Various Small Notes
Here are some nuggets from my email inbox that I thought might be of interest.
Strategies 360 is hiring an Education Communications Manager. You could be the flak for Education Reform in Seattle - if you have what it takes.
A fellow wrote to the Board and the Superintendent with this question:
Diane Ravitch, education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education, will head “"Race to Where?," a forum on the damaging realities of education reform, Tuesday, Oct. 5, at 7 p.m., at Seattle University’s Pigott Auditorium.
Strategies 360 is hiring an Education Communications Manager. You could be the flak for Education Reform in Seattle - if you have what it takes.
A fellow wrote to the Board and the Superintendent with this question:
I would like to see the district's analysis of why the Schmitz Park Elementary has such a fantastic standard Math pass rate. I'm sure the district has noticed this and determined the reasons why such a success cannot be replicated.To which Dr. Goodloe-Johnson replied:
Thank you for your question [name deleted]. The district has had conversations around success and areas of improvement. We have targeted schools to analyze and learn from, we will share publically when we are finished.I think both the question and the answer were disingenuous. The person writing pretended not to know about Singapore and so did the Superintendent. Hee-larious.
Diane Ravitch, education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education, will head “"Race to Where?," a forum on the damaging realities of education reform, Tuesday, Oct. 5, at 7 p.m., at Seattle University’s Pigott Auditorium.
Comments
AIEC
Thanks for posting a notice about our upcoming forum featuring Diane Ravitch. I just want to clarify that Dr. Ravitch will be conferencing from New York via Skype. On site at Pigott Auditorium will be Wayne Au (of Rethinking Schools), Jesse Hagopian and Dora Taylor. There will be a Q&A for audience questions after Ravich's talk. And it's free.
More details here.
See you there!
-- sue p.
--sue p.
Under state law the Board accepts or rejects a recommendation of materials that has come before them by process.
The Board had NO Right to approve a supplement from outside this process. Singapore as a supplement was not the result of a legal process by the Board.
============
The process that produced Everyday Math was in fact corrupted by Santorno to move it from TERC/Investigations to EDM.
Also, just to be clear, the state does NOT pay for textbooks. That is considered the district's duty. The line item in our budget for books was eliminated at least a decade ago. That books are an important part of the classroom and the district left itself in this position of ignoring it until it gets really bad is on them. Harium said he was very startled to get on the Board and find this out.
Anyway, I noticed each of those little booklets cost $2.50 on the EveryDay Math website. We were expected to keep them.
I don't know what they purchased from EDM. For all I know it was a package of ongoing additional materials. But for $10 wasted on this, I'd rather the district buy some Singapore materials.
Now I'm not a big fan of homework for Kindergarteners, and I can see the EDM homework is mainly meant to be homework for me. The EDM homework irritates me especially, however, because it makes a whole bunch of assumptions about my life that aren't true because I live in the future ;)
They keep asking my kid to cut things out of newspapers and magazines --paper newspaper and magazines. My kid: "A newspaper? Isn't that one of those things from the olden days."
They want me to watch the "evening news weather report" with my kid on, get this, TV. Me: When is that even on? We can probably find something online.
They expect us to buy groceries every week. Groceries filled with boxes and cans our kids can sort by shape. Uh, we don't go on big grocery store trips to buy things in boxes and cans. We go to the farmer's market and buy fresh produce and buy fresh items during the rest of the week in tiny, unsortable quantities.
The expect me to have marshmallows and toothpicks on hand for my kid to build 3-D shapes with. Who has this stuff? I don't own a car, so I can't rush out and get any either.
And they expect me to have a big jar of spare change, cause, like, I use paper money. (Okay, I'm exaggerating here. I do have some change, but give it another year or two).
Anyway, all this makes me notice that the homework is written to be usable only by a middle class family in 1995 (or one that lives like it's 1995).
Our case is comical cause, well, times have moved on, but for other less affluent kids I'm sure it's less comical.
If a family is living hand to mouth, as many do, they won't have a big jar of spare change, toothpicks and marshmallows, newspapers and magazines or even food lying around to sort into categories. Makes me thing the folks who wrote EDM are just a bunch of ignorant jerks.
I am wondering how you know that the Education Communications job is for edu-reform? I didn't glean anything like that from the job listing and from looking at the firm's client list. (And yes, after two years of under-employment and no health benefits, I am desperate for work!)
I think the ad has been revised, because I'm pretty sure it used to actually say "Education Reform".
Trust me, though, Strategies 360 is promoting the Education Reform perspective. The non-corporate perspective doesn't have money to hire PR firms.
I do find it interesting though that there is variability in how EDM is rolled out at different schools. I never got any glossy parent guides last year like Bird did. I never got a password to view activities on the EDM web site either (but I got one this year). Sporadically, we got a paper copy of the family letter for whatever unit they were doing. Why is this? Did Bird's school's PTA pay for those glossy guides but mine didn't find them helpful? Is this how schools are supposed to "individualize" and supplement the material?
And one last grumble. My child's 2nd grade EDM worksheet last nite gave her a data set and had her determining the median and mode (among other things). Why? When will a 7-year old need to find a median in her "everyday" life? And maddeningly, as I sat down to explain how you find a median ("There are 11 data points, so we divide 11 by 2..."), I realized that since she hasn't mastered basic division facts, much less how to divide an odd number by 2, we are again putting the horse before the cart. So instead, we lined the data points up from smallest to largest and did it visually (with me wondering if this is how they presented it at school - was I reinforcing a concept or confusing her with something new?). The whole thing makes me crazy; at a time in her life when she should be learning basic math facts, we were spending our time working on measures of central tendency that I don't think I learned until high school or have ever needed to use outside my professional career.
this is from their " blog"
Strategies 360 is working with the State on its Race to the Top application process. The first phase of this effort is an enormous success. As of today, 87.5% of the state’s 295 school districts have returned signed Partnership Agreements, in which they make commitments to take specific actions to improve their schools. Even better, these districts cover 96.4% of all the students in Washington’s public schools.
This is only the first phase of this application process but the breadth of this commitment to school reform improves our chances of securing these federal education funds.
But, whether Washington gets this money or not, our path of education reform is right for kids and we’ll continue building on the momentum from Washington’s Race to the Top to create better outcomes for our students.
There is no way to correctly implement Singapore Math and at the same time be using Everyday Math.
Also Schmitz Park uses no District Math coaches. At 10 or 11 million bucks per year for centralized literacy and math coaches, it seems a move to Singapore Math could easily pay for the materials out of coaching savings.
It would seem that schools that wish to move to Singapore math could begin with a k-2 adoption and then add a grade per year.
Says who?
TERC had some holes that needed supplementing, but the base content was strong mathematical ideas. EDM's base content is watered down and jumbled up (spiraling curriculum). Singapore math does a great job at building fact fluency, but also have holes that need filling. There is NO curriculum that will ever be perfect; it’s the standards that need to guide instruction NOT the curriculum!
Can you provide some details please? Sounds like you are pretty familiar with the different publishers.
What holes does Singapore need filled?
TERC's base content was "strong"? How so.
TERC occupies the space between my schooling and my kid's schooling, but I have to say everything I've heard (from neighbors and teachers) and read about it (albeit largely by critics) makes it sound genuinely disastrous.
It's my impression that during TERC kids were never taught how to divide by fractions or do long division. I've read ananlysis of the TERC texts that say you can go through the whole curriculum and never run across calculations with certain numbers (the tricky ones you can't easily do in your head). Didn't TERC have a huge bias against precision and teaching direct algorithms that work in all cases
This doesn't seem to me like a curriculum with holes, to me it looks like not teaching mathematics, and at the very least not teaching arithmetic.
But you do probably know more about it than I do. So let's hear it!
That's common to lots of recent math curricula. There are plenty of people who will tell you that doing long division by hand is as outdated as extracting cube roots by hand. (I am not one of them.)
Helen Schinske
you all may have already read it but, if, not, have a look.
http://blog.ednewscolorado.org/2010/09/07/why-i-dont-believe-in-reform/
i got this from Diane Ravitchs website. its not so much the blog entry but the responses that are very good.
jpr/seattle
However, I do confess to loving the addition fact triangles for everyday math. It's a very smart way to think about addition and subtraction. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's a way that beginning students can master.
Note 5th grade teacher Craig Parsley had been a Singapore fan before all this hub-bub started. He vehemently testified against EDM adoption in May of 2007, for he knew what could be done with Singapore Math.
In my house, we typically toss the EDM junk to the side and consult one of the Math for Dummies books, which are pretty good.
Frankly, I don't see how my kids' opinion about a problem they just did is relevant or useful to mastering math. But I guess the zombies on the adoption committee know better. If only they could appreciate the collateral damage of teaching a generation of kids to hate math.
There is no "golden age" of math, IMHO.
Helen Schinske
Yep, that sums up math in my house!
This is my 6th year teaching high school math. I'm 50, I wasn't in a k-12 environment from 1978 to 2003. Math teaching was NOT perfect 30 and 40 years ago.
I've experienced lots of similiar comments in the last 6 years, and those kind of statements come from people who typically:
have NOT been out in the low end dog eat dog job market where basic math deficiencies = permanent lousy pay and really really really limited options in the world,
have NOT been in higher end dog eat dog job markets,
are COMPLETELY unaware of their personal mastery of math basics and how important that mastery has been,
from background$ in the upper quintile$ of income, OR, have been in those upper quintile$ for quite a number of years,
well meaning but will NOT acknowledge the failures of reform dogma,
steadfastly blaming drill and kill teachers of 40 years ago who aren't anywhere I've seen in the last 6 years.
What Lori describes at 10:21 is the day to day reality for too many of our high school kids - confusion and frustration with rambling curriculum which rambles to the kids because the kids were NEVER allowed AND NEVER required to master a basic tool kit of skills.
Bob Murphy
Do the data abstraction...a child leaving Schmitz Park is the top performing math student in the district (on average).
But...SPS could care less...they can't admit failure. EDM is a failure...I will say it again...EDM IS A FAILURE. No hyperbole here...
Signed: Concerned West Seattle Parent
I'd love to know what that is, too.
Signed: Concerned West Seattle Parent
Please send it on to the Board and go to the "Contact Us" page of wheresthemath.com. They may have some ideas about who else should have a glimpse into the reality of EDM.
But hey, there's an open house at AS1 tomorrow (Thursday) night, from 6 to 7:30, and I'd love to see non-AS1 people there, checking out what we're doing. Maybe you'll hate it, maybe you'll like it, but it'd be great to at least get some exposure.
Come on by and see what we're up to in the struggle to maintain alternative education in SPS! I'll be bringing my killer mushroom blue cheese polenta tart to the potluck, in case that sways anyone!
In 2007-2008 when almost every SPS elementary school began EDM. Several Schmitz Park teachers began using Singapore Math and some did 100% Singapore Math.
The waiver came the following year 2008-2009.
Helen Schinske
So here's the news. Per the Slog, the teacher's union supports the levy. http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/09/22/teachers-union-votes-to-support-schools-levy
You are correct that most math instruction has been "historically" poor. That is not to imply that change will necessarily make things better.
In fact the Math Ed gurus at UW have made things even worse. Data HERE.
A while back THIS was posted about autonomy.
Schmitz Park is a prime example of the superiority of Autonomy.
The MGJ and her Board are killing teaching and teachers.
Mathematics teaching can be improved. There are numerous examples of teachers that when given autonomy can do so.
It seems that we are way past due on giving principals greater autonomy and greater responsibility for producing improvement.
Each school needs its own board of directors to support and hold the principal accountable. Principals need the resources and freedom to produce needed change.
Schmitz Park did it through exceptional courage. Notice 19 out of 19 principals supported the Superintendent's recommendation for Key Curriculum Press's "Discovering Math". Their jobs depend on mindless support for their Autocratic Leader, which has "Zero" effect on improving things. In fact with Discovering we've seen negative results.
You are correct that most math instruction has been "historically" poor. That is not to imply that change will necessarily make things better.
I didn't say most math instruction has historically been poor. I don't have enough data to know whether that's true. I said that from my own experience, it was nearly as bad, in a slightly different way, when I was a kid as it is today. Indeed, the "new math" of my childhood privileged conceptual knowledge at the expense of procedural and factual knowledge in much the same way as recent inquiry-based curricula tend to do.
I prefer a more balanced approach, myself, with all three kinds of knowledge brought along at the same time. From what I've seen of Singapore, it qualifies pretty well.
Helen Schinske
What caught my eye was that QA Elementary is now a STEM school. I this link comes through, it is long
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:AYUe3_luyREJ:www.seattleschools.org/area/progplace/2010-11ProgramPlacement6-4-10.pdf+education+directors&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShHc2SI_lCZvZbAo-j9P-t3Pgq2lxi50zfEulnXdFLh0H9ZIyM-BCDkhqxuG2--9fvPMEo3LxhT7S1ecqo6Qm8oE2zJG7iNe6yJmfOZGb50unpuvBTegS6I0DdqjUdvl3Xaesc3&sig=AHIEtbRhDtocdZ9oFMqR0efR2iAnJG04cg
http://tinyurl.com/2fxdsv5
ALL programs moved or opened along with QA elementary being a STEM school.
Special Ed, Spectrum, ALO...all sorts of movement, openings, closings....Thanks for the link!
- additional Generic Self-Contained classroom is needed... at West Seattle ... [and] Rainier Beach High School. Really?
- The designation of Chief Sealth as an international school completes a K-12 strand of international programs in West Seattle. What about a true International Middle and Elementary program, I guess a "strand just requires designation, not any real action.
- to accommodate increased enrollment at West Settle Elementary! Increase, decrease, whatever...
- Queen Anne Elementary will open as a STEM Program. When is this happening?
- [moving] Spectrum from WSE to Arbor Heights is consistent with the NSAP.... well, it is as consistent as anything else about NSAP.
Seriously, did someone fabricate this document just to amuse me tonight?
Now they just need to tag a 6-8 as STEM and they have a K-12 Stem program. (makes ya wonder, whose next...)
And is this what they mean by Innovation Schools. I hope not!
You know what your district needs. What are YOU going to do to really make a difference instead of pontificating from the sidelines.
And PS, yes I am putting my money where my mouth is. I am writing a check to a mom parent in Harium's district who sees through the gobbeldy-gook being spewed by the pr flacks at HQ. She is educated, engaging and is going to kick a little a** KSB-style. You do your part and that just leaves Maier.
You seem to have forgotten to include Carr. She may not be as disgracefully bad as Maier and Sundquist, but she hasn't done anything meaningful besides bleat along with the others for her entire term.
Of these 4, I think Martin-Morris has the best chance of getting set back on the tracks, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope for that.
BUT if she does revamp last year's PATHETIC budget process AND puts a public, qualified professional on the Audit committee then I might give her a pass, just because it is a hell of a lot more than Harium, Steve and Peter have done.
I do think all three of them are beatable. The Position III mom rocks from what I've seen of her. But still I persist. WHO THE HELL IS RUNNING AGAINST PETER AND STEVE. Get off this blog people and step up. Seriously. I learn a lot here but sometimes it feels like just so much armchair QBacking with no one willing to do the seriously heavy lifting.
Which word verifier, thinking this "reform" hokey, would call getting hoaked.
Compare these two schools. Schmitz Park and Lafayette. They are just a few blocks from one another. Both have the same demographics.
Schmitz Park students (Grade 5) passed the MSP at 94.5%. They are the top performers in the district under the new math standards (and 3# in the State).
LaFayette Elementary School (with Spectrum) at Grade 5 only scored 76.6% passing the MSP. They actually didn't do so well for their demographic.
Now ask yourselves...why are the Spectrum students scoring so low in math. It's not the teachers at LaFayette...they are all top quality instructors. Nope...it's the math program. EDM is a waste of money. Your children are being short-changed by the district. When are you people going to begin your revolution?
Schmitz Park began theirs several years ago. Look at what they have done in a few short years.
This thread started as a discussion of MGJ's willful ignorance and obfuscation about Singapore Math. It devolved into a mush. Personally, I am going to hound the district to get Singapore Math at my school. Who will join me.
Signed: Concerned West Seattle Parent
Yes, the document indicates a soft rollout this year, look for full implementation in Sept 2011.
When will they start talking about it publically, your guess is as good as mine.
Remember, this community wanted a Montasorri or Language school and was told no.
So, it's all fine and good to declare some sort of "math victory". But, when you drive out all your challenges rather than address them, it's hard to pin that success on a text book.
-- special education parent