Back to Basics
From my.execpc.com:
This article was reprinted from Working Mother magazine, January 1997, pp.38-41.
BACK TO BASICS
Parents complain that their kids can’t spell or do simple math.
Maybe it’s time, to return to old-fashioned teaching methods.
by Janet Bailey
Illustration by Esther Watson
When Leah Vukmir’s daughter was in kindergarten, she brought home little “stories” filled with what her teachers called “inventive spelling”- but which looked to her mother like plain spelling errors. Vukmir, a nurse practitioner in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, began to wonder what kind of education in reading and writing her daughter was about to receive. “I understood she was too young to have her spelling criticized,” says Vukmir, “but I couldn’t get a clear response from teachers as to when they would start correcting it.” Answers to her questions revealed that the school followed the “whole language” teaching philosophy, which emphasizes interesting reading materials and unconventional writing exercises, rather than drills in phonics, grammar and spelling. Though many educators (and parents) believe in this approach, Vukmir didn’t like what she heard. Worried that her daughter would miss out on the basics, Vukmir checked out books on phonics from the library and taught her to read at home.
“You know something’s wrong when parents are spending time teaching their kids things they should have learned at school,” says Vukmir. She pulled her daughter out of public school and put her in a parochial school that used more traditional teaching methods. The child, now in second grade, is an excellent reader-and her mother is president of a statewide organization fighting for more rigorous teaching standards.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Leah Vukmir is part of what might be called a back-to-basics movement among some parents and educators across the country. The term “basics” means different things to different people. It’s used to describe everything from calculator-free classes to the arrangement of classroom desks in straight rows for lecture-style teaching. But for Vukmir and her cohorts, basics means the use of phonics workbooks to teach reading and of classroom drills to teach addition, subtraction and multiplication tables.
The debate over whether to emphasize basic skills or to concentrate on the larger context in which these (still underdeveloped) skills are used is hardly new. In fact, the academic pendulum has been swinging back and forth between traditional and innovative approaches since the turn of the century.
This happens in part because over the decades teacher-training institutions have presented only the currently favored techniques. As a result, new teachers are not taught to integrate the best of the old ideas with the best of the new. Instead, they may turn their back on past lessons and try to reinvent the wheel – with a new shape. “Teachers may be unaware that there are multiple theories about how children learn, and that these theories often contain valuable concepts,” says Connie Goldman, superintendent of schools in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
Many of today’s parents remember the fads of the 1960′s, such as open classrooms and New Math, and the resulting backlash in the 1970′s that rejected the “do your own thing” ethic. No wonder today’s crop of reformers are hoping to find a balance: They say they’re not opposed to educational innovation per se; it’s just that they want evidence that the new techniques work.
“The educational establishment tends to see each new fad as the answer to their problems and then go overboard with it,” says Vukmir. “Many programs are promoted on the basis of dogma rather than scientific research, and a lot of time-tested, proven methods of teaching are being thrown out the window.
“When parents notice that grammar and spelling aren’t being corrected on their children’s papers, the kids aren’t being taught multiplication tables, fourth-graders don’t know how to write in cursive, they don’t like what they see.”
TEACHING KIDS TO READ AND WRITE
The debate over “whole language” learning is a good example. According to whole language philosophy, developed in the 1960′s, children learn to read best through “immersion” – being surrounded by written materials that excite them to read and write. They are encouraged to guess the meanings of unfamiliar words in context rather than sounding them out. As kids experiment with “authentic literature” (be it poems, short stories or simple novels) rather than Dick-and-Jane readers, the theory holds, they also gradually pick up phonics and related skills in context.
Proponents of whole language claim it’s a more natural way for kids to learn and that it imparts the joy of reading better than “skill-and-drill” methods do. There’s evidence that some children respond well to whole language. Research by Karin Dahl, PhD, of Ohio State University, and Penny Freppon, EdD, of the University of Cincinnati, found that inner city children from whole language classrooms were better at applying phonics principles to actual reading and writing than were kids from classrooms where ordinary readers were used.
The whole language classes in this study included daily instruction in phonics, embedded in the reading and writing the children were already doing. Not every whole language classroom looks alike, however, and some teachers incorporate basic skills into the curriculum more actively than others do.
“The whole language movement came out of a history of fairly good research in literacy learning,” says Victoria Purcell-Gates, PhD, director of the Harvard Literacy Lab at Harvard University. “But something got lost in the translation over the past ten years. There have been extremist misinterpretations of the theory, and in many classrooms we find no lessons in phonics, no correction of grammar, no attention to accurate spelling. Without clear, direct instruction, I don’t think most kids learn to read and write well.”
“The concept sounded good,” says Kate Robinson of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, whose son (now a teenager) was in third grade when his school began to teach whole language. “You’re talking about developing critical thinking skills and creativity, and I think that’s what kids need more than rote memorization.” Her son, who’d had early exposure to phonics, did fine, but her I3-year-old daughter, who had only whole language instruction from kindergarten, “still has trouble with spelling. She’s had to work hard to catch up.” In response to parent concerns and lower than expected reading scores, the Cape Elizabeth School District re-integrated phonics into the curriculum.
