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You are here: Home / Economics / Free Markets Solve Everything / Lessons in accountability from the school reform industry and the politicians they purchased

Lessons in accountability from the school reform industry and the politicians they purchased

by Kay|  April 15, 20139:24 am| 88 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Even the "Liberal" New Republic, Nobody could have predicted, Very Serious People

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Millions of kids all over the country are taking high stakes tests this week:

At Public School 10 on the edge of Park Slope, Brooklyn, parents begged the principal to postpone the lower school science fair, insisting it was going to add too much pressure while they were preparing their children for the coming state tests.
On Staten Island, a community meeting devolved into a series of student stress stories, with one parent recounting how his son had woken up from a bad dream, mumbling that he had forgotten to fill in a bubble answer.
And at Public School 24 in the Riverdale neighborhood in the Bronx, a fifth-grade teacher, Walter Rendon, has found himself soothing tense 10- and 11-year-olds as they pore over test prep exercises. “Sometimes, I say: ‘Just breathe.’ ”

this year’s tests, which begin Tuesday, are unlike any exams the students have seen. They have been redesigned and are tougher.
But the standards are so new that many New York schools have yet to fully adopt new curriculums — including reading material, lesson plans and exercises — to match. “It really makes me nervous,” said Patrick Timoney, a seventh grader at Intermediate School 2, on Staten Island. “It’s a big deal and if you don’t get a good grade, it’s not the best.”
Larry Larson, a Web developer with a fourth grader at Public School 58 in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, said he had started teaching his son concepts like long division. He said the new tests felt like someone “changing the rules of the road overnight.”

I’m sure when the scores come back we’ll be treated to a media barrage of stories about our failed and failing public schools, which will certainly make privatization proceed more smoothly. The kids are anxious because they’re not absolute morons, despite being failures who attend our failed and failing public schools. They’re surrounded by anxious adults and they know they didn’t cover the material. Would Arne Duncan sit for a high stakes test he hadn’t prepared for? Of course not. That’s not “education.” It’s a very common bad dream, is what it is.

Meanwhile, here’s how the adults are holding themselves accountable:

The chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee said Sunday that he has no plans to launch a full-scale investigation into allegations of widespread cheating on standardized tests in 2008, during the tenure of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee.
Council member David Catania (I-At Large) said that he intends to find out why the scope of a prior cheating investigation was limited to one school, but much of his focus will be on improving the integrity of future tests, which are used to evaluate schools and teachers.
Catania’s statement came three days after the public airing of a 2009 memo indicating that as many as 191 teachers in 70 D.C. public schools may have committed testing infractions in 2008.
Catania said that in light of the 2009 memo, he is “bewildered by the narrow scope” of a investigation by the D.C. Inspector General, which lasted 17 months and focused only on one school. But he said a full-scale reinvestigation of the five-year-old allegations “would be impractical and would yield little in terms of accountability.”
“Among other things,” he said, “simply identifying and interviewing the hundreds of witnesses would overwhelm the Council’s limited staff and resources.”
It makes more sense to focus on tightening test security and strengthening efforts to identify cheating in the future, the council member said.
The hearing will also include discussion of a report released Friday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which found that teachers in 11 schools cheated on 2012 standardized tests.

I have no idea how they’re going to “tighten security” when they’ve made a decision to ignore what happened when security was lax, but creating security standards without finding out how and why there was a breach makes about as much sense as testing kids on material they didn’t cover, so I’m not surprised. I suppose we’re getting ready to create a companion industry to the testing industry, one that focuses on test security. We’ll need lots and lots of consultants. I can save DC a lot of money and time on this hearing, because everyone in this country is familiar with how these go. The 2008 cheating was due to a few bad apples (ideally lazy, venal union members or their failed and failing students) and none of the people responsible are now or were then in positions of power. Wrap it up, release the findings and hire the security consultants.

The school reform industry spokespeople and the politicians they own yammer constantly about “accountability” and “no excuses.” The standards they impose seem to apply only to students and teachers, however, because let’s face it. It would be extremely embarrassing to the billionaires and the clueless media celebrities and the politicians from both parties who promoted Michelle Rhee and blindly climbed onto this bandwagon if they investigated what actually happened under Rhee’s watch, so they’ve simply decided not to. No excuses for fourth graders. Plenty of excuses available for the adults at the very top. That’s today’s lesson in accountability from the no excuses crowd.

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88Comments

  1. 1.

    Mark S.

    April 15, 2013 at 9:37 am

    On education, our leaders didn’t fail. They just didn’t succeed.

    I don’t have any kids so this issue isn’t foremost in my mind, but why isn’t there any pressure to change any of this bullshit? I don’t think No Child Left Behind has come up in any of the last 3 presidential elections.

  2. 2.

    c u n d gulag

    April 15, 2013 at 9:37 am

    GOP POV:
    Nothing engenders a child’s life-long love of learning, like high-stakes tests administered by corporations making profits off of them.

    You see, with theses high-stakes tests, students will learn this valuable, life-long lesson:
    Nobody gives a sh*t about you, any of you – as long as the company makes a tidy profit.

  3. 3.

    liberal

    April 15, 2013 at 9:43 am

    I’m pretty sure the “Daily Howler” guy, whatever his other foibles, is pretty good on the cheating issue.

  4. 4.

