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Many districts aren’t ready for new standards

September 15, 2011 By

Only half of school districts are working on implementing the Common Core Standards their states have adopted, according to a Center on Education Policy survey. Some are waiting for state guidance on how to adapt curriculum, instruction and assessment and add learning materials.

“What it says to me is that there is a large percentage that don’t seem to understand the train that is about to hit them,” said William H. Schmidt, a Michigan State University education professor who is conducting his own research on districts’ readiness for the new standards. “That, to me, is somewhat scary.”

Superintendents disagree on whether the new standards are more demanding, reports Education Week.

Fewer than 60 percent of the districts said they view the new standards as more rigorous than their states’ previous guidelines. Fewer still—55 percent in math, and 58 percent in English/language arts—said they believed the standards would improve students’ skills.

Two-thirds of the districts anticipate the need for new curriculum materials in math, and 56 percent anticipate a similar need for the literacy standards. About half the respondents said they thought the new standards would demand “fundamental changes” in instruction.

Surveying superintendents overstates districts’ readiness for the new standards, Schmidt told Ed Week.  “In his work surveying 700 districts, he said, he has found that teachers know less about the standards than do staff members at district headquarters.”

 

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Life’s a carnival

September 14, 2011 By

Bellringers is hosting the Meet the Teacher edition of the Education Buzz Carnival.

Darren wonders if official collaboration time is overdone.

Mister Teacher could use help with the new math curriculum, which chews up most of his class time trying to get reluctant third graders to perform High Level Tasks.

Notes from a Homeschooling Mom is hosting this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling.

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National standards: Good idea or good riddance?

September 8, 2011 By

Good riddance to new national standards, writes Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews, who’s a centrist voice in the education debate. Common Core Standards, adopted by more than 40 states and pushed by the Education Department, “won’t help and won’t work,” Mathews argues.

Such specific standards stifle creativity and conflict with a two-century American preference for local decision-making about schools.

. . . We should focus on better teaching methods and better training of teachers, as well as school structures that help educators work more as teams. Those teachers could then employ whatever methods and standards make sense for their students.

Mathews was persuaded the national standards movement will collapse by reading Jay Greene, who argues that neither the states nor the feds can afford “a ton of money” to change curriculum, testing and teaching to make standards meaningful. Not even the Gates Foundation can afford it, Greene writes.

(Greene) says the digital learning industry, a growing financial and political force, will soon realize that the new standards will frustrate innovation.

“No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top grants are likely to be the high water mark of federal involvement in schools,” Mathews predicts.

States can borrow good standards from other states without creating one set of standards for everyone, he argues. If the tests developed to go with the new standards “probe conceptual understanding in ways state tests fail to do,” then there will be demand to use those exams.

While recruiting, training and supporting good teachers is important, curriculum isn’t chopped liver. I’d like to see states with good standards stick with what they’ve got, at least until the Common Core Standards and tests prove their worth. But plenty of states have nowhere to go but up.

I’m also not persuaded national standards are doomed. Still, it’s odd that nobody will defend the rigor and quality of Common Core math standards for an Education Next forum.  “Common Core advocates seem to have already grown impatient with public give-and-take and eager to declare the issue settled,” writes Rick Hess, who sympathetic but skeptical about the Common Core effort.

 

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Teachers can learn from tests

August 31, 2011 By

Once a foe of standardized testing, Ama Nyamekye improved her teaching by analyzing her students’ scores on New York’s Regents exam, she writes in Ed Week.  When she asked her sophomores to take the English Regents exam a year early, she discovered “holes in my curriculum.”

I once dismissed standardized testing for its narrow focus on a discrete set of skills, but I learned that my self-made assignments were more problematic. It turned out they were skewed in my favor. I was better at teaching literary analysis than grammar and punctuation. When I started giving ongoing standardized assessments, I noticed that my students showed steady growth in literary analysis, but less growth in grammar and punctuation. I was teaching to my strengths instead of strengthening my weaknesses.

Grading is subjective, she writes. Emotionally invested in her students’ success — and implicitly judging her own effectiveness — she was quick to see signs of achievement.

By contrast, her students’ Regents essays were graded by English teachers who didn’t know them and who used detailed rubrics.

When I “depoliticized” the test, I found a useful and flawed ally. The exam excelled where I struggled, offering comprehensive and standards-based assessments. I thrived where the test fell short, designing creative, performance-based projects. Together, we were strategic partners. I designed and graded innovative projects—my students participated in court trials for Shakespearean characters—and the test provided a rubric that guided my evaluation of student learning.