Meanwhile, some teachers are graduating from college and university schools of education with virtually no knowledge of how to teach phonics. Jennifer Perepeluk, a first-grade teacher in Houston, was one of those graduates. After six years of using whole language in her classroom, she was invited to try a phonics-based pilot program that local parents had demanded.
I was skeptical at first,” she says. “I didn’t believe children learned phonetically, I didn’t like skill-and-drill methods, and I didn’t think it would be fun for kids. But it turns out that all my first-graders learned to read this year – whereas with whole language, the kids who were poor learners or who didn’t come from literature-rich homes had to struggle. Phonics gives them skills and strategies to work with, instead of expecting them to learn by osmosis. I’ve become a better speller just from teaching the rules!”
MASTERING NUMBER FACTS
A similar battle is being waged over math. Around the country, schools are beginning to adopt-and some states to legislate-curricula based on sweeping changes recommended by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Not to be confused with the “new-math’ of the early 1960′s, which emphasized set theories, the new “new math” stresses discovery of mathematical principles through a process that includes peer-group problem solving, trial and error, and real-life applications rather than memorization, drills or direct instruction by the teacher.
Proponents of the “new new” math standards insist the basics are being expanded, not abandoned, and the innovations make math accessible to a greater number of children, particularly girls and minorities. “Basic skills such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are still being taught,” says Jack Price, co-director of the Center for Education and Equity in Mathematics, Science and Technology at California State Polytechnic University. “But we’ve expanded the notion to include the basic skills of the twenty-first century involving problem solving, reasoning, communicating and working together.
“The kind of teaching we’ve done in the past – directed, rote memorization – works for a very small part of the student population,” Price continues. “By making use of a variety of approaches, not just one, you’re more likely to get children to learn.”
Some parents aren’t convinced. They say that basic skills aren’t being adequately taught, the innovations haven’t been proven effective, and the new curricula may even allow existing skills to deteriorate.
In Boise, Idaho, for example, the ability of fourth-graders to subtract, multiply and divide dropped below national averages after the district gave up basic math drills. In San Diego, California, a number of parents are worried about the effect of a new math curriculum, introduced last year, on their children’s skills.
“The program is a wonderful way to get four-, five- and six-year-olds to delve into mathematical concepts, but it’s frustrating for older students,” says Erica McKeown, a math tutor. “The brightest students wind up being bored, while the ones who are weak in math become more confused.”
McKeown is also troubled by the increasing use of calculators even in elementary grades which offer kids little incentive to practice such basic exercises as the multiplication tables. The results, she says, are apparent: “I’ve seen high-school students take out a calculator to multiply by ten.”
McKeown’s husband Mike, is cofounder of Mathematically Correct, an organization fighting the widespread adoption of what he calls “whole math” by California schools. “We’re not against teaching problem solving strategies,” he explains. “I’m a working scientist I solve problems for a living. But just sitting around wondering about problems doesn’t give you the tools to solve them. Developing those tools requires memorization, practice and drills.”
What the issues boil down to, say a number of experts, is a need for balance. According to the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators (NCITE), “Teaching children shouldn’t be an either/or proposition – either they learn basics or they learn how to think about words and math in a larger context. What’s needed is a synthesis of the best techniques from both.” But many experts emphasize that basics must return to the classroom.
All this is no surprise to moms and dads. “Parents know instinctively that we need to pay attention to basics,” says William Damon, PhD, director of the Center for the Study of Human Development at Brown University and author of Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in America’s Homes and Scbools (Simon & Schuster), “and that learning needs to be lively and interesting at the same time.”
Janet Bailey is a San Francisco-based freelancer who covers health and human behavior for national magazines.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
“Administrators will tell you ‘We have to use this program. That’s the rule’,” says Mike McKeown, co-founder of Mathematically Correct, an organization fighting the adoption of “whole math” by California schools. “It’s not true. Teachers can ask for a waiver of the rule. They can use old textbooks. There are options, but you have to fight for them.”
Of course, exercising those options takes persistence and clout – hence the growing number of parent groups willing to put pressure on school districts and state legislators. “Our members cover the spectrum,” says Leah Vukmir of the Wisconsin organization PRESS (Parents Raising Educational Standards in Schools). “They’re conservative and liberal, stay at-home parents as well as professionals.”
Even without joining a group, parents can have some influence over how their children are taught. William Damon, director of the Center for the Study of Human Development at Brown University encourages greater interchange among parents, teachers and administrators. Find out what the teaching philosophy of your child’s school is, and make sure you understand it. Ask to see evidence (based on controlled studies) of its value.
“The back-to-basics idea can be carried out in an open-ended and inspirational way,” says Damon. The key is to balance both old and new techniques: “to set high standards for what students need to know, without limiting a child’s horizons in the process. That approach can really open up possibilities for children,” he says.