    Phylllis

    April 15, 2013 at 9:44 am

    We have high school exit exam testing this week. Students must pass the ELA and Math sections to graduate. Then we have a 3-week period where we will be participating in Smarter Balanced pilot testing–will replace our 3rd-8th state ELA and Math tests in 2015 due to Common Core. Then in May, it’s our state testing in ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies for NCLB accountability, plus additional core class tests at the high school. And we just finished spring MAP testing, which is our growth benchmarking test. I feel so sorry for these kids and the teachers. I’m the district testing coordinator, and I have to work from a master calendar that I keep with me at all times so I don’t double-book some other meeting or dog knows what required stupid paper-pushing whatever during testing

  5. 5.

    cvstoner

    April 15, 2013 at 9:44 am

    @c u n d gulag: Indeed. I can’t think of a better way than this to destroy the desire for life-long learning. It’s now all about doing what it takes to pass the tests, no matter what.

    My father-in-law just retired after 30+ years as a teacher because he couldn’t deal with it anymore. What a disaster.

  6. 6.

    liberal

    April 15, 2013 at 9:46 am

    Not trying to get in a gratuitous dig at our resident O-bot mob, but it’s very reminiscent of “…we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

    Responsibility is for us little people.

  7. 7.

    Emma

    April 15, 2013 at 9:48 am

    I can’t even be angry anymore. All empires die, and they usually rot from the inside and are pecked apart by their former subjects.

    /sigh/ Maybe it’s the damn Femara speaking, but every news story makes me more depressed. Our politicians are bought and paid for. Large swaths of our population has internalized the “I got mine, screw you” lesson. And the corporate mindset of profit above all has invaded every corner of our lives. I feel we can’t even fight them anymore.

  8. 8.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 9:49 am

    @Phylllis:

    I feel so sorry for these kids and the teachers.

    You’ll never get promoted with that kind of attitude. Repeat after me: “fourth graders will be unemployable In The 21st Century Global Market unless they take standardized tests every three months”

    I believe that is the official line :)

  9. 9.

    PeakVT

    April 15, 2013 at 9:53 am

    @Mark S.: There is growing pressure to change, but there’s also a lot of people in power who are either financially, reputationally, or emotionally invested in high-stakes testing. And there’s also Republicans, who want to see public education “fail” enough that it can be voucherized. That’s a lot for grass-roots organizers to overcome.

  10. 10.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    April 15, 2013 at 9:54 am

    Semi-related: Anyone have any idea how to teach Abstract Algebra to an eight year old? This morning, on his way to the bus, my youngest starts telling us: “There’s a difference between even numbers and odd numbers. Odd numbers have a middle number; even numbers do not.”

    Thinking about it, I ask him, “Which odd number is its own middle number?”

    Without thinking, he answers, “One. And, if you allow even numbers to have two middle numbers, then two is also it’s own middle number.”

    I thought the fact that he came up with the concept was pretty interesting, even though it’s pretty obvious what he’s talking about. What really blew me away was his understanding the degenerate cases, and expanding the concept of middle number beyond just having to have one value.

    And, it’s Leonard Euler’s 306th birthday. Fitting.

  11. 11.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 9:58 am

    @PeakVT:

    And there’s also Republicans

    Should be interesting, because there’s a whole wingnut conspiracy faction that have decided that the testing is an Obama Domination Plan, put in by liberals.

    That Arne Duncan is indistinguishable from Jeb Bush on education may be a problem for Republican lawmakers, because Duncan is their favorite Democrat. There’s a reason you never hear screeching about Duncan, unlike every single other Cabinet member. He and the GOP are in complete agreement.

    They’re taking a “breather” from reform in the Indiana statehouse, which is owned by wingnuts. I bet they are. Getting a little politically dicey.

  12. 12.

    aimai

    April 15, 2013 at 9:59 am

    Are we really surprised that in a time of massive public funding shortfalls its simply not possible to police the policemen?That’s the whole point of starving the government–no one can monitor the rip offs by the oligarchy and its parasites. Newt Gingerich explicitly began this process (to the extent anyone person can be said to have begun it) by cutting congressional staff salaries and perks back so that Congresspeople wouldn’t have the budget to hire sophisticated older watchdogs/staffers. This is precisely why ALEC and other lobbyists could step into the breach.

    This happened in education very early on under the Michelle Rhee’s–part of the demonization of the very idea of “the public” and public accountability. Very early on you saw this trumpeting of private/public partnerships, an attempt (successful?) to destroy teacher’s unions by offering the illusion of pay parity through temporary “gifts” and “bonuses” from corporations to top teachers. This was all part of a long term shift from public to private which not coincidentally was built to be destroyed later. It was designed to create a situation in which the public, teacher’s unions, ptas and the local towns simply couldn’t afford to police educational policy and crimes against students like the cheating scandal.

  13. 13.

    aimai

    April 15, 2013 at 10:02 am

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):

    Both my daughters were taught math using a modified TERC approach (which both public and private schools do around here). And in 8th grade they both worked on their own through the entire Algebra textbook, working at their own pace and checking in with the teacher and passing chapter tests in their own time. I’m blown away by how at ease they both are with math and with algebra. The second child has just finished the entire textbook more than a month before the end of school. She is now either going to do trig or some beginning geometry to get ready for highschool.

  14. 14.

    doc g

    April 15, 2013 at 10:03 am

    I am a product of the old school, failed public educational system, but I would swear Charles Dickens covered this topic thoroughly in 1854.

