A warning to the world: If you try to make the case for the Common Core Standards, and your evidence is flawed or non-existent, you will be called out by Mercedes Schneider.Here’s the thing: If you plan to go into the ring with Mercedes Schneider, you better be fully prepared. In this case, someone named Ann Whalen, who is a former assistant to Arne Duncan decided she would attack Carol Burris for having criticized the CCSS. Burris, an experienced high school principal and a skilled writer, has written often about the defects of the CCSS and she organized nearly 40% of the principals in New York state to oppose the state’s test-based ratings of teachers and principals.
When Whalen went after Burris, Mercedes Schneider, who teaches English in Louisiana, took apart Whalen’s critique of Burris. Whalen, it should be noted, responded to Burris on the website of Education Post, a blog funded with $12 million from the far-right Walton Family Foundation, the anti-public school Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Bloomberg Foundation. Schneider, whose blog is funded by Schneider, proceeded to take Whalen apart, argument by argument, claim by claim, in a deft fashion that she may soon have to copyright, it is so fully Mercedes.
Whalen’s biggest mistake, the same one made by Carmel Martin in the “great debate” about CCSS, was to insist that states were free to change CCSS and that many have done so. Not true. The CCSS are copyrighted by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. States agree to change nothing but may add up to 15% of their own content. For defenders not to know that is indefensible.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sent last night to Mercedes Schneider’s blog and also posted to her At The Chalkface blog. I believe she deleted the comment the first time I posted it, so I sent it again and as of my last check it’s still “waiting moderation,” though many other comments have appeared. My guess is that she hasn’t set moderation as a default for the second blog. It’s rather sad that she won’t approve my comment, given the choice, as I concede a good deal of ground to her in order to try to get her to engage in actual conversation or debate. Unfortunately, Ms. Schneider has a huge blind spot when it comes to specifics of mathematics education and as a result has systematically refused to discuss the subject with me in any way for more than a year in any venue. I find that disturbing, and I believe it undermines her credibility in significant ways in the eyes of people who otherwise are inclined to agree with much of her analysis of Common Core-related issues. I know it’s had that effect on me, and has increasingly served to make me a Mercedes Schneider skeptic; I’ve long been a Common Core skeptic, well before I’d ever heard of Ms. Schneider.
“There is a flip side to the issues you raise regarding, say, the absence of research to support the Common Core as rigorous, effective, etc. First, where is the well-established body of research that has widespread acceptance for ANY curricular materials (which we need to distinguish from “curriculum,” since that usually means a game plan, not a specific set of books, ancillaries, or other resources for teaching subjects (videos, software, slides, films, lab equipment, etc.) State standards, the Common Core Standards, national standards in many other countries, do not usually prescribe specific materials. Granted, we’re seeing some change in that policy in some states in the US in the wake of the Common Core over the last couple of years, most notably (or notoriously) your own Louisiana and my native state, New York. Same materials, at least when it comes to mathematics. And while you will likely never agree to discuss publicly with me any particulars about what might be good, bad, or indifferent in the Engage-NY materials because you are prone to discussing math education issues with me at all (because I have repeatedly challenged you to do better than just repeat how much you despise programs like Everyday Math and you have repeatedly made clear that you will not get into specifics with me at all), I’ll grant you that on balance, Engage-NY has loads of problems, regardless of whether that’s a function of Common Core Math STANDARDS (content or practice) or just some really crappy work by the creators of this particular program, coupled with the very doubtful proposition of modules that every teacher in those two states are supposed to use as scripts – the dreaded wet-dream of educational deformers and reactionaries everywhere (and not just under Common Core) – “teacher-proof” materials. I’ll never support scripts for teaching. I don’t believe there is any such animal as a teacher-proof program, nor should that be a goal of people who create programs for K-12. And further, I’ll agree in advance that the two big testing consortiums seem to be doing a first-rate job of blowing their opportunities to actually make a positive improvement in standardized assessment, a predictable inevitability given the surrounding high-stakes, punitive purposes to which these assessments have been tied since before the first question was drafted by either group. In other words, when you have bad aims for assessment controlling what you create, it doesn’t matter how well-intentioned you personally might being when trying to create a good, meaningful test: it has already been corrupted and co-opted by those for whom you work and those who control the ultimate uses to which your work will be put.
