Victims of fuzzy math?

A Kentucky couple, both blond rednecks, had 9 children. They went to the doctor to see about getting the husband "fixed". The doctor gladly started the required procedure and asked them what finally made them make the decision--why after nine children, would they choose to do this.

The husband replied that they had read in a recent article that one out of every ten children being born in the United States was Mexican, and they didn't want to take a chance on having a Mexican baby because neither of them could speak Spanish.

Reading scandal (LC vs. UC)

I found this curious item in Education News about the purported Reading First scandal. It appears that the Inspector General findings did not distinguish between "direct instruction" as an instructional method and "Direct Instruction" as a commercial product. Could the real scandal be an inability to distinguish between lower case and upper case on the part of OIG?

Two of the major findings dealt with what the Inspector General considered to be "stacking" of the panels with people who were advocates of Direct Instruction programs." Although not required, the Department developed a process to screen expert review panelists for conflicts of interest; however, the Department's process was not effective. We identified six panelists whose resumes revealed significant professional connections to a teaching methodology that requires the use of a specific reading program" (page 4).The conclusion drawn by Inspector General (see page 17 for documentation that the specific methodology was direct instruction) seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the difference between: 1) a general teaching methodology (direct instruction) that incorporates systematic and explicit teaching and is incorporated into a growing number of instructional programs targeting at-risk populations and 2) a specific group of commercial programs referred to as Direct Instruction programs.

Not following through on PFT

This article discusses how the most extensive study of instructional programs ever conducted was ignored by the ed establishment. The findings did not sit well with cherished educationist notions.

Don't let them TERC you around

Linda Moran advises a handwringing dad on afterschooling. It's a measured and thoughtful response well worth reading, albeit a tad too measured for my taste.

The fearful dad writes:

Our two children (daughter - grade 4 and son - grade 1) attend a mostly wonderful private school. I say mostly wonderful because parents have been unhappy with the Math programs there for a while.

This Fall the school announced that they would be adopting TERC later in the year (apparently there is a new version of the TERC curriculum that they are waiting for). I am afraid that this will make matters worse, not better.

Our daughter is very bright; she is particularly strong in reading, writing and languages. My concern is not performance, but rather her attitude. She finds math frustrating and is learning to dislike the subject. This for a kid who otherwise loves school so much she can't wait for summer vacation to end. She prefers book stores to toy stores. You get the idea.

It's tragic that fuzzy math not only cheats children but also makes them hate "math". I would say that the academic well-being of one's children comes first and that concerns over hurting the feelings of educationists shouldn't enter the picture.

It's also remarkable that people pay for private schools only to have them feed fuzzy math to their children.

Math homework

Weapons of Math Destruction has a collection of hilarious cartoons on the fuzzy math plague.






Lots of useful information on the math wars at this companion site.

Dead horses and educationists

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, the educational establishment often tries other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Saying things like "This is the way we always have ridden this horse."
4. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
5. Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
6. Appointing a committee to study the dead horse.
7. Waiting for the horse's condition to improve from this temporary downturn.
8. Providing additional training to increase riding ability.
9. Passing legislation declaring "This horse is not dead."
10. Blaming the horse's parents.
11. Acquiring additional dead horses for increased speed.
12. Declaring that "No horse is too dead to beat."
13. Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance.
14. Commissioning a study to see if private contractors can ride it cheaper.
15. Removing all obstacles in the dead horse's path.
16. Taking bids for a state-of-the art dead horse.
17. Declaring the horse is "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
18. Revising the performance requirements for horses.
19. Saying the horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
20. Raising taxes (any excuse will do).
21. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position

Tutoring charade

One of the NCLB provisions calls for tutoring students after school. "Tutoring" may have a specific meaning in the minds of lawmakers but leads to a travesty when not nailed down in the law. In bureaucratese, "tutoring" as demanded by the law is known as Supplemental Educational Services (SES). It turns out that "tutoring" can mean anything private SES companies -- many of which are raking in big bucks in mass operations -- wish it to mean.

Here is an example of a SES company advertising for "tutors" in the Chicago area:

Tutor 6th grade students in math and reading...

[...]

We provide all materials and curriculum. The curriculum is hands-on and utilizes multiple intelligences. Students love it! Students learn math and reading by solving mysteries, playing games, acting out plays, and doing art projects. The program makes learning and teaching fun!

I think it takes more than "solving mysteries, playing games, acting out plays, and doing art projects" to become proficient in math. Once again, the disadvantaged who are supposed to benefit from the law are being short-changed. Nobody in officialdom seems to be watching.

Reading scandal

Formidably prolific Ken DeRosa of D-ED RECKONING has done a yeoman's job dissecting (in multiple installments) the purported Reading First scandal which, by all appearances, is a pseudo-scandal.

The intent of the law was to fund reading programs with a scientific research base and to weed out fashionable but worthless whole-language programs. OIG is barking up the wrong tree.

Fuzzy math behemoth cracking?

Could the fuzzy math steamroller be showing signs of sputtering?

Teens and Tweens, a site devoted to "understanding-based" math education that gratifyingly beats TERC over the head, cites a letter from a math teacher in Detroit who reports that Detroit's public schools have jettisoned CMP (a widely used fuzzy math program for the middle grades) in favor of a more traditional program:

"The Detroit Public Schools have replaced CMP with normal textbooks from Holt-Reinhart-Winston. The first group of students to have CMP throughout all 3 middle school years (6-8) had horrible standardized test scores. Someone finally got wise. The new textbooks seem OK. I will, however, continue to teach students rather than a curriculum."

However, the last sentence is somewhat mysterious. What could this teacher be teaching the students if not a curriculum? The phrase harkens back to one of the progressive ed dicta: “teach the child, not the subject.”

How about teaching the child the subject?

Deep understanding

When learning operations with integers you could just memorize (rote learning?) that a negative number times a negative number is positive or you could go for deep understanding as presented by Dr.Frank Wang of Saxon fame.
This is a brief excerpt of a much longer explanation:

Using the field axioms, we can prove a variety of things that you likely take for granted such as

–(–a) = a

– (a + b) = – a + (– b)

and a x 0 = 0 x a = 0

Now, we finally get to the crux of our explanation (the same explanation as above). In a field, the distributive property must hold. That is, if a, b and c are real numbers, then

a x (b + c) = a x b + a x c

and

(b + c) x a = b x a + c x a

The distributive property ties together the different operations of addition and multiplication.

Now, we replace a, b and c with -1, 1 and -1 respectively.

That is,

(-1) x (1 + (-1)) = (-1) x (1) + (-1)x(-1)

On the left hand side we see that 1 + (-1) is equal to 0 since any number plus its additive identity is equal to 0. Any number multiplied by 0 is 0 (this can be proven from the axioms for a field). Therefore, replacing the lefthand side with 0, we get

0 = (-1) x (1) + (-1) x (-1)

Since any number times 1, the multiplicative identity, is itself, we can further simplify this equation to get:

0 = –1 + (–1) x (–1)

We now need to figure out what (–1) x (–1) is. Since a number added to its additive inverse is 0, (–1) x (–1) must equal the additive inverse of –1. This is simply 1 so

(–1) x (–1) = 1

Sometimes memorization comes in handy.

Reflecting on reflection

Let us reflect on our reflections about reflecting.

Helpful acronym

A veteran teacher identifies patterns of how educational fads come and go:

1. They start out with an inital flurry of interest/activity, often based on the results of "recent studies" or surveys. We have to listen to the "experts" and keep track of the data they provide.
2. This is followed by a few people (usually someone in an "influential" position... not "just a teacher") in the district attending some sort of workshop/training to become an "expert" in this new approach.
3. This person often arranges to fly in some kind of "national guru" for an inspirational talk.
4. Interest spreads throughout the district thanks to a multitude of workshops/trainings on this great new approach.
5. Everyone signs up (not always willingly), takes the courses, and immediately starts using the "latest vocabulary" wherever they go.
6. Camraderie develops. Jargon abounds.
7. The new approach is tried in classrooms, with mixed results, but mostly bordering on "not so great."
8. There is reluctance to admit that this great new approach may not be all that it's cracked up to be.
9. Early adopters feel guilty and blame themselves ("I must not be implementing it properly," or "Maybe I don't have enough training.")
10. Interest wanes. Workshops become fewer and fewer. Jargon is used less and less.
11. Go to Step 1.