  15. 15.

    Gin & Tonic

    April 15, 2013 at 10:03 am

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent): Semi-related: I always had a real fondness for the 1960’s-style “New Math” that I encountered in grade school, which gave a set-theoretic basis to arithmetic. It made sense to me then, and it made even more sense when I took real mathematics (set theory, analysis) at the university level. I’m sad that it didn’t work for the general population.

  16. 16.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 10:05 am

    @aimai:

    It’s bad enough that they have to take these tests every three months. Now they’re going to put in a testing security apparatus? What a wonderful atmosphere for children.

    Everyone knows kids do best when they’re absolutely miserable and scared and you change the rules every 3 weeks, right?

    WTF? What is wrong with these people? It’s like some mass mental illness.

  17. 17.

    gene108

    April 15, 2013 at 10:07 am

    On Staten Island, a community meeting devolved into a series of student stress stories, with one parent recounting how his son had woken up from a bad dream, mumbling that he had forgotten to fill in a bubble answer.

    I fail to see the problem here.

    Students in India, China, S. Korea, and other parts of the world face this kind of pressure.

    American students will be competing against them for jobs. We will be entering a world where only those, who survive being raised in the harshest conditions will be able to claim the prize of a job.

    Therefore we need to turn American schools more Asian, because Americans have never produced anything of value to the economy and the world because of the slack educational standards.

    Also, too we need to do away with continuing secondary/higher education to be more Asian. On you have one shot at 17 to go to college and if you fail, your life path is set.

  18. 18.

    Zagloba

    April 15, 2013 at 10:08 am

    @PeakVT: That’s a lot for grass-roots organizers to overcome.

    That’s all true, but it’s easier to get the minivan brigade to storm the gates of power over school issues than over almost anything else.

    Plus, people are starting to rediscover the value of the strike. Now that’s an idea I hope spreads.

  19. 19.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    April 15, 2013 at 10:09 am

    @Gin & Tonic: I’ll have to see what I can find. One of the things he seems to have gotten from me is the ability to see the numbers in his head: He can do long addition and subtraction without having to use paper because the numbers are real shapes in his head. He seems to be able to play with them, which is pretty cool.

    @aimai: Thanks, I’ll have to look for some information. We’re in Texas, so I’d be surprised if I could find something like that in any of our schools, but if I can find some good self-paced textbooks, that would be useful.

  20. 20.

    liberal

    April 15, 2013 at 10:11 am

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):
    How do you mean by “abstract algebra”?

    AFAICT, as a [former] mathematician, “algebra” usually has two common meanings: (1) the use of symbolic variables to represent unknowns; (2) things like group theory, ring theory, etc.

    If you mean (1), either (a) [obvious] find a good book on it, or (b) just start with simple examples.

    (b) would be like “What number, when multiplied by 8, gives 56?” Then represent the same question in symbolic form, with a box for the unknown. Then replace the box with the variable “x”.

  21. 21.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 10:11 am

    @gene108:

    That’s one of my favorite parts of the industry spokespeople. How they cherrypick on comparisons to other countries. Tom Friedman is really the master. Pure wholly pre-determined narrative bullshit.

    You know what sucks about it? They deliberately manipulate the info they highlight to discredit gains US kids have made. It’s like they can’t win.

  22. 22.

    Zagloba

    April 15, 2013 at 10:12 am

    @aimai: I’m blown away by how at ease they both are with math and with algebra.

    So what you’re saying is, you didn’t instill a value of fear and loathing of math in your children? And managed to avoid their math teachers doing the same? Traitor to your class Kudos to you, that takes some work.

    Kids love math, if they get exposed to it early and don’t have their excitement and curiosity killed by the phobias of people they trust. (Real math, problem-solving, that is, something more than shunting symbols around a page.)

  23. 23.

    aimai

    April 15, 2013 at 10:13 am

    @Kay:

    We can save money by having the test security people be armed. They can shoot rogue teachers and students in the halls while running the tests out to the armored cars which will be necessary to take them to the windowless rooms where they will be graded.

  24. 24.

    Omnes Omnibus

    April 15, 2013 at 10:14 am

    @aimai: That should make the kids feel comfortable and enable them to perform at their best. Good plan.

  25. 25.

    liberal

    April 15, 2013 at 10:14 am

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):

    He can do long addition and subtraction without having to use paper because the numbers are real shapes in his head.

    On this, please don’t listen to “math reform” people who say things like “don’t have him do rote things like long division; he can always use a calculator. Have him learn “concepts” instead.”

  26. 26.

    aimai

    April 15, 2013 at 10:15 am

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):

    Belafon, have you heard about Khan academy? Its free, online, and quite amazing. Its totally legit–the brain child of an MIT professor and some of the videos are astonishing. Kids love it and it enables them to hop around, learn things they want and also see their own progress mathematically.

  27. 27.

    The Moar You Know

    April 15, 2013 at 10:16 am

    Our failure to do the minimal amount of work and self-examination needed to put Richard Milhaus Nixon in jail keeps paying dividends.

  28. 28.

    grandpa john

    April 15, 2013 at 10:19 am

    And during all this testing, designed to enrich the companies developing all these tests, how much classroom book knowledge instructional time was lost from the schedule to help enrich the test prep companies? I speak as retired teacher who has been through all this sham and grifting pushed on our schools largely because a majority of the parents don’t have a clue as to what is happening in their schools and don ‘t speak out about it.

