KitchenTableMath and Text Savvy aren’t happy with the Education Department’s advice to parents on teaching children math:

Try to be aware of how your child is being taught math, and don’t teach strategies and shortcuts that conflict with the approach the teacher is using.

That means “don’t subert fuzzy math” by teaching algorithms, KTM thinks.

In Math for poets, one of Linda Moran’s readers complains that the TERC math curriculum is teaching math appreciation rather than math understanding. Traditional math terms just won’t do:

* In TERC it is joining not addition
* separating not subtraction
* bits and pieces and not fractions
* capacity and not volume
* it is what the calculator displays and not decimals.
* it is “landmarks” rather than ALL the numbers in the decimal system.
* it is turns and not angles and degrees.
* it is write a story and not write the equation.
* it is draw pictures and not show a true effective reusable strategy.

Via Instructivist.

Update: “New-age math” is failing to teach skills or concepts, writes Seattle Times columnist Bruce Ramsey, who quotes TERC-hating math teachers and professors who complain their students don’t have the math knowledge to pursue scientific careers.

The official measure of math skills is the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. The WASL is a new-age test, with many questions being as much about explanations as answers. Some are more of logic than math — making the WASL a better test for the college-bound than the high-school grad expected to know basic algebra and fractions. At the same time, Washington, D.C., consultant Michael Cohen, who has reviewed the WASL, says the actual math in it is seventh-grade level.

Consider that. To graduate from high school, our state was going to require kids to demonstrate knowledge of seventh-grade math — and because of the way we teach them, and the way we test them, half of them can’t do it.

A parent-teacher group, Where’s the Math?, is trying to get Washington to teach “real math” using California’s math standards.

Boston’s charter schools won’t be able to rent unused Catholic schools, writes Steve Bailey, a Boston Globe columnist. The church doesn’t want the competition.

Wal-Mart would never help Target locate a store in the same neighborhood. Now the Archdiocese of Boston, in theearly stages of an ambitious effort to rebuild Catholic education, has decided to stop being quite so accommodating to its competition, charter schools.

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley “has recruited a corps of top business leaders to raise big money to expand the Catholic schools, which have seen enrollment in Eastern Massachusetts plummet to about 50,000 students from 153,000 in 1965.”

In a policy shift, the archdiocese has decided to stop writing new leases or selling its vacant facilities to Massachusetts charter schools.

Charters are free while tuition at Catholic schools runs from $2,500 to $4,000 a year, Bailey writes.

High-scoring Boston Collegiate Charter School, which has 1,300 students on a waiting list, had hoped to buy a vacant Catholic school in its neighborhood. The archdiocese won’t sell.

(Boston Collegiate), founded in 1998 in South Boston, has about 400 students in grades five through 12. Last month, 573 kids were in a lottery for 66 spots, an admissions rate that approaches some of the nation’s elite colleges.

What the school needs most is room to grow. “Our dream is to build a gymnasium,” (executive director Kathleen) Sullivan says. Students now shoot at a single basket on a cramped strip of asphalt out back; they perform Shakespeare in the school’s entrance foyer.

The former Catholic school building will remain empty while the charter school turns away eager students.

Via Education Gadfly.

St. Louis firefighters want the right to live outside city limits so their children can go to good schools The city’s schools are about to lose accreditation. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

ST. LOUIS — Twice a week after his 24-hour shift as a firefighter, Dan Lemmon works an additional 10 hours delivering freight on an 18-wheeler.

It’s not to raise money for holiday gifts or a Florida vacation — it’s to keep his kids out of the St. Louis Public Schools.

Many St. Louis firefighters — whose primary job keeps them tethered to home addresses in the city — are drawing second paychecks to pay tuition at private and parochial schools.

. . . “I’d be living out in Fenton and sending my kids to one of the best school districts in Missouri — and not paying for it,” said Lemmon, who now spends more than $12,000 a year to send three children to Catholic school.

The municipal workers’ union also is thinking of seeking an end to the residency rule. In 2005, St. Louis police officers were granted the right to live outside the city.

Via Education Gadfly.

Not everyone has to enjoy reading to read well, writes Ms. Teacher in response to a comment on the Edspresso reading debate, “A child who can read but doesn’t is a non-reader and a child who can’t read is a non-reader. Same result.” Ms. Teacher disagrees:

. . . when we teach mathematics, do we insist that all children must love math?

. . . I am someone who “can do math” but doesn’t because I’ve never enjoyed math. Am I, therefore equal, to someone who cannot “do math” at all?

She’s married to a man who considers fiction a waste of time.

However, give him a magazine on coins, or cars, or wine, and he’ll devour it. I do not think that he would say that reading is one of this favorite things to do because for him it is simply a way to gather information on something that he is interested in and then he wants to move on.

I suspect this is not uncommon for males. My husband reads non-fiction and science fiction, preferably by Isaac Asimov. I doubt he’s read a non-sci-fi novel since high school. But, if he wanted to, he could.

The first and essential step to a love of reading is learning to read fluently.

Reading First is working.

Students in the Bush administration’s embattled $1 billion-a-year reading program have improved an average of about 15 percent on tests measuring fluency over the past five years, according to an analysis of data by the Education Department.

The House education committee is holding an oversight hearing Friday on charges the program is mismanaged and that the experts on its reading panel have conflicts of interest.

On Gadfly, reading researcher Reid Lyon argues that improve Reading First “remains incredibly important” and suggests how to make it even better.

Congress should make two key changes. First, federal funds should only be used for those programs and instructional models that have been found to be effective using experimental research designs that can determine their causal impact on student achievement in reading. “Scientifically-based” programs should be replaced with “scientifically-proven” ones.

Second, Congress should stop dancing around the “local control” issue and simply ask a federal agency to vet the reading research and to determine, on a regular basis, which reading programs make the “scientifically-proven” cut. In other words, Congress should create for reading (and perhaps other subjects where scientific research can be done) the equivalent of an FDA for education to ensure that states and school districts only spend their Reading First funds on interventions that have been conclusively shown to work. (The “What Works Clearinghouse” might serve as a model.)

When Lyon visits schools, he hears administrators and teachers “discussing whether particular instructional programs and strategies have sufficient evidence of effectiveness.” So why go back to the days when federal dollars funded educational snake oil?

Also: See Michael Petrilli’s “Hooked on Hysterics.”