Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Support for Idiotic Fads is Highest Among New Teachers

although, I may have misread that statistic. Education News has this article stating "Support for Education Reform Highest Among New Teachers".
A new survey shows that teachers entering the workforce are more open to accepting changes pushed for by education reform advocates, such as linking pay and promotions to performance, than their longer-serving peers. 

Merit pay works.
Okay, I'm being slightly facetious but my sarcasm hides a valid point.

I have been teaching for nearly thirty years. I have seen, or developed, or participated in, many reforms over those years. Many of those reforms stunk, were stupid, wrongheaded, but they were all promising fundamental change that would help our students.  That's why we tried them.

Some reforms succeeded beyond our wildest dreams ... special ed foremost among them.  I can remember times when students were pushed into a closet and ignored because they were troublesome. I can remember when students were ignored if they had a learning disability.  IDEA helped change that culture and changed many lives.  We have to reach a balance between the two extremes but overall, that change is good.

If, on the other hand, a reform failed before, and the new reform looks very much like the old reform, should I ignore the similarity and forge onward?  Should I forget that I am being paid more than those new teachers ... mostly because of experience teaching ... should I forget that experience and forge onward with the "new" idea? Should I forget the mistakes I have made and make them again?

No, no, a thousand times, NO.

I truly feel that some of the loudest voices are those who are most wrongheaded.  Merit pay is a bad idea.  I have seen it fail and I have no desire to see it fail again. 

I would be happy to see reforms "such as linking pay and promotions to performance" if only someone could explain how to measure that and who would measure that.  It would be nice if anyone had the least bit of research that said this type of scheme actually worked.  (See Dan Pink, below)

In the past decade or so, my principals have embraced "Verbatim Observations" - writing down every word said in the room instead of simply watching and listening. This happens once a year. If you think I'm going to accept letting $5000 rest on that flimsy an evaluation, you are sadly mistaken.

If you insist $5000 of my income be based on my students' performance on a single test, try again. I will do everything in my power to stack the deck - against the test, against my colleagues, against the scheduler. That kid who's not working very hard - move him out. That kid in the other teacher's class - "sorry, too busy". Letting the department in on a great project? Not a chance. Cooperation in department meetings and curriculum development? Not if it means I am at a disadvantage when bonuses come out. If another teacher needs help with technology ... "I haven't tried that yet. I don't know."

You need to watch this.
Hey, let's be real.  When you talk a significant amount of money, then you have changed the focus. As Daniel Pink says in Drive, you need to pay people enough to get the question of money off the table.  Then get out of the way. Money sours the deal and makes performance worse.

Yet merit pay is high on the reformers list and high on the New Teachers' list.
 Specifically, while veteran teachers broadly reject the idea that student achievement metrics should be a part of teacher evaluation, newer teachers were much more open to the idea. The younger teachers went even further, broadly supporting the idea that student growth should play not just a role, but should be a substantial factor in judging instructor effectiveness. While veteran teachers rejected the idea outright, those with ten years of experience or less thought that it should make up at least 20% of the final assessment score.
If you are a new teacher and you disagree with me because you think I'm wrong and here's why ...fine. I'll listen and then offer my experience because you might not realize, with your fresh newly printed certification, that you don't have all the answers.

You might not realize how wrong you are.


Finally, we asked teachers if they would be willing to replace the current compensation and tenure systems with a performance-based system with much higher starting and top salaries. Here, New Majority teachers are far more supportive of a change to the status quo; specifically, 42 percent of New Majority teachers and just 15 percent of veteran teachers support such a change.
Before you reject my resistance as silly, ask WHY.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

More Fun with the School Internet Filter

Looked over the shoulder of a student in the computer room: VPR.net was blocked. That's Vermont Public Radio, by the way.  I commented on how silly it was to block that when I had a thought and asked the kid to check Foxnews.com. Open.

And this is a liberal state!

Score:
Vermont Public Radio: 0
FOXNews.com: 1

Monday, October 22, 2012

There's no Merit Pay in the RealWorld ...

Sorry. Almost never exists, at least not as the Education Reformer Model has it: your pay is always variable and dependent on an evaluation of someone else's performance.

Think about that for a second.  We're having a conversation around this country based on a fallacy. (A fallacy in education? Who'd have imagined that?)

