Math disaster

A friend of mine teaches chemistry at a community college in South Carolina and is pulling out his remaining hair. It appears that in his introductory chemistry and remedial classes the vast majority of students (recent high school graduates) is unable to do simple calculations involving percentages. Forget about dimensional analysis.

Something must have gone awfully wrong with these students' math instruction in high school and probably even earlier in elementary school. I am on the case investigating.

I teach math to eighth graders and know that teaching math successfully need not be rocket science. Most of my students can now convert fractions to decimals and percents (and vice-versa) in their sleep. They can also solve the three different types of percent word problems (unkown rate, whole and part) in their sleep.

The following is an aspect of how I teach percentages after teaching the concept that a percentage is an equivalent fraction with a denominator of one hundred.

I have my students create a table with three columns. Each column is labeled fraction, decimal, percent. This visualizes the operations and helps reduce confusion. They can go from left to right to start with fractions and end up with percents, or from right to left to start with percents and end up with fractions.

Converting percents to fractions generally poses no problems when the percent is a whole number, e.g. 47% --> .47 --> 47/100. A special problem arises when the percent is a fraction like 5-1/4 %. This is where the students need to realize that an additional step is required. Many students want to enter 5.25 in the decimal column. The task of the teacher is to focus on this problem and to show that the students must first convert to 5.25%, then to the decimal .0525 and on to the fraction.

A good way to drive home this point is to contrast the conversion of 5-1/4 (without %) and 5-1/4% to decimals and writing 5-1/4% and 5.25% in the percent column. Only now can 5.25% leave the percent column and move to the decimal column to become .0525. Bingo!

I also have my students solve percent problems as proportions and equations. I drill them in identifying the rate (percent), part and whole in any percent problem. For equations I have them use the rb=a formula. r=rate (percent), b=base (whole) and a=amount (part). This is also a nice algebra exercise since they need to solve for a, b or r as the case may be.

I once again have them make a table with three columns and several rows. The columns are labeled r, b and a.

Then I have them look at various percent problems and ask them to identify what's known and unknown. If the percent is unknown, a question mark goes into the box of the r-column and what's known (whole and part) goes into the respective boxes of the b-column and a-column.

If a (the part) or b (the whole) is unknown, the procedure is repeated accordingly. This works amazingly well and the visualization once again helps to minimize confusion.

An added advantage is that the students learn how to solve for the various variables and how to manipulate the rb=a formula, e.g. r=a/b, b=a/r.

It is amazing, though, how many of these 8th graders find this manipulation of variables difficult. Adults might consider this manipulation child's play. But it really represents a huge jump to this age group to go from the concreteness of numbers to the abstractness of variables (letters).

This concludes the lesson on how to teach percents for understanding. Instructivist will give other lessons on how to teach math successfully to middle graders as he sees fit.

Quantifying instruction

What is good teaching? Can it be quantified as educational researchers are trying to do. I, for one, am glad I am nowhere near a coding sheet and instead rely on observation, common sense and intuition.

Good teaching is far more than directly observable and measurable behavior. Good teachers possess traits and qualities that either cannot be quantified or are hard to quantify. I would even go so far as to claim that trying to quantity these traits and qualities is a case of scientism, which I idiosyncratically define as an attempt to quantify qualities that are ill-suited for quantification.

How, for example, do you go about quantifying an inspiring, radiating personality? How do you quantify a sense of humor, wit, a capability for empathy, a developed sensitivity to the zone of proximal development? How do you quantify imagination, creativity and a capacity to teach for understanding? How do you distinguish numerically between genuine and phony sentiment and what numbers would you assign to a story-telling capability?

I think education would be much better served if we approached the question of what makes a good teacher from a humanistic-philosophical perspective. But then, of course, we would first have to have a notion of desirable educational goals because "good" does not exist in a vacuum.

Arrested development

Constructivism reigns supreme in ed schools. It is the unquestioned doctrine that guides all aspects of teacher preparation. It should therefore be of some interest to find out what it is all about, if there is an empirical core that can be discerned from the thick fog that envelops hapless teacher candidates. The prospects are not good. Von Glaserfeld calls constructivism "a vast and woolly area in contemporary psychology, epistemology, and education."

Trying to pin down constructivism -- to see if it can be defined in a meaningful way and whether there is any sense that can be separated from nonsense -- is like searching for the unicorn.

At this point of my search, the best I can do is conclude that constructivists display a case of arrested development. Constructivists are stuck in the Piagetian sensorimotor or, at best, pre-operational stage. This infantilism that manifests itself in constructivists goes a long way in explaining educationist hostility to knowledge and educationist anti-intellectualism. But this infantilism is golden compared to the denial of objective reality by radical constructivist gurus like von Glaserfeld.

Let me elaborate a bit.

Constructivists cite Piaget and Vygotsky as their progenitors. Piaget did groundbreaking work on how toddlers develop intellectually and came up with different stages (really a continuum divided into stages to get a better handle on this development). For example, a toddler might recognize at some point that an object that is moved behind another object and disappears from sight does not cease to exist (permanence). Or a toddler might discover on his own that an object falls when released or that bumping into a wall is not a good idea or that a flame is hot.

The constructivists' fallacy is to carry this notion of discovery and individual experience to absurd lengths and apply it to later years -- to adolescence and even adulthood. Learning then becomes solely a matter of discovery and individual experience from which one constructs one's own knowledge and meaning. But you cannot "construct" broader knowledge ex nihilo and keep reinventing the wheel endlessly. You need external input. You need to benefit from the knowledge accumulated over thousands of years. This is where constructivism breaks down. Constructivism presents itself as a theory of learning based solely on experience. But personal experience is limited. Broader learning also needs to tap into an existing body of knowledge that constructivists disparage.

This otherwise imcomprehensible educationist hostility to knowledge and especially imparting knowledge becomes clearer when one considers the views of leading radical constructivist gurus like von Glaserfeld who seem to come straight out of the loony bin:

Von Glaserfeld is one of the leading apostles of radical constructivism. Radical constructivism rejects the traditional philosophical position of realism and adopts a relativist position. The traditional view of realism sees knowledge as a representation of an absolute reality - a world "out there" prior to having been experienced. The radical constructivists sees knowledge as "something that is personally constructed by individuals, in an active way, as they try to give meaning to socially accepted and shared notions." As von Glaserfeld himself says "knowledge is the result of an individual subject's constructive activity, not a commodity that somehow resides outside the knower and can be conveyed or distilled by diligent perception or linguistic communication"

This explains why educationists don't believe in an external body of academic knowledge that should be communicated to students. It explains why teachers are not allowed to teach, i.e. give explicit instruction.

On the other hand, how constructivists can claim Vygotsky as one of their own still remains a mystery to me. His notions of the zone of proximal development and scaffolding are sensible and don't rule out explicit instruction (despised by constructivists). His emphasis on socio-cultural factors doesn't fit in with "constructing one's own knowledge" either.

I wish someone could explain all these mysteries to me.

UPDATE #1: In the meantime, reader Rob has helpfully directed me to a scholarly article called Does No One Read Vygotsky’s Words? Commentary on Glassman that exposes attempts to Deweyize Vygotsky through omissions, distortions and inventions.

From the abstract:

In the May 2001 issue of Educational Researcher, Michael Glassman proposed several commonalities in the thinking of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky. However, in addition to general problems in the article (misstatements about scholars’ writings and a reliance on unsupported inferences), the discussion misconstrues major concepts and topics addressed by Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development—psychological tools, the role of the cross-cultural study, the zone of proximal development, and the nature of conceptual thinking. In addition, Glassman attempted to force Vygotsky’s goals into a Deweyan framework. The result is a misportrayal of Vygotsky’s work.

UPDATE #2: I dug out my ed psych text (Anita Woolfolk) we used in grad school to see what it says about Piaget and constructivism. From it I learn that knowledge is "constructed by transforming, organizing, and reorganizing previous knowledge. Knowledge is not a mirror of the external world, even though experience influences thinking and thinking influences knowledge. Exploration and discovery are more important than teaching." The quote is Woolfolk speaking and giving a summary of Piaget's purported views under the heading "Assumptions about Learning and Knowledge."

Woolfolk goes on to helpfully explain how knowledge is constructed citing Moshman (1982). Knowledge construction is directed by internal processes like Piaget's organization, assimilation and accommodation. This means that new knowledge is "abstracted from old knowledge." It turns out that "[k]nowledge is not a mirror of reality, but rather an abstraction that grows and develops with cognitivie activity. Knowledge is not true or false; it just grows more internally consistent and organized with development."