  29. 29.

    Roger Moore

    April 15, 2013 at 10:19 am

    @c u n d gulag:

    GOP POV:
    Nothing engenders destroys a child’s life-long love of learning, like high-stakes tests administered by corporations making profits off of them.

    Making kids hate school is a feature, not a bug, for the GOP. Well educated citizens who can think critically are deadly poison for the GOP’s brand of politics, so they’re doing their very best to ensure that they’ll be in short supply in the future.

  30. 30.

    maurinsky

    April 15, 2013 at 10:21 am

    I had one good math teacher in my entire school experience, and she was a retired public school teacher who was teaching a Saturday algebra class at the community college. It was the first time in my life I got an A in math. I just failed at math in high school, I didn’t understand what the teachers were trying to teach me, and I couldn’t get the answers I was supposed to get. I had to learn that math has rigid rules (although PEMDAS is bullshit now that I know it’s really just done left to right by the time you get rid of the parenthesis and exponents) and that the vocabulary used in math had very specific meaning. My good math teacher broke everything down into steps, exceptions to those steps, and WHY we do things that way, which was a part that was always missing.

    People who are good at math are not necessarily good math teachers!

  31. 31.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 10:21 am

    @aimai:

    It’s bad, because they’re losing the public and they don’t seem to have any clue that it’s happening. I had this hilarious conversation over Christmas at a party with four other women, three public school parents and a teacher. The teacher was telling us about OH test security. If a kid throws up on the test she has to seal it in a bag and turn it in. I was just struck by how ludicrous people think this is. Everyone had a story. It’s like Duncan is unaware that we have been doing the same shit for 12 years, under NCLB and now RTTT. We have heard all of this before. All of it. There’s nothing “transformational” about it, other than the huge influx of privatizers and lobbyists, so he can take credit for THAT.

  32. 32.

    gene108

    April 15, 2013 at 10:23 am

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I’m sad that it didn’t work for the general population.

    I learn math by repetition and rote. Show my an example and I can copy it. Try teaching me theory first and I fail.

    I don’t know why anyone would try to teach math in any other way besides repetition and rote, since only a very small fraction of students will ever understand the theory.

  33. 33.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    April 15, 2013 at 10:23 am

    @liberal: I meant more like the second, in that I want to encourage him to continue thinking about numbers in ways like we I mentioned in the story this morning. (I’ve been doing some of my own reading on abstract algebra and while I’m not going to be giving him the book, I want to kind of plant some of the ideas in his head occasionally.) Thanks, for the example, I can build on that.

    @liberal: No, as a math lover myself, I think he needs to be able to do it, because I actually think long division helps you understand how numbers work.

  34. 34.

    Zagloba

    April 15, 2013 at 10:24 am

    @liberal: On this, please don’t listen to “math reform” people who say things like “don’t have him do rote things like long division; he can always use a calculator. Have him learn “concepts” instead.”

    The only reason to force a student to practice hard and get very good at an algorithm like long division is not so they can do division: it’s so that they can understand how division works. If a student has the long division algorithm down cold and can’t explain to someone else why it works, what good is that?

    I’m not knocking mindless rote; but I am knocking mindless rote as the end in itself.

  35. 35.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    April 15, 2013 at 10:25 am

    @aimai: I’ll look into that. Thanks.

  36. 36.

    gene108

    April 15, 2013 at 10:27 am

    @Kay:

    I think some folks view it like the Fremen from Dune.

    They kicked ass because they were in a harsh environment. Put them up against people raised in softer climates and they whupped them.

    Of course things like how to manage things that didn’t involve surviving in the desert didn’t always work out well, but that gets overlooked.

  37. 37.

    jonas

    April 15, 2013 at 10:28 am

    @Kay: This also allows them to bypass what the real issue is. All things being equal, US schools are just as good, if not better, than any other in the western world. Where we fall dreadfully short is in high poverty/immigrant communities, where outcomes — when grouped in with other schools — drag down overall performance. When placed in proper context, it’s clear that the neighborhood and not the school is the problem. Reducing poverty in a poor district would raise test scores much more robustly than a bunch of standardized testing. But that of course wouldn’t allow politicians to grandstand and punch union hippies, so we go with the canard that it’s the school’s fault that kids are poor and unprepared.

  38. 38.

    PeakVT

    April 15, 2013 at 10:30 am

    @gene108: Make our kids miserable before someone else does!

  39. 39.

    Davis X. Machina

    April 15, 2013 at 10:31 am

    @gene108: For us non-mathemeticians, there’s repetition and rote, and there’s what looks like repetition and rote in a useful context where we have some idea what those pesky numbers are up to.

    I learned almost all my math — up through the rudiments of spherical trig for celestial navigation — in US Power Squadron and Coast Guard Auxiliary piloting and navigation classes, or in studying for the Extra Class amateur radio license.

  40. 40.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 10:32 am

    @gene108:

    It’s disgusting, because look at where Rhee went to school.

    I lived in Toledo. I’m familiar with her school. They aren’t doing constant, endless test prep and “grit” training at a Country Day.

    Let’s just call public schools “test prep” and outsource it to Kaplan. It would be more honest.

  41. 41.

    Roxy

    April 15, 2013 at 10:33 am

    I’ve been reading a few articles where Texas parents, teachers etc. are pushing back on taking these tests.