Spiraled Instruction, Stifled Learning
The Gideon Math program uses a step-by-step, linear curriculum which requires mastery of each step before proceeding on. Adding six is not started until adding five has been memorized. We also do a weekly review of previously mastered concepts to avoid getting rusty.
From blogs.EdWeek.org:
Spiraled Instruction, Stifled Learning
My first teaching experience was as a substitute teacher in Chicago assigned to an 11th grade Algebra 2 class for ELL Polish students. I began by giving students an assignment their teacher had left for them. But no one attempted it, so I asked a boy who understood English if he and his classmates needed help. He laughed and, after he translated my question for his classmates, they laughed too. He then let me in on the joke: “We learned this in 7th grade.”
To me, however, it was appalling rather than amusing: 11th grade here = 7th grade there?! Yet what I later discovered was even more appalling: 11th grade here = 9th grade here. In fact, Algebra 2 was such a rehash of the district’s Algebra 1 course that some teachers called it “Algebra T-o-o.” And really, the same point could be made about math curriculum as a whole in the U.S., since most content for any given year is a review of content from previous years. (The Common Core State Standards may help change this, but I’ll believe it when I see it.)
This approach, where we touch on lots of topics each year–rather than go deep with fewer topics–and then revisit them in subsequent years is often called spiraling. But what it is for many students is stifling. And this is as true for kids who’ve yet to master a skill as it is for those who nailed it right away. I first noticed this when I taught 9th grade Algebra classes where every student was performing at least two years below grade level.
“Meet them where they are,” fellow math teachers advised me. Makes sense, I thought, since I couldn’t imagine teaching Algebra to kids who didn’t know basic arithmetic. But what I soon learned is that perception matters more to students than performance. For many kids, having seen something is akin to having learned something. “Man, we already know this,” students said, as I presented lesson after lesson on fractions, decimals, and percents.
Other students, meanwhile, knew they didn’t understand the material, but had given up hope of ever understanding it. The implication was therefore the same for all students: encore presentations on previous years’ topics were pointless. And though I was able to engage a few students when I found new ways to present old topics, one group of students was always slighted: those who really did “already know this.”
I’ve seen this same scene play out in dozens of math classes: teachers presenting material as though students had never seen it when they had actually seen it early and often. Consider, for example, area and perimeter, which students are first exposed to in third or fourth grade, and see again in middle school. Yet when area and perimeter come up in high school, most teachers–including me at first–teach them from scratch.
The problem, of course, goes back to the disconnect between kids seeing something and actually learning–and retaining–it. But if it didn’t sink in for them the first, second, or third time a teacher presented it, why should we present it again?
We shouldn’t. At some point the focus needs to be on students practicing math rather than teachers presenting it. And to me, that point begins right after students are first introduced to a concept or skill and continues for the rest of that year and subsequent years. Instead of limiting assignments to recent content from the current course, we should also include problems on earlier content from that course AND previous courses.
In other words, we should provide students spiraled practice, not spiraled instruction. When I did this in 10th grade Geometry classes, students said they learned more Algebra than they had learned in their 9th grade Algebra course. And, as a result, they were ready for more advanced math–starting with Algebra T-w-o.
Image provided by Phillip Martin with permission
Chicago Plans Six-Year Tech High Schools
From Community College Spotlight:
POSTED BY Joanne Jacobs ON March 9, 2012
Five technology companies will help Chicago open five new six-year high schools that will allow students to graduate with an associate’s degree and high-tech job skills, reports the Chicago Sun-Times.
IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions and Verizon will develop curricula, mentor students, provide summer internships and guarantee every student who completes the program a “first-in-line” job interview after graduation. The city’s community colleges will provide instruction and award credits.
“We want to hire them all. All they need to do is be able to successfully complete a curriculum through Grade 9 to 14 that’s gonna be their ticket to a good-paying job and to the middle class,” said Stanley Litow, IBM’s vice-president of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs.
IBM, which provided a $400,000 challenge grant to develop the new schools, helped open a six-year high school called P-TECH in New York City last year. The school, which is focused on information technology, recruited a wide range of students.
School Math Lesson: Pupils Scared to Ask For Help
From BBC.CO.UK:
By Judith Burns Education reporter, BBC News
Related Stories
Secondary school pupils are so scared of looking stupid in maths lessons they will not tell their teachers if they do not understand, suggests research.
A survey of 1,000 10- to 16-year-olds found two-thirds would rather struggle alone or ask friends or family for help.
Half of the 15- and 16-year-olds felt they should already know the answer.
A government spokeswoman said plans to overhaul maths teaching would give children more confidence.
The reasons pupils gave for not asking for help more often were that they were worried about looking foolish, were embarrassed or did not want to draw attention to themselves.
Hands up
The survey suggests that older teenagers are more timid than younger pupils when it comes to answering questions in class.
Two-thirds of 10-year-olds said they were always happy to put their hands up, but this proportion was down to just over a third in the 16-year-olds.