All her students who took the exam passed it. Most earned high scores.

Nyamekye left teaching in New York City to work as a communications consultant for nonprofits and write a book to be titled The Call to Teach: Building Careers on the Front Lines and Fault Lines of Public Education.

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Corporations write curricula, train principals

August 28, 2011 By

Corporations aren’t writing many no-strings checks to schools. They’re helping to write curricula, design classes and train principals, reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

In St. Paul and Mahtomedi, 3M has already helped schools develop science curricula and teach lessons. Cargill executives coach 11 Minneapolis charter school principals on management and business. And this school year St. Louis Park High School will ask corporations for help in designing electives.

“My concern is that many partnerships benefit the company more than the school and students,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a Boston advocacy nonprofit.

A look at such collaborations around the country finds IBM helping to open an inner-city public high school in September. The school will prepare graduates for entry-level technology jobs, possibly at IBM.

In Nashville, Tenn., a high school joined with a local credit union to open a student-run branch in the cafeteria, open during lunch periods to students and staff.

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton has asked businesses to “adopt” schools, giving both expertise and dollars.

In Minneapolis, Cargill, General Mills and Medtronic helped set up a $2.8 million, three-year leadership development program for principals. Corporate human resources executives will coach Minneapolis principals this year on management and other issues.

. . . 3M volunteers advised Mahtomedi Public Schools on an engineering curriculum this year, but the 3M Foundation’s Barbara Kaufman said the district led the curriculum conversations.

“Most of these teachers have never been in the industry … we provide the relevancy,” she said.

Education’s goal is “to create a literate population who can think critically,” not to train a workforce,  said Linn, of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

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Math or quantitative literacy?

August 26, 2011 By

The traditional math curriculum is too abstract for most students, argue Sol Garfunkel of the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications and David Mumford, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown, in a New York Times op-ed.

Today, American high schools offer a sequence of algebra, geometry, more algebra, pre-calculus and calculus . . .

. . . how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation? Do they need to know what constitutes a “group of transformations” or a “complex number”? Of course professional mathematicians, physicists and engineers need to know all this, but most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood.

Students could learn math in the context of real-world problems, they writes.

Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.

Applied math students would learn abstract reasoning skills as well as useable knowledge, they argue.  Teaching only abstract math is like teaching Latin instead of Spanish and German.

In math, what we need is “quantitative literacy,” the ability to make quantitative connections whenever life requires (as when we are confronted with conflicting medical test results but need to decide whether to undergo a further procedure) and “mathematical modeling,” the ability to move practically between everyday problems and mathematical formulations (as when we decide whether it is better to buy or lease a new car).

Tracking is taboo in schools. I can envision massive resistance to splitting students into abstract math and applied math streams. And Common Core Standards enshrine the traditional math sequence as the way to teach all students.

What to do you think, math teachers and math mavens?

“Relevant” always seems to mean “dumbed-down,” writes Robert Pondiscio on Core Knowledge Blog.

The 21st homework problem in a 1898 algebra textbook and the 21st assignment in a contemporary integrative math book are up on Out In Left Field.  Note that the modern assignment is “relevant” — and simple.

Today’s math texts are filled with real-world problems, though usually not very real, adds OILF.

 

 

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Plastics industry edited environmental guide

August 20, 2011 By

California’s new environmental curriculum was changed to please the plastics industry, reports California Watch.

American Chemistry Council lobbyists persuaded school officials to include a section on “The Advantages of Plastic Shopping Bags” in the 11th-grade teachers’ edition textbook.

Although the curriculum includes the environmental hazards of plastic bags, the consultant also added a five-point question to a workbook asking students to list some advantages. According to the teachers’ edition, the correct answer is: “Plastic shopping bags are very convenient to use. They take less energy to manufacture than paper bags, cost less to transport, and can be reused.”

Some California cities and counties have banned plastic shopping bags; San Francisco requires markets to charge customers for paper bags. We’re all supposed to have reusable bags.

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Attack of the reading tests

August 9, 2011 By

Rachel Levy hoped to teach history and geography while developing her high school students’ reading and writing skills. But the principal of her inner-city D.C. school — pre-Rhee — told social studies teachers to spend one-fifth of class time teaching the reading test, Levy writes on Core Knowledge Blog.

Teachers were told to make a chart for each student showing how well he or she did on each skill, such as “context clues.”

Then I was supposed to target my lesson plans to teach and remedy each student’s individual weaknesses. . . . such instruction and data collection had to be documented in our lesson plan books and during classroom observations.

