Self-Tracking in Palo Alto

by Robert Pondiscio
June 22nd, 2009

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A stunning 60% of parents in Palo Alto, California 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 cited in the San Jose Mercury News.

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.

Nearly 63 percent of parents surveyed said their children don’t need extra help in math.  However nearly six in ten said they provide extra math work anyway to challenge their kids.  Palo Alto is the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, where engineers and scientists are legion.  “They have a low-expectation math program in a community where there are high expectations for math,” one former school board member tells the paper.

I can’t help but view this through the lens of the spirited, ongoing tracking discussion prompted by Will Fitzhugh’s piece on “athletic tracking.”  Granted, what’s happening in Palo Alto is about a poorly received curriculum, but it’s driven by the perception kids aren’t being challenged enough.  It’s useful to be reminded that parents of more advantaged children will go to great lengths to make sure their kids excel.   One has to wonder how poorer potential high achievers without access to tutors or even advanced classes (if we insist on mixed ability classrooms) will possibly compete with the likes of these Palo Alto whiz kids. 

Or maybe we’re OK with that?

Duncan: Close Failed Charters

by Robert Pondiscio
June 22nd, 2009

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Posted in Education Practice, accountability | 4 Comments »

The NY Times plays up Secretary Duncan’s coming warning to charter school operators that “low-quality institutions are giving their movement a black eye.”  Writes the Times’ Sam Dillon:

The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist,” Mr. Duncan says in prepared remarks that he is scheduled to deliver in Washington at the annual gathering of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.  In an interview, Mr. Duncan said he would use the address to praise innovations made by high-quality charter schools, urge charter leaders to become more active in weeding out bad apples in their movement and invite the leaders to help out in the administration’s broad effort to remake several thousand of the nation’s worst public schools.

The Times makes much of last week’s Stanford study indicating that nearly half of all charter schools nationwide “have results that are no different from the local public school options, and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.”

It will be interesting to see how charter advocates react to Duncan’s call.  At worst, it seems like a reminder of the accountability principles undergirding the movement.   Indeed, if the movement practices what it preaches, closing bad charter schools should be considered a victory– for the charter movement.