"Teachers should be paid on the basis of how well their students do on a test because that is how the rest of the world does it."  Pretty funny but that is definitely NOT how the rest of the world does it.

SmartBoard still haven't fired the idiot
who wrote this app, nor have they fixed it.
Teachers, unfortunately, don't usually get it because we're too deep in the debate.  We've become immersed in whether or not value-added measures work or whether merit pay does or does not affect teacher performance and school climate.  All too often, we forget that the underlying rationale for this idea is flawed.  The RealWorld doesn't base its workers' pay on something the workers have little control over, if they want to have workers.

There are no successful companies who say to their staff, "I don't know how much you'll get paid this year until the Consumer Reports issue on our washing machines comes out." They might pink-slip people if the company tanks but the paycheck is not set to the manager's whim, nor it is set on consumer feedback.

No one says "Your pay will be $12 an hour if I like the shine on this floor but only $10 an hour if I find dirt here from a customer's shoes."

No one hires an engineer saying, "Your salary this year could be from $60,000 to $80,000 depending on whether your designs are built properly by the factory."

Farm workers are paid by the bushel or the box, not by the quality of the vegetables. The farmer can't thank them for picking the crop but, "Jeez, the truck driver crashed and the crop was destroyed, so I'll only pay you half."

An article quoted by NYC Educator included this line:
Workers in the private sector take it for granted that their performance will affect their pay, and that if they screw up badly, they will be fired. Teachers, like many other public employees, have been protected against that harsh, real-world stuff.
And that is utter bullshit.  Your performance at a private company won't affect your pay. Someone else's performance won't affect your pay. The boss can't just change your paycheck at whim.  Once hired, you have a great deal of protection in the courts if you want to fight it. Screws-ups need to be major (and documented, documented, documented, and break some clause in the contract or involve something illegal) in order to get fired summarily because the unemployment repercussions are pretty severe for the company -- because there are rules. Lawsuits are expensive. Discrimination is illegal.

Even if it's documented, your performance isn't an easy trigger. They hired you - implying that they thought you could do the job. The company can't then say that you've been doing a fine job for 3 years but now you suck and should be fired ... well, it can but its unemployment taxes will skyrocket and it'll pay just about as much but get nothing for it. And then the employee can sue to get the job back so the company has to have extensive evidence to show you were breaking your contract or malingering.

The onus is on the hiring personnel to get the right person and make sure that, once the probationary and training period is over, the person can do the job. Contracts and contract law are pretty well developed in this country.

Yes, teachers have a contract that a union probably negotiated, but if you listen to the blowhards, you might be thinking that no one else in the world has one and that there aren't any unions anywhere else and that UNION=EVIL. Didn't the blowhard sign a contract? Isn't he being recorded and broadcast and published by people working for a contract, under the protection of a union?

But Merit Pay? Nope. Even in sports, there is no merit pay in the way these reformers are envisioning it.  A pitcher's check cannot be reduced if he can't get a runner out because the second baseman made an error. He might get let go, but the money still comes. He might get bonuses if the team makes the postseason but those are above and beyond his base pay in his contract.  And his industry has a minimum wage, too. Football players can be dropped at a whim, but their contract specifies that it's only a game at a time - and teachers contracts are for a year at a time.

But, but, but ... merit pay does exist, doesn't it?

Nope.  Bonuses, maybe, but not merit pay in the sense that your pay is always variable and is dependent on an evaluation.  The employee MUST be paid the wage agreed to in the contract and if bonuses are being awarded, MUST be apportioned fairly. Otherwise, bosses could give bonuses to their favorites, or to just the men in the company, or only to the white workers.

No. Even the purest form of merit pay in this country -- tipping your waiter -- has considerations beyond just your whim of the moment.  As an experiment, try walking out of a nice restaurant without leaving one. Then, return the next day, announcing that you will only tip for GOOD service, and ask for a table. See how far that gets you. Of course, this isn't merit pay anyway - you are the customer, not the boss.

Bottom line: There are companies, like Google, that use a form of merit pay, but the bonuses come fast and freely, are considerably larger than what we are discussing here with a minimum far higher than schools are willing to pay, and are tied to an individual's performance instead of on the performance of someone else's kids.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Tech Gurus need to Shut Up.