Boys were more willing than girls to answer questions and were also more likely to describe themselves as very good at maths.
A minority of pupils were said they felt embarrassed or like swots because of their strong mathematical ability.
Peter Lacey, of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics, said schools should focus on developing pupils’ confidence in mathematics slowly, rather than racing through concepts with undue haste and leaving some students behind.
“Confidence and competence go hand in hand. If you have a small mathematical toolkit and use it confidently you will be a more numerate person than someone with a large mathematical toolkit who doesn’t know what to do with it,” said Mr Lacey.
The research also included a questionnaire of 1,000 parents which suggested that about a fifth felt they did not have the maths skills to help their children.
Almost two-thirds of parents said they were not comfortable with some of the new mathematical methods now being taught in schools.
The survey of 1,000 10- to 16-year-olds was conducted online by researchers at Opinion Matters. It was funded by the children’s newspaper First News and iTutor Maths, an online tutoring service.
This is your child’s brain on TV.
Via: Online Courses News
Texas Schools Chief Calls Testing Obsession a ‘Perversion’
From WashPost:
Posted at 05:00 AM ET, 02/07/2012
The Republican education commissioner of Texas, Robert Scott, might not be the first person you’d think would find common ground with California’s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, but Scott has savaged high-stakes testing in language that would make Brown smile.
Speaking to the Texas State Board of Education late last month, Scott said that the mentality that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion” of what a quality education should be.
What’s more, he called “the assessment and accountability regime” not only “a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex.” And he attacked the Common Core Standards Initiative as being motivated by business concerns.
“What we’ve done in the past decade, is we’ve doubled down on the test every couple of years, and used it for more and more things, to make it the end-all, be-all,” Scott said. “… You’ve reached a point now of having this one thing that the entire system is dependent upon. It is the heart of the vampire, so to speak.”
These sentiments — which he repeated in similar language at a conference of school administrators a few days later — go well beyond the common sentiment in Texas Republican politics that public education policy should be the domain of state and local officials and not the federal government. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has famously feuded with President Obama’s administration over the federal government’s role in school reform.
Scott’s attack on testing mania sounded like Brown, who has attacked test-based school reform and said he wants to reduce the number of standardized tests students take. (You can see the whole video of Scott speaking at the meeting by going here and clicking on “view discussion of item 1.” And here’s Scott at the school administrators conference.)
Scott made the comments amid growing concern among parents, educators and even business leaders in the state about a new standardized testing regime called the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, STARR, which is the successor to the maligned Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS. Under the new system, 15 percent of the grades of high school students in English, history, math and science will be based on test results.
Here are some of the things that Scott said at the board meeting late last month, taken from the video and from the Dallas Morning News:
“I’ve been a proponent of standardized testing, for some things, and I want to continue to use it, for some things. But we have overemphasized it, and even if we haven’t overemphasized it specifically at the state level, the perception out there is that it is the end-all, be-all, and that is causing behavior in many cases, to compound upon itself, and even if that’s not the intent at the state level, that’s reality. And perception is reality, so once they perceive that is all that counts, that it’s all we’re looking at, that’s all they focus on.”
–
After board member George Clayton of Dallas commented that at some schools testing is paramount, Scott replied:
“I would only say that is a perversion of what is intended, and I can say that I’ve been to many schools where that is not the case. “And I do agree with you that in many schools that is the case, and that’s why I’ve been very supportive of the Visioning Institute bill that is going to give this agency the authority to get 20 districts to serve as pilots for a new accountability system that maybe doesn’t focus on testing every kid every year and maybe does sampling like the NAEP, and allows us to think beyond this current system that we have, because we do have many districts and many campuses that are overemphasizing testing.
“Testing is good for some things. It is good for data, it is good for instructional practices, it is good for feedback, it is not the end-all, be-all of the universe. But it is important … in making the system care about kids. I say this all the time: Parents care about kids, teachers care about kids, individuals in this room care about kids.
“The system doesn’t give a damn about kids unless you make it care. And that’s really what the idea of testing and accountability was about, was to make the system care about kids, about different subgroups of kids, and not leave one subgroup to be stranded while the law of averages makes the campus look great.
“Now I agree that we’ve reached a point where there’s going to be a backlash against standardized testing…..”
Clayton then said: “Perversion”?
And Scott responded: “I know that’s a strong word.”
But he didn’t take it back.
–
“The assessment and accountability regime has become not only a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex. And the reason that you’re seeing this move toward the “common core” is there’s a big business sentiment out there that if you’re going to spend $600-$700 billion a year in public education, why shouldn’t be one big Boeing, or Lockheed-Grumman contract where one company can get it all and provide all these services to schools across the country.”
–
“We are trying to figure out a way to strike the balance between what the state requires and the reaction from the local level that might overdo exactly what you’re talking about — too many formative assessments, too many mini-TAKS tests, too many STAAR tests during the school year. What we’ve tried to do with standards-based assessments is provide a guidepost and provide some quality control across the state. That works in many cases., and in many cases it does not. …
“What we’re trying to do is set a benchmark for standards and for human behavior, and human behavior can’t always be dictated from Austin, Texas, as much as we try. But what you see at the local level is an attempt to enforce that through a regime of mini testing that won’t work.