But all of the above said, you really need to be a bit more honest about two things, at the minimum. First, the disparity between various state standards/curricula and the Common Core in mathematics isn’t huge for the most part. Yes, James Milgram and many of his old-guard pals in Mathematically Correct and NYC-HOLD make a lot of claims about the marvels of the California Math framework that they were able to shove down the throats of that state’s teachers by pulling an amazing end-run around the established method for adopting standards there (this around 1997 or so), getting rid of the so-called “fuzzy” framework from the late ’80s/early ’90s that predated and reflected the 1989-2000 NCTM Standards volumes to which educational conservatives reacted with fear and loathing. And from what I’ve read of your thinking on math teaching, you’d likely agree with the MC/HOLD cabal, a fact that has made it very difficult for me to take you seriously about math education, even if I appreciate much of the analysis you’ve done about the Common Core Initiative (the “big picture” of the juggernaut that Duncan, Pearson, Gates, and others have unleashed upon us). Nonetheless, NCTM & NCSM, which remain the two big professional organizations for mathematics teaching in K-12 in this country have been working towards a different vision of math teaching for decades, long before there was a Common Core or even talk of one, and I don’t think that the many mathematics educators and researchers who help form that vision and develop various K-5, 6-8, and 9-12 programs are crazed lunatics in the pay of Pearson, Gates, etc, out to destroy or “dumb down” America’s children in mathematics. Quite the opposite, in fact (see my blog post today for more on that issue: ). You may (and almost certainly do) disagree, but your is not the only possible or reasonable viewpoint, and no matter how much you despise the Common Core, the Math Wars issues predate it significantly, have only coincidental connections to it, and will not vanish if and when the main thrust of the CCSS is blunted or utterly defeated. In other words, you can’t get rid of progressive math education by ridding the nation of the Common Core, much as you might like to. And many of us who oppose the Common Core for deep-seated political reasons happen to think that it would be a huge error to toss the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
Second, you need to admit that traditional curricular programs aren’t any better established scientifically than the stuff being currently labeled as “Common Core aligned.” And neither were their predecessors. And most of the attacks you level in this particular blog piece could (and should) be aimed at 50 to 125 years’ worth of textbooks, teaching methods, assessments, as well as the overall philosophical and pedagogical lenses that have created “the” US public school system as we’ve known it. There’s a lot of religion and very little solid research informing choices in our educational history, and there’s a lot of good reason to believe that while there is good done by good people in our schools, there is a fundamental rottenness at the heart of the system that has been there for a very long time, to the eternal misery of generations of American children, who for the most part emerge from our schools with a twisted view of far too many things, not the least of which is the very idea of learning. I’ll leave the details of that last sentence for another time, but merely mention in passing the work of Alfie Kohn as one among many authors who have seen much that is similar to what I see and have been trying to change matters for the benefit of kids and the nation as a whole for a long time. I wonder what, if anything, you’ll have to say about schools and what’s taught in them, should the entire Common Core Standards and everything associated with it miraculously vanish tomorrow and things return to some previous state, perhaps back to a hypothetical Golden Age of US public education.
The problem with Common Core standards are that it is a standard. To treat all students the same is a fundamental defect of the approach. Those creating the standard are looking for a simple minded, turn the knobs solution to education. Add to the movement the underlying misanthropic view that professionals cannot be trusted and must be punitively guided in all aspects of the job, and you have the makings for a disaster.
Your comparison to a golden age is interesting. Teachers are very concerned about learning as opposed to say, shareholder value and profits. But for at least the past 30 years, teachers have been undermined and hampered in the classroom by outside interests more concerned about a bottom line or the next election than the well being of students.