Scott Macleod is saying that he is Struggling with educators’ lack of technology fluency

Confused
"All teachers suck at tech."
It’s 2012. Technology suffuses everything around us. The Internet and Internet browsers have been pretty mainstream for at least a decade. And yet, I continually run into significant numbers of educators who still don’t know how to work their Internet browser. They struggle with copying and pasting. They get confused just clicking between 2 or 3 different browser tabs. They don’t conceptually understand the difference between their browser’s Google search box and the box where they can actually type in the URL and get there directly. They have no idea that they can right-click on things like hyperlinks or images. And so on… [And this is just the Internet browser. I'm not even talking about individual software programs or online tools.]
I have a few things.

This is hardly just a teacher issue. Frequent any tech-centric forum and you’ll hear these complaints are endemic to EVERY field, from nuclear physics to graphic arts AND Education. When I am helping the nurse in the emergency room with a computer issue and it's brain-dead simple, I don't run screaming that all nurses should be tech nerds or be fired.

You need to stop lumping the capable with the clueless and stop implying that I am just like that apocryphal moron. Sure, you "continually run into" them but you also continually run into capable people, too.  We don't hit you in the metaphorical gut in such a memorable way, though. I suffer these fools, too, but I don't want to fire everyone who can't run AutoCAD.

You need to stop conflating your pet peeves with actual problems. Not understanding the difference between the URL box and the Google search box is a minor issue. The only difference, when you come right down to it, is that the one gives Google one more sliver of ad-revenue. Maybe. I'm sure that I could find some equally "silly" thing that you don't know about IE or Chrome.


In education, the answer is many-faceted:
  1. Free up the tech people to make tech available to the faculty and to provide training for teachers and students. SOMEONE has to be the go-to guy, looking at various options and deciding which might be worth following. Tech is coming out constantly - you can't expect faculty to succeed with two full-time jobs simultaneously: (1) teach high-school math and (2) discover, evaluate, learn, train on the 1200+ software tools on the 10+ major platforms.
  2. Introduce tech to the classrooms that works as promoted. Too often, the starry-eyed purchase something that winds up being ignored because every time you go to use it, it fails and you have to have a plan B ready for the 45 minutes you have these kids. The tablets needs to be able to connect to the Internet ... all the time, in every classroom, without a 15 minute delay.  By the time I finish taking roll, the tech should be working. If my smartboard crashes every time I use it, I won't count on it.  If the tech guy comes in with a wide-screen monitor for a 3:4 aspect ratio projector, you're not going to be able to use one of those two. If the students can't access their Google accounts, you won't get much done. If the school tech guy can't get the filter to work seamlessly, then you will be constantly doing things that are not what you planned. 
  3. Plan for repair and maintenance. If you ask the average person to repair the tech in his room, be sure that he will make some mistakes - it's not just a teacher thing.
  4. Free up the faculty to develop these new resources. Remove the stigma / penalties for those who try something new and fail the first couple times.  If your teachers are afraid for their jobs, they will be ultra-conservative since few want to take a wild-ass chance on a curriculum revamp with merit-pay and test scores and observances and evaluations on the line. When parents and administrators and school boards are all questioning a new way of teaching, few teachers are going to jump at the chance to be the guinea pig. If it has to be perfect the first time, it won't happen at all.
  5. Research and Published Results. Tech-gurus and bloggers and educational researchers are consistently contradictory as to the value and efficacy of new (or rehashed) ideas.  It would be really nice if you-all could agree on starting school at age 3 or age 7, whether this tech or that tech is best, whether collaborative learning Integrated Math or Singapore Math is best. Figure this shit out for me so I can apply it.
  6. Free up the money to let this all happen. Tech is expensive. Tech mistakes are expensive too.
  7. Free up the faculty from union restrictions. Yeah, I said it. In the  push to help guarantee fair treatment for all teachers, the NEA and AFT too often negotiate contract compromises that bind faculty or give faculty the sense that going around that provision is tantamount to surrender in a bloody civil war. Occasionally, the faculty need to tell off the Union Rep in order to get the time to receive training that actually helps them.  Of course, the school has to be sure that the training actually helps them.
We aren’t asking for much.

Getting rid of 12th grade is Idiocy.