Talk about being self-referential. Where is the external input?

I don't know what to make of this. I can understand that we might have to readjust our thinking when we learn new things that might conflict with or supplement our previous knowledge. But apparently there is no input of new knowledge from an external source. Saying that knowledge is constructed by transforming, organizing, and reorganizing previous knowledge is purely self-referential. Previous knowledge is simply remixed and stirred the way you might mix the ingredients of a cake. Nothing new is added. How relevant is all this to teaching reading and writing skills, math, science, history, geography, literature or languages?

Neither relevant nor helpful. It's all nonsense -- nonsense on stilts that has managed to become the dominant creed of the ed establishment. Constructivism is to education what creationism is to science. Both lack an empirical basis and rely on some unfathomable, ineffable, magical, supernatural thing said to "construct" something out of nothing.

How refreshing, then, to have someone like Prof. Plum rip the mask off this pretentious drivel:

What is Constructivism?

Constructivism is big word that makes education perfessers think they are intelligent.

Constructivism is an invention that makes education perfessers think they know something that everyone else doesn't.

Constructivism is a set of statements about learning that are quite simpleminded and generally false.

"Knowledge can't be transmitted from one person to another. 'Learners' have to construct knowledge." [This very statement shows that constructivists don't believe what they say. Isn't the statement an effort to transmit knowledge?]

"Therefore, teachers should not teach directly by telling or showing (e.g., how to solve math problems). Instead, they should guide students as STUDENTS figure out concepts (what granite is) and strategies (how to sound out words, how to solve math problems)." [Constructing knowledge means NOTHING more than comparing and contrasting, identifying sameness and difference, making inductions and deductions. This is all OLD news. There is NO reason why teachers can't teach in a direct and focused fashion. In fact, students "construct knowledge" (figure things out) better--faster and with fewer errors--when they ARE taught directly, rather than expected to "discover" knowledge--which makes no sense, anyway. If knowledge is constructed, what IS there to discover?]

"How each person constructs knowledge is unique. Therefore, teachers should not arrange instruction in sequences. Instead, students should select learning tasks. Don't worry. They will select what they are ready for." [Unique in the DETAILS but not in the general logical operations by which human beings learn. If each person is unique, I guess physicians should not take their blood pressure.]

"Drill (distributed practice) is bad. It is boring. It is not needed." [Baloney!]

"Tasks should be 'authentic.' Holistic. Teach the fundamentals of chemistry in the CONTEXT of chemistry experiments. Teach phonics skills in the context of reading." [This is the prescription for keeping kids ignorant and unskilled and for leaving them demoralized.]

"Since each student's learning is unique and INTERNAL, you cannot use quantitative and standardized methods of assessment. It should be qualitative--how students feel and think about what they are learning." [This makes no sense. Body temperature is also "internal," but you can measure it quantitatively and with a standard instrument. Likewise, you can easily count how many math problems kids do correctly. This is a cop-out to protect constructivists from data that would ruin them.]

And from this set of sophomoric beliefs, you get whole language, fuzziest math, inquiry science, literature without literacy, and history without moral and political lessons.

...

Constructivist "theory" is a mishmash of overlapping platitudes and absurdities--"empty words and poetic metaphors" (Aristotle, Metaphysics). Taken separately, constructivist "propositions" are merely simpleminded. Taken together, they are indistinguishable from the verbal behavior of a person suffering from chronic schizophrenia.

"Reality is a construction."
"Knowledge is a construction."
"Experience is a construction."
"Experience is constructed with constructs."
"Constructs are constructed out of experience."
"Reality is knowledge."
"Knowledge is reality."
"Experience is reality."
"There is no knowable reality external to the knowing subject (the constructor)."
"Individuals and groups construct meaning as they interact with environments."
"Therefore, no statement can be more than relatively true."
"A current body of knowledge ('reality') is a context that shapes the construction of knowledge."
"Therefore, environment, knowledge, experience, meaning and reality are the same thing."

What does progressive/constructivist education actually look like in practice. Here we have a smartly written account from someone who is experiencing it first hand:

In my lesson during the first block, we read a lot of the primary source documents out loud together, and then I led a discussion about them and we took notes together. This was roundly condemned as the wrong approach, and so the next period I had to let them read and interpret in groups. As usual, they wasted a lot of time and I don't really think they understood it. Not that I'm sure they had totally understood it in the first block, since they didn't have the proper historical background and I can't give them quizzes, but at least I got some reasonable answers out of the class discussion. In the second block, everyone got something different, depending on their group. It was so frustrating. I don't want to learn to teach like this because I don't think it's right. But I can't contradict the teacher. But I need the practice. It's an education grad school moral dilemma. The best kind.

This is just the last paragraph of a fairly long post. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE #3: Here are more sources on constructivism:

http://mathforum.org/mathed/constructivism.html

What is Constructivism?

"Students need to construct their own understanding of each mathematical concept, so that the primary role of teaching is not to lecture, explain, or otherwise attempt to 'transfer' mathematical knowledge, but to create situations for students that will foster their making the necessary mental constructions. A critical aspect of the approach is a decomposition of each mathematical concept into developmental steps following a Piagetian theory of knowledge based on observation of, and interviews with, students as they attempt to learn a concept." [Emphasis added].
- Calculus, Concepts, Computers, and Cooperative Learning (C4L)

These prescriptions would explain the surfeit of math cripples. I know from my own experience teaching math that students thrive when having things explained to them combined with guided practice and independent homework in the form of distributed practice and overlearning.

Non-instruction (rev.)

Of all the educational lunacies dreamed up by educationists, non-instruction must be among the looniest.

Here is an account from the frontlines of what is not happening in a high school math class. The account relates the experiences of a student in a math class in which the teacher won't teach. It was posted at Kitchen Table Math, a lively math site that has been called "the hippest online math ed community in the known universe."

Hello, my name is Colin Johnston and in this post I will describe the horrors of high school algebra.

On the first day of my junior year, I stepped into my math class. I will leave names out so as not to offend anyone. I had heard mixed reviews about the math teacher that I would have this year, but people generally said he was a pretty good teahcer. As the bell rang, the class sat down and waited patiently for him to enter the room. He slowly stepped into the classroom. He looked like a smart enough guy. He then passed out the textbooks and walked to the front of the classroom. He began talking about the curriculum we would cover this year, his grading scale, etc. He then said something, however, that didn't go down as easily as the other things he had mentioned. He said "You kids have been told how to do everything in your math careers. That is, up until now. This year, you are going to learn how to teach yourselves."

What? Then why don't we just take this class at home, over the internet? What is the point of having a teacher that doesn't teach? I made these same arguments to my friend after class, but he just shruged it off. "It will probably get better as the year goes on." He said. I guess I would give it a shot.

But as this year has gone on, things have gotten worse if anything. Now, the norm for the class is come in, sit down, spend an hour correcting last nights assignment (it takes so long because everyone has so many questions), get the new assignment, and puzzle over it for 10 minutes until you finally give up due to complete lack of understanding. Such is life in the new new math, Constructivism.

As Colin says, why not just take this class at home, over the internet? Maybe constructivists are on to something and this is the wave of the future. It would help save hundreds of billions spent on "education."

Politicized math

An outfit called Rethinking Schools opines that being for solid math instruction and against turning math into a political circus is committing a "right-wing" act. Shouting "right-wing" is a poor substitute for an argument.

We think Diane Ravitch and her fellow right-wing pundits have gotten multiculturalism -- and us -- all wrong.

[...]

In June Ravitch penned a Wall Street Journal opinion piece lambasting multicultural approaches to teaching mathematics. And she singled out our new book Rethinking Mathematics for special scorn.

Quoting from the table of contents -- in a manner that suggests she never bothered to read further -- she decried the book for trying to make math education culturally relevant to the children actually being served by U.S. public schools.

Ravitch accused Rethinking Schools -- and math teachers who believe in multiculturalism -- of abandoning academic rigor in favor of "political correctness."

Other right-wing pundits quickly took up Ravitch's chant and Rethinking Mathematics became a lightning rod for right-wing pundits and bloggers. Notably, Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane -- who also seemed content to scan the book's table of contents and read no further -- blasted away at Rethinking Schools and multiculturalism.

Materialist fallacy

Conventional wisdom has it that educational failure is solely due to insufficient funding and can be remedied by pumping more money into the system. Even though many districts would benefit from the infusion of more funds if used wisely, ultimately this conventional wisdom constitutes a misdiagnosis of educational failure. The key culprits for this failure are the curriculum and instructional methods as well as the cultural values of the students and parents.

