Prospective math teacher “John Dewey” got an “A” in math education from his professor, Mr. NCTM, despite their disagreements on constructivism.
Dewey thinks students could figure out a formula for the sum of interior angles of a convex polygon in five to 10 minutes with guidance from the teacher or 45 minutes with the professor’s approach.

Given a choice between giving students 45 minutes to reach an “aha” experience, or 5 to 10 minutes, I and others like me opt for the latter.

Dewey thinks his classmates — including the diehard constructivist — will shift to his views over time.

See Dave Marain’s newish blog, Math Notations, for more.

D-Ed Reckoning is giggling (and snarking) at a petition by the Educator Roundtable to abolish No Child Left Behind. Among the roundtablers’ NCLB objections:

12. Applies standards to discrete subjects rather than to larger goals such as insightful children, vibrant communities, and a healthy democracy.

D-Ed Reckoning wonders how that’s going to work.

Now those are standards that I’d like to see — state standards for evaluating when children are insightful, when communities are vibrant, and democracies are healthy. Hopefully, schools will teach to the test and devote the morning to teaching insightfulness and the afternoons to teaching vibrancy. Hopefully, they’ll do a better job teaching these subjects than they did teaching math and reading.

The petition goes on:

10. Emphasizes minimum content standards rather than maximum development of human potential.

11. Neglects the teaching of higher order thinking skills which cannot be evaluated by machines.

Reckoning asks the question that goes through my mind at such times:

Have you ever seen a person with higher order thinking skills who couldn’t answer basic skills-type questions? No? Me neither. If anything, NCLB has shown that schools aren’t doing a very good job imparting basic skills, let alone those elusive higher order thinking skills. Let’s stick to baby steps.

The comments are, ahem, lively. One roundtabler says “children are being tortured systematically in our neighborhood schools.” Like that’s a bad thing.

The neediest students are being shortchanged, concludes Funding Gaps, 2006, an Education Trust report. Federal Title 1 funds — $13 billion a year to fund extra help for low-income students — go disproportionately to wealthy states.

For example, Maryland has fewer poor children than Arkansas but receives 51 percent more Title I aid per poor child, even though Arkansas dedicates more of its taxable resources to education than wealthier Maryland.

In about half the states, high-poverty and high-minority districts receive less funding than low-poverty and low-minority districts.

On average, states and localities spend $908 less per student in districts educating the most students of color, and $825 less per student in districts educating the most low-income students as compared to what is spent in the wealthiest and whitest districts.

Within school districts, “substantially less money is spent in high-poverty and high-minority schools.” Experienced, top-scale teachers cluster in schools with more affluent students. Austin spends an extra $383,700 per year at an advantaged school with 100 teachers.

In addition, districts balance the federal funds for poor students by spending most of their extra state and local funding at lower-poverty schools.

It’s no surprise Title I hasn’t closed the achievement gap, the Washington Post points out.

Experts say children raised in poverty need more instructional time and specially trained teachers to help overcome their disadvantages — resources that require more spending.

More money won’t solve all the high-poverty schools’ problems, but they deserve at least as much as the kids in middle-class schools. In particular, it would make a real difference if needy schools could offer more money to lure experienced and master teachers.

Because so many students go to Mexico for three or four weeks at Christmas, some California schools now start a week early and take a three-week winter break. The longer break cuts absenteeism.

Our School, my book about a San Jose charter high school, deals with this dilemma. The school’s principal and teachers try to persuade parents not to leave for Mexico before students have finished their finals and to return before school starts. Parents sometimes see time with family as more important than school time. If Downtown College Prep students overstay their vacation, they’ll miss the chance to take electives and catch-up courses during the two-week intersession between semesters; they won’t miss regular classes.

Open Educator’s Open Planner, created by teachers Andrew and Jennifer Stillman, is a non-profit online curriculum development and support community. Using open-source software, teachers work in teams to build and refine curriculum. Teachers are encouraged to modify the curriculum to suit their needs, try it and report back on the results. Here’s some of Open Educator’s pitch to “hard-working, relatively isolated and emotionally and intellectually under-supported practitioners.”

Almost all of our expertise is developed “where the rubber meets the road,” through the interactions and judgments we must continually make in the classroom.

. . . there have been few mechanisms by which to document and share the practical wisdom of hundreds of thousands of teachers who must actually implement and use these knowledge products.

Open Educator believes “many of the ailments of the teaching profession can be treated as systemic information failures.”

I’ve thought for years that teachers need ways to share their ideas and successes.