    Here’s a couple of links:

    http://tinyurl.com/blsqthb

    http://tinyurl.com/cdyvq

  42. 42.

    path to perdition

    April 15, 2013 at 10:33 am

    Pennsylvania eliminated the 11th grade PSSA this year and replaced it with Keystone exams in algebra, literature, and biology. Most school districts teach biology in 9th grade. Guess how well the 11th grade student’s scored on the biology Keystone exam?

  43. 43.

    Zifnab25

    April 15, 2013 at 10:35 am

    I have no idea how they’re going to “tighten security” when they’ve made a decision to ignore what happened when security was lax, but creating security standards without finding out how and why there was a breach makes about as much sense as testing kids on material they didn’t cover, so I’m not surprised.

    Ah, I see the problem here. You’re assuming “tighten security” means “prevent people from cheating”. In truth, “tighten security” means “prevent our guys from getting caught”.

  44. 44.

    Davis X. Machina

    April 15, 2013 at 10:35 am

    @jonas: Public schools are public. They’re roughly as bad or as good as the public wants them to be. They’re not imposed from without by some foreign occupying power.

    There’s a real constituency, with political clout, for keeping schools in those communities you mention inadequate to the task. There’s a real constituency, with political clout, for selling them nostrums to improve.

    In the first case, it’s taxpayers, and in the second, it’s the educational-industrial complex, and the politicians it can purchase and influence.

  45. 45.

    Omnes Omnibus

    April 15, 2013 at 10:35 am

    @maurinsky:

    People who are good at math are not necessarily good math teachers!

    It is not at all infrequent for people who are naturally talented at something to be less than stellar teachers and coaches. If you just almost instinctively “get” almost something, you might not be able to explain it to others.

  46. 46.

    Gin & Tonic

    April 15, 2013 at 10:36 am

    @gene108:

    since only a very small fraction of students will ever understand the theory

    What a defeatist attitude. I’m at a loss even to comment. You’re like “math is hard” Barbie.

  47. 47.

    grandpa john

    April 15, 2013 at 10:36 am

    @maurinsky: The same is true in other areas as well, like sports. highly intellectual people or gifted people even athletes who find things come easily to them , seldom have the ability to teach or coach the same skills in others, because the don,t know how to break it down into teachable steps. being able to do this is in itself an skill set that many people do not possess. think back on your own teachers and think about how many of them could really do this. How many highly successful sports coachs or managers were themselves highly successful athletes? they became successful because their lack of natural talent required them to become students of the game, requiring much study and analyazation.

  48. 48.

    Roger Moore

    April 15, 2013 at 10:36 am

    @gene108:

    I don’t know why anyone would try to teach math in any other way besides repetition and rote, since only a very small fraction of students will ever understand the theory.

    Sure, but the people who are writing the curriculum are among the small fraction who do understand the theory, and understanding the theory is a big reason why they’re good at it. Since the people who are good at math understand the theory, the cum hoc ergo propter hoc analysis says that teaching the theory will improve math skills. Even as somebody who does get the theory, I’m inclined to agree with you that teaching rote rules about how to get the right answer probably ought to precede teaching the theory. That way, even people who never get the theory will still be able to grind out the right answer, and I find it’s easier to understand the theory as an explanation for why the rules are the way they are than developing the rules based on the theory.

  49. 49.

    aimai

    April 15, 2013 at 10:37 am

    @gene108:

    This is so very, very, not true. Its actually part of a fairly late American cultural notion that music and math are only to be performed/practiced by people who are set apart, geniuses, extremely talented. That’s just not the case. People can learn basic math concepts, learn to love manipulating numbers, and grow through math classes that are made relevant to them at every age just as everyone can learn a little music and/or learn to perform.

  50. 50.

    jonas

    April 15, 2013 at 10:37 am

    @maurinsky: I agree — most really great mathematicians are lousy math teachers because they’ve just intuited how numbers work; it’s how their brains are wired, like someone with perfect pitch who can play piano by ear and don’t even need to read music. I’m just about the least mathematically inclined person out there, though I was fortunate to have some good teachers in high school who were brilliant at just breaking things down into basic steps and rules. Then I did fine. In college, I was back to learning from “real” mathematicians and it was like taking music lessons from a music prodigy who just tells you “well, play it like it sounds. Duh.”

  51. 51.

    Phylllis

    April 15, 2013 at 10:39 am

    @Kay: Heh, like that would happen anyway, since I’m regularly referred to as the local radical. For, among other things, pointing out the historical reason for the 2nd Amendment. And being vocal about the need to completely divorce athletics from public schooling.

  52. 52.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 10:42 am

    @Zifnab25:

    Oh, no. I’m familiar with fads. I work in juvenile delinquency issues from time to time. They’ll institute harsh security measures. They love that shit.

    There is an alarming large section of the (elite) US opinion and politician cohort who believe in things like “no excuses” and “zero tolerance.” They’re authoritarian weirdos with an ideological ax to grind and their ideas always fail, but they LOVE the idea of a “boot camp”

    We essentially had to wait until they got bored with Our Failing Youth so reasonable, practical people could be heard :)

    It’s been much better.

  53. 53.

    Roger Moore

    April 15, 2013 at 10:42 am

    @Davis X. Machina:

    I learned almost all my math — up through the rudiments of spherical trig for celestial navigation — in US Power Squadron and Coast Guard Auxiliary piloting and navigation classes, or in studying for the Extra Class amateur radio license.