“If you look at it, this is where the frustration comes from — you know, “drill and kill,” and teachers getting burnout. I don’t know how to stop that behavior, other than to say that’s not the intent, and to tell them, “It’s not going to work.”
“When you fundamentally get back to it, it’s the quality of the teacher in the classroom, it’s the quality of professional materials, the alignment of professional development, all of those things that go into the development of a quality classroom.
“Simply regurgitating a mini-TAKS test or a mini-STAAR test every two weeks I don’t believe is going to be ultimately effective and ultimately provide a quality education. I agree with you on that. Again, I’m trying to figure out a way to impart that that’s meaningful. …
“What we’ve done in the past decade, is we’ve doubled down on the test every couple of years, and used it for more and more things, to make it the end-all, be-all. … You’ve reached a point now of having this one thing that the entire system is dependent upon. It is the heart of the vampire, so to speak.
“All you have to do is kill that, and you’ve killed a whole lot of things. I think there needs to be a balance here.”
From NYTimes:
Op-Ed Columnist
Pass the Books. Hold the Oil.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 10, 2012
EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?”
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.
Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?”
That, at least, was my gut instinct. But now we have proof.
A team from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., has just come out with a fascinating little study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries — and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig?
The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix. (See the data map at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/49881940.pdf.)
As the Bible notes, added Schleicher, “Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert — just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has one of the most innovative economies, and its population enjoys a standard of living most of the oil-rich countries in the region are not able to offer.”
So hold the oil, and pass the books. According to Schleicher, in the latest PISA results, students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores and few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the highest oil rents and the lowest PISA scores. (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria stood out the same way in a similar 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or Timss, test, while, interestingly, students from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey — also Middle East states with few natural resources — scored better.) Also lagging in recent PISA scores, though, were students in many of the resource-rich countries of Latin America, like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Africa was not tested. Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part, argues Schleicher, because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them.
Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,” says Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”
Economists have long known about “Dutch disease,” which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills.
By, contrast, says Schleicher, “in countries with little in the way of natural resources — Finland, Singapore or Japan — education has strong outcomes and a high status, at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. … Every parent and child in these countries knows that skills will decide the life chances of the child and nothing else is going to rescue them, so they build a whole culture and education system around it.”
Or as my Indian-American friend K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”
That’s why the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore — none of which can live off natural resources.
But there is an important message for the industrialized world in this study, too. In these difficult economic times, it is tempting to buttress our own standards of living today by incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. To be sure, there is a role for stimulus in a prolonged recession, but “the only sustainable way is to grow our way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,” argues Schleicher.
In sum, says Schleicher, “knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. “The thing that will keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the table yourself.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 11, 2012, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pass the Books. Hold the Oil..
Can elite students do arithmetic?
From kitchentablemath:
Looks like the answer is no. (pdf file)
After a conversation with a “well respected mathematician who was heavily involved with K-12 mathematics education,” W. Stephen Wilson re-analyzed the results of the arithmetic test he gave his Calculus III students at Johns Hopkins in 2007. The unnamed mathematician had told Wilson that fewer than 1% of college students would be unable to work a multiplication problem by hand, so Wilson took a look:
He was a little off on his estimate.
In the fall of 2007 I gave a 10 question arithmetic test to my 229 Calculus III (multi-variable calculus) students on the first day of class. Among other things, this means they already had credit for a full year of Calculus. The vast majority of these students were freshmen and … and the average math SAT score was about 740.
[snip]
Seven of [the problems involving multiplication] were each missed by 8% or more of my students and 69 students, or 30%, missed more than 1 problem.
These are high achieving, highly motivated students (remember the 740 average SAT math score). These are disturbing numbers for them, but I suspect the numbers are much much worse among college freshmen with an average math SAT of 582, and, from Table 145 of Digest of Education Statistics 2009 we see that the average SAT score for the intended college major of engineering is 582 in 2008-2009.
Anyway, there is no real purpose to this paper except as a resource for me. It does suggest, very strongly, to me, that we have lost the pro-arithmetic war. This is a revelation to me and it calls into question what I will do next year with my big service course. I now feel compelled to assume that [my students] are chronically accident prone or they really are arithmetically handicapped. It isn’t clear that there is a difference. The question remains, how can I teach serious college level mathematics to students who are ill-prepared?
For passers-by, here’s a quick run-down of Wilson’s original observations:
As another experiment, Wilson gave a short test of basic math skills at the start of his Calculus III class in 2007. The results predicted how students later fared on the final exam. Those who could use pencil and paper to do basic multiplication and long division at the beginning of the semester scored better on the final Calc III material. His most startling finding was that 33 out of 236 advanced students didn’t even know how to begin a long division problem.