Joanne Jacobs has
Children should start school at 3 but skip 12th grade, writes Linus D. Wright, ...
Why is this picture of
a cracked pot here?
Do I imply something?
“A fully financed mandatory early-childhood-education program would do more to change the culture and academic outcomes of students than any other area of reform,” Wright argues.
Step two of the formula for improving education at every level in the United States is to eliminate the 12th grade. It is the least productive and most expensive of all grades, and the money saved by getting rid of it would pay for early-childhood programs, which are the most productive and least expensive. Most students are taking electives in 12th grade, he writes. They’re focused on their part-time jobs. Move ‘em out and use the savings for the little kids.
Which is silly.  This "problem" of seniors taking only electives, of seniors leaving school early or doing work-study, of students focusing more on out-of-school than on academics is a logical extension of the trend in recent years of holding kids back, of "red-shirting" them so as to raise early test scores. When you have parents keeping kids out of school until age 6 so that they will have a developmental edge on their "peers", you will have 18- and 19- year-old seniors. When you have schools encouraging the practice so they get marginally better scores, you will have this problem.

BUT ...

Seniors can do research, too.
It's not just for Education experts.
Instead of eliminating the senior year and sending barely-ready students to college remediation and full-time minimum wage jobs, make the seniors take electives in math and science and English and history.  Give them a Senior English Seminar (vocab, grammar, and a 30 page research paper) in addition to the regular English 12 BritLit class, an AP US History or US Military History, a math class in Discrete Math or Game Theory or Chess, a foreign language such as Latin or Japanese. How about freakin' Art or Architectural drafting? You have a theater program, don't you? Your music teacher isn't the modern day El-KaBong, right?

Of course the senior year costs a lot - you have to do more than throw a marginally intelligent elementary teacher (who majored in elementary ed because she was incapable of anything more intellectual) in the room to babysit. You actually need to push those know-it-all 18yos into a place where they'll step it up a bit ... and that takes resources.

Seniors are about to make major life choices. It is the responsibility of the school to give them some experience and education in as many strands as they can con the seniors into.

On the other end of the scale ... why in anyone's delusional world would you want to require ALL children go to pre-school from age 3?  I'm sure that everyone can name a few children who should have this intervention but it's absolutely NOT better for the vast majority.  Children should learn from and be with parents.  Daycare should be just that unless the parents specifically ask for pre-school.

Having Pre-school available from age 3 is alright, but the key word is "available" as opposed to "required".

Linus Wright writes, "In the most recent report of the Program for International Student Assessment, released in 2009, American students ranked well below those in a significant number of other industrialized nations in such critical areas as reading, science, and math."

Yeah, and many of those countries start education later than we do.  In fact, Finland starts them at 7 years old:
Ever since Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million that does not start formal education until age 7 and scorns homework and testing until well into the teenage years, scored at the top of a well-respected international test in 2001 in math, science and reading, it has been an object of fascination among American educators and policy makers.-NYTimes.
Why can't these Education Research "Experts" get their facts straight and their conclusions consistent?

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Voter Intimidation is Illegal.

I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope — I hope you pass those along to your employees. Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well.
Thank God you can't actually find out who people voted for, but this does seem to be fairly intimidating.  Hope the employees can lie well.... and yes, it's illegal to threaten employees if they don't vote the way you want them to.

It's not illegal for Romney to ask the CEOs to do so, though.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Math Literacy - It's not just for breakfast, you know.

The stat of the day ...
OCTOBER 17, 2012

Don't Believe People Who Say They Work 60 Hours a Week

That's very interesting.
People overstate the number of weekly hours they "usually" work by 5% to 10%, with those on the higher end being more likely to overestimate, according to a study led by John P. Robinson of the University of Maryland. By examining U.S. workers' time diaries, the researchers found that people who say they usually work 55 to 64 hours per week are off by an average of about 10 hours; people who say they work 65 to 74 hours are overstating by about 20 hours. Respondents may inflate their estimates because of a desire to appear industrious, the researchers suggest.
Okay. Listen up.
If you're going to have a blog called Stat of the Day, you need to adhere to some basic rules.
  1. Don't make stupid math errors.
  2. Don't quote stupid research.
  • If a person claimed 55 to 64 hours and is off by 10 hours, then they worked 45 to 54 hours. 
  • If a person claimed 65 to 74 hours and is off by 20 hours, then they worked 45 to 54 hours. 
These two statements should not be separate - people only work 45 to 54 hours, regardless of what they claim.
  •  Overestimating by 5% to 10% on 45 to 54 hours of real work does not make you 10 hours off in your estimate.
Sheesh.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Youtube Blocked. No Math Tutorials for You!

