Raising standards will do what, again?

Here's the bad news:

This is a four-state test given to all juniors in RI, ME, NH, and Vermont. 6,000 in Vermont. The 4 point scale is

1. Not proficient
2. Nearly Proficient
3. Proficient
4. Proficient with distinction

Our 11th grade students do pretty well in English, not so much in math: 36% passed, i.e. got a 3 or 4. If we look into those numbers,though, a weird thing shows up. Only 3% got the top score. Only 33% of the students got more than half of the questions correct for a passing score.

That's right. 3% got the high score (2/3 correct or better, appr. 70%). (edited 2/13: 800) 180 kids out of 6000, spread out across the state. Three year totals of 600 out of 20,000. The passing score is roughly 50% and only a third of the kids got that.

Either every single math teacher in Vermont is screwing up and not doing their jobs or we have a test that isn't appropriate. (and after missing that number in the previous paragraph, maybe it's me.)

If it were just one or two schools, or a single county, you might have a point to make about teachers or demographics but not if the problem is statewide ... and the numbers for Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine are exactly in line with Vermont's.

If I were to write that test with that kind of passing rate, I'd be excoriated for making it too difficult. Instead, our Commissioner says that we should make the test harder:

"Commissioner Vilaseca stated: "We are gathering more information about what Math courses all students are required to take, and will carefully consider whether it is time for Vermont to increase our graduation requirements in mathematics."

Uh, dude, they don't pass the test now. What exactly do you figure raising the cutoff will do?

The best things in life are real

Caught an ad for Nature Valley Granola Bars: "The best things in life are real things ... like Nature valley Granola Bars." The scenes show two actors obviously walking in front of a green scene of nature trails.

Do they get the irony?

Habits of Highly Ineffective Principals ... Fair Weather Discipline

The true HIPster always has a weather-eye open for trouble ... and stays away. 

Whenever there's a problem, he's nowhere to be found. Faculty who hear the ruckus come running to break it up, split the combatants, and escort the drama queens to the office.  Since the teachers were there, they must be responsible for the problem.  This is, of course, obvious.

When things are calm and peaceful ... there he is, smiling as if he did something to be proud of. "My presence here has made all the difference."

He's like the Anti-Fire Department ... Always Missing.

Thinking about exams.

Real Teaching Means Real Learning wants to
Re-evaluate exam week, something that he feels he hasn't thought about deeply enough. After he bemoans the fact that students aren't collaborating on these exams, he throws up a couple of strawman arguments and takes some huge liberties with student motivation.

"If a kid can fail the exam and still pass, should he take the exam?" Apparently not, which seems like a crazy idea to me. It's been my experience that kids often don't put their knowledge all together in one coherent package until they sit for the exam. "I don't know what I am doing" becomes "Oh, that was easier than I thought. Now I get it." Additionally, how many kids want to only get a 60% passing grade if they could get a 80% ?

Further, he seems astonished that a kid with an average of 28% can't pass the class and is required to sit the exam anyway. I look at it this way: most kids who have a mark in the twenties are sabotaging themselves; they're rarely stupid. If they take the exam and score well, they have that to build from the next time they take the course - not everyone can do it in the same allotted time.

You can even make the case that scoring well on the exam is the ONLY criteria for passing a course -- if the exam is comprehensive. It takes a fairly complete knowledge to bring together all of that knowledge in one place, for one exam, during two hours.

I have never used one.
Seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Up pops strawman #2. "As most exams are multiple choice" the student can guess and get a 25%. It's been a while since I gave a MC exam. Tests and quizzes? Yes, there's almost always a MC section. Final exam? No.

RTMRL wants to take some of the kids out of exams and give them intensive one-on-one tutoring instead. He's ignoring the reality that they weren't working for the previous six months; expecting them to suddenly catch up on all of that during the time the rest are taking exams is a little foolish.

"Do we take these students, who are obviously struggling with the course, and test them again or do we teach them? Imagine the learning which could occur with 1-1 help in a 3 hour block with a weak student?" Um, probably not much.