Teach and remedy each student’s individual weaknesses?

While testing doesn’t require such stupidities, few educators have the patience to rely on a “well-rounded and knowledge-rich curriculum” to raise scores gradually, Levy writes.

She tried to persuade colleagues that the way to raise test scores was to “teach content and have students read and write as much as possible.”  No one agreed.

Now raising three children, Levy blogs at All Things Education.

Update:  You need to know how to teach but you also need to know your subject very well, writes Michael Bromley, a social studies teacher who guest-blogged for Rick Hess on Ed Week.  “No matter the teaching strategy, if you don’t have something valid, interesting, and important to teach there will be no learning.”

In June, the National Assessment of Educational Progress released a report showing core historical illiteracy among American school children. In response, famed historian David McCullough told the Wall Street Journal, “People who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively because they’re often assigned to teach subjects about which they know little or nothing.”

Wait a minute, there, David, hold on: modern pedagogy states that qualified, education-proficient teachers can teach anything, so long as the correct strategies for student engagement are followed. Isn’t that the problem? David replies, “You can’t love something you don’t know any more than you can love someone you don’t know.” Amen, brother . . .

If you don’t know the subject, your students won’t either, Bromley concludes.

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Scholastic cuts back on corporate lessons

August 2, 2011 By

Scholastic will cut some industry-sponsored curricula and appoint a review board to vet new projects, reports the New York Times. The publisher was criticized for distributing a lesson packet on energy funded by the American Coal Foundation.  The packet praised the benefits of coal without mentioning any of the drawbacks.

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Change.org launched a petition drive urging Scholastic to stop distributing corporate-sponsored classroom material.

In addition to the coal curriculum, Scholastic distributed a program stressing the environmental wrongs of plastic water bottles, sponsored by Brita, which sells water filters. It also had a $3 million Microsoft campaign in which schools could earn points toward prizes for each Microsoft search, as well as a program featuring Playmobil’s small plastic figures.

Scholastic has ended these programs. However, the publisher will continue to distribute materials produced by the Egg Board.

. . . “All About Eggs” gives teachers a poster showing how eggs journey from farm to table, lesson plans revolving around eggs, and promotes the Good Egg Project, through which farmers contribute one egg to feed the hungry for each student who takes the pledge to “Eat Good. Do Good Every Day.”

They couldn’t write a grammatically correct pledge?

In the 2010-11 school year, the program included a Back to Breakfast contest in which 12 teachers each won $5,000 for short essays describing how they would use that grant, with the winners creating videos to post on YouTube. In one video, “Eggucation Week Back to Breakfast Challenge,” a Chicago fourth-grade teacher tells of teaching her students about the benefits of eating eggs, and asking them to create egg recipes.

Teachers who wanted that $5,000 probably didn’t use the word “cholesterol” in their essays. Still, I suspect nobody spent a full week on Eggucation.

 

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Silver bullet: More time teaching at kid's level

June 29, 2011 By

Stuart Buck praises Barker Bausell’s Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change, which argues that “the only thing that improves education is spending more time on instruction at a given child’s level.”

Bausell suggests adding pre-K (using direct instruction) BS lengthening the school day and year. Schools would focus on relevant instruction, eliminating time wasters such as “candy sales, worthless school assemblies, loudspeaker announcements, sports activities, ad nauseam.” Disruptive students would be removed from class.  (“If this means that we have to leave certain children behind because they can’t meet behavioral expectations (or we don’t know how to enable them to conform), so be it.”)

In addition, Buck summarizes:

The entire curriculum should be exhaustive and detailed, and computerized tests should be based exclusively on the curriculum.

. . . Teacher behavior should be “monitored constantly to ensure the delivery of sufficient instruction, as well as satisfactory coverage of (and minimal departures from) the established curriculum.”

. . . Use efficient instructional methods. Bausell points to an example of inefficiency: “My son once had a teacher who had an elaborate class project involving building a medieval castle out of popsicle sticks that stretched over a period of several months. Regardless of what the teacher thought she was accomplishing, this is valuable time wasted . . . ‘”

Finally, recruit volunteer tutors who can help students practice reading sight words or learn math with flash cards.

Most teachers are supposed to “differentiate instruction” for children with a wide range of learning needs. Some students are way ahead, some on track, some way behind. Some speak English fluently; some don’t. A few students have disabilities. Others are behavior problems. If teachers had more time, no distractions and groups of children working at the same level . . .  Teachers, what do you think?

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