Spend four hours recording some math tutorials,
Upload them to YouTube via the video manager,
Click on the link so you can get the embed code
So you can drop the links on the Moodle page.
Denied.



Tell me again how we're teaching the children of the new millennium?

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Reform math or Keep it Traditional?

Compare this point of view from Scott MacLeod, who promoted the quote:
Education will only truly be transformed…
Education will only truly be transformed when we stop trying to jam content into our kids’ heads and start allowing them to explore and learn in contexts that feed their desire to keep learning - Will Richardson via http://connectedprincipals.com/archives/2939#comment-3896

With this one, copied from http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/barry-garelick-math-education-being-outwitted-by-stupidity/ :
The criticism of traditional math teaching is based largely on a mischaracterization of how it is/has been taught, and misrepresented as having failed thousands of students in math education despite evidence of its effectiveness in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s.

Reacting to this characterization of the traditional model, math reformers promote a teaching approach in which understanding and process dominate over content. In lower grades, mental math and number sense are emphasized before students are fluent with procedures and number facts.

Procedural fluency is seldom achieved.

In lieu of the standard methods for adding/subtracting, multiplying and dividing, in some programs students are taught strategies and alternative methods. Whole class and teacher-led explicit instruction (and even teacher-led discovery) has given way to what the education establishment believes is superior: students working in groups in a collaborative learning environment. Classrooms have become student-centered and inquiry-based. The grouping of students by ability has almost entirely disappeared in the lower grades—full inclusion has become the norm.

Reformers dismiss the possibility that understanding and discovery can be achieved by students working on sets of math problems individually and that procedural fluency is a prerequisite to understanding. 

Much of the education establishment now believes it is the other way around; if students have the understanding, then the need to work many problems (which they term “drill and kill”) can be avoided. The de-emphasis on mastery of basic facts, skills and procedures has met with growing opposition, not only from parents but also from university mathematicians. At a recent conference on math education held in Winnipeg, math professor Stephen Wilson from Johns Hopkins University said, much to the consternation of the educationists on the panel, that “the way mathematicians learn is to learn how to do it first and then figure out how it works later.” This sentiment was also echoed in an article written by Keith Devlin (2006). Such opposition has had limited success, however, in turning the tide away from reform approaches.


Here's the whole article:

Mathematics Education: Being Outwitted by Stupidity

By Barry Garelick
In a well-publicized paper that addressed why some students were not learning to read, Reid Lyon (2001) concluded that children from disadvantaged backgrounds where early childhood education was not available failed to read because they did not receive effective instruction in the early grades. Many of these children then required special education services to make up for this early failure in reading instruction, which were by and large instruction in phonics as the means of decoding. Some of these students had no specific learning disability other than lack of access to effective instruction. These findings are significant because a similar dynamic is at play in math education: the effective treatment for many students who would otherwise be labeled learning disabled is also the effective preventative measure.
In 2010 approximately 2.4 million students were identified with learning disabilities — about three times as many as were identified in 1976-1977. (See http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/xls/tabn045.xls and http://www.ideadata.org/arc_toc12.asp#partbEX). This increase raises the question of whether the shift in instructional emphasis over the past several decades has increased the number of low achieving children because of poor or ineffective instruction who would have swum with the rest of the pack when traditional math teaching prevailed. I believe that what is offered as treatment for math learning disabilities is what we could have done—and need to be doing—in the first place. While there has been a good amount of research and effort into early interventions in reading and decoding instruction, extremely little research of equivalent quality on the learning of mathematics exists. Given the education establishment’s resistance to the idea that traditional math teaching methods are effective, this research is very much needed to draw such a definitive conclusion about the effect of instruction on the diagnosis of learning disabilities.1
Some Background
Over the past several decades, math education in the United States has shifted from the traditional model of math instruction to “reform math”. The traditional model has been criticized for relying on rote memorization rather than conceptual understanding. Calling the traditional approach “skills based”, math reformers deride it and claim that it teaches students only how to follow the teacher’s direction in solving routine problems, but does not teach students how to think critically or to solve non-routine problems. Traditional/skills-based teaching, the argument goes, doesn’t meet the demands of our 21st century world.
As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the criticism of traditional math teaching is based largely on a mischaracterization of how it is/has been taught, and misrepresented as having failed thousands of students in math education despite evidence of its effectiveness in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s. Reacting to this characterization of the traditional model, math reformers promote a teaching approach in which understanding and process dominate over content. In lower grades, mental math and number sense are emphasized before students are fluent with procedures and number facts. Procedural fluency is seldom achieved. In lieu of the standard methods for adding/subtracting, multiplying and dividing, in some programs students are taught strategies and alternative methods. Whole class and teacher-led explicit instruction (and even teacher-led discovery) has given way to what the education establishment believes is superior: students working in groups in a collaborative learning environment. Classrooms have become student-centered and inquiry-based. The grouping of students by ability has almost entirely disappeared in the lower grades—full inclusion has become the norm. Reformers dismiss the possibility that understanding and discovery can be achieved by students working on sets of math problems individually and that procedural fluency is a prerequisite to understanding. Much of the education establishment now believes it is the other way around; if students have the understanding, then the need to work many problems (which they term “drill and kill”) can be avoided.
The de-emphasis on mastery of basic facts, skills and procedures has met with growing opposition, not only from parents but also from university mathematicians. At a recent conference on math education held in Winnipeg, math professor Stephen Wilson from Johns Hopkins University said, much to the consternation of the educationists on the panel, that “the way mathematicians learn is to learn how to do it first and then figure out how it works later.” This sentiment was also echoed in an article written by Keith Devlin (2006). Such opposition has had limited success, however, in turning the tide away from reform approaches.
The Growth of Learning Disabilities
Students struggling in math may not have an actual learning disability but may be in the category termed “low achieving” (LA). Recent studies have begun to distinguish between students who are LA and those who have mathematical learning disabilities (MLD). Geary (2004) states that LA students don’t have any serious cognitive deficits that would prevent them from learning math with appropriate instruction. Students with MLD, however, (about 5-6% of students) do appear to have both general (working memory) and specific (fact retrieval) deficits that result in a real learning disability. Among other reasons, ineffective instruction, may account for the subset of LA students struggling in mathematics.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) initially established the criteria by which students are designated as “learning disabled”. IDEA was reauthorized in 2004 and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA). The reauthorized act changed the criteria by which learning disabilities are defined and removed the requirements of the “significant discrepancy” formula. That formula identified students as learning disabled if they performed significantly worse in school than indicated by their cognitive potential as measured by IQ. IDEIA required instead that states must permit districts to adopt alternative models including the “Response to Intervention” (RtI) model in which struggling students are pulled out of class and given alternative instruction.