The site also has a collection of ed jargon under a section called Mechanisms to Advance New Understanding for Renewal in Education. As an acronym, this phrase spells MANURE.

Now even the kiddies are being taught ed jargon, as this Washington Post article shows.

Yeah, first we'll do SSR, then we'll do a constructed response!

Contraband textbooks

Homeschoolers suffered a setback when ebay banned textbooks for teachers and solution manuals from its site. Textbooks are joining a long list of prohibited items on ebay like illegal drugs, reports WND.

A new policy by Internet trading behemoth eBay that bans homeschool teachers' texts from its auctions is prompting a tirade of complaints from the company's faithful customers.

Surely, institutions shouldn't have a monopoly on acquiring these instructional materials.

Ed pablum masquerading as visions

This writer decries a "crisis of ignorance" but I am afraid his prescriptions will lead to more ignorance.

I also find it hilarious that an artificial marker like the turn of a century is said to make the world "unrecognizable".

Anyone who has read Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat" or seen Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" knows that our times are radically different than they were even 10 years ago. Our children and the "yet to be born" are inheriting a world and way of living that is becoming unrecognizable. The awesome power and potential of the Internet and the new technology being created is transforming how we communicate and collaborate while at the same time we are on a collision course with destructive environmental issues the results of which are impossible to calculate.I'm reminded of Buckminster Fuller's words, "There is no environmental crisis, or food crisis, or energy crisis. There is a crisis of ignorance." As an educator, those words are disturbing. Why are we so ignorant? What is it about our approach to education and our way of living on this planet that has caused this crisis?

Apparently, the way to overcome ignorance is less emphasis on knowledge and more failed progressive ed practices.

Equally disturbing is our approach to education does not consider how the brain works and how people actually learn. Why do so many children lose their uniqueness and joy of learning? For many students, it's the extra-curricular activities - music, theater, sports - that excite and fully engage students. These activities bring out the best in young people and foster important skills - the ability to collaborate and commit to a high quality performance - to do their best. Students choose these activities and I'm convinced that if students had more choice in what they learned and classes were more project- and problem-based, more experiential and hands-on, students would develop the essential skills for the 21st century. In other words, the three Rs would be replaced by the three Cs - creative problem solving, collaboration and communication - integrating the basic skills in deeper, more relevant learning experiences. New models for schools are being created around the country. Hi-Tech High in San Diego and spin-offs of that school are being developed. The Met and Big Picture Schools developed in Providence are also being replicated. Thirty Project Based Learning Schools under the EdVisions network have opened around the country. The Great Maine Schools Project is working at "reinventing the American High School" - all of these attempts are being funded by the Gates Foundation. At present, however, most schools still follow an obsolete Industrial Age model. The NCLB legislation is emphasizing skills that are being learned through drill rather than developing those skills through relevant learning experiences that prepare young people for the 21st century.

Parents fight back

I came across this parent group site in Penfield. The parents are concerned about fuzzy math in their schools. This list of observations neatly encapsulates what's wrong with the fuzzy math plague:

Penfield parents have noticed several problems relative to the new math programs. Some of the most common problems and observations are noted below. Skip to the bottom of the list to see some of the more recent observations noted since parents have turned up the heat on the district:

Students are receiving high grades on their report cards, but they don't seem to exhibit appropriate math skills for their grade level.

Children are no longer being taught basic math facts. Students lack skills in division, multiplication, fractions etc...

Calculators are too widely used and kids are losing their ability to perform simple arithmetic without their calculators.

There is too much group work. Students no longer receive direct instruction. They may work for a long period of time on one question and never really learn the correct method to solve the problem.

There is no emphasis on finding the correct answer.

There are no reference materials. There is no textbook.

There is not enough practice so children do not retain the concepts.

Problems are very abstract and often frustrate the students, sometimes to tears.

Parents are concerned about the future of their children should they need to leave the district and relocate to a district using traditional math techniques. Their children will not know the math algorithms.

Many parents have placed their children in tutoring to compensate for the lack of instruction.

Several teachers have mentioned that they are unhappy with the programs, but they don't speak out for fear of retribution.

High school students who have experienced both math techniques have spoken out against the "reformed math".

Many universities have indicated that students from traditional math programs perform better in college math courses.

Children with learning disabilities, particularly those with reading/writing difficulties, are hurt by these programs.

Students are asked to solve problems using tools/algorithms that have not been taught.

The schools have taken away the ability for students to work independently. Parents are forced to teach math lessons at home.

Children no longer feel confident or successful. They hate math now.

There are big concerns about the way that standardized test scores are being interpreted by the school district administrators.

Complaints to teachers and counselors are not being addressed.

Core-Plus received a poor showing in the Michigan State University study by Hill and Parker.

The math materials don't match the NYS guidelines for the various grade level expectations.

High achievers are being held back.

Academic Intervention Services (AIS) are not effective.

The district has no plans in place to repair the damage done to students over the past few years.

They are experimenting with our kids again. This is another "Whole Language" fiasco, only now it's math.

There are inconsistencies in the implementation of the programs between schools and even within schools.

Students report that some science teachers are providing math instruction during/after science class due to missing math prerequisites.

I love this entry under more recent observations:

Traditional math worksheets coming home for homework just prior to standardized testing. Teaching to the test and cramming.

Looks like the fuzzies don't have full confidence in their crap programs. They want to have it both ways: Supplement with traditional math and attribute any success to their snake oil programs to keep the faith.

Social construct

Educationists in Australia are on a "social construction" kick. How many "multiple and/or conflicting interpretations" can there be for 2+2=4 or for the fact that an educationist would fall on his face if he jumped out of a window? Teachers are to be penalized for presenting factual knowledge:

TEACHERS should present knowledge as a "social construct" open to interpretation rather than undisputed facts, even in maths and the sciences, says a NSW guide to quality teaching.

The Quality Teaching framework, developed on behalf of the NSW Education Department, rewards teachers for presenting "problematic knowledge" in their lessons.

Under a coding system developed to assess teachers, lessons that present knowledge "only as fact and not open to question" score the lowest.

The highest score is given when "knowledge is seen as socially constructed, with multiple and/or conflicting interpretations presented and ... a judgment is made about the appropriateness of aninterpretation in a given context".

"Knowledge is treated as problematic when it involves an understanding of knowledge not as a fixed body of information but rather as being socially constructed, and hence subject to political, social and cultural influences and implications," the guide says. "Knowledge is not treated as problematic when it is presented only as fact, a body of truth to be acquired by students, or is treated as static and open to only one interpretation."

The guide specifically relates the idea of contested knowledge to the teaching of science, saying if it is difficult to see how a subject is problematic, look at its history.

Deconstruction is in full bloom.

Decreased attention

An excellent dissection of NCTM charlatanry.

The NCTM Standards have been developed by progressive "math educators", not by people with genuine knowledge of mathematics. For eighty years progressive educationists have rejected the idea of remembering any domain-specific knowledge. They say knowledge is changing too fast, and the facts of today will be obsolete tomorrow. Calculators and computers are the latest "proof" of this claim. The NCTM wields them as a double-edged sword, justifying the trashing of traditional math and offering the benefit of exciting "tools" for bypassing the difficulties of traditional "paper-and-pencil" math.

Progressive educationists believe important factual knowledge is already known intuitively or will be picked up naturally as a byproduct of real-world experiences. They claim that real-world experts rely on "higher-order skills" and "just-in-time" factual knowledge supplied by computers and reference materials. They say real-world experts never trust their own long-term memory.

Michigan tries "history"

Michigan produces history "standards" (called "content expectations") that sound more like a joke.

Indeed, the draft "expectations" say nothing about America before 1890, leaving the nation's foundation years, its crucial philosophical groundings and the Civil War to elementary and middle schools. In the post-1890 studies, no mention is to be found of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. Same for Henry Ford, Rosa Parks, Andrew Carnegie, Douglas MacArthur and Earl Warren -- and Hitler, Stalin and Tojo. Similarly absent: the development of mass production and the rise of industrial unions, D-Day, defeat of fascist Germany and imperial Japan, the Korean War and the toppling of Soviet communism. In a flash of good sense, curriculum writers rejected the lead consultant's attempt to ban use of "America" and "American" as "ethnocentric," potentially offensive to the rest of the hemisphere.