To the best of my knowledge of the history of US mathematics education, the Golden Age is a myth. And I think big publishers have had a huge and unfortunate influence on the field (and other subjects) for far longer than the last 30 years or so. 1981 brought us the beginning of what we’ve got now in public education, thanks to Ronald Wilson Reagan and his education honchos, but according to older math educators I’ve spoken with, notably Bill Willoughby, publishers have been screwing the pooch for far longer than that. They’re just now consolidated into a few super powerful blocs, and with levels of influence that they probably didn’t believe possible. Reagan made it easy for them to accrue power and influence, of course, but let’s not forget that the negative impression most Americans have of the “New Math” from the ’60s is due to the fact that only one publisher got a math textbook series out there to any degree, and that was the highly formalistic Dolciani series. There were better ideas for teaching math, particularly in primary grades, out there that never got much distribution.
Oops, make that Stephen, not Bill, Willoughby. above. Confusing math educators with former NBA players is a little unusual for me. 😦
In the sense that common core is an attempt to measure and quantify all learning, open ended math investigations seem to lend themselves less to this than the traditional mastery of procedure. This seems like a little bit of a common core conundrum. How do you put a number on how well some one is pondering?
I’ve said this elsewhere and it bears repeating: as long as the overall viewpoint on the aims of education in this country are controlled by a fundamentally conservative narrative, kids are doomed to mostly hate school, particularly a subject as SEEMINGLY divorced from day-to-day life as mathematics, and that as soon as the math gets to the level of algebra, if not before. That narrative is about: 1) sorting/grading people for the purposes of corporate capitalism and the class interests of those at the top – guaranteeing that they and theirs get pathways to all the best opportunities and the lion’s share thereof, and limiting the opportunities of ‘the other,’ which in that narrative is generally anyone not in as narrow a band of people “like them” as possible (see, in this regard, Richard Rorty’s CONTINGENCY, IRONY, AND CERTAINTY for a counter-narrative, one that is aimed at widening whom we are willing to see as “like us,” and hence potentially with whom we are willing to be in solidarity). That aspect of the narrative is anti-democratic, elitist, and generally terribly anti-child; 2) convincing everyone that we live in a world of narrowing resources for which we as a nation and they as a tiny ruling class must compete against others, a competition in which the average and even well-above-average American is in constant danger of losing – to foreign nations, to lazy and unworthy lower-class people, to immigrants, to people of color, to women (assuming we’re male), ad nauseam.
If you can keep everyone having to hustle for the few prime positions at every stage of life, and for the most part having to resign him/herself to settling for whatever crumbs fall off the tables of the winners, you are going to be able to keep most people from questioning why it’s “natural” for those who are born into wealth and privilege to have all the power and all the good things. Instead, you’ll have to focus on those at or below your level against whom you’ve been set in perpetual conflict.
And in this narrative, school does a major job of making all these things normal, while ensuring that not all that many people can actually make use of education to empower themselves and those like them. It is essential in this narrative that mathematics, one of the gatekeepers for so many high-status, high-paying jobs, is never accessible to any significant degree to the vast majority.
So regardless of what some people of good will may believe about where the Common Core is supposed to take us, it can’t and it won’t, namely because the entire enterprise is corrupt and flawed. There is simply no way, for example, to do a top-down reform of mathematics education with such a narrative operating at the center of our system of public education and economics. Thus, we’ve seen what in principle was a grand idea for improving the quality of math testing – to wit, performance tasks with an emphasis on formative rather than summative assessment, go down the toilet before it even started, because the frame-tale of high stakes testing and the abuses to which the powerful elements in the Common Core Initiative wanted regardless of the potentially good ideas some folks in these testing consortia and in organizations like NCTM & NCSM thought were the main goal, ensured that the main thrust would be punitive, particularly of teachers, giving the privatizers leverage to destroy, not improve, free public education, particularly any progressive elements therein, and set up vouchers and for-profit charters as the dominant options in the near future.
Having looked at some sample math items from both testing groups, I would say that they show a predictable mixture of interesting, even useful ideas that teachers, students, parents, and other educational stakeholders could, in both the short- and long-run benefit from greatly, and some pretty dumb things that miss the spirit of meaningful formative assessment.