    Yup. I learned a lot more really practical stuff about statistics from being a hardcore baseball fan than I ever did in my stats class. It’s much easier to learn this stuff when you have a reason to care.

  54. 54.

    Mnemosyne

    April 15, 2013 at 10:42 am

    @Kay:

    Everyone knows kids do best when they’re absolutely miserable and scared and you change the rules every 3 weeks, right?

    That’s how the modern corporation works, so I guess they’ve decided to make sure the kiddies are accustomed to that atmosphere long before they go out into the working world.

  55. 55.

    Feudalism Now!

    April 15, 2013 at 10:45 am

    Education via Thunderdome: two students enter, one graduate leaves.
    School funding: two districts enter, one district absorbs the other.

  56. 56.

    maurinsky

    April 15, 2013 at 10:46 am

    After I had that wonderful math teacher, I seriously thought about becoming a math teacher. But I was concerned that going forward as a math/education major would expose me to more terrible math teachers like the ones I had in high school.

    My older daughter is an elementary school teacher, and when she was doing field work as a student, she assisted in one class where the teacher said “Okay kids, today we’re going to start learning fractions. It’s scary, but we’ll get through it.” My daughter was horrified. She was lucky enough to have elementary school teachers who weren’t afraid of math and didn’t pass that fear on to their students. She found that a lot of elementary school teachers were lacking in confidence about math. I think that has to contribute to the innumeracy of our society.

    I find Kahn Academy extremely helpful if I have a math concept I want to understand. I used to hate math, now I appreciate it and I want to understand it more.

    aimai – I’m a later in life musician, and I agree – practice is important, there are people who have natural gifts in areas like math and music, but anyone can improve their skills given adequate instruction and practice.

  57. 57.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 10:46 am

    @Phylllis:

    I sort of came around on athletics. I don’t follow sports, I have no feel for any of it, I bring a newspaper to football games, and I used to complain about the time and money expended at our public school.

    The thing is, kids really do like sports, girls and boys, a whole lot of them. There’s definite benefits to sports. They persuaded me.

  58. 58.

    Omnes Omnibus

    April 15, 2013 at 10:49 am

    @Roger Moore: My younger brother is a wiz at stats do to a childhood (and ongoing) sports stats obsession.

  59. 59.

    Roger Moore

    April 15, 2013 at 10:49 am

    @Kay:

    They’re authoritarian weirdos with an ideological ax to grind and their ideas always fail, but they LOVE the idea of a “boot camp”

    It doesn’t matter whether their ideas fail; they’re just a rationalization for being as harsh as possible. Sadists will always find an excuse to punish people.

  60. 60.

    Roger Moore

    April 15, 2013 at 11:01 am

    @Kay:
    I think school sports can be a good idea, but there’s real danger to them, too. In addition to the general benefits of exercise, there’s a whole group of kids who will respond to sports much better than they’ll respond to academics. This isn’t necessarily just jocks, either. I was definitely more of a nerd than a jock, so being in sports taught me far more about setting goals and working hard on things I’m not naturally good at than academics ever did. I’m pretty sure I would have failed out of college (or at least had to transfer to an easier school) if sports hadn’t taught me how to grind away on something hard.

    The danger comes from people who want to push sports ahead of academics. There are plenty of places where the community’s primary interest in their schools is in their sports teams, and I think we’ve all seen the bad things that can result. All the rules about academic eligibility should serve as a warning for what happens when our priorities get screwed up.

  61. 61.

    Wyatt Earp

    April 15, 2013 at 11:02 am

    @Kay: Incidentally, what I have not yet seen proposed (though for all I know it has already actually been implemented) is off-shoring the entire testing/scoring/security business. It only makes sense, after all.

  62. 62.

    Mnemosyne

    April 15, 2013 at 11:04 am

    @gene108:

    It’s funny — I was always very bad at math because I’m the exact opposite. I need to know why I’m supposed to do something a certain way before I can do it. Telling me, “That’s just the way you do it, now work on those problems” turned out to be a total disaster and led to my lifelong math phobia.

    The only math class I did halfway well on was geometry, because they let us write down all of the proofs and refer to them during tests. Chemistry and physics were freakin’ disasters because I didn’t have a good enough grasp of the why of the math we were doing because no one had ever bothered to explain the why of other kinds of math.

  63. 63.

    Mnemosyne

    April 15, 2013 at 11:07 am

    @Roger Moore:

    I always thought my high school had a good grasp on gym class and athletics, especially once you got to junior and senior year. That was when they started mixing it up and introducing us to the idea that athletics and exercise wasn’t just about sports — it was also dance and aerobics and other non-sport activities. They also introduced us to some less popular sports, and it turned out I was pretty good at team handball — who knew?

    Plus it was a nice payback to get see the guys who mocked us for our co-ed softballs skills flailing around helplessly during an aerobics routine.

  64. 64.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 11:13 am

    @Roger Moore:

    I think school sports can be a good idea, but there’s real danger to them, too.