Instead of history, there is an ideological agenda:

The standards do direct study of, for example, the environmental movement, the American Indian protests at Wounded Knee, Rosie the Riveter, the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, acid rain, the automobile's contribution to global warming, consequences in the Persian Gulf of U.S. energy policy and alternatives to President Truman's use of the atomic bomb.

Mumbo-jumbo vs. quality education

As more and more schools adopt ed school mumbo-jumbo (authentic assessment, countless intelligences and learning styles, constructivism, etc.), it is reassuring that quality schools crop up now and then.

Teacher tests

In Why American Students Do Not Learn to Read Very Well: The Unintended Consequences of Title II and Teacher Testing Sandra Stotsky takes a look at teacher tests and finds that prospective teachers are not expected to have knowledge of research-based reading instruction:

This paper provides an analysis of the descriptions of the subject tests assessing reading instructional knowledge that prospective elementary teachers in this country take for licensure: those offered by Educational Testing Service, a variety of those provided by National Evaluation Systems, and the one offered by American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. I examined these descriptions to determine whether the tests appear to address three major components of a research-based approach to reading pedagogy (instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary knowledge), the weights attached to knowledge of these three components, and the quality of the sample questions they provide.

I guess science is not needed if reading unfolds naturally, as whole language advocates believe. The trouble is that learning how to read is not natural like language acquisiton.

Pod people

Over at edspresso a prospective teacher has discovered that the pod people have invaded math education:

Math education is in a shambles, starting from the so-called standards put out by the National Council of Mathematics (NCTM) in 1989 and revised in 2000. These standards were then copied by many states that thought they were great. State boards of education paid no mind to the shrieks of horror from mathematicians, simply not believing that the resulting standards took the math out of mathematics in the name of fun, and whose approach for eliminating the achievement gap eliminated the mastery of any math knowledge that matters. The well-intentioned but ill-conceived standards have actually widened the gaps between the rich and the poor by motivating those who can do so to hire tutors for their children, to enroll them in learning centers like Sylvan and Kumon, or to put them in private schools.

Fuzzy math was ostensibly invented to make math "accessible" to what's termed "minorities". But as the writer points out, taking math out of math only widens the achievement gap.

Ed school "teacher"

Ever wondered what a teacher is? A school of education has the answer. Discovered by Chanman

Helpful jargon

England is abuzz with something called "personalised education" as shown in this BBC account. It looks similar to what's known here as differentiated instruction. As is usually the case in edland, these innovations are couched in inpenetrable jargon. One can never be sure of what one is dealing with:

There is a very tricky question which is bothering many people involved in schools today, namely: "What is personalised education?"

The question is important because "personalisation" is the current buzzword in the Department for Education and in schools.

Last October, the Prime Minister said the government's school reforms would lead to "personalised lessons" for pupils. The then Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly (my, how fast they change!) characterised the reforms as being about "personalisation and choice".

So, everyone is talking about it. It will eventually affect every child in a school. All teachers will have to learn how to teach it. But what does it mean?

Ask professional educators and you might get an answer like this: "Personalised learning is about learner-managed and co-constructed learning -- the shift from dependency to independence and interdependency -- and invitational learning and assessment."

I took this from a website dedicated to personalised education. If you can make sense of it, you are a much better person than me.

It also talked about the "re-integration of learning, life and community", making use of "catalogue and natural versions of curriculum and assessment" and "de-coupling of age-stage progressions".

That clears it up.

Up is down

One of the panel members of Bush's new National Mathematics Advisory Panel enters another dimension:

A very short story by Vern Williams

One night I walked into the 4 3/8 dimension and actually believed the following:

We should write about math but never do math.
Correcting students' papers using red ink is a threat to children's self esteem and that red pens should be banned from all public schools.
Howard Gardner was right about his multiple intelligence theory (I think that he claims about nine at the moment) and that schools should value bodily-kinesthetic ability and the intelligence of self as much as mathematical and linguistic ability.
The war on intellectual excellence is a great thing. It will make us all equal.
Teachers Unions are actually concerned about students.
Advanced courses and gifted programs should be banned because they are elitist and unfair. Since everyone is gifted in their own way (see Howard Gardner), why have special gifted programs?
There are no bored students in US public schools.
We can teach thinking even when there is no content to think about.
We should treat members of politically protected minority groups as victims.
We should never view our students as individuals but as members of racial and ethnic groups.
We should buy into the latest educational fad even if it's based on political correctness and has nothing to do with learning or common sense.
There is no money wasted on administration, specialists, and useless programs. In fact, we should have more of each.
I should join the NCTM.
I should join the NEA.
I should feel guilty because I teach smart kids.
I should feel really guilty because I enjoy teaching smart kids.

I finally woke up in a cold sweat from this nightmare and asked myself does anyone actually believe those things? The answer is a resounding yes. Unfortunately the people who believe them are running our school systems and colleges of education.

I do my very best to shield my students from the effects of educational fads, political correctness and anti-intellectualism that we experience every day in public schools.

Small schools malaise

Somehow I have the feeling that academics isn't high up on the agenda of this new small school, despite its lip service. This is a pattern with a lot of these new small schools. Their motto should be: Anything but academics.

The Green School is a New Century High School opening in September 2006 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City.

Our mission is to foster community values in sustainability; specifically self, relationships, community and society, while preparing students for Regents exams, college and careers.

Our School themes: Sustainability • Real-World Learning • Student Voice • Careers that Make a Difference

Strong applicants for a teaching position will demonstrate the following abilities to: • Link subject area curricula to the school’s themes and incorporate discussion of current events, hands-on experiences in the community, and meaningful connection to students’ interests and lives. • Create project-based curricula and use performance-based assessment. • Use inquiry-based approach to teach interdisciplinary classes. • Teach an advisory class that includes community building, identity development, reflective writing, and interest exploration. • Work collaboratively with other teachers to design curricula and assessments, and to support each other in improving teaching practices. • Involve students in decision making about topics of classes and electives, and support students in independent projects. • Work to develop internship opportunities for students around the theme of sustainability. • Design and teach curricula to heterogeneous classes including English language learners, special needs students, and accelerated students, together. • Will participate in developing and implementing new ideas into the school or “wearing more than one hat” (this is key in small schools). • Help plan and participate in field trips of various duration. • Develop curricula that uses the resources of NYC and gets students to apply their learning in real-world settings.

Febrile in Seattle

The Seattle Public Schools system has adopted a set of definitions dripping with far-left wackiness that purport to identify various forms of "racism". "Racism" itself (without a modifying adjective) apparently cannot be perpetrated by groups which in the view of the Seattle Public Schools have "relatively little social power," identified as "Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians." This would seem to exempt a sizable chunk of the population (known in the PC vernacular as "people of color") from being capable of committing this hideous crime. One would have thought that "racism" (without the adjectives) is a state of mind. Apparently it is an activity:

Racism:
The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society.

The next entry is on "individual racism." Just when I thought that individuals of all colorations are capable of "racism" after all, it turns out that, besides "telling a racist joke, using a racial epithet," the miscreant must believe in the "inherent superiority of whites." So, unless members of "targeted racial groups" perversely believe in such superiority, they are off the hook once again:

Individual Racism:
The beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individuals that support or perpetuate racism. Individual racism can occur at both an unconscious and conscious level, and can be both active and passive. Examples include telling a racist joke, using a racial epithet, or believing in the inherent superiority of whites.

But perhaps matters are even more weirdly complex than that. Perhaps members of "targeted racial groups" cannot be individuals at all, for we learn under "cultural racism" that the emphasis on "individualism" is also "racist". Since "targeted racial groups" cannot be "racist," they thus cannot hold "racist" beliefs such as a belief in the individual. Following this dizzying Seattle Public Schools logic, "targeted racial groups" might not exist as individuals at all:

Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

Another revelation is that planning ahead (what these educationists call "having a future time orientation") is apparently also "racist". Now, believing that planning ahead is a function of pigmentation strikes me as truly racist. But these educationists are probably too dim-witted to realize this.

It should be noted that these dogmas have been far-left fare for a long time. They are not recent creations of Seattle schools. The inspiration listed as a source is Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, 1197 eds. Adams, Bell & Griffin. Still, it is astonishing that a tax-financed, public entity would adopt a lunatic fringe creed as its guiding policy. An incidental benefit is that it becomes a little clearer what the proponents of "social justice" have in mind.