This point was driven home in spectacular fashion by a multi-billion grand experiment in Kansas City that resulted in abysmal failure:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing
money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more
money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any
other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money
bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such
amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the
black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not
greater, integration.

Tales out of ed school

While going through ed school I had the dubious pleasure of encountering postmodernism and "critical pedagogy" on several occasions. One such occasion was a course required for middle grades endorsement. The only book used in the course was called Affirming Middle Grades Education edited by Carl W. Walley and W. Gregory Gerrick (Allyn and Bacon).

A nebulous title like that does not bode well and indeed the book is about all kinds of things except academic achievement. You'll find chapter headings and topics like Middle Grades Teacher Advisory System (this is big), Interdisciplinary and Interthematic Curriculum Designs (educationists are obsessed with interdisciplinary and thematic units, more often than not contrived), Morally Responsive Teaching, Team Teaching, Community Building...

The weirdest chapter was The Excluded Middle: Postmodern Conceptions of the Middle School. It's couched in thick postmodern jargon and obsessed with "power arrangements". It argues for a "fundamental shift away from the status quo power arrangements. The survival of the planet is at stake." Education must no longer serve "social structures" (whatever that is) and "unjust power arrangements" and embrace a "postmodern vision." The author urges that "society must be the function of education," as John Dewey and George Counts are said to have "insisted". Apparently this means that "the primary focus of education" must be the improvement of society and the creation of a "just, caring and ecologically sustainable community." Middle schools must adopt this vision or students and teachers will never be "empowered".

Schools must move away from "linear organization of curriculum on scope and sequence charts...mastering proficiency in discrete skills...memorizing officially sanctioned information (could the author mean academic subjects?)...accountability...written tests..." The author proclaims that we "have now entered a postmodern era" despite those who cling to "hegemonic schooling structures." Postmodern education "promotes diversity, understanding and a new social imagination with 'multiple points of consent.'"

What should education be about? Condemning "modern power structures." What will be "the hallmark of postmodern learning environments?" You guessed it! "Multiculturalism; eclecticism; cooperative practices; interdisciplinary experiences; community based projects; racial and gender inclusiveness; ecological and spiritual sensibilities; shared power arrangements; just economic structures that support health, nutrition and psychological well-being of all citizens..."

So education is all about welcoming some "structures" and condemning other "structures". The "structures" that education "must be prophetic" in condeming turn out to be, once again, "modern power structures."

I would have liked to learn some specifics about these nefarious "modern power structures," but apparently the author feels they are self-evident and that repeating the phrase endlessly is sufficient. This is odd since these "modern power structures" that education must not serve (how is education serving them now?) are evil incarnate and "have resulted in holocausts, genocide, starvation, ecological destruction, massive poverty, slavery, patriarchal domination, colonization, environmental degradation and other horrors of the twentieth century." They surely deserve to be described in great detail so we can recognize them and stare them in the face en masse.

The author issues this dire warning: "If education does not focus on these issues, then it is complicit in the continuing modern holocausts."

Adopt the ill-defined postmodern stew or you are a criminal!

This is some of the crap prospective teachers must endure to become "certified."

BTW, the author of this chapter is Patrick Slattery, Associate Professor of Education at Texas A&M University where he teaches "curriculum theory" and "foundations in education" among other things.

Mindless middle school games

The Education Wonks have a hair-raising report on the mindless goings-on at a middle school. It seems that middle schoolism is taken to new heights with a dash of social engineering:

Wacky Wednesday: Several times per month, kids participate in a series of activities at lunch time designed to get them even more wired before they come into our afternoon classrooms. Examples include the notorious eat-the-candied necklace-off-a-member-of-the-opposite-sex contest, the raw-egg/ toss, water-balloon slingshot hit-the-kid contest, and Fun With Shaving Cream.

The Monthly Dance: Right after school, our 12-14 year-old students get to spend an hour-and-a-half bumping and grinding (and what they call freak dancing) in a darkened room while teachers and administrators blithely look on. (No parents are ever to be seen.)

And then there are those extra-curricular activities that are tailored to a more specific group of kids:

Annual Turkey Trot: This little time waster contest occurs right after lunch one day during the week before Thanksgiving. While the whole school is watching, our more athletic types run through an obstacle course. Students with the best times are awarded large trophies.

What was once called "The Christmas Mile" then, "The Holiday Mile," and now, "The Winter Mile:" In the week before winter vacation, in the late morning, our student athletes once again get the opportunity to demonstrate their prowess in front of their lesser-fit classmates by running one mile around the school's track. The girls go first, and then the boys. Large trophies are awarded to the winners.

Powder Puff Football Game: This annual throwback spring-time homage to a time of more gender-specific roles innocence features our more popular girls on the field playing flag football while our male athletes perform cheerleading routines in short skirts, falsies, and pom-poms. Again, the entire school gets to watch right after lunch, usually on a Friday afternoon.

There is much more. Read the whole thing.

Middle schoolism

Middle schools are a major target of an anti-intellectual movement dubbed "middle schoolism" that sees middle schools more like a psychiatric ward than a place for academic achievement. In fact, it is hostile to academic achievement.

Now the veil is ripped off the ugly face of middle schoolism in a just-released
major study by the Fordham Foundation.

The study concludes that middle schoolism together with be lingering effects of the bizarre theory of "brain periodization" should be consigned to history's dustbin.

As a teacher of middle graders I know first-hand that early adolescents are perfectly capable of academic achievement and are not the dysfunctional monsters the movement would have us believe they are.

Excerpt from The Education Gladfly:

Fie on Middle Schoolism

If ever an education fad showed dreadful timing, reaching its intellectual and political pinnacle just as lightning struck the mountaintop, it's "middle schoolism." The key year was 1989, when the middle school bible, an influential Carnegie-backed report named Turning Points, was published. It hit just as the governors and then-President Bush gathered in Charlottesville to place the United States squarely astride the standards-based reform that is antithetical to the central message of this education religion.

In the ensuing decade and a half, the National Middle School Association (NMSA) and its acolytes, flying the banner of Turning Points and arguing that the middle grades are no time for academic learning, argued with great success that these schools should be devoted to social adjustment, coping with hormonal throbs, and looking out for the needs of the "whole child."

That is the essence of middle schoolism as set forth in a stunning new Fordham report by Cheri Pierson Yecke. It's a jeremiad drawing upon gobs of evidence that show the middle grades are where U.S. student achievement begins its fateful plunge and where a growing number of other nations begins to outpace us.

You can access the middle school report here.

Semantic fraud

If you thought "multicultural" education had anything to do with learning about different cultures, world history or perhaps languages or an appreciation for , say, Indian food and exotic dances, a leading guru of "multiculturalism" will quickly disabuse you.

It's about something totally different:

The underlying goal of multicultural education is to affect [sic] social change. The pathway toward this goal incorporates three strands of transformation:


the transformation of self;
the transformation of schools and schooling; and
the transformation of society.

Polski3's complaint

Teacher and fellow blogger Polski3 left an interesting comment here on the vast amounts of history that need to be crammed into one year according to the California framework. This necessarily leads to the most suferficial treatment of history topics.

"....Teach the subject matter in depth".

This would be nice. But, here in California (and I am sure many teachers in other states are subjected to this), I have to teach what is mandated by our State Dept. of Ed. via their frameworks.

I am currently teaching Grade 7 History, which, according to the framework, includes the end of the Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, European Middle Ages (including the history and influence of the Christian Church, Medieval life and institutions, the Crusades, the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Age of Reason, Age of Discovery, Age of Revolutions), Survey of Islam and development of Islamic Empire and its Contributions, 'Medieval' African Empires and Cultures, 'Medieval' China and Japan and the major PreColumbian Native cultures of Middle and South America.

This is a ton of material to try to cover with my 175 mostly 11-13 year olds, most of whom did not study early US History in Grade 5 or Ancient History in Grade 6 (also as per State framework) because "they are not tested on social studies" while in grade school. BUT, they are tested on this material in Grade 8.

It would be great to teach some of the above in depth.....especially such personally interesting topics as the Crusades, Black Death, Vikings, Chinese Inventions and Discoveries, the Mongols and their Empire, etc. But I can't teach any of this in depth. I have to 'get through the standards'. They have to be ready for THE TEST.

A much better approach would be to spread out the teaching of history over many grades, beginning in the early grades. But this would run smack into one of the most sacred and pervasive dogmas of progressive/constructivist ideology: the dogma known as expanding horizons and any number of other names. As a result, the early grades are a content-free wasteland as far as the teaching of history (and geography for that matter) is concerned.

