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Fun with math at MoMath

September 9, 2012 by

An interactive Museum of Math dubbed MoMath is opening in New York City on Dec. 15 funded by a math-loving financial analyst named Glenn Whitney.

Math Midway, a traveling exhibition of math marvels, is touring science museums as a preview: Kids can “ride the square-wheeled tricycle, spin the universal wheel of chance or dare to challenge the ring of fire.” Also included: “mind-bending mirrors, terrific tessellations and perfectly packed patterns.”

MoMath will show that math matters, writes Daniel Willingham, who shows Joel Klein, the former New York schools chancellor, on the trike. (It “can be ridden smoothly on a track with inverted curves, calculated to keep the axles of the trike level.”)

Picture

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Romney’s pick for Education: Jeb? Rhee?

August 28, 2012 by

With the Republican convention underway, it’s time to speculate about Romney’s pick for Education secretary. Over at Politics K-12, Alyson Klein writes that  former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is the number one guess among GOP insiders. Bush wrote the foreword to Romney’s education plan and is the “godfather” of the state superintendents’ group “Chiefs for Change,” which has “had a major impact on state-level education policies.”

Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota also is a top mentionee.

If Romney looks for a state superintendent, Tony Bennett of Indiana, a Chief for Change, and Tom Luna of Idaho are possibilities.

. . . given Romney’s dissing of the teacher’s unions, Luna’s got anti-union street cred to spare—his tires were slashed last year when he tried to raise class size and put merit pay in place.

Other folks are fans of New Jersey’s Chris Cerf, a registered Democrat who, works with a GOP governor (Tuesday’s keynote speaker, Chris Christie).

Former superintendents include Robert Scott (Texas), Paul Pastorek (Louisiana) and Lisa Graham Keegan (of Arizona).

Folks have also suggested that Romney could use the Education Department as the one place to stick a (non-state chief) Democrat, to show his administration can be bipartisan. The name that came up most often? Former New York City chancellor Joel Klein. Other folks suggested Michelle Rhee, a Democrat, who is now running the Students First juggernaut and will be in both Tampa and Charlotte. She’ll be at screenings of the parent-trigger movie “Won’t Back Down.”

The darkest of dark horses? Some of Klein’s Republican sources suggested Romney could ask Arne Duncan to stick around. “Even if it is a joke, it shows Duncan’s still got some cross-aisle credibility,” writes Klein.

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But which one gets to be Crassus?

April 6, 2012 by

Via EducationNext, a little inside baseball for those of you following the ongoing reform wars: Klein, Moskowitz, and Rhee have joined forces in New York.  It looks like that’s where they’re going to make a stand.  According to the NYT:

Like the national group, the state branch will promote the expansion of charter schools and the firing of ineffective schoolteachers, while opposing tenure.

I should visit the concession stand and pick up some popcorn.  This is going to be good.  Anyone want anything while I’m up?

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Bold dissenter — or burnable heretic?

November 30, 2011 by

The Dissenter in the New Republic (subscribers’ only) analyzes education historian Diane Ravitch’s turn against education reform ideas she’d once championed.

Author Kevin Carey seems to attribute Ravitch’s change of heart to her long-time partner’s rejection by Joel Klein. As a new chancellor, Klein started a training program for principals, ignoring the work of an existing and well-respected leadership academy run by Mary Butz, Ravitch’s partner.

Ravitch had good reason to distrust Klein and his reforms, writes Mike Petrilli.

. . . Diane had a point about Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein running schools as if they were “selling toothpaste.” The leadership academy was a perfect example. . . . like many reformers who distrust the reformers who came before them, he didn’t consider that Mary’s program might be worth building on, rather than replacing. And instead of recruiting experienced principals to run his new initiative, he went to corporate America for its funding and design.

Keep in mind that this was the same Joel Klein who was trashing the federal Reading First program for being too prescriptive, lavishing money on Lucy Calkins and her hare-brained “writing workshop” ideas, and arguing that the content of a particular curriculum didn’t matter; what was important was picking one and sticking to it. Klein was agnostic about the education side of education. And that (understandably) infuriated Diane.