Lisa Watts: Back to Basics
DECEMBER 6, 2010 | BY LISA WATTS
Posted by Catherine Johnson at 4:02 PM
From WashPost:
Jon Stewart tried to engage Education Secretary Arne Duncan on “The Daily Show” Thursday night, but the effort was an exercise in the futility of conversing with someone who won’t deviate from his talking points. VIDEO
Duncan was so programmed that Stewart was even unable to get the basketball-playing secretary to have some fun talking about the New York Knicks’ new hero, Jeremy Lin.
When Stewart jokingly asked Duncan whether, having graduated from Harvard, it was “a disappointment” that he “ended up as just the secretary of education” and not as an NBA superstar, Duncan’s only response was about how great a role model the hard-working Lin was for young people.
Stewart surely knew at that point he would get nothing from Duncan, but he made a polite effort anyway, because he had time to fill and, perhaps, because he knew his mother, a teacher who apparently can’t stand Duncan’s policies, would be watching.
Stewart told Duncan that his mother tells him that the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative is exacerbating the standardized testing obsession of No Child Left Behind and making it harder for teachers to creatively do their jobs.
This is happening because the administration’s policies encourage states to link teacher evaluation to standardized test scores, which not only has lead to more “teaching to the test,” but also an expansion of standardized testing into areas besides the traditional math and reading areas. I ran a guest post last year from a high school student who wanted to know why he had to take a standardized test in his yearbook class as his district field-tested 52 such tests in all kinds of subjects so that teachers in all subjects could be evaluated by the results.
That’s the kind of thing teachers are complaining about, but Duncan gave no indication that he has heard them.
When Stewart said that a lot of the rhetoric about Race to the Top centers around innovation and creativity but that the reality is the opposite, and that teachers shouldn’t be teaching to the test, Duncan said: “I actually agree with that.” Huh?
Duncan then quoted President Obama as saying recently that “we have to stop teaching to the test,” betraying not a hint of irony that it is the administration’s policies that are continuing this dynamic in public schools.
Stewart tried again and again to get Duncan to have a real conversation, but Duncan seemed to never directly respond to a question, always coming back to one of his talking points.
He even said that “teachers have been beaten down,” again without betraying any recognition that many teachers blame his policies for this state of affairs.
What we learned from this exchange (the part that was televised) is that Stewart displayed a great grasp of the issues and the consequences of Race to the Top, and Duncan, well, not so much. I don’t need to say that something is wrong with this picture, so I won’t.
Afraid of Your Child’s Math Textbook? You Should Be.
Annie Keeghan, who worked in educational publishing for 20 years, in Open Salon, discusses the poor quality of math textbooks being sold today.
From open.salon.com
There may be a reason you can’t figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter’s math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you’re trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution. It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept your child hasn’t yet been introduced to, or that the math problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons.
I have worked for over 20 years in educational publishing as a product developer, writer, and editor of curriculum materials for grades K-8. I’ve worked directly for textbook publishers and supplemental publishers (supplemental being those books that are adjuncts to the text), start-ups and large publishing houses. I’ve attended countless sales meetings, product meetings, and planning sessions, seen and taken part in the inner workings of a successful textbook from inception to completion. Over the course of my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with publishers dedicated to producing the best materials possible. Because of them, I was able to produce several successful reading, math, and assessment programs and make a darn good living doing it.
Best of all, I was able to feel proud of those books to which my name was attached. But there are no longer many projects that allow such a feeling to take hold. Why? Because the “new normal” among too many publishers is a severe lack of oversight in the quality of curriculum being produced, and a frightening prevalence of apathy to do anything about it.
The root of problem begins with this key fact: There are only a small number of educational publishers left after rabid buyouts and mergers in the 90s, publishers that all vie for a piece of a four-billion dollar (forbes.com) pie. In recent years, math has become the subject du jour due to government initiatives and efforts to raise the rankings of U.S. students who lag behind in math compared to 30 other industrialized nations. With state and local budgets constrained to unprecedented levels, publishers must compete for fewer available dollars. As a result, many are rushing their products (especially in math) to market to before their competitors, product that in many instances is inherently, tragically flawed.
At one time, a writer in this industry could write a book and receive roughly 6% royalties on sales. The salesperson who sold the product, however, earned (and still does) a commission upwards of 17% on the same product. This sort of pay structure never made sense to me; without the product, there’d be nothing to sell, after all. But this disparity serves to illustrate the thinking that has been entrenched industry-wide for decades—that sales and marketing is more valuable than product.
Now, the balance between the budgets for marketing and product development is growing farther and farther apart, and exponentially so. Today, royalties are a thing of the past for most writers and work-for-hire is the norm. Sales staffs still receive their high commissions, but with today’s outsourcing, writers and editors are consistently offered less than 20% of what they used to make. As a result, the number of qualified writers and editors is diminishing, and those being contracted by developers and publishers often don’t have the necessary skills or experience to produce a text worthy of the publisher’s marketing claims.