Up pops strawman #3, "If the answer is the latter, then I suggest you be upfront with your stakeholders and put a sign outside your school saying “For an entire month, two weeks during each semester, your child will not learn at this school”.

He is pretending that the kids are losing 2 weeks at a time for exams. I have been working in education, public and private, for nearly 30 years. Not one school has ever taken this much time for exams. Not only that, there is the idea that learning can't happen at exam time.

Enough of that. Are exams worth it? I feel they are, for all students.

It is a summary evaluation. For the entire course, we've broken things down and scaffolded them up. We've looked at pieces of the course in isolation. Projects have been deliberately limited in scope and the students are analyzing and committing to long-term memory the nuts and bolts as well as the grand themes.

The final exam is the time when you can make problems that bring the whole course together, when the student needs to demonstrate ability and knowledge of a whole vast subject, when the notebook is useless and memory is critical, when a single question requires a deep understanding of parts of 10 or more months of work.

Some kids crash and burn and still learn that lesson, and come out of the fire tested and ready to do better the next time. Some students realize how much they really do know (and surprise the hell out of themselves). The rest consolidate their knowledge and prove to themselves how much they understand -- or don't.

You can't fake that.

Is this on?

-- brushes dust --

I think I used to write here.

Teenagers are different, now.

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in 7 years." - Mark Twain

Nope. No different after all.

#AnyQs - Chocolate cake mix

I also like the last visible comment:
"The batter may look curdled; that's OK, it will bake up fine."

Film Alphabet "Puzzles"

From Steven Wildish's Friday Project: Film Alphabets.

There was no math warmup problem today. I put the 1990s up as the windows wallpaper and then turned on the SmartBoard. They were fascinated. It seemed a hit so I printed them out from the folder - in Windows, you can print some of the contents of a folder and it will automatically scale them to full-page -- and lined them up on the wall outside my door. Teachers thought it was a hoot. The person with the most solutions? The science teacher across the hall. The second best? A senior with a Netflix connection.

Feel free to put in some answers in the comments. The artist's website is cool too, but there are only solutions for the 80s and 90s up so far.

Teacher evaluations, new research

eSchool online sends me weekly emails about school reform and technology integration. This week's included this paragraph:

Some states are at risk of losing their Race to the Top funding because they've been forced to delay plans to implement proposed reforms; and a new study indicates that evaluating classroom teachers just once a year will not help teachers to improve.

I'm thinking that delaying some of that reform might well be a good thing in the long run since RttT overly promotes merit pay and other bogus "incentives", weird ideas about testing and technophiliac waste.

Then I get to the second part and I'm struck by the emphasis that evaluating "just once a year" will not help teachers improve, implying that it ought to be several times per year.  I actually believe the study, but coupled with what I've seen in the past thirty years or so, "one evaluation won't help a teacher improve" because evaluations don't do much and repetitions of nothing are still nothing. I've had good principals who gave good evaluations that really were helpful but I've had many, many more that were useless.

Overall, the study seems typical of education research and education reporting.

Bottom line for me is that if they found that multiple evaluations each year were beneficial, they'd have said so. Since they didn't say that (and they would dearly LOVE to say that), then it can be assumed that they found no evidence so they fudged the report and let the reader assume.

I'm glad I use Thunderbird for my email, though, because it warned me about this email.  Thinks it's a scam.

Smart program.

It's not that colleges don't teach ...

It's that their students aren't 100% students. Far too many students are unprepared, unmotivated and unwilling to put much effort into their college courses. Fortunately for their delayed entry into the RealWorld, they can still pay their bills (albeit by taking out loans in many cases).

Wander a college campus at night, follow the students around, listen in at campus bistros, check in on the residents, take a class, and you'll quickly see two types of students: the ones who do care, are motivated and who are getting their money's worth and those who feel that work is an imposition on their sex and drinking lives.

"I can't write an essay, that's the weekend."
"My computer stopped working so I didn't do that assignment."
Facebooking during class.
Watching video on the laptop.

Why would anyone be surprised "that 45 percent of undergraduates gain little in thinking and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent show little gains in four years of college"?

