Sorry, Larry Summers. An analysis of standardized test scores from more than 7 million students in grades 2 through 11 finds no difference in math scores for girls and boys. Everybody is on this one, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, TIME, lots more.
Tag Archive for 'math'
Uh-oh…the secret’s out. If you want your child to do well in math, teach ‘em long division at the kitchen table after school. Traditional formulas have been supplanted, the Associated Press has discovered (long after the horse has departed the barn) by concept-based curricula aiming to “teach the ideas behind mathematics.” This is leading “renegade parents” to teach basic math formulas on the sly at home.
Renegade teachers too, as Matthew Clavel described in a terrific piece in City Journal some time back:
If school officials knew how far my lessons would deviate from the school district-mandated math program in the months ahead, they probably would have fired me on the spot. But boy, did my kids need a fresh approach….Not one of my students knew his or her times tables, and few had mastered even the most basic operations; knowledge of multiplication and division was abysmal. Perhaps you think I shouldn’t have rejected a course of learning without giving it a full year (my school had only recently hired me as a 23-year-old Teach for America corps member). But what would you do, if you discovered that none of your fourth graders could correctly tell you the answer to four times eight?
You’d teach them the algorithms, like Clavel did, I did, and countless others. The idea that teaching for understanding precludes automatic recall and traditional methods of instruction–that children haven’t learned unless they ”construct” their understanding of math–is one of those mindless orthodoxies that have squeezed out common sense and strewn failure in its wake. Watch a 4th or 5th grader struggle with partial sums addition and lattice multiplication and you’d quickly revert to time drills and memorization too.
If I run into one of my 5th graders even 20 years from now, I will ask him or her, “Do you know how to divide?” I’d bet my rent money I’ll get the answer, “Does McDonalds Sell Cheese Burgers?” Sue me. Take away my teaching license. But I’ll bet they can divide.
West Virginia wants more veterans in the classroom. Not veteran teachers, just veterans. State education officials are looking to expand their involvement in the federal “Troops to Teachers” program, which was created over a decade ago to encourage more National Guard, reserve and former active-duty military veterans to become teachers.
“Veterans possess a wealth of knowledge, talent, skills and experience that they can share with West Virginia students,” the state’s Superintendent of Schools Steve Paine said in a news release. “Many of them have science, math and engineering backgrounds that we desperately need. They also bring a world view to the classroom that works well with our 21st Century Learning initiative to help our children succeed in a global economy.”
I have to admit that I utterly was unaware of this program, which sounds like a rock-solid idea. It’s surprising to hear it’s been in existence since 1994. A study cited on the TTT web site gives the program high marks for bringing more men, more minorities to education, as well as more teachers in inner cities, especially in special education, math and science.
I’d invite anyone involved in the program to post more about it.
When it comes to Math education, less is more says Virginia teacher Patrick Welsh in a USA Today opinion piece. Virginia’s Standards of Learning features 64-pages detailing “what math gurus in Richmond think kids should absorb at every step in their 13 years in school.” Still he notes at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., where he teaches English, “we have been graduating hundreds of kids who need a calculator to figure out that nine times five is 45.”
One reason for the teacher frustration is that the state’s math gurus have de-emphasized memorization in favor of “conceptual thinking.” The same philosophy has crept into English classes, where “creativity” has been elevated over knowledge of grammar, and into history classes, where knowing historical trends — “the big picture” — has replaced knowing dates of important events. The result is seniors who are not just incapable of multiplication, but also unable to identify the verb in a sentence or come within 100 years of placing the Civil War.
“Kids also are taught the wrong material at the wrong time,” says Welsh, who counsels slowing down and giving kids the time and ability to master basics. “Students are not the only ones who must ‘get’ math. Many elementary school teachers are notoriously weak here.”
Related News: Every California eighth-grader will be tested in algebra — ready or not — under a policy approved Wednesday that could make the state the first in the nation to require an upper-level math class before high school, the L.A. Times reports.
I’m almost sorry I chose to be on the north rim of the Grand Canyon when my home state of New York announced that universal proficiency is nigh. Better than four out of five public school students in the Empire State are suddenly at or above grade level in math up from 73 percent last year while 69 percent of students were at or above state standards.