    I think so, too, but I also think public schools can’t be all things to all people. There’s a huge majority here that love sports. They just do. I have to recognize that, because it’s a public school located in THIS place with THESE people. I see how it could become obsessive, though. It may not be excessive here because our teams just aren’t really very good,which is fine with me. I could care less if they win :)

    I’m not sure I completely buy the criminal behavior as intrinsic to sports. I have trouble with those connections, am wary of them, because, for example, I know that child sexual abuse isn’t limited to the Catholic Church or even men. One of the worst scandals in physical and sexual abuse in juvenile detention was in Texas, and the abusers were women.

  65. 65.

    aimai

    April 15, 2013 at 11:17 am

    @Kay:

    Of course team sports can be done on a town by town basis, too–they don’t have to be a big focus of school time. When they are cutting basic play/playground time out of kids school and not bringing into the school yoga, dance, music, and art you have to query the insistence that certain team sports are the be all and end all of the goals we should have for our public school kids. Lots of kids learn better when they can burn off some energy during the school day–that doesn’t mean they need to do it in team sports.

  66. 66.

    M-pop

    April 15, 2013 at 11:18 am

    My son is taking the FCATs starting today – I wish they would get rid of these stupid, standardized tests.

  67. 67.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 11:25 am

    @aimai:

    This place is odd because we have both. We have a crazed sports fan base AND a vocal “arts” group. My daughter did both, and I think she probably benefitted more from the sports (tennis and swimming, both are things her father loves, and does) because she was going to do arts, because that’s where her interest is. She still plays tennis and swims and she’s a very good painter.

  68. 68.

    rikyrah

    April 15, 2013 at 11:33 am

    I’m glad you keep on this, Kay. Keep on this fraud.

  69. 69.

    gene108

    April 15, 2013 at 11:33 am

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I went up to third semester calculus in college. I learned my limits the hard way.

    My first third semester calculus teacher started double integration with, “this is intuitive, but since most of you are engineers, who like to write stuff down…” and went to the chalk board and drew a picture of sphere.

    The class sent downhill from there for me.

    I’d personally be willing to give my left nut to be better at math and understand the theory. It’d have made my life a lot easier.

    But even mathematical illiterates like myself have to make our way in the world, even though I can’t grasp the theory behind math.

  70. 70.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 11:35 am

    @aimai:

    that doesn’t mean they need to do it in team sports.

    It does, but a lot of sports aren’t really “team” sports. They set it up as teams but it’s not like a football team or a basketball team. If you’re swimming or playing tennis you’re operating as much as an individual as on a team. I think people who like that sort of non-team atmosphere would gravitate to sports that are less team-focused. I would imagine.

    I myself do not do any sports, so I’m guessing :)

  71. 71.

    Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937

    April 15, 2013 at 11:37 am

    Since they aren’t teaching what is on the test, you can kill two birds by making up the test on the day it is given, and then scoring it any way you want. No need for security either.

  72. 72.

    Emerald

    April 15, 2013 at 11:38 am

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):

    if I can find some good self-paced textbooks, that would be useful.

    Try the Khan Academy, a free website that takes you from arithemetic to calculus at your own pace and is being used by schools all over the world, including in the U.S.

    Very simple, and kids love it. I’m using it myself to re-do my completely failed mathematics instruction from 50 years ago.

  73. 73.

    rk

    April 15, 2013 at 11:39 am

    I have been helping my son with test preparation and I can say that looking over the released tests from previous years, these tests are not a big deal. The standards are ridiculously low in fact. I say this as a parent whose child has performed poorly for last two yrs on standardized tests. It was this poor performance which alerted me to the fact that something was wrong. The teachers were telling me how great he was and he was getting good grades but when I actually tested him myself eg. sitting him down and asking him questions to see if he actually understood what he was reading, I was shocked at what I found. We are in a good school district, yet I think the standards are low. The district recently changed the math standards so that the math which earlier used to be intermediate is now called advanced and the advanced has been eliminated. So the standards actually went down.
    I suggest that people actually take a look at the tests and see for themselves. There is nothing hard at all. I was impressed by the English reading test. The questions are actually designed thoughtfully. A few were silly and confusing but overall they are good. Take a look at the standards and the tests themselves. I went over the tests of many states (PA, FL, CA, NC). There is nothing wrong in asking that children have a good grasp of fundamental math concepts or be able to read passages in English and answer some basic comprehension and vocabulary questions. There are no advanced concepts, just basic stuff. We actually had fun going over the science test (even I learned a few things). At the higher grades the formulas are given and there is no need for memorization. If schools are failing these tests then there is something wrong which has to be addressed, not by shifting to private education, but certainly looking at what is wrong and figuring out how to fix it.
    I know I sound like a cheerleader for the tests (not my intention), but seriously if kids are sweating this stuff at elementary or middle school that is scary.

  74. 74.

    rikyrah

    April 15, 2013 at 11:40 am

    @Kay:

    never liked Duncan.

    period

  75. 75.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 11:51 am

    @rikyrah:

    I think there’s real, growing pushback to it, and it’s mostly Duncan’s fault, so I don’t have any sympathy. You’re supposed to bring people in when you change things. They forgot to bring in parents and kids. Big mistake. It’s also a dumb mistake. I live in podunk Ohio and our superintendent wouldn’t steamroll over parents. She’s smarter than that :)

    He needs to spend less time on celebrity panels with Michelle Rhee and the billionaires and the fawning media and more time in actual public schools. I’m not sold on any of this.

  76. 76.