This problem is compounded by the lack of history testing in earlier grades.
As Polski3 points out, although the framework requires history in earlier grades it doesn't get taught because "they are not tested on social studies." No tests, no teaching. This points up the need for testing on the one hand and explains educationist hostility to testing on the other. Hostility because it would force educationists to do something they don't want to do: teach content. (Educationist is my shorthand for followers of the progressive/constructivist faith).

From the Fordham Foundation's study called Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?:

The same is true in education, and specifically in the social studies: you have to possess some basic skills and knowledge before you can begin to tackle the higher tasks of analysis and critical thinking. Content knowledge is also the backbone of good teaching. To be effective, pedagogy must begin by identifying the specific knowledge a teacher expects students to learn and establishing clear assessment procedures. Only then can teachers begin to determine how to teach content to their students.

Unfortunately, the delivery of content in elementary social studies is frequently hampered by two popular but misguided theories— "expanding environments" and "constructivism." Both are ineffective because they focus on how social studies should be taught in elementary classrooms rather than on the content knowledge that should be the centerpiece for teaching and learning.

Expanding environments is the basic curriculum that most states, textbook companies, and curriculum leaders use to organize elementary (K-6) social studies, and it has dominated elementary school social studies for nearly 75 years. The basic premise is that at each grade level, each year, students are exposed to a slowly widening social environment that takes up, in turn, self/home (kindergarten), families (1st grade), neighborhoods (2nd), communities (3rd), state (4th), country (5th), and world (6th). While this approach appears to provide an organized curricular sequence, it lacks substantial content, especially in the early elementary grades, and children tend to find its narrow focus deeply boring. In fact, expanding environments actually impedes content knowledge because of its trivial and repetitious sequence. For example, students in grades K-3 are taught about "community helpers" like mail carriers, milkmen, and fire fighters. Such lessons are superfluous (what kindergartener does not know about firefighters?) but more damagingly do not even begin to lay the groundwork for later study of history, heroes, struggles, victories, and defeats. Instead, they limit children's instruction to persons and institutions with which children are already familiar.

Constructivism is a theory that holds that humans learn when they analyze, interpret, create, and construct meaning from experience and knowledge. At its root is a belief that only self-discovered knowledge is understood and remembered. Constructivists believe that students must be self-directed while learning in order to create their own meaningful experiences that will be retained when moving forward in life. While there is no doubt that some worthwhile learning may occur this way, it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve self-created meaning unless specific content knowledge is a prerequisite.

Proponents of both approaches—expanding environments and constructivism—stress the importance of active learning over content knowledge as a necessary component of historical or geographical understanding. Yet just as the chess player needs to know how to move the pieces before he or she can begin the process of mastering chess, the elementary student needs content knowledge as the basis of thinking critically about history, civics, geography, economics, and all the other disciplines that make up the social studies. Content knowledge, we argue, must come first when making teaching and learning decisions.

The importance of domain knowledge

A rich vocabulary and fluency are generally recognized as essential elements required for reading comprehension. Another key element -- domain knowledge -- is getting short shrift under the dominant anti-knowledge ed credo known as progressive/constructivist education. The focus is on fiction and abstract comprehension strategies when endless time is not spent on often trivial hands-on activities and projects.

Let's hope this forthcoming book by E. D. Hirsch will help curtail the prevailing worst practices.

New Book on Reading by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., to Be Called The Knowledge Deficit

Press Release

Charlottesville, VA August 25, 2005 —This March, Houghton Mifflin will publish a new book by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., that will answer questions plaguing educators all across the country. Why do American children fail to perform as well as children in other industrialized countries? Why, after fourth grade, do students experience a slump in reading comprehension? Why, despite federal government spending of a billion dollars a year on the Reading First program, do so many schools fail to meet the goals established by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)?

The book, entitled The Knowledge Deficit, answers these questions not by looking at funding or legislation, but by looking at what children are actually being taught. This, says Hirsch, is where the problem lies. Our children are not learning how to read because they are subjected to a watered-down curriculum that fails to build the background knowledge essential to reading comprehension. Many schools excel at teaching the mechanics of reading, at giving kids the decoding skills they need to make out individual words. However, by fourth grade, students’ deficit in background knowledge trips them up. A steady diet of fictional stories and instruction in abstract thinking skills leaves students starved for facts ─ facts about history, geography, science, literature, mathematics, music, and art. Because of their knowledge deficit, students cannot comprehend the texts they are asked to read in fourth grade and beyond.

Hirsch not only diagnoses the problem with reading in America and explains why students are failing to make adequate yearly progress under NCLB, he also shows how these problems can be corrected. This book builds upon decades of research into school curricula that Hirsch has conducted since his best-selling Cultural Literacy captured the American imagination in the 1980s. The new book is likely to be a bombshell, blasting to smithereens the received ideas of the education school thoughtworld that determine what and how kids are being taught in America today.

Drawing on extensive scholarship and vast knowledge of cognitive psychology, as well as on recent practical experience in school reform, Hirsch points the way out of our current morass, showing educators, policy makers, and parents how we can overcome the achievement gap that leaves poor students, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic, behind. Only by doing this, says Hirsch, can we fulfill the democratic imperative that first drove the creation of America’s public schools.

Force-fed constructivism

In the latest issue of Education Next, Sol Stern describes the tyrannical reign of the B&K regime in NYC. Teachers are being indoctrinated at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to become mindless robots forced to implement whacko educational theories:

As the video opens, Klein announces, “This CD will walk you through the research upon which we based our decisions regarding our program choices.” The implication is that the city’s search for the “best practices” was intellectually serious. Not so. Otherwise, this instructional guide would not be dominated by the pedagogical principles of a radical education guru from Australia named Brian Cambourne, who believes that teachers ought to encourage their students to achieve a “literacy for social equity and social justice.”

Professor Cambourne says he came to his theories when he discovered that many of his poorly performing students were actually quite bright. To his surprise, almost all demonstrated competence at challenging tasks in the real adult world, including poker. This led to the brainstorm that children learn better in natural settings with a minimum amount of adult help. So important does Joel Klein’s education department deem Cambourne’s theories to be that it instructs all city teachers to go through a checklist to make sure their classroom practices meet the down-under education professor’s “Conditions for Learning.” Which of four scenarios most accurately describes how your classroom is set up? teachers are asked. If the teacher can claim “a variety of center-based activities, for purposeful learning using different strategies, and for students to flow as needed,” she can pat herself on the back. But if her classroom is set up “for lecture with rows facing forward,” she must immediately change her practice.

You might ask whether there’s any evidence for such pedagogy. It’s “weak to nonexistent,” according to Reid Lyon, former head of all reading research at the National Institutes of Health. “The philosophical and romantic notion that children learn to read naturally and through incidental exposure to print and literature has no scientific merit whatsoever.”

That hasn’t deterred Chancellor Klein in the least. Constructivist pedagogical guidelines are forced on classroom teachers in weekly “professional development” sessions that are closer to a military boot camp than any serious inquiry into the best classroom practices. No dissent is allowed. Teachers are given lists of “nonnegotiables,” a strange and embarrassing concept for any education enterprise. Thus students must not be sitting in rows. Teachers are forbidden to stand at the head of the class and do “chalk and talk” at the blackboard. There must be a “workshop” (students working in groups) in every single reading period. Teachers are also provided with classroom maps indicating the exact location of the teacher’s desk, the students’ writing stations, and exactly how much of the wall space should be set aside for posting student work. Also nonnegotiable is that every elementary school classroom must have a rug.

Educationists pay lip service to "critical thinking" but any critical thought gets you denounced:

Is it surprising then that Chancellor Klein is facing a revolt from teachers like 13-year veteran Jackie Bennett, from a Staten Island high school? Ms. Bennett’s problem is that she believes it’s not a sin to bring her knowledge of great literature to her students, even if she occasionally lectures. After all, Bennett has a master’s in English literature from Columbia University, exactly the kind of academic attainment we supposedly want more of from our teachers.

“DOE administrators talk about balance,” Ms. Bennett recently wrote in an unpublished letter to the New York Times.

"What they really want is all-group, all the time. What’s more, the message is clear: when we visit your classes and the kids are not in groups, you have one strike against you.

My recent experience at staff development is illustrative of just how clear that message is intended to be. After spending the morning working with my colleagues on a small group activity that entailed busywork that did nothing to further our development as teachers, we returned to a whole-class discussion to briefly assess what we had learned. I raised my hand and asked if there was any research tying group work to better test scores. The answer was no.

