 60 percent. Half of the low-grad-rate schools in California were charters. Kentucky, Texas and Washington topped the list of states with particularly high shares of low-grad-rate schools that were alternative schools.

But in some states, the charter sector is “helping solve the dropout crisis” by running many schools with good graduation rates, Balfanz said. He pointed to New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Oklahoma as examples.

Nina Rees, the president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, welcomed the report’s inquiry into graduation rates at different types of schools. But she took issue with its methdology, saying the charter sector’s share of low-grad-rate schools looks worse than it is because researchers didn’t adequately separate alternative schools from mainstream charters. She also pointed out that the study found that more than 4 in 10 charter schools are graduating more than 85 percent of their students.

Many celebrated last December when the nation’s high school graduation rate reached an all-time high of 82 percent for the class of 2014. But the milestone also sparked skepticism about whether states or districts were using shortcuts to boost their diploma numbers, by lowering academic expectations or changing they way they counted transfer students in each class cohort.

The Grad Nation researchers took on those questions, and concluded that there was little or no evidence that such practices were affecting state-level graduation rates. Further analysis would have to be done to make such conclusions at the district level, the report says. It did not examine schools’ increasing reliance on quick credit-recovery programs to improve graduation rates.

The Every Student Succeeds Act gives states much more autonomy than they had under the No Child Left Behind Act over the way they handle low-performing schools. With that in mind, the Grad Nation authors urged states to give graduation rates significant weight in the accountability systems, and to make sure that charter, virtual, and alternative schools, as well as traditional high schools, are monitored and provided solid help with low graduation rates.

They also urged states to report five- and six-year graduation rates, to capture a more accurate picture of diploma-earning. Many alternative schools, in particular, were created to serve students who struggled in traditional schools, and who might take longer to earn their diplomas, the report notes. Adding five-year graduation rates to the national picture would boost the rate by 3 percentage points, it says, and adding six-year rates would increase it by another point.

 

 

Where DC’s schools rank by family income, test scores, and ethnicity – NYTimes

The New York Times recently ran the results of some pretty fancy number-crunching for all sufficiently-large public school districts in the United States. They graphed family income against ‘years ahead or behind’ in school and also showed the discrepancies in each of those school districts among hispanics, whites, and blacks.

If you haven’t played with the graphs, I urge you to do so. I did a little bit, looking for Washington, DC, my home town, where I and my children attended and where I taught for 30 years. I already knew that DC has one of the largest black-white gaps anywhere in the nation – a gap that 9 years of Edu-Reform under Fenty, Rhee, Gray, Henderson various charter companies have not narrowed at all.

Notice the extremely tight correlation between family income and scores on achievement tests, and where the District of Columbia is situated on the graph.

This next plot shows where DC’s whites, hispanics, and blacks are situated on the graph (as well as for thousands of other school districts):

Notice that white students in DC’s public schools are nearly the wealthiest and highest-achieving group anywhere in the nation, while DC’s black students are very far behind in both income and achievement. DC’s hispanic students, to my surprise, are considered to be a bit above the middle of the income levels, but still rather far behind academically. (I actually rather doubt the data on those DC hispanic income levels, based on my own personal experiences with Hispanic families here in DC…)