Jay Matthews:
The previous post on this blog is my Monday column, complaining about the lack of much reaction to last year's study, which showed that 45 percent of undergraduates gain little in thinking and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent show little gains in four years of college. This is based on results at 24 colleges on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a lengthy essay exam.
I failed to address this question. Do we care about such results, or is the reputation of the colleges of more use, as we choose colleges? Some colleges do release their National Survey of Student Engagement results, which indicate if they are teaching the right way. Have any of us ever sought that data while making a college admission decision? Are colleges right to keep such information confidential if it makes them look bad? Or would anyone care?

My answer to Jay: "No, we expected that 9% are losers until they get the junior-class wake-up call and that 36% never hear that call." 

1. College is not for everyone. Plumbers are people, too. (And they work harder to get as good as they are - that's why they get paid more than a newly minted graduate.)
2. Education gets more complicated and demands more from you as get older. That's why it costs more and takes more time while taking less class time.
3. You get what you pay for.
4. You get what you work for.

The problem is Cross-Curriculum teaching

from Darren, a school might in trouble for its attempt at cross curricular teaching ...

The question was a word problem that said, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?" Another math problem said, "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?"... (District spokeswoman) Roach explained the teachers were trying to incorporate social studies lessons into the math problems, which is something the school district encourages. But the problem with the questions is there is no historical context.

No, the problem is that when you are teaching in the 21st Century, you need to pull your head out of the hole in the ground (or out of your behind ... some have trouble telling the difference). Much better to use word problems such as these (provided as a public service by the Curmudgeon Math Project, LLC.)

1. If an elementary teacher makes three stupid decisions per day, how many days will it be until she is fired? For extra credit, make a diorama of the classroom using macaroni and tongue depressors.
2. If four teachers collectively have an IQ of 380, what is the average IQ of a teacher in this school system? For full credit, don't forget to show your work - text your answers to 1-802-IDIOTIC.
3. When a teacher chooses to write beyond her intelligence, how many irate parents will it take to get it all written up in the national press? Answers must be posted to Twitter because this teacher is obviously a twit herself. Use the hashtag #LowGradeMoron
4. Write a paragraph explaining why posting a nude picture of herself on Facebook page would have been a better career move. How many reposts will she get if 3500 people see it every three minutes?
5. Use the MAKEYOURSELFAFATPIG program on your smartphones to figure out the total amount of ice cream eaten by 26 students who eat 3 scoops of ice cream each, if each scoop of ice cream costs $23 and uses $18,000 worth of 21st Century Technology.
6. Mrs Barnettt has three real daughters and one imaginary one, if she can claim one extra week of vacation in Costa Rica each time she claims that a daughter died, how many weeks will she be spending on the unemployment line in Costa Rica?

Or you could stick to your strengths,
stop trying to be clever,
and ... just ... teach ... math.

Time off for good behavior?

New York City school employee faked her child's death to get extra vacation.


Wow.

"Joan Barnett, a parent coordinator at the Manhattan High School of Hospitality Management, was so determined to make the spring break jaunt that she:
* Had one of her daughters call the school to say that her sister had suffered a heart attack in Costa Rica.
* Had another daughter call the school later that day to say that the sister had died and that about a dozen relatives, including Barnett, were traveling to the country for a funeral.
* Faxed a forged death certificate of her daughter “Xinia Daley Herman” to school as proof of the death. The document is required if a city school employee asks for bereavement days.

I can't even imagine the thought process that didn't go into this idea.

Curriculum mapping in standard little boxes

Writing is horizontal ... except in maps.

I was struck by a few things the other day when the Mrs. was putting together her curriculum maps for the year ... her curriculum coordinator was demanding that all teachers use the same template so there wouldn't be any confusion and there wouldn't be multiple formats coming in to her office.

1) Why does the template have boxes labeled by the month?

My math classes are split into chapters/ units that have never corresponded to months all that well. The lengths of the months is different as well because of the random nature of vacations, exams, sporting events. We're in block scheduling so the second semester has a completely different pace than the first. Obviously, some variations are less disruptive than others but the month-by-month format seems to be the format that least well corresponds to the course. English classes don't think month by month either. Nor does pretty much anybody else. Why insist on it?

Then you have the long words that don't fit. Unless you teach math, "Prop ortio nal Reas" isn't that meaningful nor is "Probl ems and Linea."

Adding to the silliness is the repetition, as shown here.  This teacher has broken the course down to the weekly level ... and repeated everything. Enlarge the image above ... by my count he pasted "Linea r Equa tions" 56 times.Why? Because he wasn't allowed to combine table cells.  Legibility is sacrificed and some of the words don't even show up in the cells but we were able to keep the format.

Writing is horizontal. Except here, where six letter words are split with a single "r" on the next line and there's no thought of proper hyphenation. This is crazy.  The formatting should not take higher precedence than the content.

2) Why does the Coordinator assume that the course changes significantly from year to year?

Maybe it varies in some classes, but the essence of the transcript is that we are awarding a credit for Algebra I. For that to mean anything, the Algebra I class needs to have some consistency from section to section and from year to year. If it doesn't, then something is wrong. The "C" in Algebra I means that the student has accomplished a certain amount of algebra with a certain amount of facility and thus can be admitted to Algebra II and placed appropriately.

Or you need to give a grade for "Individualized Mathematics" and be ready to explain it to anyone who needs to know. If you're a single tutor of a single home-schooled kid, then this is the rule. When you are dealing with a few thousand kids, however, each kid's transcript needs to be clear. When you are hiring a math teacher to teach Algebra I, you need to know what that entails.

3) Different formats would complicate things for parents.

This complaint is a weird one to me. Even if I thought a parent would read the curriculum map, certainly not a winning bet, I would expect that the parent would have a harder time with the terms and descriptions than with the organization. Labeling the top of the chart Sept, Oct, Nov gives less information than sections 1, 2, 3 and much less than "Polynomials", "Slopes and Lines", "Linear Functions".

A format that provided greater information is preferred here as well as one that doesn't force weird splits in short words: "Probl ems and Linea"

Remember that the original idea (in Jacobs, Heidi Hayes: Mapping the Big Picture ) was for the teachers to make the map so they could identify missing pieces and make the entire school curriculum into a coordinated whole.

If the course isn't taught month-by-month, why map it that way? The teachers are the audience. The point is to identify gaps ... months do not add to that information. Further, Common Core and other standards purposefully do not specify when a particular topic be addressed or how ... why examine it that way?

4) What kind of confusion could possibly arise - doesn't the curriculum coordinator know enough about the curriculum that she could interpret pretty much any format?

Unfortunately, no. If she is like ours, she only wants you to enter all of this data into an online database that she has paid a lot of money for (and needs to justify the expense). The online database was never designed to accommodate teachers and this is what you get.

But she gets to push a button and the database will scan through and determine whether you've addressed standard F-TF (Functions, Trigonometric Functions).

She couldn't just look herself because she's never taught math and has no idea what we put in the boxes.

5) Why does everything have to fit into one box even when different?

Here's the funniest thing (and we get to use this screaming gem of a program so the word "funniest" is coming through clenched teeth) ... Everything in the month goes in the same box, so you have extra lines put in so you can keep the resources for topic one aligned with the content, skills, and assessment for topic one.  Add a few words to clarify one thing and you have to go back and adjust all the other columns ... which gets all messed up when the font size changes.

Like when a browser is set differently (full-screen vs. windowed) or when you print.

Did I mention that the web form accepts Word formatting, so a copy and paste job from the equally useless Word document you did three years ago) comes with 80KB of unbreakable hidden formatting? Yeah, it does. We spent so much time trying to make it look right, we finally broke down and re-typed every word. And every link to the "Standard" had to drill down through the entire document ...

Nothing changed.
Nothing improved.
No benefit to the students.
No mysterious "missing content" suddenly found.

Just five in-service days wasted changing from a Word document which was a printout from the last web company mapping system, itself a conversion from the excel spreadsheet which was a conversion from a word document which had been in wordperfect format fifteen years ago.

I still have the binder.