And it’s not likely to get better anytime soon, because doing really high-quality formative assessment that will consistently make testing a meaningful and productive part of the teaching-learning-teaching cycle is expensive, whether the subject be mathematics, reading, writing, science, social studies, or anything else. And if the point is just to get numbers with which you can beat people up (kids, teachers, administrators, entire communities), then you really will never commit to those more powerful sorts of testing instruments and their evaluation/scoring, because the real potential for such formative tools lies in the individualized, constructive comments, utterly sans letter or numerical grades, that are so time-consuming and expensive to produce (see the work of Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam).
So basically, yes, you’re right, TC. The conundrum, however, isn’t impossible to unravel. It’s just that doing so doesn’t serve the interests of the few.
@ Michael:
Your argument describes well precisely why the ACT and College Board were major players in the development of the Common Core, and why they – and the likes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable – are such staunch proponents of it.
And it’s because of that role and the role of the rest of the big money corporate and Wall St. players in this initiative that I oppose it, even if I can do what some can or will not: look at what’s in the actual standards and try to determine what’s worthwhile. There were too many good people who labored to come up with good content and/or practice standards (in mathematics) to just deep six anything and everything that appears within the documents. Doesn’t mean we have to swallow the testing or other unreasonable tenets, nor fall into the trap of thinking we can pick and choose what to adopt while under the legal constraints of the CCSS Initiative. But neither need we spit on good ideas just because they happened to get included here. And it’s that scorched earth approach that some particularly vocal critics have been taking that continues to concern me deeply.
In our school district in 1935, a new “progressive” math program was implemented. It was tested, quite successful and served our children well. Common Core math involves group work. This has failed. It encourages laziness and cheating with low level learners and it’s unfair to the high learners who have to help the low levels. We are not paying students to help other students and not move on at their own pace. Here is an article from our school newspaper in 1935:
“Olmsted Adopts Progressive Methods – Individualizes Arithmetic.”
In Olmsted Falls Elementary school we have been trying the individualized plan devised by Supt. Washburne of the Winnetka, Illinois schools and used to achieve excellent results in that city…..Educators generally have come to realize forcefully that children vary greatly as individuals and that any one school grade contains children of an astonishingly wide variety of capacity and achievement. Every child should master the essentials. The amount of practice and time that is sufficient for one child may be insufficient for another and it is absurd to expect to achieve uniform results from uniform assignments, made to a class of widely differing individuals. Throughout the educational world there has therefore awakened a desire to find some way of adapting schools to the different individuals who attend them. This desire has resulted in a variety of experiments. One experiment substitutes individual subject promotions for class promotions. Each child, within certain limits, moves forward at his own rate in the mastery of the common essentials of each subject.
Why not identify the district, source the materials and the testing? I’m sure we could all learn from the experience?
I just read a story about how Billy Wimsatt, founder of progressive league of young voters….attempting to encourage Elizabeth Warren to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2016……what I want if for both women to be challenged regarding common core and whether Arne Duncan needs to be replaced…..is there anything on record for either woman?
I’d be pretty shocked if HRC came out against either the Common Core or Arne Duncan, having served in the first Obama Administration and having been married to WJC, who wanted national tests and I imagine would be just fine with the idea of national standards and curricula.
I don’t know of any statements from Warren on CCSSI or the execrable Mr. Duncan. But I’d be intrigued to know what she thinks of either. Keep in mind, however, that making a pronouncement on the former that is at all useful would mean being nuanced, the sort of thing I associate with Elizabeth Warren, but not HRC. There’s not much nuance required to discuss Arne Duncan, however.
I did identify the school district – Olmsted Falls – they used a tested program from ” Supt. Washburne of the Winnetka, Illinois schools and used to achieve excellent results in that city”. This was in 1935, however, and I’m sure there have been several math programs since then that have been scrapped. Perhaps you can find out why the individual approach was abandoned long ago if there was such great results? Why are we using a group approach now that is failing. Find out why Sinclair Community College piloted a group approach to math about 5 years ago and why they scrapped the program because it failed the students.