. . .  she is right to be suspicious of a school reform movement that still, to this day, has little to say about matters of curriculum and pedagogy.

“Successful movements seek converts; unsuccessful movements hunt heretics,” responds Core Knowledge‘s Robert Pondiscio in an e-mail.
. . . Look, I disagree with Diane on choice and charters, among other things (lest I become the next heretic to be burned at the stake). But I remain deeply appreciative of her unchanged and unflinching support of a core curriculum, and enormously influenced by her overall body of work. The speculation that she would gainsay a life of scholarship merely for the cheap thrill of settling a personal grudge is just plain silly.
Indeed.

In a 1983 essay, “Scapegoating the Teachers,” Ravitch wrote:

It is comforting to blame teachers for the low state of education, because it relieves so many others of their own responsibility for years of educational neglect.

Ravitch was affiliated with the anti-communist left and was a friend of teachers’ union leader Al Shanker, Goldstein adds.

Both Goldstein and Alexander Russo raise the issue of sexism.

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If it works, keep doing it

July 18, 2011 by

New York City wasted millions of dollars on bonuses for students and teachers with no effect on performance, writes Sol Stern in a New York Daily News op-ed.  Now a Core Knowledge reading program is succeeding in 10 Bronx and Queens elementary schools by teaching phonics and background knowledge to disadvantaged students. But there’s no guarantee the funding will be continued.

As chancellor of New York City schools, Joel Klein set up a comparison between the Core Knowledge pilot schools and similar schools using “balanced literacy.”

After the first year, Klein announced the early results: On a battery of reading tests, the kindergartners in the Core Knowledge program had achieved gains five times greater than those of students in the control group. The second-year study showed that the Core Knowledge kids made reading gains twice as great as those of students in the control group.

The third-year results will be released in the fall. If the gains continue, logic says the program should be extended. But logic doesn’t always prevail.

On the other hand, New York City’s Education Department has ended a three-year bonus program for teachers and administrators because a RAND study found it had no effect on students’ or schools’ performance.

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The case for (and against) commonality

June 25, 2011 by

We need higher and common education standards, argue former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The Common Core State Standards define what students need to know; they do not define how teachers should teach, or how students should learn. That is up to each state. And they are built on what we have learned from high-performing international competitors as well as the best practices in leading states.

. . . research shows that rigorous mastery of fractions is crucial for later math performance. The Common Core State Standards provide clear grade-by-grade goals for what students should know about fractions, built on the best practices of high-performing countries. In literacy, what most predicts college readiness is the ability to read and understand complex texts. The Common Standards set clear benchmarks for each grade for students reading sufficiently complex texts in English, history/social studies, science and technical subjects.

Bush and Klein make the case against common standards, contends Greg Forster on Jay Greene’s blog. They argue that states, not the federal government, should set education policy. But the feds have pushed states to adopt Common Core Standards by threatening loss of Title I funds; the testing consortia are federally funded.

Furthermore, what’s so great about commonality?

If states should lead the way, if what we want is a decentralized 50-state laboratory of democracy, why not actually do that instead of rounding up all the states to all do it one way?

I wish a few states with strong standards and an established test, such as Massachusetts, had resisted pressure to jump on the Common Core bandwagon. It would be nice to see a few laboratories of democracy.

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A return to “Death and Life”

May 17, 2011 by

I have been enjoying my recent return to Diane Ravitch’s latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (Basic Books, 2010). I have read the book many, many times; I edited it and was research assistant during the final stages of revision. After dozens of readings, the book remains absorbing, invigorating, and beautiful.

As I read it this time, it occurs to me that the central error of Balanced Literacy is very similar to the error of implementing Balanced Literacy (or any other model) across a system. Ravitch’s book draws an implicit and compelling parallel between the two errors.