Here’s how it works: Many publishers solicit developers, often on the Internet and from all over the world, looking for the best bid on a project. With competition this fierce, developers are forced to drastically lower their rates just to stay in business (and publishers exploit this fact). Let’s say a publisher hires a developer for a certain low-bid fee to produce seven supplemental math books for grades 3-8. The product specs call for each student book and teacher guide to have page counts of roughly 100 pages and 80 pages, respectively. The publisher wants these seven books ready for press in five weeks—over 1,400 pages. To put this in perspective, in the not too recent past at least six months would be allotted for a project of this size. But publishers customarily shrink their deadlines to get a jump on the competition, especially in today’s math market. Unreasonable turnaround times are part of the new normal, something that almost guarantees a lack of quality right out of the gate.
Of course, the developer could say no to this ridiculous timeline, but there are plenty of others who will say yes. So, the developer accepts the work and scrambles to put together a team of writers and editors who must have immediate availability, sheepishly offering them a take-it-or-leave-it rate, a mere pittance of what they could once demand. As is the case for the developer, for each writer or editor who declines, there are scores in the wings who will say yes just to survive. Those who do accept the inferior pay and grueling schedule often do so without the ability to review the product specs to know what they’re getting into. That’s because the specs are still being hashed out by the publisher and developer even as the project begins. And when product specs are “complete”, they are often vague, contradictory, and in need of extensive reworking since they were hastily put together by people juggling far too many projects already.
Given the five-week turnaround time, one book is often broken up among several different writers, a practice which assures a lack of consistency and structure throughout a single book. But I’m being picky. Midway through the writing, the developer realizes that even more writers are needed in order to meet the deadline. Sometimes, in the rush to complete the project, there is no time to discuss resumes and qualifications; there’s a schedule to keep and the developer’s bottom line is starting to dwindle. What often happens is that writers overstate their abilities and haven’t the first clue about state educational standards, Common Core State Standards, or those put out by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, a knowledge of which is essential to produce a worthy math book or text, a knoweldge of which should be demanded by developers and publishers alike.
Educational publishing is a small world, and the pool of qualified writers and editors has always been comparatively small to that of mass market or trade publishing. Now with fewer of us willing to accept these conditions, that pool is drying up. Over the last few years I’ve stopped developing and writing educational books; there’s no longer any satisfaction in the work, no demand or appreciation for a product well crafted, no way to make a decent living or produce something that I feel proud to have my name attached to. The day I heard myself ask a publisher not to include my name or that of my company’s in the credits of the book I’d consulted on (the final product was nothing like what was originally conceived) came the sad realization that my career as I’d known it was dying. I’d heard whisperings for years from other writers and editors working for other publishers about this “new normal,” but I didn’t understand until I saw with my own eyes what they’d been telling me. I finally understood all their frustration and angst, the conflicted feelings of weighing the need of a paycheck against principle, the feeling of trying to improve a product even if it meant bucking heads with those in charge, people who weren’t going to appreciate the effort or compensate appropriately anyway.
So, like many of my fellow colleagues, I’ve taken a step back, chosen not to be a party to something so fundamentally backward. The only work I accept is copyediting, and only when the money is decent (which isn’t often) and when the developer is at least committed to producing curriculum of quality (which also isn’t often). Most of the work I’ve been offered in the past few years is in math, the subject du jour I spoke of. Copyediting, the work I generally do now, is the final stage of editing before the product goes to press, where only a check for grammar, punctuation and things of this nature should be required. Content editing is a whole other expertise, one that is done after the writing where the content editor reviews the writer’s work for accuracy, sense, and structure, and makes sure the material adheres to the product specs. When I’m hired to copyedit, the profound errors I see in content are often staggering enough that grammar and punctuation seem immaterial. Sometimes the content in the student materials is so poor—steps omitted, unclear directions, concepts introduced when they’re not developed till later in the text, distorted interpretations of math terms and applications —that it boggles the mind it got past a content editor. With so many errors rampant at this stage of editing, rewriting is hastily done and it’s only inevitable that some errors will show up in the final printed product. And with a different copyeditor on each book, there are those who don’t even think about, or have the experience to recognize, the content issues so they go unaddressed. For a rate of four dollars a page, most copyeditors will do only what they were hired to do—look for errors and in grammar and punctuation and move on. There’s a mortgage due after all.
When I point out critical errors in content to a developer’s project manager, there’s generally a pause at the other end of the phone. I’m ruining their day, handing them a problem they don’t want, can’t possibly address given their resources and time. Some do their best; they’ll ask me to make corrections and bump up my rate a bit. Some will ask me to make notes so that they can fix the errors and do the rewrites themselves on their own time. Others will simply sigh, “The publisher knows it’s bad. Just do the best you can.” The publisher knows it’s bad. And yet, it doesn’t seem to matter. That’s because the sales and marketing team is already at work developing videos, brochures, webinars, catalog copy, and whatever else their bloated budgets will allow in order to sell what doesn’t actually exist—a quality product.