I couldn’t find a link in what you posted, Jenny. Did I miss something? Olmstead was not enough for me to know where you were talking about. If you were quoting something, it also wasn’t evident.
That said, you have a point of view on the use of groups. I don’t agree with that position, since you are making a blanket statement: group work fails. Yet there has been a good deal of research for at least as long as I’ve been in this field (the late 1980s) to suggest otherwise. As a counter-example, I offer the “reform” calculus at the University of Michigan, where group work has been part of the approach used since about 1992. And the model, which includes the use of graphing calculators and the “Harvard” calculus series, which was authored by Deborah Hughes-Hallett, the late Andrew Gleason (whose text Fundamentals of Abstract Analysis is one I recommend highly to those interested in studying higher mathematics), Bill McCallum (a name that will ring more than a few bells to some readers), Tom Tucker, and a host of others). I’ve not been checking lately, but last I did, it was still the approach used in the first couple of semesters of calculus for the majority of students at U of M. This approach is also used at Harvard and a number of other fine universities and colleges. For more information, you might start here: http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/pedagogy/harvardcalculus/
I think you’re making extreme claims, e.g., that group work fails students. I’ve seen ample evidence in a wide variety of mathematics classrooms to suggest otherwise, but I’m not going to expect you to accept that idea. I will only say that if there is a program from 1935 that was wildly successful, it seems surprising that it didn’t engender a lot of buzz outside of the local community. Or if it did, I haven’t encountered anything about it prior to your mentioning it.
But since it has not been extant for a long time, apparently, I could use the tactic that some of the people at Mathematically Correct and NYC-HOLD have employed repeatedly when the subject of the New Hampshire-based Benezet Experiment is raised (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sanjoy/benezet/), namely to claim that since it was eventually replaced, it was a failure. But I don’t buy that analysis of Benezet, so I won’t assume that’s the case with Olmstead. However, you’re the expert here on Olmstead, so I would expect you to be providing links and citations, rather than asking ME to find out. I try to provide sources for the programs about which I’m knowledgeable and expect the same courtesy from others. Thanks in advance.
Yes I think you did miss something – You aren’t taking an objective approach to anything. You think you know it all already. I’ve cited how Math used to be taught in our school district – Olmsted Falls – in 1935. They piloted this way of having children master the basics and move on, depending on their ability – the individual approach. Apparently it worked because our school district produced Alumni who were successful in college, careers, and life. Funny you should mention Calculus. My son is taking pre-calculus now and received a C on a common core group test. He is a junior and colleges will be looking at his transcripts. A group grade isn’t fair. Grades should be based on individual achievement and merit. Groups hold students back. My 5th grade son was placed in a Math group last week. He said 2 boys copied off of he and another student. Groups encourage laziness and cheating. In fact, don’t take my word for it. Ask Sinclair Community College in Dayton , Ohio. They piloted group math work in their math classes about 5 years ago. Guess what? They came to the same conclusion – the students who weren’t hard workers didn’t learn or achieve anything – the achievers in the groups did all the work. They SCRAPPED the group model. And, common core will also be scrapped with this unfair group work in math. Unfortunately my children are the guinea pigs during school. Luckily, I supplement and teach them the right way to perform Math functions/equations at home so they will be prepared for college.
Your idea of “cite” is to mention. Mine is to have a reference, documentation, links to sources, not your semi-anecdotal approach. I’m still asking you for some source other than your word that an outsider like me could check. And I am yet to see one. That’s what I asked if I’d missed. And your claims that I think I know it all already don’t substitute for an actual citation. Just one. I searched, which shouldn’t have been my job, and didn’t find anything, so as the saying goes, the burden of proof is on you. Did you check any of the links I supplied? You don’t even bother to mention anything about them. I wonder why you so thoroughly ignore any discussion at all about the Harvard (you’ve heard of Harvard, as opposed to a community college in Dayton, OH, as having a pretty fair academic reputation, I’m sure) model, that does INCLUDE group work. But your issue isn’t group work. It’s group GRADES. And so now we’re having a non-conversation about a complete non-issue as far as Common Core and NCTM and 25 years of progressive mathematics education are concerned.