My behavior was reported to the Local Instructional Superintendent, and two days later, my assistant principal asked me to forgo attendance at the remaining meetings. I had, it seems, been kicked out of staff development. Had I made a ruckus? No. But I had asked uncomfortable questions. I had thought critically. Though the City’s Department of Education gives lip service to teaching kids to think critically, it is clear they want those critical thinking skills taught by drones."

Crayola curriculum redux

The reading wars between whole languagists and phonics advocates are given considerable attention. But there may be another big reason for poor reading results, especially among the disadvantaged: coloring and more coloring from now until Doomsday is crowding out reading and other instruction. This is the conclusion reached by Mike Schmoker after observing this phenomenon in classroom after classroom:

The ‘Crayola Curriculum’
By Mike Schmoker
Education Week

We may have the reading crisis all wrong. It may have far less to do with the "reading wars" than we presumed. I am convinced that the following explanation is, without doubt, the least recognized but most salient explanation for why there is a reading gap between rich and poor, for why so many kids reach upper-elementary and middle school with less than even minimal ability to read and make sense of text. The explanation is both simple and shocking. But the evidence for it is compelling. Best of all, this explanation holds out enormous hope for dramatic, near-term improvements at every level of education.

A couple of years ago, I found myself touring a school that had received an international award for excellence in staff development. Roaming from class to class—on what was clearly a "showcase day"—I went from being puzzled to astonished by what I saw.

Two things were terribly wrong: One, a majority of students were sitting in small, unsupervised groups, barely, if at all, engaged in what were supposedly learning activities. Many of the children were chatting. Second, but more important, was that the activities themselves seemed to bear no relation whatsoever to reading, the presumed subject being taught at the time. After seeing this pattern in several classes, I finally asked my host what kinds of gains had been made in this award-winning but high-poverty school. I was regretfully informed that there had been no gains, what with the hardships these children faced at home and in their neighborhoods.

...

After a few such tours, I became more convinced that something was truly awry, something more profound than the debates that perennially rage about such matters as phonics vs. whole language. After touring about 50 classrooms in several schools in several states—always with others from that same school or district—I became doubly convinced. I am now up to about 300 classrooms, and the pattern still holds.

What is actually going on during these early-grade reading periods? A number of things, but the activity that overwhelmed all legitimate literacy activities may surprise you. Students were not reading, they weren't writing about what they had read, they weren't learning the alphabet or its corresponding sounds; they weren't learning words or sentences or how to read short texts.

They were coloring. Coloring on a scale unimaginable to us before these classroom tours. The crayons were ever-present. Sometimes, students were cutting or building things out of paper (which they had colored) or just talking quietly while sitting at "activity centers" that were presumably for the purpose of promoting reading and writing skills. These centers, too, were ubiquitous, and a great source of pride to many teachers and administrators. They were great for classroom management—and patently, tragically counterproductive.

None of this is really surprising since non-instruction and hands-on activities are major components of the dominant progressive/constructivist ed ideology.

Content-free "standards"

Kevin Killion of the magnificent illinoisloop site combed through the Illinois Science Standards and made a list of words that are NOT in these so-called "standards". It's all about process. Knowledge is out. This is how constructivism is institutionalized:

The Illinois State Board of Education would have you believe that our official state standards for science education are tough and demanding.

But what could possibly be the point of a science standard that doesn't even mention "mammals", "machine", "electronics", "acid", "radiation", "reptile", "dinosaur", "evolution", "pollution", "oxygen", "organ", "muscle", "brain", "lung", "heart", "smell", "taste", "touch", "skin", "fat", "sugar", "salt", "volcano", "geology", "meteorology", "astronomy", "eclipse", "sunrise" or "sunset"?

Read the entire list at illinoisloop

I have taken the trouble to look at the Illinois Learning Standards for Science. It's pathetic! There is no there there.

The "standards" turn out to be three goals for science education covering the whole gamut from "early elementary" to "late high school." These goals are:

STATE GOAL 11: HAVE A WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF THE PROCESSES OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY AND TECHNOLOGICAL DESIGN TO INVESTIGATE QUESTIONS, CONDUCT EXPERIMENTS AND SOLVE PROBLEMS.

STATE GOAL 12: HAVE A WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS AND PRINCIPLES OF THE LIFE, PHYSICAL, AND EARTH/SPACE SCIENCES AND THEIR CONNECTIONS.

STATE GOAL 13: HAVE A WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTS.

I clicked on the goals to see if any factual knowledge is specified for individual grades. Not at all. No specific grades, no specific knowledge. Instead there is a verb salad of things to do, all in the constructivist mold. It's all about collecting and recording data, constructing charts, identifying a design problem, assessing results, reporting test design, building a prototype, developing a plan, design and procedure, formulating a hypothesis and so on.

Under understanding concepts each item starts with a verb. It's compare, identify, describe, explain, demonstrate ad nauseam.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that the situation is similar in most other states.

Constructivists' secret weapon

I was perusing illinoisloop, one of the most spectacular sites on the Internet devoted to exposing educational lunacy, and came across this delicious tidbit:

o A New York Times article ( Fuzzy Answers: The New, Flexible Math Meets Parental Rebellion) includes this wonderfully delicious look at a Chicago school where Math Trailblazers was used:

The Daniel Boone School, in West Ridge, a tidy working class part of Chicago brightened by magnolia trees and the babushkas of Russian grandmothers, has been a laboratory for the development of TIMS Math Trailblazers, a constructivist program created by the University of Illinois. Math scores have risen since the program was put into effect. The principal, Paul Zavitkovsky, credits the program, but does not rule out increased attention to math, teacher training and collaboration.

In fifth grade the other day, Mila Kell, a Russian immigrant, taught a crisp lesson in probability, improvising riffs on the probability that the sun would rise in the morning and that she would fly to the moon. The class was enchanted.

Mrs. Kell said she loved the freedom and creativity of the new math. But on her desk was a secret weapon: a stack of worksheets -- the antithesis of constructivist math -- pages of classic problems in long division, the addition of fractions and reducing the sum of fractions to its simplest terms.

I suspect this pollution of fuzzy math goes on quite a bit. Teachers might sneak in real math, parents may do real math with their kids (on the kitchen table if necessary) or hire tutors.

Of course, if pupils fed fuzzy stuff test well on real math tests, credit will be given to the fuzzies.

Intelligent Falling Theory

Theory of gravity under attack.

TOPEKA, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.

Schnoz-based learning

At first I thought I was witnessing another instance of Prof. Plum's delicious satirical streak:

As advertised, a NEW (improved) learning style has been added to the ever-growing list (of things that don’t exist)

Olfactory.

* Learns best though the sense of smell and taste [Yeah, lots of kids learn calculus this way. It’s called schnoz-based learning.]
* Smells have a special significance [Is there ANYone for whom this isn’t true?]
* Associates a particular smell with specific past memories [Is there anyone who doesn’t?]
* Is frequently able to identify smells [Is there anyone who CAN’T?]
* Finds that smells add to learning [This is precise! “Finds”… And what exactly do smells add? Smell is pretty much all I can see, or smell.]

I guess this means that teachers who feel obliged to “adapt instruction to each child’s learning styles,” will be shoving things up their students’ noses or letting them taste the pages.

“Look, boys and girls. This is the letter m. It says mmmm. Smell it?”

“Now. let’s examine the Declaration of Independence. All you olfactory learners lick the text a few times to get the flavor of the argument.”

Now I am realizing the modality folks are hurling another stink bomb and are quite serious about schnoz-based learning.

But there is an antidote. Cognitive science is coming to the rescue of the cognitively challenged.

The latest issue of American Educator has an extraordinary article by cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham called Do Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners Need Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Instruction? that throws cold water on one of the educationists favorite fads:

What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn’t affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality. In this column, I will describe some of the research on matching modality strength to the modality of instruction. I will also address why the idea of tailoring instruction to a student’s best modality is so enduring—despite substantial evidence that it is wrong. [Emphasis added]

The "content’s best modality!" That is so commonsensical, and yet must be regarded as a revolutionary insight in today's ed climate. Let's hope this important article drives a stake through the heart of the "learning styles" craze.

Rolling in dough

Today's NYT has a report on the fastastic sums of money poured into the school system by foundations.

According to the Foundation Center, which tracks and analyzes foundation giving, large foundations gave $1.23 billion in grants to elementary and secondary schools in 2003, the latest year for which data is available. That same year, higher education grants totaled $1.12 billion. It was a sharp turnaround from five years earlier, when K-12 grants were about $620 million, compared with $1.07 billion for higher education.

But it is not only the size of the grants that has changed. The nature of the philanthropy has undergone a profound shift.