Nutty judge

The Los Angeles Times reports that a California judge thinks it is unfair to ask high school graduates to know some 8th grade math and ninth- and 10th-grade English since some went to lousy schools:

A California judge struck down the state's controversial high school exit exam Friday, potentially clearing the way for thousands of seniors who have failed the test to graduate with their class next month.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Robert B. Freedman issued a preliminary injunction against the mandatory testing requirement, ruling it places an unfair burden on poor and minority students who attend low-performing schools.

Even answering little more than half the questions on the test is an onerous requirement:

This year's 12th-graders were the first class to face the testing requirement, which includes a section of eighth-grade math and another of ninth- and 10th-grade English. Students are required to answer little more than half of the questions correctly and can take the test multiple times. Students with learning disabilities were exempted from the test.

The judge's insistence on giving ignorant students a diploma confuses symbolism and substance. What good is a diploma if it does not stand for something? And how much are students helped if educational failure is shoved under the rug?

Political litmus test for math teacher

A Chicago public school is seeking a math teacher who needs to have a "social justice background" (whatever that is) of all things to qualify. Political indoctrination at taxpayer expense.

Cluster/Area 04/25
School Name/Address Greater Lawndale / Little Village School for Social Justice
3021 S. Kostner
Chicago, IL 60623 (or GSR #37)
Grade or Subject Mathematics
Certificate Requirements (Type 09) 6-12 w/Mathematics Endorsement

Other Information: Progressive educators with social justice background. Must be willing to create alternative assessments and work collaboratively.
School uses IMP curriculum.

UPDATE: See Darren's analysis of social justice math in the Comment section.

Farther shores

In Silly Season for the School Scholars, Frederick Hess and Laura LoGerfo report on the doings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Will this organization drown in its own irrelevance?

Here is a sampling:

One scholar of multiculturalism showed how to do away with injustice and racism, while promoting compassion and wisdom, in “Resisting Resistance: Using Eco-Justice and Eco-Racism to Awaken Mindfulness, Compassion, and Wisdom in Preservice Teachers.”

Other work promised to promote proper multicultural teacher attitudes: as with “Teaching White Preservice Teachers: Pedagogical Responses to Color-Blind Ideology” and “Overcoming Odds: Preparing Bilingual Paraeducators to Teach for Social Justice.” Breakthrough research on this front included “Discovering Collage as a Method in Researching Multicultural Lives” and “Artistic Code-Switching in a Collaged Book on Border Identity and Spanglish.”

Among the panels tackling the pressing questions of “queer studies” (formerly “gay and lesbian studies”) were “Queering Schooling and (Un)Doing the Public Good: Rubbing Against the Grain for Schooling Sexualities,” “The Silence at School: An Ethnodrama for Educators About the School Experiences of Gay Boys,” and “Working Against Heterosexism and Homophobia Through Teacher Inquiry.” Unfortunately, this work may have felt a bit conventional to those researchers fortunate enough to catch the 2004 analysis of ableist oppression in homoerotic magazines: “Unzipping the Monster Dick: Deconstructing Ableist Representations in Two Homoerotic Magazines.”

Reading Moloch

The NYT reports how, driven by NCLB, math and reading is driving out other subjects like science and history.

SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.

Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

I find it curious that educationists regard "reading" and learning science and history as being mutually exclusive. "Reading" is not some abstract, isolated skill but a practical tool that can be applied to many fields. Couldn't you learn a lot of history and science by reading? Whatever happened to reading across the curriculum?

In The Knowledge Deficit , E.D. Hirsch argues that reading instruction should be less concerned with "strategies" and should focus more on domain knowledge:

From Publishers Weekly
The notion of learning how to learn is a shibboleth in America's schools, but it distorts reading instruction, contends this provocative manifesto. Education theorist Hirsch decries a dominant "Romantic" pedagogy that disparages factual knowledge and emphasizes reading comprehension "strategies"—summarizing, identifying themes, drawing inferences—that children can deploy on any text. Such formal skills, he argues, are easily acquired; what kids really need is a broad background knowledge of history, science and culture to help them assimilate new vocabulary and understand more advanced readings. "Process-oriented" methods that apply reading comprehension drills to "vapid" texts waste time and slow kids' progress, Hirsch contends, and should be replaced with a more traditional, "knowledge-oriented" academic approach with a rich factual content. Hirsch repeats the call for a standard curriculum based on a canon of general knowledge (he touts his own core knowledge sequence as a model) made in his bestselling Cultural Literacy. That work drew fire from multiculturalists who accused Hirsch of promoting dead-white-male worship, but here he grounds his case in the latest cognitive-science research (with a healthy dose of common sense). Fluently written and accessible to teachers and parents alike, the book presents a challenge to reigning educational orthodoxies. (Apr. 24)

Humor

Teacher Arrested

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, the attorney general said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," a Justice Department spokesman said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country.

As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, "there are 3 sides to every triangle."

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."

Small is radical left

The promise of the small-schools movement was to create manageable, cozy entities as an alternative to the mammoth high-school jungles. Now it turns out that small schools are a vehicle for the implementation of a radical left agenda.

See, for example, this mission statement from a new small school being set up in Chicago that goes by the inspiring name of UPLIFT:

MISSION: Our mission is to continue to adapt and align our curriculum so that it is relevant, student-centered and adheres to the highest national standards. We will transform service delivery so that the theme of social justice is embedded in all subject areas.

Perhaps none of this is surprising since the father of the movement is none other than an SDS (Weathermen) fugitive turned Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Examples of other small schools turned into radical indoctrination centers abound as chronicled by Sol Stern.

Kozol made him do it

Sol Stern discusses how a quasi-official pedagogy permeating pre-collegiate education promotes political indoctrination:

At least the higher education professoriate denies that it favors using the classroom as a political bully pulpit. By contrast, the K-12 public school establishment has adopted a quasi-official pedagogy that encourages the classroom teacher to shape students’ beliefs on controversial issues like race, gender, sexual preference, and American foreign policy.

The documentation on this is so extensive that Jay Bennish might have a pretty good Nurenberg defense: “my union and my professional teacher association made me do it.”

For example, the National Education Association, the larger of the two national teacher unions, supports “the movement toward self-determination by American Indians/Alaska natives” and believes these designated victim groups should control their own education. It believes that all schools should designate separate months to celebrate Black History, Hispanic Heritage, Native American Indian Heritage, Asian/Pacific Heritage, Women’s History, Lesbian and Gay History. This nearly takes up the entire school calendar, leaving scant time for American history – or Geography, the subject that Mr. Bennish was supposed to be teaching when he went off on Bush and Bush’s Amerikkka.

After 9/11, the NEA posted guidelines on how teachers should discuss with their students the terrorist attack on our homeland. It was filled with multicultural psychobabble and stressed the need for children to be tolerant and to respect all cultures – while hardly saying a word about the fact that the country was at war with a vicious enemy out to destroy our tolerant society. The document came so close to apologizing for the 9/11 attack that a public outcry ensued, and the union was forced to remove the teacher guidelines from its website.

NEA-affiliated teacher organizations, such as the National Council of the Social Studies and the National Council of Teachers of English, carry on the political struggle by training teachers to focus inordinate attention in the classroom on issues of “diversity.” The NCSS believes that academic history – which some of its leaders have disparaged as "pastology" – is elitist and irrelevant. The organization has successfully lobbied state education departments to require little or no history. Instead, it has filled the schools with a hodgepodge of "global studies," "cultural studies," and "peace studies" that present all cultures and civilizations as equal in value.

If NCSS had its way, American education’s entire system would reflect a race- and gender-centered pedagogy. The organization's official policy paper, "Curriculum Guidelines for Multicultural Education," is one of the scariest documents in American education today, going far beyond the demand that social studies curricula reflect the grievances of a rainbow coalition of ethnic and racial groups. In the tone of a commissar's lecture at a political reeducation camp, the NCSS exhorts teachers, administrators, and other school employees to think and act multiculturally during every moment of the school day, lest they become accomplices of American culture's invisible but omnipresent racism. Teachers are instructed to scrutinize every aspect of the school environment – from classroom teaching styles and the pictures on the walls to the foods served in the lunchroom and the songs sung in the school assemblies – to be sure they reflect "multicultural literacy."

At the heart of the NCSS paper lies a fundamentally racist assumption: "[T]he instructional strategies and learning styles most often favored in the nation's schools," the guidelines declare, "are inconsistent with the cognitive styles, cultural orientations, and cultural characteristics of some groups of students of color." These students flourish under "cooperative teaching techniques" rather than the "competitive learning activities" that work for white kids.

We are left with this Orwellian conclusion by the Social Studies group: "Schools should recognize that they cannot treat all students alike or they run the risk of denying equal educational opportunity to all persons."

Spelling helps reading

Among the countless educationist lunacies is the belittling of correct spelling. This
article from American Educator shows that correct spelling supports reading.

A different take on "constructivism"

A reader of this site called Allison left a comment on my piece on arrested development that I found fascinaning. She describes how Husserl of phenomenology fame views constructivism and authentic learning. I have to admit, though, that I had hitherto been unaware that educationists have ever heard of Husserl, let alone have sufficient knowledge of phenomenology to distort it to absurd lengths:

How sad that the constructivists in education misused the ideas from such wonderful philosophers as Husserl and Wittgenstein.

Husserl, in particular, was terrified that within a generation, all modern knowledge could be lost. From his perspective, we were standing on such a tower of shoulders of giants that we could fall due to some calamity (war, plague, etc.) and we couldn't even reconstruct the society we'd had before. So he set out to find the "Authentic description" for things--for concepts, ideas, words, traits, algorithms, experiences. He was trying to write down a body of knowledge as best as possible so that we wouldn't have to start over with a blank slate.

This idea of his led him to be one of the founders of phenomenology, a philosophy much maligned for many unfair reasons. Between Husserl and Heidegger, phenomenology came up with any explanation for learning called the Hermeneutic circle, which explains that constructivism is a necessary component for authentic learning.

But in the circle, all of the rote learning is a REQUIREMENT before the constructivist reaching BECOMES authentic.

Here's an example: At first, you don't know things like your times tables. You don't know 6 times 7 off the top of your head. You must inauthentically calculate it, say by adding 6 7s. You are unsure of your answer, maybe. (And you have yet to REALLY be convinced that adding 7 6s produces the same answer.) You have doubt still. Over time, though, you learn your times tables by rote (still inauthentically at first) because you are forced to. So now when asked, 6 times 7 is 42 AND 7 time s 6 is 42. You don't think about why; it's just the rule.

Eventually, you learn the tables so well that they become known to you, and you have no doubt that 6 times 7 is 42.

Now, you start working on another problem: 2 times 21. Now, this isn't in your times table. You have doubt; you are forced to try and discover something you DO know that helps you solve the problem. In doing so, you may learn something fascinating: that 2 times 21 is 2 times 3 times 7. This may be one of the first times that you've even NOTICED factors before. You finally, unsurely at first, guess that maybe 21 times 2 is 6 times 7, because 2 times 3 is 6.

But now, you're beginning to guess something FASCINATING: that factors are associative! This is still unsteady to you, so you fall back on the KNOWN, the rote: and you start examining other multiples: 3 times 14, for example. lo and behold, this is 3 times 2 times 7!

This is an example of the hermeneutic circle at work: every time you learn something inauthentically, it becomes the basis for a future authentic learning. All learning is predicated on prior learning--and ironically, predicated on "learning" in such a way that you even FORGOT that it was strange that you knew that fact, and yet, this time around, that fact you were convince of, leads you to an A-Ha! you never saw before.

And over time, you know these truths so deeply that you KNOW all numbers have prime factorizations; then at some later layer, you understand the beauty of diophantine equations because of what you've "always known" about prime factorizations, etc.

So the original constructivists, who were trying to get at authentic learning, which always involves moving into the unknown, understood that you must ALWAYS predicate that unknown on the known. (In fact, ask a phenomenologist what the bottom layer of that predication is, and he'll probably tell you something fascinating: the top!)

Tutoring

Misguided pretentiousness and false rigor

The Chicago Public Schools are pushing something called the Chicago Math & Science Initiative

I checked out what is supposed to be taught in sixth grade and found that one quarter is devoted to this:

In Investigating Climate and Weather students begin by conducting a series of inquiries to connect their own experience of climate and weather to the planetary systems that govern weather events and climate change. Next, they investigate the evidence and associated scientific debate surrounding climate change. From their evaluations of this evidence, students predict climate and weather changes for the area in which they live.

I can't help it but somehow I find the idea that sixth grade pupils in Chicago schools will conduct a "series of inquiries to connect their own experience of climate and weather to the planetary systems that govern weather events and climate change" utterly laughable. Most of these kids can't even spell atmosphere and wouldn't know troposphere from ionosphere. Try throwing "adiabatic" at them (a reversible thermodynamic process executed at constant entropy and occurring without gain or loss of heat). Next they will "investigate the evidence and associated scientific debate surrounding climate change." For sure!

Weather systems and factors contributing to climate are some of the most complex things imaginable requiring an advanced and sophisticated store of knowledge. The top brains in science can't even come up with computer models that can fully account for this complexity. But Chicago pupils who lack even the rudiments of science will somehow pore over scientific papers and make predictions. This is delusional to the point of being comical!

What these students need is a systematic, coherent and age-appropriate grounding in major topics of science (physics, chemistry, earth science, biology, etc.) with increasing sophistication as they advance through the grades.

Instead of realistic, specific content goals for each grade, the Illinois state board presents vague and highly pretentious "descriptors" focused entirely on process and "inquiry". These "descriptors" are essentially the same for babes and high-school seniors and everything in between. What "content" knowledge requirements exist are rather vague, skimpy and applied to broad grade ranges.

The following is an excerpt from the Illinois Learning Standards: Classroom Assessments and Performance Descriptors:

Here is a portion of the "descriptors" for FIRST AND SECOND GRADE!!!

Descriptors
11A - Students who meet the standard know and apply the concepts, principles, and processes of scientific inquiry.
1. Describe an observed science concept using appropriate senses, making applicable estimations and measurements, predicting steps or sequences, describing changes in terms of starting and ending conditions using words, diagrams or graphs.
2. Begin guided inquiry asking questions using prior knowledge and observations, inferring from observations to generate new questions, or developing strategies to investigate questions.
3. Conduct guided inquiry following appropriate procedural steps and safety precautions as directed by teacher.
4. Collect data for guided inquiry identifying and using instruments for gathering data, making estimates and measurements, recording observations, or reading data from data-collection instruments.
5. Record and store data assembling pictures to illustrate data, or organizing data on charts and pictographs, tables, journals or computers.
6. Analyze and display results recognizing and describing patterns, noting similarities and differences in patterns, or predicting trends.
7. Communicate individual and group results identifying similar data from others, generalizing data, drawing simple conclusions, or suggesting more questions to consider.
11B - Students who meet the standard know and apply the concepts, principles, and processes of technological design.

Revised whole language golf instruction

The creators of a golf instruction program that applies modern educational theories have been forced to update their program, reports Kerry Hempenstall in Balanced golf instruction.

Here are some elements of the revised program:

We are also conscious of the developing golfer's learning style. We advise the visual learners to focus their learning transactions on watching the golf on TV (with the sound off) at every opportunity. The auditory learners actually go to golf courses, but wear blindfolds - better to focus attention on the sound of the ball being struck. They also make use of brain-based golf education employing a looped audiotape of a ball being struck. When played during sleep, this procedure repatterns the golfing region of the brain for these fortunate students. The kinaesthetic learners must actually swing the club regularly, but their oneness with the game is dramatically enhanced when they cannot see the ball. The feel is the thing. Because our teachers are so skilled they are also able to use multiple methods, tailor-made to parallel each of the multiple golf intelligences our students may display.

You can read about the original WL golf instruction program here.

MI disorder

A teacher in Denver writing in the NYT education forum illustrates the absurd lengths to which Gardner's so-called multiple intelligences are taken by educationists:

While you are on this one, my American History class is heterogeneous.

We know that there are seven separate and distinct learning modalities.

Kindly tell us how you will differentiate your teaching so that the tactile, auditory, visual, and kinetic [sic] learners will come away with the same knowledge as the readers and writers.

I would like to see how this teacher would teach history in the purely tactile and kinesthetic mode. At some point there has to be exposure to words, either by reading or listening. It's also dubious that people can be pigeonholed into one mode to the exclusion of other modes.

I also find it ironic that on the one hand educationists rail against expository instruction and on the other hand they show concern for "auditory" learners.

See here for a link to Willingham's debunking of modality theory. In Willingham's priceless observation, students learn best when content is presented in the subject's best modality.

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/summer2002/curriculum.pdf

Superficial ed reporting

Fuzzy math enthusiasts like to justify their enthusiasm by invariably pointing to supposedly towering test scores attributed to fuzzy math. This self-congratulation then gets reported uncritically in the media. See, for example, Everyday Math multiplies in schools:

But administrators at Clayton and Edwardsville stand by the program.

"Look at the scoreboard," Keenoy said, referring to Clayton's high test scores.

Edwardsville has seen its math scores jump since it started the program in 2001 by up to 20 percent in a grade level, some of the highest overall in the area. And the number of students taking higher math classes in high school has nearly tripled, said Lynda Andre, assistant superintendent for instruction.

What education reporters fail to do is ask a series of critical questions and do some investigating. For example, reporters could ask: What math questions are on these tests? Are these tests possibly geared to fuzzy math? Is there math instruction outside of fuzzy math, e.g. from parents or tutors?

The article does point out that there is supplementary math instruction.

Both districts have addressed some of the perceived shortfalls by requiring teachers to supplement the program with timed tests and exercises on basic math facts.

Could that and other unreported factors like parent involvement and tutoring contribute to the supposedly high tests scores attributed to fuzzy math?

Math puzzle

I found this math problem at Kitchen Table Math.

"769. An old brainteaser by Leonty Magnitsky: If a man drinks a barrel of water by himself in 14 days and the same barrel with his wife in 10 days, how many days would it take his wife to drink the barrel by herself?"

First of all, I find this easier to solve when the wording is changed to a barrel of vodka.

Here is my solution:

The sum of the fractional parts (man and wife) of drinking in one day is equal to the fractional part of both drinking in one day:

Let x = days wife takes to consume the whole barrel

1/14 + 1/x = 1/10

Multiply each side by the LCD to clear fractions:

10x + 140 = 14x
4x = 140
x = 35

Eduvacuity

The Fordham Institute has published a major review of state science standards. According to the study, a handful of states has managed to produce respectable standards. However, the vast majority of state standards is afflicted with numerous problems, most notably with the "constructivist" anti-knowledge plague:

Educational Constructivism
Constructivism is not new. It was evident in the first draft
(1992) of the National Science Education Standards, where
it took the form of a claimed postmodern philosophy of science. That, in turn, incorporates one kind of constructivism (“social” constructivism) about knowledge, including scientific knowledge.The adopted philosophy was an application to learning standards of the increasingly popular educational constructivism,whose main tenet is that learning happens only by an individual’s action, his or her making and doing things in the world, not as a result of any conveyance of knowledge (as in teaching).10 A revision of that early draft eliminated the praise of postmodernism but left in place the notion that a learner can do no more than to construct knowledge, which is therefore personal, from things and events in his or her sensed environment. It is supposed to follow from this that scientific knowledge cannot be transferred from one person—a teacher (or from a book)—to another. The learning expectations of standards should therefore focus much more on process, the “doing”of science by the student, and much less on its reputed facts.11

The California science framework has received top marks and can be read here.

"Whole language" appreciation

Loony education theories can have unintended consequences: They can be a rich source of hilarity. So it is with the psychotic guessing game promoted by whole languagists.

Here, a writer gives thanks to the whole panoply of whole language inventors and promoters:

Thank you Whole Language. Thank you for your many pearls of wisdom. Thank you for Context Clues. Thank you for Prior Knowledge. Thank you for the Initial Consonant. Thank you for Picture Clues. Thank you for Miscues.

But most of all, thank you for my wife. The other day she and I were riding along the highway and saw a sign for a town called Verona, so my wife read "Veronica". It's very simple, you see. First she applied Context Clues (she knew we were looking for a name). Then she applied the Initial Consonant ("V"). Then she applied Prior Knowledge (she already knew of a name "Veronica"). She put these Whole Language strategies together and ... success! At least, as much success as we can expect, I suppose.

Thank you William S. Gray for inventing "Look-Say" and the "Dick and Jane" series of basal readers. Thank you A. Sterl Artley for helping Mr. Gray and for your phonics-bashing diatribes of the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to the National Education Association for giving Mr. Gray and his friends two years of free promotion in the NEA Journal in 1930 and 1931. Together you all had managed to essentially eradicate phonics from America's public schools by the 1950s and early 60s, when my wife went to school.

But more importantly, thank you for my wife. A while back she was reading a pamphlet about something that was described as "venerable". Now that's a word you don't see every day, so what did she do but cleverly pull out her Whole Language skills? Context Clues, you see, told her that she was looking for an adjective. Next was the Initial Consonant "V". Then out came the Prior Knowledge -- she simply thought of an adjective she already knew that was about the right length and started with "V". And voila ... success again ... she came up with "vulnerable". Perfect! Well, at least as perfect as things get in publik ejukayshun, right?

Thanks Kenneth Goodman for reviving the floundering Look-Say, adding a few New Age twists and renaming it Whole Language back in the early 80s. Just like the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Grains and everything else that was Whole ... what else could it be but wonderful? Without you, Kenneth, the evils of phonics might have returned, and then where would we have been?

Thank you Dorothy Strickland for "Emerging Literacy" -- the idea that kids are naturally inclined to read if only we will surround them with literature. Thanks to all the other Whole Language textbook authors who cranked out textbook after textbook that either omitted phonics entirely or disparaged phonics openly. Thank you Teachers College, Columbia, for promoting Whole Language to teachers' colleges worldwide. Can you even imagine how effective you were in eradicating phonics instruction throughout the English-speaking world?

Thank you International Reading Association (IRA) and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). For decades you appointed people like William S. Gray and Kenneth Goodman to lead your entire organizations in the fight against phonics. Somehow you raised hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of dollars to pay PR firms to get their opinions so heavily quoted in the press that the public is now completely confused in its ideas about what works and what doesn't work in reading instruction.

But once again thank you for my wife. A while back she was reading about some Congregational Church. And do you know, even with the Context Clues and the Prior Knowledge (about what names churches might have, presumably) and the Initial Consonant, she still managed to come up with "Congressional Church". Even though this was years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday.

Thank you Alfie Kohn and Dennis Baron and Mike Ford and Gerald Coles and Harvey Daniels and Gerald Bracey and Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen and Jim Trelease and all the other propagandists who lash out continuously against successful practice in general and phonics in particular. Through your tireless efforts, the public is continually misinformed. Without the public's perpetual state of confusion and misinformation, Whole Language would not have survived a single day. Thank you for keeping Look-Say and Whole Language and Balanced Literacy alive to create yet another generation of people who can read as well as my wife does.

Speaking of my wife, last night she was reading a brochure aloud about a museum with an "eclectic" collection, and what do you suppose she said? You guessed it (and so did she): "electric"! Maybe the absence of the Initial Consonant threw her off.

Thank you Marie Clay for inventing the phenomenally expensive Reading Recovery, a program installed in virtually every public school, it seems, and designed to treat the educational effects of Whole Language by applying yet more Whole Language. Thank you for giving my school district more stuff like this to spend my tax money on. How is it that I am not clever enough to imagine things like this?

Thank you Richard Allington, current (2005) president of the International Reading Association, for your campaign of misinformation against Direct Instruction (a successful phonics-based program). The cleverness of your propaganda puts the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, and all the other tyrants of the 20th century to shame. You know of course that Direct Instruction (DI) participated in a huge study (Project Follow Through) in which all the participants except DI failed, and in which DI succeeded brilliantly. And so you twist this around to say that by virtue of its association in this study with the constructivist-favored instructional styles that failed so miserably, we should all conclude that DI must necessarily also have been a failure. Your logic, so typical of that of the IRA, the NCTE, and the rest of the Constructivist Cabal, is irrefutable.

But once again thank you all for my wife. Hardly a day goes by when she does not demonstrate the success of Look-Say, or Whole Language, or Balanced Literacy or whatever you all call it now. Really, it's so amusing I really can't even quantify it. I never know what she'll read next ... and neither does she! Just imagine all her Miscues!

The sheer unpredictability of listening to her read is astounding ... and unpredictability is the essence of entertainment, right? I mean, she might read "deleterious" as "delicious" or perhaps "injurious" as "injustice" or "parabola" as "parachute" or maybe "quintessence" as "quintuplet", or "signify" as "signature". I could go on and on almost endlessly. The laughs just never stop here. And all thanks to you. All of you.