Can you point to where in the Common Core or the various NCTM volumes from 1989 through 2000 that presented standards for mathematics content and pedagogy there was a mandate offered for either group work as the sole or dominant approach, OR, far more to the point, GROUP GRADING? There is no group grading in the University of Michigan calculus program. Now, I took a course in 1993 in geometry for secondary teachers during which we did a group presentation and I think there was a group grade, but then, we kicked each other’s butts to make sure that everyone pulled his/her weight. And everyone did. But that was one grade out of an entire semester’s work, with the bulk of the grade being completely individually assigned based on exams, quizzes, homework. So the walls of civilization didn’t fall.
But let’s say that group work was the consistent abject horror show you seem convinced it is: where is that prescribed in the CCSS, please? I’ve read through them pretty thoroughly, more than once, over the past couple of years, and I can’t recall seeing a word about how teachers have to assign work, let alone grades. But clearly you know something I don’t. I’m open to being enlightened, but I need proof, not just your repeated but unsupported insinuations that Common Core (or any of the various publisher’s alleged implementations thereof) require or recommend group grades.
If your next response here is as devoid of real evidence as have been the previous ones, I’ll consider the matter settled and will not reply, regardless of the bait offered. This isn’t a theoretical discussion, but a very specific set of facts that either exists or doesn’t. In my experience, it doesn’t, regardless of what allegedly went on in a COMMUNITY COLLEGE IN DAYTON, which has ZERO (0) connection to K-12 math in the last 25 years or in what’s in the Common Core Math Content or Practice Standards.
You write too much. I don’t have time to read any of what you wrote. I am providing you real world proof of what works and what doesn’t. I have two examples of math group work failing. If you choose to ignore, that’s fine – you will see soon enough that this common core experiment of group math work will fail again as it has before.
ROTFLMAO.
Finally a short answer from this person!
“From ‘this person.'”
Stay classy, Jenny. Sorry I can’t reduce discussions about important issues to one or two vapid sentences. Seems like one distinguishing feature between conservatives and progressives is that the former believe that complex issues can be settled by removing all nuance and subtlety, and that solutions to problems are “easy,” since things are either 100% wrong (as in your view on group work, which now has the added weight of your father’s opinion) or 100% right (some still undocumented curriculum from 1935).
I Googled “North Olmsted Ohio 1935 mathematics curriculum” and got no relevant hits, not even close. I wish I could say I’m surprised. I hoped there’d actually be something to look at, but no dice. Same for evidence of a change in pedagogy at Sinclair Community College’s mathematics department. But at least I can give a phone call or two down there. Harder to reach 1935 by cell phone. 😦
Why must you resort to pettiness? And why would you search North Olmsted when I’ve been clear that Olmsted Falls is the school district? This leads me to believe your reading comprehension isn’t very good. I’ve provided you an article from the school newspaper in 1935 describing the new math program that was implemented back then. The point is that it had been tested and was successful in another area before it was implemented in our school district. Since 1935 (and before), we have graduated many successful Alumni – business, military, community leaders, doctors, lawyers, college jeopardy, academy award winner, jewelry maker, you name it! Our Alumni are successful in college, careers, and life…. All without common core. Yes, please call Sinclair and hear for yourself how group math work FAILED students so that they had to scrap the program.
I did search for Olmsted Falls. I mis-remembered which useless search I’d done when I sent my last message. It didn’t matter which I searched, since there’s nothing there to find, apparently.
As for petty, you’re joking, right? I’m pretty sure you’re the one who referred to me (as if you were addressing your fans) as “this person.” Did I get that wrong, too?
I’m done with you here, Jenny. This is Diane’s blog and I’m sure she would prefer that any conversation here be grounded in more than snark. I asked for sources, you don’t have any to offer, you clearly aren’t about to produce any, and now you’re just going to be snide and insulting (I’m sure your next response will be to attack me for being snide and insulting, but that won’t reduce your own guilt in that regard, and far more importantly, it won’t give one ounce of weight to your repeated yet still unsubstantiated references to what seems to be a mythical curriculum from 1935 (how did you find out about it? Not even your dad could be old enough to have been in public school then, I suspect).