"A lot of the old philanthropy was devoted to helping schools do what they were already doing," said Richard Lee Colvin, director of the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College at Columbia University. "The new group is saying, 'Let's try something different.' It's a lot of young, active entrepreneurial people - Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons, Dell, Milken - who want to change the schools, who want to use their money to support specific school reforms."

My unsolicited advice to the superrich foundations: Don't pour money into existing school systems. Create your own quality schools. You have a wonderful model you can follow in the Core Knowledge program.

Research on math instruction

This could be a hopeful sign that what was done for reading instruction at the fed level will now be done for math instruction.

Science Magazine reports on a new federal research initiative:

As assistant secretary for vocational and adult education at the Department of Education (ED), Sclafani is championing a $120 million initiative in secondary school mathematics that is built in part on money shifted from the same NSF directorate that funded the Houston grant. The initiative, included in President George W. Bush's 2006 budget request for ED now pending in Congress, will give preference to studies that test the effectiveness of educational interventions in the same way that medical researchers prove the efficacy of a drug. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of new approaches to teaching math, Sclafani says, will help school officials know what works, and they can then scale up the most promising new curricula and teaching methods. "Randomized studies are the only way to establish a causal link between educational practice and student performance," she says.

It's also encouraging that the EHR division of NSF might have less tax money to do damage to math instruction. NSF-EHR is the chief tax-financed promoter of fuzzy math.

The proposed math initiative at ED would be a competitive grants program to prepare students to take Algebra I, a gateway course for the study of higher mathematics and the sciences. Applicants will be encouraged to use RCTs and quasi-experimental designs to measure whether the reform works, Sclafani says. The initiative comes at the same time the Administration has requested a $107 million cut in NSF's $840 million Education and Human Resources (EHR) directorate. The cuts include a phasing out of NSF's portion of the $240 million Math/Science Partnership program...

See here for more on NSF-EHR's role in promoting fuzzy math.

David Klein, a math professor at California State University Northridge, has identified NSF-EHR as the institution that has done the most damage to math education:

The principal funding source of fuzzy math for the past decade has been the federal government by way of the Education and Human Resources (EHR) division of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The EHR is the directorate within the NSF that funds K-12 education projects. No single institution in the United States has caused more damage to the mathematical education of children than this low-profile bureaucratic unit of the National Science Foundation. The damage that the EHR has caused, and continues to cause, contrasts sharply with the NSF's overall admirable and important role in supporting fundamental scientific research.

Celebrating academic excellence

High schools are not all dismal. They can be places of extraordinary achievement.

It’s refreshing that not only athletes get all the attention. Students who write exemplary history essays have a place to get recognized and published -- in The Concord Review. The Concord Review believes “that the pursuit of academic excellence in secondary schools should be given the same attention as the pursuit of excellence in extracurricular activities…” What a great departure from the jock culture!

The result is a wide range of essays on historical topics as this selection of sample essays indicates.

Here you can learn about the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918, Kerensky and Kornilov, and Spanish fascism among many other topics.

I was particularly intrigued by AN INQUIRY INTO THE DEMISE OF THE TEMPLARS by Michelle Mann

Here are the opening lines:

Circa 1310, 113 knights, belonging to one of the most
powerful military religious Orders of the 12th and 13th centuries,
were slowly burned at the stake in Paris. Others were put to the
torch in Lorraine and Normandy.1 The Knights Templar were
charged with heresy, sodomy, denunciation of Christ, having vows
which put the benefit of the Order before morality, cat and idol
worship, and other various sins. Those who were not burned were
sentenced to life in prison,2 or during England’s more lenient
trials, life in a monastery.3

Intelligent design

The New Republic (subscription required) has come out with a huge article written by a University of Chicago professor debunking Intelligent Design. A must read for those who don't want to see science overrun by superstition.

ID supporters try to get mileage out of the ambiguity of "theory" arising from the different conceptions of "theory" by laypeople and scientists.

This excerpt should shed some light on the scientific meaning of "theory":

Intelligent design, or ID, is the latest pseudoscientific incarnation of religious creationism, cleverly crafted by a new group of enthusiasts to circumvent recent legal restrictions. ID comes in two parts. The first is a simple critique of evolutionary theory, to the effect that Darwinism, as an explanation of the origin, the development, and the diversity of life, is fatally flawed. The second is the assertion that the major features of life are best understood as the result of creation by a supernatural intelligent designer. To understand ID, then, we must first understand modern evolutionary theory (often called "neo-Darwinism" to take into account post-Darwinian modifications).

It is important to realize at the outset that evolution is not "just a theory." It is, again, a theory and a fact. Although non-scientists often equate "theory" with "hunch" or "wild guess," the Oxford English Dictionary defines a scientific theory as "a scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts." In science, a theory is a convincing explanation for a diversity of data from nature. Thus scientists speak of "atomic theory" and "gravitational theory" as explanations for the properties of matter and the mutual attraction of physical bodies. It makes as little sense to doubt the factuality of evolution as to doubt the factuality of gravity.

Postmodern obscurantism and the call for multiple perspectives in education are making it easier for creeds like ID to succeed, as I teasingly tried to tell another blogger.

Teaching multiple perspectives is now all the rage in edland.
Multiple perspectives puts you on the cutting edge of
multicultural education. Besides, real science is so terribly
Eurocentric and marginalizes non-dominant groups.

See for yourself what the cutting edge has to say:

The curriculum of the mainstream is Eurocentric and male-centric. It fully ignores the experiences, voices, contributions, and perspectives of non-dominant individuals and groups in all subject areas. All educational materials including textbooks, films, and other teaching and learning tools present information in a purely Eurocentric, male-centric format. This stage is harmful for both students who identify with mainstream culture as well as individuals from non-dominant groups. It has negative consequences for the former because, according to Banks (1993) it:

UPDATE:
Bush, to his credit, finds no evidence of intelligent design in schools, reports ScrappleFace:

(2005-08-04) -- Entering the debate over the teaching of origins for the first time, President George Bush today said he sees "no evidence of intelligent design in America's public schools."

"A lot folks claim that the public school system is irreducibly complex, so there must have been an intelligent designer," said Mr. Bush, "But I believe our public schools advance by mutation and random chance. They have evolved into an unwieldy beast with an insatiable appetite."

The president, a professed Christian, said his only hope for a better future in American education rests on his faith in "the survival of the fittest."

Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs

Ed PhD

What it takes to write a dissertation in education and become an ed professor.
The case of Paul Gorski..

Sampling:

Racial and Gender Identity Development in White Male
Multicultural Educators and Facilitators:
Toward Individual Processes of Self-development

by Paul Gorski
University of Virginia
April 1998

© Copyright by
Paul C. Gorski
All Rights Reserved
May 1998


CHAPTER ONE


BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE


Background


I am a white male multicultural awareness facilitator.

As such, I facilitate activities and discussions focused on

multicultural issues and identifiers including race,

ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class,

ability status, and religion. In these forums, I request

that individuals describe from their personal experience

what it means to be "female," "Jewish," "Latino," or other

identification descriptors. It is through facilitating the

exchange of these experiences and perspectives and

advocating for the introspective process of exploring them

that I work to build an atmosphere conducive to

introspection, self-development, and increased awareness of

a discussion's participants.

Rogues and rugs

It must be fun to be teaching under the dreadful Bloomberg & Klein regime in NYC. I can't figure out what so-called "balanced literacy" (another name for whole language) has to do with sitting cross-legged on rugs and limiting lessons to five minutes.

From the New York Times (By the Script by Sewell Chan):

In many New York City public schools, children sit cross-legged on rugs. Desks must be arranged into clusters of students with varying abilities, not in rows. A ''word wall'' serves as a vocabulary reference. Lessons last five minutes.

All of the above are elements of the city's ''balanced literacy'' curriculum, and it has newly minted college graduates, bursting with ideas about shaping young lives, complaining about a disconnect.

''It's not up to you what to teach every day,'' says Christian A. Ledesma, 25, who has taught for three years at Public School 9 in the Bronx, in second and fourth grades. He joined Teach for America in 2002, a year before the introduction of the curriculum, and earned his master's degree in elementary education through evening classes at Pace University. There, he learned about backward design, which emphasizes teaching with the end result -- knowledge of state reading or math standards -- in mind.

But in his classroom, he was not designing anything; instead, he was following the balanced literacy script. In a 90-minute period, actual imparting of knowledge was restricted to a lesson as short as five minutes. Then pupils broke into small groups for independent guided work, and reconvened to share their efforts. School administrators made unannounced visits to ensure that teachers were using their rugs and abiding by the ''flow of the day'' schedule posted in each classroom.

To avoid being caught if they did not follow the schedules, some teachers began ''actually training their kids to switch subjects on command,'' Mr. Ledesma says. ''They can be doing a reading lesson, and if somebody walks through the door, all of a sudden they're doing the writing lesson.''

Carnival time

Entries for the 27th edition of The Carnival Of Education are due TONIGHT (Tuesday) by 10:00 PM. (Eastern) 7:00 (Pacific). Send all submissions to owlshome [at] earthlink [dot] net.

I hope owlshome doesn't scare away anybody.

From Diane Ravitch's Items Deleted from a Doomed Fourth-Grade Reading Test

No More Owls
The passage about owls was like a children’s encyclopedia entry. It described how their keen eyesight and hearing enabled them to hunt at night for rodents. When I saw that this passage was rejected, I imagined that it was because of the violence associated with hunting (although that’s how the owl survives). I was wrong. The passage was rejected because a Native-American member of the bias committee said that owls are taboo for the Navajos. Consequently, the entire committee agreed that the passage should be dropped. The test publisher added a notation that the owl is associated with death in some other cultures and should not be mentioned anymore, neither in texts nor in illustrations.

Here is a classic problem presented by today’s bias and sensitivity review process. If any cultural group attributes negative connotations to anything, or considers it taboo or offensive, then that topic will not be referred to, represented, described, or illustrated on tests. But owls exist. They are real birds. They are not creatures of the imagination. Nevertheless, to avoid giving offense, the tests will pretend that owls don’t exist. Owls are to be deleted and never again mentioned to the highly vulnerable and sensitive American schoolchild.

Expunging utopians

In its review of Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police, the yale review of books describes how many words have taken on a different meaning after what it perceives as an “educational revolution.”

So it is with the word “bias”:

Now “bias” is used to mean the appearance of any idea or term that references a specific aspect of a non-utopian society in any educational material. Under this bloated definition, anything that could potentially offend anyone must be excised from textbooks and standardized tests.

Anything that is particular and distinctive could thus be regarded as offensive. Only blandness will do. Have the expungers considered that some people might find blandness offensive?

This zeal to expunge “bias” from textbooks and tests sometimes has hilarious, if bizarre, results.

In these excerpts in American Educator, Diane Ravitch relates how the most unlikely topics were considered offensive by a bias and sensitivity review panel and excised from a reading test. For example, in what amounts to a falsification of history, the panel “rejected a passage about patchwork quilting by women on the western frontier in the mid-19th century.” Social classes could not be shown to exist in ancient Egypt, owls had to vanish (offensive and frightening to some). A black girl could not be portrayed as weak in math even though another black girl aced it.

In another passage, a blind man could not be portrayed as having overcome incredible odds. It turns out that blindness cannot be regarded as a disability:

The Blind Mountain Climber

One of the stranger recommendations of the bias and sensitivity panel involved a true story about a heroic young blind man who hiked to the top of Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America. The story described the dangers of hiking up an icy mountain trail, especially for a blind person. The panel voted 12-11 to eliminate this inspiring story. First, the majority maintained that the story contained "regional bias" because it was about hiking and mountain climbing, which favors students who live in regions where those activities are common. Second, they rejected the passage because it suggested that people who are blind are somehow at a disadvantage compared to people who have normal sight--that they are "worse off" and have a more difficult time facing dangers than those who are not blind.

"Regional bias," in this instance, means that children should not be expected to read or comprehend stories set in unfamiliar terrain. A story that happened in a desert would be "biased" against children who have never lived in a desert, and a story set in a tropical climate would be biased against those who have never lived in a tropical climate. Consider the impoverishment of imagination that flows from such assumptions: No reading passage on a test may have a specific geographical setting; every event must occur in a generic locale. Under these assumptions, no child should be expected to understand a story set in a locale other than the one that he or she currently lives in or in a locale that has no distinguishing characteristics.

Even more peculiar is the assumption by the panel’s majority that it is demeaning to applaud a blind person for overcoming daunting obstacles, like climbing a steep, icy mountain trail. It is not unreasonable, I believe, to consider blindness to be a handicap for a person facing physical danger. By definition, people who are blind cannot see as much or as well as people who have sight. Is it not more difficult to cope with dangerous situations when one cannot see? Yet, perversely, the bias and sensitivity panel concluded that this story celebrating a blind athlete’s achievements and his heroism was biased against people who are blind. Blindness, apparently, should be treated as just another personal attribute, like the color of one’s hair or one’s height. In the new meaning of bias, it is considered biased to acknowledge that lack of sight is a disability.

Competition works

Proving that discovery learning can sometimes work, a school district discovers the role of schools to lure back pupils. In a sane educational world, teaching at least how to read, write and do math would be taken for granted. Of course, discovering science, history, geography and foreign languages would also be desirable.

In an ed world in which educational lunacy is the dominant mode, such a development must be celebrated as big news.

WEST PHOENIX - The Cartwright Elementary School District was once considered one of the fastest-growing areas in west Phoenix.

But the district seems to have peaked at about 20,000. The challenge now, administrators say, is to retain that enrollment number despite competition from charter, parochial or other public schools outfitted with special magnet or traditional programs.

To help do that, the district has started a new traditional school at Palm Lane Elementary. The Pride Program, as it's called, is designed for 96 sixth-graders. It will focus on the basic instructions of reading, writing and math, and students should expect a challenge, said Principal Richard Mauran.

Via EducationNews.org

Engaging hands-on learning activities

A potentially helpful provision in NCLB is government-funded after-school tutoring. But how much real learning can take place if tutoring becomes more fun and games? I've tutored middle grades math and saw that students can made progress when they put in the effort and try to understand math concepts and work out problems with explanations, modeling and guidance provided by the teacher/tutor as needed. In other words, engagement with the subject matter.

I saw this ad for tutors that makes me worry that constructivism is once again rearing its ugly head in an area that could otherwise be an alternative to the usual practices.

Brain Hurricane is an approved Supplemental Educational Service (SES) provider. We are looking to hire instructors to tutor small groups (5 students at a time) of students in an after-school program. Tutors would go to a school during after-school hours and spend two hours per day working with a group.

Our tutoring program uses fun and engaging hands-on learning activities. Students enjoy working with their hands, interacting with teammates, and learning important math and reading skills in a way that is very different from the normal school day.

Constructivists believe that students learn by "working with their hands". For some subjects like math they must also be working with their brains. Not all academic subject matter is reducible to working with one's hands. For example, can you learn history solely through "fun and engaging hands-on learning activities" or would you have to pick up a book at some time?

See here for more on the hands-on mania. and here for a superb article on trivial activities.

MAZE Craze

When I went through ed school, I was exposed to the MAZE craze. I suspect it is more WL mumbo-jumbo. (With MAZE every nth word is omitted in a text. Pupils must guess the missing word).

At ed school we were asked to apply MAZE in a clinical setting to determine the pupils’ supposed reading level. Since the MAZE method is based on false premises, the results are suspect. Harm is done if these questionable results are used to determine reading levels. I say harm because pupils can read at a higher level than MAZE would indicate.

An article on reading myths mentions a study that shows the false premises on which MAZE is based.

Excerpt from the reading myths article:

Myth #5 Skilled reading involves using syntactic and semantic cues to “guess” words, and good readers make many “mistakes” as they read authentic text.

Research indicates that both of these claims are quite wrong, but both are surprisingly pervasive in reading instruction. The idea that good readers use context cues to guess words in running text comes from a method of assessment developed by Ken Goodman that he called “miscue analysis” (which has given rise to the popular “running records” assessments). For his dissertation, Goodman examined the types of mistakes that young readers make, and drew inferences about the strategies they employ as they read. He noticed that the children in his studies very often made errors as they read, but many of these errors did not change the meaning of the text (e.g. misreading “rabbit” as “bunny”). He surmised that the reason must be that good readers depend on context to predict upcoming words in passages of text. He further suggested that for good readers, these context cues are so important that the reader only needs to occasionally “sample” from the text (i.e. look at the words on the page) to confirm the predictions. Children who struggle to sound out words, Goodman says, are over-depending on the letter / word cues, and need to learn to pay more attention to the semantic and syntactic cues.

Goodman’s model, that eventually gave rise to the “Three Cueing Systems” model of word recognition, is very influential in reading instruction, but unfortunately, it has never been supported by research evidence.

In fact, repeated studies have shown that only poor readers depend upon context to try to “guess” words in text. Good readers depend heavily upon the visual information contained in the words themselves (i.e. the letter / word cues) to quickly and automatically identify the word. Keith Stanovich has been especially critical of the three cueing systems model because the predictions made by the model are exactly the opposite of what has been observed in research studies.

Philip Gough and I addressed the second claim and showed that, in fact, good readers almost never make any mistakes at all when they read, which means the notion of conducting a “miscue analysis” is somewhat suspect. How can you perform a miscue analysis when there are typically no miscues? We had over 400 college students read a passage of text from Ken Goodman’s book Phonics Phacts, and showed that the modal number of mistakes made by these students was zero. Almost all of the students read the passage flawlessly. To suggest that good readers are correctly guessing the words in the passage with one-hundred percent accuracy stretched the boundaries of credulity.

However, to be sure, we examined how accurate people would be if they were forced to use semantics and context as their only cues. We concealed the passage of text and asked our college students to guess each of the words in the passage one at a time; after each guess, the correct word was revealed, and students were asked to guess the next word. This process was repeated for every word in the passage, so the students always knew the words leading up to the unknown word. We found that, given unlimited time to ponder, students were able to correctly guess one out of ten content words in the passage. That’s a ninety percent failure rate, as opposed to the zero percent failure rate seen in skilled readers who were not forced to make guesses based on context.

It is clear that good readers depend very heavily upon the visual information contained in the word for word identification (what is commonly called the graphemic information or orthographic information). The semantic and syntactic information is critical for comprehension of passages of text, but they do not play an important role in decoding or identifying words. Good readers make virtually no mistakes as they read because they have developed extremely effective and efficient word identification skills that do not depend upon semantics/context or syntax. For good readers, word identification is fast, fluent, and automatic. It needs to be so that their attention can be fully focused on using semantics and syntax to comprehend the text.

Fun with Edspeak

Check out this Educational Jargon Generator to tap a rich source of impressive-sounding ed phrases. You can dazzle your friends with phrases like "revolutionize problem-based curriculum integration." Or how about "synergize cooperative critical thinking" or if that won't do try "integrate mission-critical pedagogy."

Pensée unique

This report from a past National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference reveals the near-totalitarian mentality of the crowd that dominates this nebulous field. There is no reason to believe that anything has changed.

Throughout the conference, in plenary and small-group sessions alike, conspiracy theories abounded. To NCSS members, at least, the vast right-wing conspiracy is alive and thriving. Apparently their definition of “radical right wing” now includes anyone who advocates school choice, standards and accountability, alternative teacher certification, or other such reforms. Moreover, such “reformers” and policy makers are all part of a political conspiracy to undermine public education. I encountered precisely one person who could actually articulate what he thought the conspiracy was; everyone else settled for the simplistic assertion that “politics” is driving these unwelcome reforms.

The conspiracy, insisted one NCSS member whose name I didn’t catch, is driven by right-wing ideologues who use testing, standards, and accountability to set public schools up for failure. Then they’ll be able to divert public funding to private schools. The notion that these “ideologues” might just want what’s best for kids was rejected on its face as preposterous.

Were I a conspiracy theorist, however, I now have enough information to conclude the opposite: that the education establishment in general, and the NCSS in particular, are working energetically to shut down the kind of dissent and debate that makes effective reforms possible. Consider, for example, that while NCSS leaders discussed and denounced Fordham’s recent publication Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? at more than one session, they didn’t invite a single author, editor, Fordham staffer, or really anyone who disagrees with the status quo to engage in debate.

But it gets worse. The self-styled “Contrarians,” a tiny band of teachers and ed school professors within NCSS who believe that social studies urgently needs an overhaul, have tried for two years to get a session at the NCSS annual wingding. In 2002, though ostensibly granted a session, it was conveniently left off the program and thus couldn’t meet. This year, though their session was listed on the program, NCSS conveniently double-booked the room. So the Contrarians scrambled to find an empty room with no help from NCSS (and minimal help from the hotel). After two tries, they finally found a spot and were able to proceed on their own, no thanks to the NCSS.

A small group attended, including a hostile NCSS past president and a current board member. A few of the authors of Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? presented their arguments, then opened the floor for discussion--a real one that included debate of hotly contested issues, something that I had not seen in any other NCSS session. During this debate, however, I was amazed by the mean, ad hominem, and insulting nature of the comments from the social studies establishment. Though the NCSS board member said that a more “productive” way to air these matters would be for the Contrarians to hold a general session where they presented their ideas and brought in opponents who could debate the pros and cons, in fact NCSS for years now has refused to give the Contrarians any room at their conference, let alone a large room to hold a general session and debate.

The theme of this year’s conference was: “The power of one: How to make a difference in a changing world.” Based on the efforts of the NCSS elite to promote a one-sided look at social studies education while stifling all attempts to question the status quo, I can only conclude that they truly believe in the power of one--and fear that permitting even a single voice of dissent might put at risk the enormous influence they have over the field of social studies.

Sparkling quackery

The Gates foundation keeps pouring money into the small-schools project. Even though small schools are an attractive notion, they are of little use if the curriculum and instruction are rotten. Small schools also seem to attract activists with political agendas.

I found this ad seeking math teachers for a sparkling new small school in Chicago (excerpt):

The Multicultural Arts School, an exciting, innovative new arts integrated high school that will be opening in September in the Little Village Lawndale High School Campus needs math teachers! We are looking for dedicated, creative professionals to teach the IMP math program in our brand new, state of the art, community based school. You will have the best of all facilities and resources and you will be a member of an incredible, talented, innovative, and challenging team.

What caught my eye is that this "exciting" new school wants to use the dreadful, constructivist IMP math program. IMP, which stands for Interactive Mathematics Program, has been thoroughly denounced by mathematicians, including by Bastiaan J. Braams who calls it the "most degenerate of all mathematics programs."

Sparkling new buildings and the "best of all facilities and resources" are going to be for naught if the curriculum and instructional practices -- the soul of a school -- follow educational quackery and are corrupted. It reminds me of Matthew's admonition which could be adapted to the situation with some modification: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

Algebra through literature

When learning algebra gets too tiring, you can always brighten up your day through fun literature. Here is ENC with a slew of suggestions but will this make kids more proficient?

Exploring math outside the "math textbook box" can make math interesting and different in charming ways for students and teachers. This is fairly easy to do in the elementary grades. There are a number of excellent books for younger students (two favorites come to mind immediately--Sir Cumference and the Round Table and Counting on Frank), and students love them. But obvious curriculum links with literature get slimmer in mathematics in later grades even though literature is still a good way to engage student interest and expand learning. Here we are highlighting books with mathematics that should be accessible to students who are studying either algebra or geometry--there is no higher math to scare students! Our goal is to offer ideas for teaching mathematics using books and stories that should interest young teens.

I am all in favor of fun and making connections but I am afraid there is no substitute for hard work.

The fiction and nonfiction books we feature offer a different approach to thinking about mathematics. The books explore mathematics as part of today's world and as part of history. A literature approach can offer ways to look at current issues (see 200% of Nothing) or to explore a little math history (see the reprinted 1919 classic Number Stories of Long Ago).

We also suggest three literary works that may seem unusual for a math class, but they were selected for their easy-to-find mathematics and an enjoyable story to read. You can access them online--the latest format for these classic stories:

"The Priory School," The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle--available in book form and on the web: http://www.bakerstreet221b.de/canon/prio.htm
"The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson--available in book form and on the web: http://mbhs.bergtraum.k12.ny.us/cybereng/shorts/lotry.html
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift--available in book form and on the web: http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/contents.html

Pugilist match

There is a long, civilized (contrary to what my pun might imply) and enlightening debate going on at Kitchen Table Math about a math professor's discovery and use of a new-fangled (but really same old hat) method called POGIL (Process Guided-Inquiry Learning).

NSF-funded POGIL promises to extend constructivism to higher education. Reading POGIL's description of itself makes it clear that it is the same constructivist boilerplate so nauseatingly familiar to those who had the misfortune to be dragged through ed school.

"Recent developments in cognitive learning theory as well as results of classroom research suggest that most students experience improved learning when they are actively engaged and when they are given the opportunity to construct their own knowledge. These results counter the widespread misapprehension that effective teaching must be instructor-centered, involving the transfer of content directly from the expert (professor) to the novice (student). More "student-centered" approaches to learning are based on the premises that students will learn better when: they are actively engaged and thinking in class; they construct knowledge and draw conclusions by analyzing data and discussing ideas; they learn how to work together to understand concepts and solve problems; and the instructor serves as a facilitator to assist students in the learning process."

As the math professor discusses at his own site and in this debate, he finds useful elements in the method. But is his approach still POGIL?

Kitchen Table Math is a lively site I am addicted to. I highly recomend it.