High school juniors in California will have to pass the state’s graduation exam to get a diploma. This LA Times’ story starts with a familiar refrain: A poor girl might not achieve her dream to be a pediatrician if she can’t pass the math portion of the exam. The implication is that the exam hurts the prospects of low-income minority students. But the Manual Arts High student won’t make it through college, much less medical school, if she doesn’t know enough math to get a 55 percent, the minimum passing score, on a four-choice multiple-choice exam covering sixth through eighth grade math skills.

The story goes on to show that the exam is forcing schools to offer tutoring and Saturday classes, so students can pass the graduation test on their second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth try. The test is motivating students to work harder to improve their math and reading skills. Teachers are paying more attention to teaching the state standards, and they’re keeping track of students’ progress.

Junior Adriana de la Rosa, who grew up in Guatemala and struggles with English, said she would benefit from attention to fundamentals — such as vocabulary development and reading comprehension — rather than from reading “The Odyssey” in her English class.

“That’s why I’m taking the classes on Saturday because I think I need more help with my English,” she said.

. . . Manual Arts teachers and administrators said they were doing all they could to make sure their students were prepared. Among other things, teachers say they closely follow the state’s academic content standards on which the test is based. And school counselors met last month with incoming juniors who failed one or both parts of the test, recruiting the students for the Saturday classes.

. . . Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer said his district’s high schools were trying new approaches to better prepare students for the exit exam.

For example, he said that ninth-grade teachers are now using instruction guides that cover the tested standards, and are assessing students regularly to make sure they are learning.

What a concept!

“I think it’s important to pass it, to see if you’ve been learning for the last [four] years,” said junior Julio Sosa, who failed the math section and now gets after-school algebra tutoring twice a week. “I think I’ll pass it this year.”

With her hopes for medical school, (Edith) Nicolas is eager to improve her algebra skills and is signing up for Saturday classes.

If the graduation exam didn’t exist, these students wouldn’t be trying to learn algebra and wouldn’t have Saturday classes to help them get on track for college. I just don’t understand why “advocates” for disadvantaged students oppose the graduation exam.

The kids get a day off while the teachers listen to a professional development consultant they’ll never see again. It’s usually a waste of time, teachers say. But there’s hope for a new idea: Coaches who work with teachers in their school. New teachers are much more likely to stay with the job if they get support from coaches and colleagues. So says the Harvard Education Letter, via Education News.

In Opinion Journal, Philip Terzian reviews Patrick Allitt’s I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student, which describes a semester teaching American history to cheerfully uninformed Emory students.

. . . the ignorance, laziness, sense of entitlement and lack of basic rhetorical skills are stunning. One student thinks that “books” and “novels” are the same. Another identifies the Granite State as “New Hamster.” Few are familiar with the rules of language, many spell poorly and all are confused by tenses and apostrophes and complain bitterly when Prof. Allitt marks them down for grammatical errors.

Emory is a highly selective university that enrolls students with excellent grades and high SAT scores. But they can’t organize their ideas in order to write an essay.

“Science and Society” classes mislead students who haven’t learned about the complexity of the scientific method in high school or college, writes Phil Mole (great name!) in Skeptical Inquirer. He took a graduate class called “Behavioral Sciences and Public Health” that promised to help students “become sufficiently confused about the complexities of professional life.” And it did!

The course was not a balanced, critically informed discussion of the merits and limitations of science. It was a lopsided diatribe against the arrogance of science and its suppression of other, allegedly valid “ways of knowing.”

We read articles claiming the language, assumptions, and methodologies of science to be inherently sexist and imperialistic, and fundamentally opposed to the role of intuition and the expression of femininity. An article by Ruth Hubbard maintained that scientists construct fact claims in order to justify their own economic positions and prevent the social mobility of women and ethnic minorities (Hubbard 1990). We perused the writings of Sandra Harding and Luce Irigaray and read more testimony that science represents the ideologies of white males seeking to disenfranchise, deflower, and discredit femininity at every opportunity. These authors discussed “alternate epistemologies,” suppressed by chauvinist scientists, and considered conventional science inherently inauthentic.

Many graduate students take “science and society” classes without having taken core science classes in college, Mole writes. If they have taken science, they’ve been taught the end results but not the process of scientific inquiry.

Not surprisingly, students are most appreciative of those descriptions of science that best satisfy their own longings for justice and equality. After learning that science is much more contentious than their high- school and college courses led them to believe, these students crave emotional solace. They want the kind of certainty that only relativism can provide, in which indifference to the very idea of authority erases all real doubts. “Science and society” classes address this need and fill the intellectual void partially created by the incompleteness of the students’ earlier science courses. As a result, postmodernism erases the helpful doubt that stimulates real thinkers to rigorously challenge their own preconceived notions and pursue the difficult pleasure of objective truth.

I took very little science in high school and even less in college, but I did read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in my Science for Non-Science Majors class, which I took to fulfill the math-science requirement. We actually learned about science in the class, not politics. But, then, I’m pre-postmodern.

“Discovery learning” advocates claim Japan’s high-scoring math students come up with original answers without being guided by the teacher. That’s not so, says Alan Siegel, a computer science professor at NYU who’s studied the videotapes of Japanese math lessons. Columnist Linda Seebach explains:

The eighth-grade geometry lesson Siegel discusses is based on the theorem that two triangles with the same base and the same altitude have the same area, and it is framed in nominally “real world” terms as a problem in figuring out how to straighten the boundary fence between two farmers’ fields so that neither farmer loses any land.