And speaking of the printed product, there’s one more step before we get there—production. These are the people who typeset the books and get them ready for press. India is a favored venue for some publishers because workers are available on three shifts and work fast, but mostly because the price is far cheaper than in the U.S. As editors, we often have to compensate for language barriers by color coding our instructions to the production staff or using simple language that is still frequently misunderstood, resulting in further unintended errors that often make it into the final product because there’s no time left in the schedule, no money left to pay someone, to do a final and thorough review in the manner it should be, and used to be, done.
You may be wondering by now where students fit into the grand plan of these practices. Let’s write and solve and equation to find out: Poorly-executed product (x) + a greater concentration of money spent on marketing to maximize profits (y) = nowhere, that’s where.
One must conclude that students and their education, if this is judged against product quality, is becoming an increasingly low priority. Not only don’t some publishers care, some have no problem expressing their lack of concern. Example: I received an email from a senior math executive of a well-established publisher responding to a concern I raised about the lack of correlations in a particular math series to the Common Core State Standards, correlations that were part of the product specs. The reason they were part of the product specs is because Common Core State Standards have been officially adopted by 43 states (ascd.org) and publishers are racing to make sure their products address them. This is how the senior executive answered my query: “It doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough correlations; our marketing materials say only that we ‘expose’ students to Common Core.”
Not only did this top-level “professional” have no problem stating this, she had no problem committing it to writing. Buyer beware: Read that marketing copy very carefully.
One math series out there is from a well-known textbook publisher incorporating the success of a particular math approach in another country (that’s a hint) into their textbooks. A while back, a group of us was hired to edit and adapt the product for the English-speaking market since it was written overseas. Not much time passed before it was clear that what the product required was not editing but extensive rewriting. One math exercise in a chapter I was assigned called for students to use a math formula to calculate their level of attractiveness, using a mathematical ratio of 1:1.618 (otherwise known as phi or divine proportion), a formula scientists have devised to set standards of beauty. Math can be tough enough for some kids without having to learn that, on top of struggling to apply math formulas to their face, they are also inherently unattractive. Talk about installing math phobia! No publisher in their right mind would allow such a problem to slip into their math books, but what does it say about the hiring practices of publishers and their developers when a writer who believes that such an exercise is appropriate gets a contract? The project was scrapped, but only temporarily. The publisher felt the writers just needed more time to clean up their work. Yeah, that’s all they needed. Meanwhile, the marketing for the product was already developed, prominent on the web and in mass media. And customers likely believed it because of the publisher’s reputation.
A more recent math project I was hired to edit was not only full of content errors, the books were so peculiar in the execution of math concepts and instruction that I hadn’t seen anything like it in all my 20+ years of experience. I asked the project manager if she’d ever seen math approached in this manner. She gave a resigned groan and said no, but this was what the publisher wanted. The books in question were a series of supplemental products designed for struggling students, which is sadly ironic because students of all abilities will indeed struggle to complete the lessons in these books. How could this happen, you might ask? Well, the books were published by a company that was reorganized a few years ago in order to boost profits. That’s when the bulk of the product development staff was let go and the budget for their department slashed. Meanwhile, the marketing and sales departments swelled, as did their budgets. And though many of those in charge now have lofty MBAs, few have little, if any, experience in publishing of any kind, never taught in a classroom, and haven’t the first clue of how to build a coherent educational book from start to finish. The lust for the bottom line—that is how this happens.
At the end of this project, the same project manager mused to me aloud, “I want to know who buys this crap.” Crap. That was the word she used after all her exhausting efforts trying to make a silk purse out of this pig’s ear. My reply to her was, “I want to know who buys it twice.” Because that’s the only way educational publishers make money, on repeat sales. Those books are out there now in print, on the shelves in the publisher’s warehouse, being packed and shipped to a school near you. So who are you people who choose to buy these books? Identify yourselves. Because you, too, a part of the problem.
Don’t get me wrong; they are many responsible educational publishers out there, publishers who are careful to hire teachers or those with a background in education and publishing to produce their materials. But they are becoming the minority. Teachers, curriculum specialists, parents, home schoolers, and anyone interested in the education of this generation of children need to beware. There are those who are capitalizing on established reputations to produce low-budget, low-quality materials with a high-concentration on disingenuous marketing all in the name of priority one—profit. Meanwhile, the people qualified to develop and write sound educational products are leaving the industry in droves to pursue more profitable careers at Wendy’s and Wal-Mart.
And so, I say to parents: Take a good look at the materials your children are bringing home. And to educators: Look at what you’re purchasing. Don’t be satisfied with the classic “thumb through” and don’t take those marketing materials or the sales pitch at face value. Take the time to study the materials; match them to your state’s desired standards and preferred benchmarks. If they’re not a good fit, take a pass and develop your own if you must. The only way kids are going to become better educated through the materials you buy, to increase their rankings among those 30 other countries, is to break the cycle and stop buying those books that are—there’s no other way to put it—crap.