I’d love to look at any evidence you care to provide. So far, poring through references and facts you offer takes zero time, since there are none offered at all.
I think you have problems. I’m glad you are done. You could use a break.
Here’s one of my problems – Prove that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. Any thoughts?
How old are you again? I think you are a lonely old man who has to prove his manliness/verility via winning a debate on this blog. Because you haven’t won any arguments on this blog, you now resort to something which you feel most comfortable – math. But you don’t really know math or you would know that Group math fails students. Individual math according to ability works.
I was 64 on my most recent birthday. Do you figure that will help you demonstrate the existence of your 1935 math program? Win the hearts and minds of younger readers? Maybe one or two older readers will be puzzled by your query along those lines, though. If advanced age (i.e., older than you are right now) means that nothing one says is worth listening to, what are you doing on Diane Ravitch’s blog? ;^)
You are sounding senile now. You are clearly lonely because you are desperate for any conversation and any attention at this point that you can get. You’ve veered off the subject which is again, the 1935 implementation of Individual math and Individual ability works; group math does not.
“You are sounding senile now. You are clearly lonely because you are desperate for any conversation and any attention at this point that you can get. You’ve veered off the subject which is again, the 1935 implementation of Individual math and Individual ability works; group math does not.”
You are not only an expert in psychotherapy, but you have medical expertise in senescence, too? And maybe social work. But it seems to me that you would benefit from turning those skills on yourself and asking why you don’t want to just walk away from the conversation. You try to ensure it continues now by resorting to more and more base insults. If I thought you had any knowledge of any relevant discipline, my feelings might be hurt. As things stand, however, I’m just amused.
Now, back to business. This will be “too long” for you to read. You’re much more comfy with your little insults, not so good with struggling with ideas, but perhaps other readers will want to follow up on what I discovered:
I finally tracked down information on the superintendent in Winnetka, Il you claim to admire (or at least his ideas about teaching, which I suspect, perhaps wrongly, you wouldn’t like so much if you fully got their connection to the group work you so despise).
“Winnetka Plan, widely imitated educational experiment in individualized ungraded learning, developed in 1919 under the leadership of Carleton Washburne in the elementary school system of Winnetka, Ill., U.S. The Winnetka Plan grew out of the reaction of many educators to the uniform grading system that held all children to the same rate of progress. Children participating in the Winnetka Plan might be working in several grades at once. The curriculum was set up in two sections: the common essentials, which was grade work divided into specific tasks to be learned by each child individually; and creative activities, which included art, literature, music appreciation, crafts, drama, and physical activities. In the common-essentials section of grade work, a pupil could move on as soon as the material had been mastered. The second section had no achievement standards: each pupil did as much or as little as he wished.”
It’s more than a bit funny that you think that a man who was influenced deeply by John Dewey would be upset about your son not getting the grade you’re sure he deserved. I’m fairly sure that Dewey and those who were influenced by him had rather different concerns. And John Dewey isn’t generally the go-to guy for people who hate progressive mathematics education ideas from the 1990s. But whatever makes you happy, Jenny.
Like so many people who can’t seem to understand what it means to teach mathematics effectively, you insist on taking the ideas you fear and loathe to an extreme: all group work all the time. Maybe that was what went on in that community college, maybe not. Maybe it was what one or more teachers your son had or might have had did, and it got you all knotted up. Or maybe not. You’re so angry and extreme that it’s hard to take your description of matters as unvarnished truth.