What type of alternative instruction is effective? A popular textbook on special education (Rosenberg, et. al, 2008), notes that up to 50% of students with learning disabilities have been shown to overcome their learning difficulties when given explicit instruction. This idea is echoed by others and has become the mainstay of RtI. What Works Clearinghouse finds strong evidence that explicit instruction is an effective intervention, stating: “Instruction during the intervention should be explicit and systematic. This includes providing models of proficient problem solving, verbalization of thought processes, guided practice, corrective feedback, and frequent cumulative review”. Also, the final report of the President’s National Math Advisory Panel states: “Explicit instruction with students who have mathematical difficulties has shown consistently positive effects on performance with word problems and computation. Results are consistent for students with learning disabilities, as well as other students who perform in the lowest third of a typical class.” (p. xxiii). The treatment for low achieving, learning disabled and otherwise struggling students in math thus includes some of the traditional methods for teaching math that have been decried by reformers as having failed millions of students.
The Stealth Growth of Effective Instruction
Although the number of students classified as learning disabled has grown since 1976, the number of students classified as LD since the passage of IDEIA has decreased (see Figure 1). Why the decrease has occurred is not clear. A number of factors may be at play. One may be a provision of No Child Left Behind that allows schools with low numbers of special-education students to avoid reporting the academic progress of those students. Other factors include more charter schools, expanded access to preschools, improved technologies, and greater understanding of which students need specialized services. Last but not least, the decrease may also be due to targeted RtI programs that have reduced the identification of struggling and/or low achieving students as learning disabled. .
Having seen the results of ineffective math curricula and pedagogy as well as having worked with the casualties of such educational experiments, I have no difficulty assuming that RtI plays a significant role in reducing the identification of students with learning disabilities. In my opinion it is only a matter of time before high-quality research and the best professional judgment and experience of accomplished classroom teachers verify it. Such research should include 1) the effect of collaborative/group work compared to individual work, including the effect of grouping on students who may have difficulty socially; 2) the degree to which students on the autistic spectrum (as well as those with other learning disabilities) may depend on direct, structured, systematic instruction; 3) the effect of explicit and systematic instruction of procedures, skills and problem solving, compared with inquiry-based approaches; 4) the effect of sequential and logical presentation of topics that require mastery of specific skills, compared with a spiral approaches to topics that do not lead to closure and 5) Identifying which conditions result in student-led/teacher-facilitated discovery, inquiry-based, and problem-based learning having a positive effect, compared with teacher-led discovery, inquiry-based and problem-based learning. Would such research show that the use of RtI is higher in schools that rely on programs that are low on skills and content but high on trendy unproven techniques and which promise to build critical thinking and higher order thinking skills? If so, shouldn’t we be doing more of the RtI style of teaching in the first place instead of waiting to heal reform math’s casualties?
Until any such research is in, the educational establishment will continue to resist recognizing the merits of traditional math teaching. One education professor with whom I spoke stated that the RtI model fits mathematics for the 1960s, when “skills throughout the K-8 spectrum were the main focus of instruction and is seriously out of date.” Another reformer argued that reform curricula require a good deal of conceptual understanding and that students have to do more than solve word problems. These confident statements assume that traditional methods—and the methods used in RtI—do not provide this understanding. In their view, students who respond to more explicit instruction constitute a group who may simply learn better on a superficial level. Based on these views, I fear that RtI will incorporate the pedagogical features of reform math that has resulted in the use of RtI in the first place.
While the criticism of traditional methods may have merit for those occasions when it has been taught poorly, the fact that traditional math has been taught badly doesn’t mean we should give up on teaching it properly. Without sufficient skills, critical thinking doesn’t amount to much more than a sound bite. If in fact there is an increasing trend toward effective math instruction, it will have to be stealth enough to fly underneath the radar of the dominant edu-reformers. Unless and until this happens, the thoughtworld of the well-intentioned educational establishment will prevail. Parents and professionals who benefitted from traditional teaching techniques and environments will remain on the outside — and the public will continue to be outwitted by stupidity.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (2011). Digest of Education Statistics, 2010 (NCES 2011-015), Chapter 2.
Barry Garelick has written extensively about math education in various publications including Education Next, Educational Leadership, and Education News. He recently retired from the federal government and has completed his requirements for a credential to teach math (middle school/high school) in California.
1This article focuses on math teaching and learning, but the same pedagogical issues arise in history, science, and English Language Arts (ELA), including grammar, spelling, composition, reading comprehension and literature.
References
Devlin, Keith. (2006). Math back in forefront, but debate lingers on how to teach it. San Jose Mercury News. Feb. 19.
Geary, David. (2004). Mathematics and learning disabilities. J Learn Disabil 2004; 37; 4
Lyon, Reid (2001), in “Rethinking special education for a new century” (Chapter 12) by Chester Finn, et al., Thomas B. Fordham Foundation; Progressive Policy Inst., Washington, DC.
Available via http://eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED454636.pdf
Rosenberg, Michael S., Westling, D.L., McLeskey, J. 2008. Special Education for Today’s Teachers: An Introduction. Columbus: Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Get Rid of As Bs Cs?

As a point of reference, for those who want to remove the "traditional" A-F scale and replace it with something more rubric based, you're not being particularly new or original. Changing a grade from "A" to "Proficient with Distinction" doesn't actually provide any more or less information - it's still a distillation of mounds of data down to a single indicator, with interpretation and fiddling for those students the teacher doesn't want to be truthful to. "F" means "Fair" or "C" means "Average" or "2" means "Didn't quite meet the standard" -- what's the difference, really?


I got this nugget from Black River Union High School, in southern Vermont: