Independent George on the pundits and their ways

re: March of the pundits, part 3

That thread really is astonishing. On the one hand, you have a professional backing EM in vague generalities, while the "civilians" independently demolish her every argument with specifics about the most minute detail. It's pretty much the model of an engaged, informed citizenry participating in the public sphere - and the reaction was pretty much the model of an entrenched, indifferent bureaucracy.

October 3, 2008 10:35 AM

[snip]

The worst part is Ms. Cullen's constant refrain for the parents to 'give EM a chance', when it was painfully obvious that they were intimately familiar with EM, and and were clearly documenting all of its deficiencies based on first-hand experience. On the flip side, it was equally apparent that she had only passing familiarity with Singapore Math, and was completely unable to address the numerous substantive issues being brought up. And somehow, she manages to dismiss the entire debate as just another battle in the Math Wars without ever directly addressing the substantive issues mentioned. It's mind-boggling.

October 3, 2008 1:08 PM

You can say that again.


march of the pundits, part 1
speaking of pundits
march of the pundits, part 2
how to change the system
parents need a union
Independent George on the pundits and their ways
one is a nutjob, twenty five are powerful
first person

Steve on high school rankings & non-linear optimization

Steve has left several comments on the U.S. News & Newsweek rankings of high schools. In this one he responds to the question I asked about whether a parent could base a decisions about where to live in the rankings:

"In other words, say you're a parent looking to move to a district with good schools. Could you base a decision in these rankings?"

"Base a decision"? No. Is it of no value? No, but it's all relative. Schools think it's important because it's good PR. Our high school has a reference to it on its home page, and it's only a silver medal!

Over the long run, schools can take advantage of the formula. Anytime you have an extremely important formula that condenses a lot of information down into a single number, it's open to gamesmanship. But, the more that schools play the game, the less useful is the formula. I've seen cases where it's a constant arms race between those who want a formula to reflect reality and those who want to beat the formula.

If a school pushes all students to one AP class or another whether or not they are properly prepared, then that might improve the score, but the education might not be better. Or, it could be a false or local optimum and they completely miss a much larger global optimum that uses a different approach.

Important formulas generally force a trend towards one particular solution. Uncertainties in the formula can hide other solutions that might offer much better results. Instead of reflecting reality, they drive reality.

Think of a formula that tries to represent a topographic map. You want to find the highest point on the map but all you can do is plug in your latitude and longitude into a black box that will give you a height. You keep doing this and try to search for the highest point. If your second point gives a lower height, you turn around and go in the other direction and check the height.

This is called non-linear optimization and I have many books that discuss solutions to this problem. If you know derivative information, you can search faster. If not, you can find slopes numerically.

The problem is that you might find a mountain peak, but it's the shortest peak of the mountain range. Another problem is that the black box might not represent reality very well. There might not be a mountain peak there at all.

Another, more subtle issue is that (due to uncertainty) the very highest peak location is no better than a location that is 10 percent lower. If you think of a long mountain range, it might be much easier to climb to the slightly lower end of the mountain range than it is to climb the other end where the absolute highest point is located. In other words, an easier optimum to a problem (within 10 percent) might be located far, far away.

Rather than push all high school kids onto at least one AP track in high school, the easier approach might be to fix the problems in K-6 before they get large. They won't find this solution if they are focused on a formula that uses only high school data.

differentiated instruction in action

C's math class has graduated from Glencoe Algebra to Glencoe Geometry, thank God.

I say "Thank God" because last fall my neighbor managed to track down a Teacher Wraparound Edition of Glencoe Geometry, which she's loaned to me.

I do not have a Teacher Wrapround Edition for Glencoe Algebra. I've been working without a net. In order to check C's homework — which I have to do because here in Irvington Union Free School District (per pupil funding: $22,000) teachers stop collecting and correcting homework around grade 3 — I have to work every homework set myself, check my answers against C's, then figure out which one of us is wrong when the answers don't agree, and, finally, after all that is out of the way & my book deadline has receded further into the distance, have C. re-do the problem(s) in question if he's the one who got them wrong.

I have to do all this because the school refuses to supply answers to kids or their parents.

All the answers are belong to us.

For geometry, I have the answers. (The answers, they are belong to me.)

Boy, does that save time.

I work the problems quickly and efficiently, then I check my answers in the book.

If an answer is wrong, I re-do quickly and efficiently. I can afford to be quick and efficient, because I have the answers.

"speed and accuracy": the KUMON mantra. Have I mentioned the fact that KUMON provides the parent with the answer key? The parent quickly checks her children's work, then has them re-do problems they missed.

Without the answer key, I work problems painstakingly, doubting myself at every turn, sometimes re-working because I think maybe the answer could be wrong. From time to time an answer will come out the same wrong-seeming way 3, 4 times in a row, so that's more time, and in the end I still suffer doubt.

Having to work every problem without an answer key is a huge waste of time. A FWOT, actually. As Carolyn used to say.

So glad the paid professionals who teach my kid don't have to do it.


differentiated instruction 'round Glencoe way

Back on topic. The topic being: differentiated instruction.

I think a lot of us have wondered what differentiated instruction actually is when it's taking place inside the black box.

Sure, sure, I know the concept: if you have 20 students in a class, they are taught in 20 different ways. That is the concept here in Irvington, anyway, or so I gather from the Principal's Message in the Main Street School newsletter.

But what does that look like?

What might those 20 different instructional ways be on any given day?

Tonight, looking up the answers in my neighbor's Glencoe Geometry Teacher Wrapround Edition, I noticed that the book includes, in each Lesson, a "Daily Intervention" labeled "Differentiated Instruction."

Here is the Differentiated Instruction for Lesson 1.4 Angles Measures:

Auditory/Musical A metronome is a tool used to keep a constant tempo in music. It is composed of a pendulum that swings back and forth at varying speeds. The fulcrum of the pendulum acts as a vertex of the angle through which the pendulum swings. Demonstrate this by holding two pens at an angle in one hand and tapping another pen between the first two, creating a series of "ticks."

source: Glencoe Geometry Teacher Wraparound Edition
North Carolina Edition, p. 30
ISBN 0078601789

Daily Intervention Number 2: Inferential Thinking Activity

I am going to infer from the above that:

• it is normal for a high school geometry teacher not to know what a metronome is, what it looks like, or how it works
• a differentiated instruction activity is likely to command the attention of all 20 or 30 students in the room, seeing as how it involves the teacher performing a noisy classroom demonstration
• a differentiated instruction activity accompanying a lesson on angle measures doesn't have to have anything to do with angle measures, necessarily
  

I don't think this differentiated instruction thing is going to work out.


update from redkudu:

This is not a differentiated strategy. It is an engagement strategy. This is what I talk about when I say there is such little knowledge about the difference between the two.

That clears things up.

redkudu had mentioned this earlier and I didn't know what she meant.

She's absolutely right.

These are engagement strategies, pure and simple -- although they are labeled with the type of learner the "strategy" is supposed to address (auditory/musical; ELL; etc.)

What a mess.


update 2-13-2008: Steve H analyzes the US News & Newsweek rankings of high schools in the Comments thread.


woo hoo, Friday edition
differentiated instruction in action
can you FOIL the answers?
the Gambill method

Speaking of pundits

Speaking of pundits, I find it revealing that none of them appears to have picked up on the fact that, in math, KIPP is blowing "high-performing" suburban schools out of the water.

The only people I've seen talking about this issue are Bill Sanders, who invented value-added measurement, and Ted Hershberg, also an academic.

Do we have any pundits using the phrase slide and glide?

I'm thinking we don't.


Bill Sanders, interview
Bill Sanders, statement before the Committee on Education and the Workforce
Hershberg articles & presentations
Hershberg clips
march of the pundits, part 1
speaking of pundits
march of the pundits, part 2
how to change the system
parents need a union
Independent George on the pundits and their ways
one is a nutjob, twenty five are powerful
first person

March of the pundits

OK, I have just spent 5 minutes of my life listening to Fordham's weekly podcast.

Subject:
suburban schools

Question:
Suburban schools are doing "fine" (or some such) teaching their white kids.
They are failing to teach their black kids.
Should we or should we not, as a matter of law, insist they teach their black kids, too?

Number one, how is this even a question?

Yes, I understand politics are involved: white parents, the middle class voter, blah blah blah.

What I don't understand: How is this even a question?

Suburban schools should teach all children attending suburban schools.


the white kids aren't doing "fine"

Number two, suburban schools are not doing fine teaching their white kids.

Suburban tutors and parents are doing fine teaching their white kids.

Scratch that.

Surburban tutors and parents are not doing fine, either. Many of us are merely hanging on, averting complete disaster.

This is why we have a Math War. We have a Math War because parents are aware they can't make up for the lousy math education their child is receiving at school.

If it were easy just to teach great math at home, we'd do it and forget about the math war. Or, rather, some of us would forget about the math war. I'd probably join the Math War for the same reason people climb Mt. Everest, because it's there. But that's me.


why don't we have a Spelling War?

If pundits wanted to know why "high-performing" schools are failing to teach disadvantaged students, which they apparently do not, they might ask themselves why we have a Math War in the first place.

Why don't we have, say, a Spelling War?

My own school has failed to teach C. how to spell. When I asked his 3rd grade teacher— a terrific teacher in every other respect, a woman who taught him 3rd grade fractions and made it stick—about his spelling, she laughed and said, "He's not very good, is he?"