Balanced Literacy makes the mistake of putting the “strategy” at the center of instruction. Ravitch describes the approach in chapter 3:

Teachers are supposed to teach the prescribed strategies and procedures, and the students (alone or in groups) are expected to practice their reading strategies and refer to them by name. A student might say, for example, “I am visualizing,” “I am summarizing,” “I am making a text-to-self connection,” “I am making a prediction,” or “I am making an inference.”

The emphasis on strategies is misguided (in my opinion). Reading strategies, taught and applied generically, can distract from the text and distort its meaning. What’s more, one learns much more about literature from close reading of specific literature than from instruction in the strategies themselves. The strategy approach is supposed to apply to all students and texts, but each text should be approached on its own terms. Of course, patterns and general practices do emerge, but they come out of the careful reading and attentive listening.

So there’s the central error: taking a so-called strategy, which is ill-defined to begin with, and applying it to an array of situations, without carefully considering the specifics.

A similar error can be found in the very act of mandating Balanced Literacy across a district. Ravitch describes how Balanced Literacy migrated from District 2 in New York City to the entire school system of San Diego and then back to New York City as a whole. [Read more...]

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Flash: School reform ‘won’t fix everything’

April 27, 2011 by

School reformers ignore student’s home life, asserts Joe Nocera, the New York Times new op-ed columnist. “At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that’s required to improve student performance, so that’s all the reformers focus on.”

Not a safe school community, not strong school leaders, not curriculum, not a longer school day and year, not college aspirations and never parent outreach.  (Ninety percent of school improvement plans in Midwest states include a parent involvement initiative.) Silly reformers.

He talks to Joel Klein, New York’s former school chief, who says that “family engagement can matter” but poverty isn’t destiny.  We shouldn’t give up on improving schools, Klein says.

“To let us off the hook prematurely seems, to me, to play into the hands of the other side.”

Who’s the other side? Social scientists and teachers’ unions, writes Nocera. He concedes that improving schools is a worthy goal, but warns “school reform won’t fix everything.”

Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.

Is it “demonizing” teachers to say that some are better than others? Are reformers ignoring the problems of poor kids by trying to get more effective teachers in high-poverty schools? Are there school reformers who think school reform is easy and will fix everything? Or maybe they’re trying to improve teachers and teaching (and curriculum, etc.) because they don’t have the power to improve parents.

Ed Next’s Peter Meyer had a similar reaction. School reform won’t fix everything? Gosh! Who knew?

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Klein resigns in New York City

November 9, 2010 by

Joel Klein has resigned after eight years as chancellor of New York City schools. He will be replaced by Cathleen Black, chairman of Hearst Magazines, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

Like Klein, who was a federal prosector, Black, 66, has no education experience. A Chicago native, she attended parochial grammar schools and sent her two children to private boarding schools.

The mayor called Ms. Black “a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector” and added, “There’s no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy.” A former publisher of New York magazine, she went on to become publisher of USA Today, and now heads Hearst Magazines, which publishes Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping and other titles.

Klein, 64, will become an executive vice president at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Gotham Schools live-blogged the announcement. On HechingerEd, Sarah Garland looks at Klein’s “legacy of rage, reform and rising graduation rates.“

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Liberating languor

May 24, 2009 by

Over breakfast with New York Times reporter Susan Dominus, Chancellor Joel Klein waxed enthusiastic over the recent book of Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb, Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of Education. According to Klein, this book shows how, “through distance learning and other individualized teaching approaches, we may be able to reduce the need in the future for teachers’ overall numbers and increase their pay.”

One might use online courses to supplement existing curricula. But it’s hard to see how they could replace teachers. What would count as an absence, and what would be done about chronic absences? How many students would drop out of contact and slip through the cracks? What would keep children from “learning” on the sofa with the TV on?

Nor would it be fair to use distance learning for the top students. They, too, need teachers in their daily lives. Intellectual advancement and self-sufficiency are not one and the same. Moreover, young people spend so much time online with their peers that they need a counterbalance: adults they must face, places where they must be.

There is no getting around it. Teachers are needed.

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