There’s so much to say about lowering the bar and how the good news doesn’t square with NAEP results, but lots of other commenters including Sol Stern were on the job while I was away:
Sometime in the next decade, the white children of Lake George and the black children of New York City will come face to face with reality. On a high school math Regents test—or on an SAT test, or in a college remediation course—they will discover that they are not quite as proficient as New York State once assured them.
Other fascinating items waiting in my inbox: Karin Chenoweth’s take on the IES Reading First report is crystal clear on what the data shows…and what it doesn’t; and a study shows elementary-school teachers are poorly prepared by education schools to teach math. Hmmm. I wonder why no one is suggesting copying whatever it is that has helped New York’s teachers do so well.
Nice to be back.
I could kiss Michael Petrilli on the mouth.
A perennial, frustrating blind spot among ed reformers, with their monomaniacal focus on systems, structures and accountability, is curriculum. Trying to build good schools without looking at curriculum is like trying to build a winning baseball team by focusing on the parking lot, the stadium and the vendors and assuming the “baseball people” are the experts on the game. My new hero Mr. Petrilli gets this. Read his take in the Fordham Foundation’s Gadfly on the NY Times piece How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?
“In a 5,000 word forum on education, these words did not appear once: instruction, curriculum, reading, math, history, literature,” sayeth Mr. Petrilli, with the clarity of the child pointing out the Emperor is naked. “This ‘incentivist’ thinking is a fair reflection of the state of the ‘new’ education philanthropy. Staffed mostly by smart MBAs and obsessed with structures and systems and processes, their ignorance about the stuff of education leads to agnosticism. And, predictably, to trouble. (See Joel Klein’s embrace of Diana Lam and Lucy Calkins as Exhibits 1 and 2.).” As Petrilli sees it, to remain agnostic on curriculum and pedagogy is “like sending in nation-builders who can’t speak Arabic and never studied Iraqi history.”
He wraps up with a thought exercise. What if a billionaire wants to focus his philanthropy on smart instructionist investments? Petrilli offers three: Support the development of national standards and tests; create a voluntary national curriculum; and fund thousands of high-quality summer workshops.
Not a bad start. Bravo, sir! Discuss among yourselves, billionaires.
Proponents of a more traditional, rigorous approach to teaching mathematics should read this piece from the Los Angeles Times about the success a struggling Hollywood elementary school has enjoyed with Singapore Math.
Several Core Knowledge schools have reported strong results from Singapore and Saxon math programs, and the paper does a good job of showing why. Describing what appears to be a standard timed drill (the dreaded “drill and kill” that reform advocates blithely dismiss) the Times smartly reports: “What isn’t obvious to a casual observer is that this drill is carefully thought out to reinforce patterns of mathematical thinking that carry through the curriculum. ‘These are ‘procedures with connections,’ math coach Robin Ramos said, arranged to convey sometimes subtle points. This thoughtfulness — some say brilliance — is the true hallmark of the Singapore books, advocates say.”
Also this week: an anticipated report from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, which is expected to urge U.S. teachers to promote “quick and effortless” recall of arithmetic facts in early grades. Taken together, it’s a potent one-two punch that coupled with a rising tide of parent activism, may be turning the tide against reform or constructivist math programs like Everyday Math.
A consummation devoutly to be wished.
The Wall Street Journal reports a presidential panel will describe the nation’s system of teaching math as “broken” and recommend a focus on basic math instruction.
“The National Mathematics Advisory Panel, appointed by President Bush in 2006, is expected to urge the nation’s teachers to promote ‘quick and effortless’ recall of arithmetic facts in early grades, mastery of fractions in middle school, and rigorous algebra courses in high school or even earlier,” the Journal reports. “Targeting such key elements of math would mark a sharp departure from the diverse priorities that now govern teaching of the subject in U.S. public schools.”
The back-to-basics call will surely be music to the ears of teachers and parents unhappy with constructivist math programs in Texas, Washington, and elsewhere who have railed recently against “fuzzy math.” That said, the members of the advisory panel includes mathematicians and educators from both sides of the “reform vs. basics” math wars. “The draft of the final report declines to take sides, saying the group agreed only on the content that students must master, not the best way to teach it,” reports the WSJ.
“Unlike most countries that outperform the U.S., America leaves education decisions largely to state and local governments and has no national curriculum,” notes the paper. “School boards and state education departments across the country are likely to pore over the math panel’s findings and adjust their teaching to make sure it aligns with the nation’s best thinking on math instruction.”
Did someone say national curriculum??
There’s almost no good idea in pedagogy that doesn’t become a bad idea the moment it hardens into orthodoxy. People’s exhibit 1A: Constructivist math. On the surface, the idea makes sense. It’s not enough to perform a math algorithm by rote. If you divide fractions by saying “Yours is not to reason why, just invert and multiply,” you’ll get the right answer, but you don’t really understand the math. Constructivist math values the why of math over the how. But somehow, in too many schools, this good idea—that children should actually understand the calculations they’re performing—transmogrified into “children should not be taught standard algorithms.”
The video above, produced by a Washington State TV news personality M. J. McDermott, shows of examples of TERC and Everyday Math problems and how those programs expect students to solve them. Teachers may find it familiar, but it’s instructive for parents and policy types who might wonder why math scores continue to lag. Remember that this is not a fringe curriculum, but mainstream math as it’s taught in tens of thousands of classrooms every day. Meanwhile, parents in suburban Washington, DC are the latest to raise questions about the constructivist math instruction their kids are getting in school, even launching a dissenting parent web site.
As a teacher, I certainly want my students to understand the bigger concepts behind long division and two-digit multiplication. But I don’t want them to take 20 minutes to multiply 26×31. Truth be told, I went off the reservation and gave my students daily timed drills until they were all able to do 80 problems in five minutes. Watch the video and ask yourself how a student who doesn’t have automatic grasp of math facts can possible score well on a standardized test when calculators are forbidden.
The video, by the way, is from the Where’s the Math web site, which puts forth a reasonable position on math instruction: “Math education must be balanced, encouraging solid essential skills and understanding. It is time to stop blaming teachers— poor State math standards and curricula are failing our students. Well-meaning activists, pushing unsupported theories, have undermined our State’s educational system.”
The RAND Review gives NCLB a mixed midterm. RAND makes a good case for national standards and curriculum, noting that while every state has complied with the law by testing students in required grades in reading and math, “student ‘proficiency’ on these tests has little common meaning across states.” The reports first recommendation: “Congress should require similar yardsticks for all states.” RAND also says “Congress should look beyond math, reading, and science” to determine proficiency. Hear, hear.
Writing in the New Yorker, Caleb Crain wonders what life will be like if people stop reading. In 1982, 57% of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. Twenty years later it was down to 47%. Last month, the National Endowment of the Arts report “To Read or Not to Read,” showed correlations between the decline of reading and everything from income disparity and exercise to voting. Meanwhile spending on books is at a 20-year low. “More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability,” writes Crain, who backs it up with this eyebrow-raising statistic: Only 13% of adults are capable of such tasks as comparing viewpoints in two editorials.
Researchers at Oxford University have determined that there’s no such thing as a “cultural elite,” those who love opera and fine arts but wouldn’t stoop to anything as common as prime-time TV. Most people fall into four categories: univores, who only like popular culture; omnivores, who like everything from opera to soap opera; paucivores, who absorb very little culture; and inactives, who absorb practically none.
The Corvallis (Oregon) Gazette Times in a year-end education roundup replays the plans to redraw school attendance boundaries in the district. Franklin School, which is an Official Core Knowledge visitation site, has no attendance boundary and is open to families by lottery. It also has a long waiting list. Unfortunately, it also has the lowest percentage in the district of low-income students, who would benefit the most from Core Knowledge.
The Washington Post notes that teaching elementary math is tough and will get tougher since U.S. 15-year-olds trail peers from 23 industrialized countries in math. (23 is the number between 22 and 24). Math is too hard? Don’t teach it! A University of Pennsylvania professor says fractions are as “obsolete as Roman numerals” and recommends dropping them from the curriculum in favor of decimals. A five-tenths baked idea if ever I heard one.
In the Blogs… New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum adds her voice to the growing chorus of those complaining about standardized tests in the Big Apple. NYC Public School Parents spanks the DOE for its “condescending” response… . Mamacita at Scheiss Weekly lays on a passionate rant about the need to see every child as an individual. Hard to do, she notes, in classrooms that are bursting at the seams… . Check out the education jargon generator. Learn to throw around smart-sounding eduspeak like delivering meaning-centered assessment! Enhance child-centered critical thinking! Thanks to Joanne Jacobs for pointing this one out.
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