Then she said she couldn't spell, either.

When we asked his 4th grade teacher, also an excellent teacher, she shared with us the method she'd ended up using to teach her own kids to spell. (As I recall, she had them write each spelling word 20 times.)

Then his 7th grade teacher told us: "I always tell the kids, if you can't write well nobody's going to care if you can spell,'" or something along those lines. (She, too, was a terrific teacher, an opinion I can probably document. C.'s grammar and usage in written work are very good for his age, and he didn't learn either at home.)

My email to the assistant superintendent in charge of instruction on the subject of a spelling curriculum for middle schoolers went unaddressed.

So: not only did my district not teach C. how to spell, my district routinely conveyed to us the attitude that if we wanted our child to spell, it was up to us.

Question: Do you see me waging a Spelling War here in my district?

Writing a blog about spelling?

Answer: No. You do not.

The reason I am not engaged in a Spelling War is that, as it happens, it has turned out to be possible to teach spelling here at home. I spent a couple of weeks of my life Googling the known universe, trying to figure out what spelling actually was and why people can't do it; I bought a couple of books on the subject, which I have yet to read beyond the first chapter; then I cruised the available textbooks and lit upon Megawords.

C. started the Megawords series in the beginning of 5th grade.^*

He is now in 8th grade and is completing the 4th book in the series.

Last week I began testing him on all of the word lists contained in the first 3 books. Result: he's not bad.

"Not bad," in this context, is meaningful. Today his spelling errors are reasonable, as opposed to psychotic, which is what they were when he was 10.

For instance, when I asked him to spell badminton, he said b-a-d-m-i-t-t-e-n.

That is a correct guess.

I have now pulled out all of the words he missed from the first and second books (have yet to review Book 3), and will have him practice them sporadically as he works his way through Book 5. I'll do the same for Book 4 when we finish it this week.

It's clear now—even Ed says so—that by the time he graduates high school he will be proficient in spelling, or close enough.

This is why I am not engaged in a Spelling War. I think it's ridiculous my "high-performing," lavishly funded school district didn't teach my kid to spell.

I also know for a fact that some of the brainiest kids in the school can't spell worth a damn.

But I'm not having a Spelling War.

I'm having a Math War.

I'm having a Math War, not a Spelling War, because I can make up for lousy spelling instruction, but I can't make up for lousy math instruction.

Pundits appear to be singularly uninterested in the existence of a raging Math War across the land. If they spent 5 seconds paying attention to it, they'd realize their core premise where suburban schools are concerned is wrong.

Talk about the answer being right under your nose.


what does an achievement gap in a high-performing district tell you?

When you look at a suburban school and you see the white kids "doing fine," and the black kids not doing fine, what does that tell you about the school's curriculum, pedagogy, and accountability?

It tells you the school doesn't trouble itself with accountability.

The school does what it does; if the kids learn, great; if they don't, they're disadvantaged and what can you expect?

Humbug.


the slow girl track

This reminds me of a story I've probably told before. It appears in Ed's new book (not sure if it's out yet—I'll check).

The book is a collection of essays by French historians talking about why they became French historians.

In one of the stories, a historian who is.....in his 40s maybe?....writes that as a kid, he was a math hotshot here in the U.S. Then he went to France on a student-exchange program, and the French school put him in "the slow girl track."

Meaning: the track was the slowest the school had to offer and it was filled with girls. The slow boy track was faster than the slow girl track.

He was in the slow girl track.

I say: let's pick a high-performing suburban school district, do a student-body swap with a high performing school in Singapore, and see what happens.

Our kids are gonna get stashed in the slow girl track.

That's assuming Singapore even has a slow girl track.

Which it probably doesn't.


the physicist

Speaking of which, I sat by a former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on my flight back from Illinois.

His daughter is now in graduate school, and he's still exercised about the low quality of U.S. public education.

He told me, flat out, that no parent can remediate a bad math education.^** He'd said this repeatedly to his own school board, to no avail.

He had actually said, to his school board, "You have them sequestered here 6 hours a day and you're not teaching them anything."

This is a physicist and former head of the JPL.

Saying no parent can remediate a bad math program.

Reasonable conclusion: if the head of JPL can't remediate his daughter's lousy math education, I can't, either.

I wish our pundits would get a clue.

^* The books are created to begin in 4th grade, continuing through 11th.
^** I think he extended this to reading and writing, but I don't remember what he said specifically.


march of the pundits, part 1
speaking of pundits
march of the pundits, part 2
how to change the system
parents need a union
Independent George on the pundits and their ways
one is a nutjob, twenty five are powerful
first person
#marchofthepundits