. . . The teacher first primes the class by reminding them of the theorem, which they had studied the previous day. Then he playfully suggests with a pointer some ways to draw a new boundary, most of them amusingly wrong but a couple that are in fact the lines students will have to draw to solve the problem (though they aren’t identified as such).

Then he gives the students a brief time, three minutes, to wrestle with the problem by themselves, and another few minutes for those who have figured out a solution based on his broad hints to present it. Then he explains the solution, and then he extends the explanation to a slightly more complex problem, and finally assigns yet another extension for homework.

As Siegel describes it, “The teacher-led study of all possible solutions masked direct instruction and repetitive practice in an interesting and enlightening problem space.

“Evidently, no student ever developed a new mathematical method or principle that differed from the technique introduced at the beginning of the lesson. In all, the teacher showed 10 times how to apply the method.”

A U.S. Department of Education report claims Japanese students devise their own solutions to “mathematics problem employing principles they have not yet learned.” Siegel says analysts who watched the videos were poorly trained. They came up with “10 student-generated alternative solution methods, even though it contains no student-discovered methods whatsoever.”

Discovery learning is fashionable in math reform circles, writes Seebach. The Japanese are supposed to be the models. But the Japanese teach traditionally — with “beautifully designed and superbly executed” lessons.

The videotape shows, Siegel says, that “a master teacher can present every step of a solution without divulging the answer, and can, by so doing, help students learn to think deeply. In such circumstances, the notion that students might have discovered the ideas on their own becomes an enticing mix of illusion intertwined with threads of truth.”

We’re short of master teachers, especially in math.

Update: According to Chris Correa, Japanese teachers believe that students are less serious about learning math.

Overall, students had become weaker in nine of the 11 areas that the survey asked about. The most striking declines in students’ scholastic aptitude were in the ability to calculate, which did not feature in the society’s survey in the mid-1990s, and in logical expression. The most alarming deterioration was among students at teacher-training universities.

That bodes ill.

Charter schools offer choice, not a particular educational or political ideology, writes Samuel Freedman, the New York Times’ first-rate education writer. He’s implicitly rebutting the Times’ editorial on its AFT-inspired charter school story.

The instant polarization that followed the charter school report misrepresented the issue in dangerous ways. Simply because the Bush administration supports charter schools does not make charter schools a Republican cause to be dragged into this divisive, bitter presidential campaign. Democrats as prominent as former President Bill Clinton also promoted charter schools, and so have many black leaders, whose communities are most ill-served by the status quo in public education.

Nor is there even a discernible charter school movement, if by that one means a unifying philosophy. All that binds together the nation’s 3,000 charter schools is their ability to operate free of the existing local bureaucracy. On the ground, charter schools range from ultraprogressive to determinedly back-to-basics, with operators as divergent as private companies, nonprofit social service organizations, and coalitions of parents.

I’m working on a freelance piece on the tendency to make all education policy about politics instead of being about education.

I can’t summarize this. You’ll just have to read it.

There’s good news on charter students’ performance in Wisconsin and Florida. The Orlando Sentinel reports on a state study of Florida’s 262 charter schools:

The report states that a larger percentage of charter-school students achieved national benchmarks for academic progress than traditional-school students.

The report also highlighted that while charter-school students may lag in achievement initially, they eventually make significant improvements in the school system over seven years.

In Los Angeles, a coalition of high-performing charter schools is fighting for funding, complaining that the district overcharges for services and won’t pass along the charters’ share of state money for low-income minority students.

The newly formed Coalition of High-Achieving Los Angeles Charter Schools, which includes five campuses in the San Fernando Valley, claims it pays nearly $4 million annually for special education programs, facility maintenance and administrative oversight but aren’t receiving that level of services in return.

The group also wants to stop the district from carrying out plans to withhold a total of $3 million in state funding this year — money each school received in 2003 — to help educate minority and disadvantaged students.

Coalition leaders said they’ve been waiting a year for the district to account for how it spends the money charters pay for district services.

Meanwhile, charter elementaries are outperforming district schools, reports the Daily News. Only 27 percent of fourth graders in LA district schools scored proficient or above on the reading exam, compared to 42 percent of charter students.

Kimberly Swygert, who’s back and blogging up a storm, has the latest on lonely sheep.

Benedict College, a historically black college in South Carolina, has fired two professors for refusing to go along with “effort-based grading.” From The State:

Benedict College has fired two professors who refused to go along with a policy that says freshmen are awarded 60 percent of their grades based on effort and the rest on their work’s academic quality.

Benedict President David Swinton says the Success Equals Effort policy gives struggling freshmen a chance to adapt to college academics. He expects students to improve – the formula drops to 50-50 in the sophomore year and isn’t used in the junior or senior year. But he says he’s “interested in where they are at when they graduate, not where they are when they get here.”

Students “have to get an A in effort to guarantee that if they fail the subject matter, they can get the minimum passing grade,” Swinton said. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

Science professors Milwood Motley and Larry Williams defied that policy and Swinton dismissed them. Neither had tenure, which could have protected them from firing.

Eventually, effort leads to success, but not necessarily in the first year of college for students who start without basic skills and knowledge. And how did students get so far behind? They’ve been passed through school without learning the subject matter. It’s the Low Standards Equals Failure plan.