    Fair Economist

    April 15, 2013 at 11:51 am

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I always had a real fondness for the 1960′s-style “New Math” that I encountered in grade school, which gave a set-theoretic basis to arithmetic. It made sense to me then, and it made even more sense when I took real mathematics (set theory, analysis) at the university level. I’m sad that it didn’t work for the general population.

    Except now we’re finding out that the high crime rate from that period was caused by leaded gas poisoning the air. Lead exposure destroys intellectual capacity as well as impairing impulse control. So did new math fail, or was it just tried at the wrong time?

  77. 77.

    Roger Moore

    April 15, 2013 at 12:07 pm

    @Kay:

    I’m not sure I completely buy the criminal behavior as intrinsic to sports.

    I wasn’t thinking so much about sports and criminal behavior. I was thinking that before there was universal high-stakes testing, the biggest cheating scandals were often about helping jocks stay academically eligible to play sports.

  78. 78.

    PurpleGirl

    April 15, 2013 at 12:19 pm

    @gene108: May I ask if you remember the textbook you had for calculus? Was it Calculus: An Intuitive Approach, by Morris Kline?

    When I went to NYU undergrad, Morris Kline was a big shot in the math department of the education school (NOT attached to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science). All the undergrad calc classes used his “intuitive” approach and book. There was even a song about him sung to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club theme. (Morris Kline, Morris Kline, forever may be the integral define…)

  79. 79.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 12:22 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    I didn’t know that, so I should probably drop out of this discussion. I thought maybe you were referencing Steubenville, which I think DOES have some intersect with a fanatical focus on sports, although juvenile sex offense is really complex. I get the cases quite a bit.

    The only time I “talk” about sports is when I’m sitting in a pretrial and they all start discussing Ohio State. Yawn. I use that time to daydream, plan my garden, whatever. Often I’m grateful for the break.

  80. 80.

    gelfling545

    April 15, 2013 at 12:23 pm

    @Kay:It’s pretty close to the official line. Of course, preparing kids for future employment based on jobs available today is a little better than tea leaf reading, though not by much. Still, whatever jobs are out there in the future for these kids, I doubt that filling in circles with a #2 pencil will be a skill that is much in demand.

  81. 81.

    Gretchen

    April 15, 2013 at 12:25 pm

    My godson is a math whiz. The only B he got in high school was algebra. He was required to show his work, and he didn’t know how to do that because the answer was obivious when he saw the question, so he couldn’t articulate the intermediate steps. When he was in college, an honors math professer gave him a problem, and he immediately gave the answer. The professor was surprised, and gave him another problem. In his words “it was exactly the same problem with different numbers, but I could see I was supposed to have to work on it, so I went away and pretended to work on it before I gave him the answer.”

  82. 82.

    Kay

    April 15, 2013 at 12:36 pm

    @gelfling545:

    The politics should be getting interesting. The California Democratic Party passed a resolution against corporate ed reform. Michelle Rhee’s husband is the mayor of Sacramento.

    “Let’s be perfectly clear,” he added. “These organizations are backed by moneyed interests, Republican operatives and out-of-state Wall Street billionaires dedicated to school privatization and trampling on teacher and worker rights.”

    Yup. Pretty much.

    It’s been brewing for a while, but I think there was such lock-step media support for the reformers that people felt they were alone in being really uncomfortable with deregulating and then privatizing public schools. The reformers are incredibly arrogant, too. There was no good reason the mayor of Chicago had to displace 50,000 kids in one fell swoop. That’s just reckless. You can’t upend whole neighborhoods like that. People are going to resist, as they should. They’re naturally and rightly suspicious of the hard sell and the constant cries of “urgent! right now!”

  83. 83.

    rikyrah

    April 15, 2013 at 12:39 pm

    I have a friend in grad school, and she had school reform as a debate topic. She and I went over for an hour on what she had found….I already knew it was a scam. She suspected it, but now is certain.

  84. 84.

    dcdl

    April 15, 2013 at 12:46 pm

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):
    My kids teachers have said to parents do not help your kids with math. They learn how to do it in school and if they bring unfinished work home they are supposed to know how to do it. I tried helping anyways and couldn’t. A totally new approach to me. Didn’t even know where to start. One of my friends who is a principal told me to go to Khan Academy to see how they are doing some math.

    One of my sons in first grade was doing some math and I was telling him that is not how you do it. I got a book on mental math and turns out he was just doing mental math.

    Edit: Looks like someone beat me to it about Khan Academy.

  85. 85.

    TG Chicago

    April 15, 2013 at 12:57 pm

    Thanks for these posts on “school reform”, Kay. Great stuff.

  86. 86.

    gene108

    April 15, 2013 at 1:00 pm

    @PurpleGirl:

    Wasn’t the textbook, just that professor.

  87. 87.

    LanceThruster

    April 15, 2013 at 2:03 pm

    The only “miracle” miracle workers work is redirecting public school money to themselves and their cronies.

    I pity the poor parents who have to deal with this same horseshite year in and year out.

  88. 88.

    Blue Loon

    April 15, 2013 at 8:05 pm

    I’ve been a public school parent for 17 years and I support standardized testing and yes, value-added data which tracks the average growth kids make in each teacher’s class. I’ve seen enough lousy teachers and grade inflation to make me want some kind of “objective” data besides what a teacher reports. However, this data needs to be well-managed. If cheating is a problem, put in better security. I agree that we need to hold Michelle Rhee to the same high stnadards of accountability.

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