So thank you, Whole Language. Where would we be without you? The possibilities just boggle the mind.

-- Anonymous

[Note: This author normally signs his work, but in this case declines because he doesn't want his wife identified in this manner.]

The e-learning route

High-ability students who are languishing in a regular school setting have a chance to pay big bucks and move as fast as they can for credit. All this thanks to Stanford's EPGY program.

Flexible inefficiency

The National Education Association helpfully offers A Parent's Guide to Helping Your Child with Today's Math but then only goes halfway as this example illustrates:

A farmer sends his daughter and son out into the barnyard to count the number of chickens and pigs. When they return the son says that he counted 200 legs and the daughter says she counted 70 heads. How many pigs and chickens does the farmer have?

A student well versed in algebra might do the following to set up the problem: p = pigs, c = chickens. p + c = 70 (heads) 4p + 2c = 200 (pigs have 4 legs and chickens have 2 legs). These two equations may be used to solve the problem. Students might solve this problem by "guessing and checking," or drawing pictures. Some methods of solving problems might be considered more "efficient." That may be true, but the correct answer can be found using multiple methods. Children think about mathematics in different ways depending on their prior experiences at home and school. By allowing students to think flexibly about numbers, we encourage them to "own" the math forever, instead of "borrowing" until class is over. (Answer: 40 chickens and 30 pigs)

Constructivism is rearing its ugly head again. With this kind of help, students are not going to "own" the algebraic method of solving this problems. They might not even "own" the inefficient guess-and-check method. If you are being taught properly and practice sufficiently to the point of overlearning, then you are more likely to "own" math knowledge than when left groping in the dark.

"Learning specialists" alarmed by academic achievement

What's the problem with schools? You guessed it! Students know too much. At least that's the concern voiced by three "learning specialists" (an education consultant, a professor emeritus at an ed school and a professor at a law school) in a commentary published in EdWeek.

In what sounds like a three stooges routine, the three "learning specialists" are alarmed by what they see as a trend toward academic achievement:

Perhaps now is a good time to ask this question: What are schools supposed to do for our children? As learning specialists, we see an alarming trend: Our education system increasingly is focusing not on developing children’s aptitude for learning—their ability to absorb new information quickly and solve problems creatively—but on their academic achievements—their mastery of particular subjects and skills as proven by performance on standardized tests.

Silly me. I would have thought that academic achievement demonstrates at least an "ability to absorb new information quickly," the purported goal of these specialists.

The authors of the anti-achievement piece do manage to offer "sobering" examples of imperial decline due to memorization and academic achievement. The cause-and-effect scenario painted here does seem a bit fishy to me. I kind of doubt that China went into a tailspin because a few mandarins had the ability memorize Confucian philosophy. Would we as a society suddenly have to live in caves in the unthinkable event that some of our bureaucrats (say, at the board of ed) suddenly had the urge to memorize a few poems by Whitehead and Tennyson?

Snippet from the trio's commentary:

This is a serious concern for our kids and our society. History offers sobering examples of what can happen when standardized achievements are elevated over open-ended abilities.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, imperial China—once the most technologically advanced civilization in the world—fell into decline as power passed into the hands of a mandarin class of bureaucrats selected for their ability to memorize Confucian philosophy. More recently, Japanese authorities have begun dismantling an education system that long relied on a uniform national curriculum and after-hours classes at juku “cram schools.” The Japanese believe this approach has stifled creativity, innovation, and independent thinking, contributing to the stagnation of the Japanese economy.

We worry that America is heading down a similar path. If promoting our children’s achievements becomes our sole focus, both our children and our society will suffer.

The essence of the anti-academic achievement position as far as I can distill it is a false dichotomy between learning academic subject matter on the one hand and "creativity, innovation, and independent thinking" on the other. Educationists worship at at the altar of ignorance in the name of "creativity" but ignorance is not a prerequisite for "creativity".

"Progressive" education impedes progress

In Why Traditional Education Is More Progressive, E.D. Hirsch makes a strong and plausible case that the dominant educational creed defeats the purported aims of its advocates:

I would label myself a political liberal and an educational conservative, or perhaps more accurately, an educational pragmatist. Political liberals really ought to oppose progressive educational ideas because they have led to practical failure and greater social inequity. The only practical way to achieve liberalism’s aim of greater social justice is to pursue conservative educational policies.

In combating the dominant ed creed, propopents of quality education must have a developed sense of how the language employed by the dominant ed creed is manipulative, charged, disparaging and stacked against them. Some of the phrases that come to mind are "sage on the stage, guide on the side," "chalk and talk," "drill and kill" "teach the whole child," "teach the child, not the subject," "less is more," "up is down," "freedom is slavery" (well, I made up the last two or, rather, stole the last one from Orwell). There is nothing comparable for those who value expository instruction and domain knowledge.

[Fortunately, not all educationist phrases are catchy. There is also some pretty dreary stuff. I culled this from a constructivist site: "This article discusses several active-learning techniques that instructors can use to help students construct knowledge, such as think-pair-share, guided reciprocal peer questioning, jigsaw, and co-op co-op."]

Other words deployed by the dominant ed creed to disparage the notion of imparting knowledge are "lecture", "active" and "passive". "Lecture" has the negative connotation of droning on without regard for the audience's (in this case the pupils') level of understanding and its capacity to follow while the captive audience sits by "passively". No teacher worth anything would teach that way. (Adherents of the dominant ed creed forget that listening attentively to explicit instruction is also being active, but the followers of the creed claim to have a monopoly on "active").

But the disparagement of any explicit instruction by labeling it "lecture" is so strong that explicit instruction is proscribed in many places. That is detrimental to achieving quality education. For example, good math instruction should consist of modeling (interactive modeling if appropriate) followed by guided practice, independent practice and review. In other words, there must be talk as required by the circumstances. And how would one teach history and other subjects without talking?

I coined the impressive, albeit cumbersome, phrase "empathetic, interactive expository instruction" as a counterpoint to the dreaded "lecture". Alas, it can't compete with the catchiness of "talk and chalk" or "drill and kill". (Now I have to put my phrase in rhyme form).

I include "empathetic" in my phrase to stress the importance of discovering and being being sensitive to Vygosky's fabled zone of proximal development (a jazzed-up way of saying that our instruction must be geared to the pupils' ability and level of comprehension).

In his article, E.D. Hirsch takes apart some of the conceits of educationists:

Unfortunately, many of today’s American educators paint traditional education as the arch-enemy of "humane" modern education. Even everyday classroom language unfairly pits the two alternatives against one another. Here are some typical descriptions used by progressives to compare old and new methods:

Traditional vs. Modern
Merely verbal vs. Hands-on
Premature vs. Developmentally appropriate
Fragmented vs. Integrated
Boring vs. Interesting
Lockstep vs. Individualized

Parents presented with such choices for their children’s education would be unlikely to prefer traditional, merely verbal, premature, fragmented, boring, and lockstep instruction to instruction that is modern, hands-on, developmentally appropriate, integrated, interesting, and individualized. But of course this is a loaded and misleading contrast. Let’s look at those simple polarities one at a time.

You can read the entire article here.

Math-challenged child does CMP

Fuzzy math is being rammed down people's throat and reasonable requests to provide an alternative are being denied.

From the NYT's Penfield article:

By last spring, these parents had discovered one another and their common exasperation with constructivist math. Jim Munch's father, Bill, a software developer at Kodak, drew up a petition asking the Penfield schools to offer pupils the option of taking traditional math. Nearly 700 residents signed it. Last June, the Board of Education turned down the request.

Giving parents a choice between fuzzy and real math is the democratic thing to do and is also a good political strategy. It should satisfy everyone. It's an inoffensive offensive. But I doubt that zealous educationists in a position of power will go along (and don't as the example above shows). Being responsive to reasonable popular wishes is not their thing. I also suspect that many parents are not conversant with the real vs. fuzzy math issues and won't know what to do with choice.

Just yesterday I talked to a parent of a sixth grader I am tutoring in math who had no clue of fuzzy math. (I tutor disadvantaged kids after hours in addition to my regular classes.)

I was helping the kid do homework. Part of the homework required the young girl to cut a sheet of paper into strips to make various fractions. The parent was aghast and thought it was a time-waster. I had to explain the purpose of the exercise. It was all news to her.

The school the kid is in uses the fuzzy math series Connected Math. The homework assignment was quite demanding and way beyond this pupil's abilities. She had neither a conceptual understanding of the task nor the requisite tools (computational skills, procedural knowledge, math facts) to accomplish the task had she had a conceptual understanding of the problem.

This is a key problem with fuzzy math. It is quite pretentious on the one hand, and refuses to teach the necessary skills on the other. The result: the kid was hopelessly drowning and getting straight F's.

Now what was the task? It was a real-world problem.

A class was holding a fundraiser to raise $300.00 in ten days. The progress was shown in the form of thermometers showing progress in two-day increments. The thermometers were all 8 1/2 inches long and showed the money raised so far on the various days in red. The fraction strips were to be used to determine the amount of money raised so far on the various days and then to plot the progress in a coordinate plane. The pupil was to make the strips and mark fractions from 1/2 to 1/12 on the various strips, and then use the strips for measurement.

Making fractions strips of 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 is of course easy. It's not so easy to come up with 1/3, 1/5, 1/7, 1/9, 1/12. You could do time-consuming trial-and-error folding. Or you could divide 8 1/2 by the denominator of the various fractions if you know how (the child didn't know).

Even if you can get the numbers they don't work well with an inch ruler. You could approximate. Suppose you (meaning the kid) could accomplish all that. Then what?

The goal of the assignment is to come up with dollar amounts derived from the thermometers and then to plot these amounts over time (fundraising progress).

How are you going to derive dollar amounts if all you have is an 8 1/2 in long thermometer (representing $300) and a red bar on the thermometer without any numbers, marks or gradations (the length of the red bar represents the money raised so far)?

You could measure the red bar in inches, form a ratio (the red bar to total thermometer length ratio), calculate the decimal, multiply the decimal by 300.

However, the assignment calls for measuring the red bar with the "fraction ruler". Then you would know what fraction of 8 1/2 the red bar represents. You can then multiply the fraction by 300 to get the dollar amount. All this without instructions in CMP and without computational skills and procedural knowledge.

This is too complicated and frustrating for a math-challenged child who needs to learn at her level and make steady progress.

No wonder the kid is drowning. What a tragedy.

Alternative to fuzzy math denied

An illuminating story appeared in the NYT on how the fuzzy math plague plays out in a Rochester, NY, suburb:

LAST spring, when he was only a sophomore, Jim Munch received a plaque honoring him as top scorer on the high school math team here. He went on to earn the highest mark possible, a 5, on an Advanced Placement exam in calculus. His ambition is to become a theoretical mathematician.

So Jim might have seemed the veritable symbol for the new math curriculum installed over the last seven years in this ambitious, educated suburb of Rochester. Since seventh grade, he had been taking the "constructivist" or "inquiry" program, so named because it emphasizes pupils' constructing their own knowledge through a process of reasoning.

Jim, however, placed the credit elsewhere. His parents, an engineer and an educator, covertly tutored him in traditional math. Several teachers, in the privacy of their own classrooms, contravened the official curriculum to teach the problem-solving formulas that constructivist math denigrates as mindless memorization.

"My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the program," Jim said recently. "Whatever I've achieved, I've achieved in spite of it. Kids do not do better learning math themselves. There's a reason we go to school, which is that there's someone smarter than us with something to teach us."

After citing example after example of math cripples, the article has this gem that shows the arrogance of educationists:

By last spring, these parents had discovered one another and their common exasperation with constructivist math. Jim Munch's father, Bill, a software developer at Kodak, drew up a petition asking the Penfield schools to offer pupils the option of taking traditional math. Nearly 700 residents signed it. Last June, the Board of Education turned down the request.

The superintendent haughtily dismisses parent concerns. Many of the parents have extensive math backgrounds:

Susan Gray, the superintendent, attributed the criticism of the math program to "helicopter parents" who are accustomed to being deeply involved in all aspects of their children's lives. "Because the pedagogy has changed, the parents who knew the old ways didn't know how to help their children," she said. "They didn't have the knowledge and skills to support their children at home. There's a security in memorization of math facts, and that security is gone now."

YET many of the dissident parents have extensive math backgrounds and thus the ability to criticize the curriculum. It is also true that most of them tolerated the constructivist program for its first several years, until bitter experience drove them into rebellion.

Fuzzy math watch

Homeschool Math has a helpful list of fuzzy math books to avoid. The site also quotes Mathematically Correct on how the fuzzies operate:

"Mathematics achievement in America is far below what we would like it to be. Recent "reform" efforts only aggravate the problem. As a result, our children have less and less exposure to rigorous, content-rich mathematics. The advocates of the new, fuzzy math have practiced their rhetoric well. They speak of higher-order thinking, conceptual understanding and solving problems, but they neglect the systematic mastery of the fundamental building blocks necessary for success in any of these areas. Their focus is on things like calculators, blocks, guesswork, and group activities and they shun things like algorithms and repeated practice. The new programs are shy on fundamentals and they also lack the mathematical depth and rigor that promotes greater achievement."

National standards

NCLB leaves it up to the states to set academic standards. Schools must also demonstrate progress if the states want fed money and if the schools want to avoid being placed on the list of the infamous. This creates a perverse incentive leading to a "race to the bottom."

One way out of this disastrous state of affairs is to create national standards. This is, of course, fraught with danger as past experiences show, e.g. the experience with the Gary B. Nash history "standards". Such a project would attract the usual suspects. But I think the risk has to be taken. The advocates of sound, rigorous standards must organize and mobilize and be in a position to counter the inevitable attempt to dilute the standards and to institute educational lunacy.

It is therefore gratifying to read that Diane Ravitch is calling precisely for such standards. [Diane Ravitch's article was first published in the NYT but the article will soon disappear into the paid archives.]

The release last month of test results by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is part of the Department of Education, vividly demonstrated why varying state standards and tests are inadequate. Almost all states report that, based on their own tests, incredibly large proportions of their students meet high standards. Yet the scores on the federal test (which was given to a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders) were far lower. Basically, the states have embraced low standards and grade inflation.

Ed psych kitsch

Here is a novel perspective on a popular ed psych text. It's Anita Woolfolk's text I used in grad school.

So why don’t I like it? Why do I belittle it as kitsch? Kitsch, after all, usually refers to something of tawdry design or appearance created to appeal to nondiscriminating tastes—for example, those portraits of Elvis or bullfighters painted in neon colours on black velvet. But the Woolfolk text can hardly be accused of tawdry design or appearance. Indeed, measured against its competitors, it is presumably the crème de la crème.

Miseducative kitsch. In name-calling the Woolfolk text “kitsch,” I have in mind a less obvious, but perhaps more definitive, meaning of the term suggested by writer and critic Robert Fulford. In a recent CBC radio interview, Fulford dismissed so-called “victim-based art” as kitsch, but not necessarily because of any cheap or garish aesthetic qualities. Rather, Fulford argued, this “art” is kitsch because it seeks, by design, to compel the viewer to experience certain predetermined responses to it—in this case, sorrow, sympathy, compassion, and, perhaps, guilt. Fulford went on to liken victim-based art to the kitschy Saturday Evening Post cover art of Norman Rockwell, the artist whose slice-of-Americanlife paintings are typically unambiguously and irresistibly “cute” and, hence, admit of no other viewer response. For Fulford, what makes both victim-based and Norman Rockwell’s “art” quintessentially kitsch is that both contrive to over-determine and, consequently, to limit the viewer’s range of intellectual and emotional response. Neither allows for any interpretive or responsive ambiguity; both attempt to coerce thought and feeling.

Multiple ignorances

First we get "multiple intelligences." Now the rage is "multiple perspectives." From INTASC and numerous other educationist outfits we get "dispositions" that extol the virtue of "multiple perspectives."

The teacher appreciates multiple perspectives and conveys to learners how knowledge is developed from the vantage point of the knower.

The teacher appreciates and values human diversity, shows respect for students’ varied talents and perspectives, and is committed to the pursuit of “individually configured excellence.”

What is it with these "multiple perspectives?" It seems to me that at the bottom of this excitement is this postmodern notion that evidence, scholarship, objectivity and truth are illusory. There are only perpectives -- influenced, no doubt, by some "power" considerations.

This is dangerous drivel. What would stand in the way to conferring to creationism and to Holocaust denial the status of just another, equally valid, "multiple perspective?"

It would be much more appropriate to talk about "multiple ignorances."

UPDATE: See Chris Correa for a thoughtful examination of dispositions.