I have never advocated going to one single style of instruction, but then, most math instruction in this country for decades was in fact a single style of instruction: teacher-centered lecture, drill-and-practice, no discussion of anything, no pair work, no small group work. That didn’t seem to bother many folks, with the exception of some of the great progressive educators out there who took their lead in no small part from the work and thinking of John Dewey. I doubt very much, however, that a man who wrote DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION would be opposed to ANY or ALL use of an instructional method that involved students interacting with one another to try to solve mathematical (and other) problems. You, clearly, decry this approach being used at all, at any time, in any way, in any subject (gym class must be interesting when students must work completely individually, and where in team-based activities, some athletically-talented students occasionally have to “put the team on their shoulders.” That must make the other kids lazy, maybe lead to cheating (“Mr. Johnson, Joey was trying to steal my muscles again!”)
Bottom line here, Jenny: I have no stake in group grading. I have no investment in an all-group-work approach to math education (but then, I never have like any approach to math instruction that puts all its eggs in one basket). But I am not opposed to using small group work as part of an effective pedagogical practice. You, on the other hand, seem to “know” that group work “doesn’t work” period. Bully for you. When I’m teaching somewhere and you’re a player in the school, I’ll worry about your fanatical position on this issue, but until then, I’m going to assume that this is about your political leanings and your personal rage about your son not getting his due credit for something. That doesn’t sound like someone who like progressive education, John Dewey, or those influenced by Dewey, but rather someone who thinks she’s found a life-preserver that in actuality might be an anchor.
You have serious issues and a lot of time on your hands. Your insults don’t effect me – because I’ve read some of your drivel and you are insignificant….you don’t know enough to matter.
If you look at the comment interaction, it was you, when backed in a corner and nowhere to go, who began with the insults and condescension. That is when one knows she won the argument. Now you are backtracking -” I’m not all for this or all for that.” You seem to think you are the expert but now you are backtracking. Not so subtle there.
So I peaked your interest enough, as a stranger on the internet, to take time (of course you have plenty) to research an Individual Math approach that worked… Moving students forward as they master the basics. Yes it worked, and it continues to work where it is implemented. Holding children back in groups doesn’t work, which is what I maintained all along. That has been proven in the past and recently at a community college.
The real world matters – what works and what doesn’t. You don’t seem to live in the real world any more and probably never did. So glad my children didn’t have you as a teacher or anyone like you as a teacher!
I kept asking you for a decent link, but you refused to provide one. Eventually, I focused on Washburne and Winnetka, not YOUR town, the one you kept yapping about, which wasn’t doing me any good. Once I did that, I found what I needed. And realized immediately that the fact that the developer of the Winnetka Plan was a close friend of John Dewey meant that you likely would have been calling for his firing, had you been a parent at the time. You sound like a perfect “parent-with-pitchfork” type.
Your basic problem is, I strongly suspect, that you don’t understand what you’re discussing, which is why you’re not really discussing it. You’re just propagandizing something because you so thoroughly despise something you think is its antithesis. Nonetheless, I’m sure that there is value in what Washburne was up to. I found more information that points to that:
You probably shouldn’t read it. I don’t think you’d have like Washburne or his plan very much at all. You’ve been nasty, closed-minded, repeatedly insulting, and utterly unable to promote what you think is a miracle panacea without likely ever having read more than that high school paper piece you quoted, one that speaks of success not in its own school or community, but rather hopes for such success based on the results Washburne is supposed to have attained in Winnetka. Whether similar success was achieved in your town or not, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if the ending of a progressive education program there was brought about by people very much like you.
Keep believing that the use of various classroom structures (pairs, small groups, whole class discussion, individual work, lecture) is a horrible idea, and that this particular misunderstood on your part model is THE answer. It isn’t. There is no single panacea, Jenny, as any real educator knows. And no amount of insulting me will change that reality, particularly when it’s so badly spelled. The angrier you get, the worse you write, it seems. You have a gift for undermining your own viewpoint. I’m sure any teacher that has dealt with you in person has considered practicing voodoo in self-defense.
Final bit of advice: get a sense of humor. You appear utterly devoid of even the vaguest sense of irony.
I feel sorry for you, the lonely old man who has so much time on his hands that he has to write a book for every comment he makes. You are only important and relevant in your own mind. From your writings, I sense you were a terrible teacher and had to be dealt with by administration several times. You may have retired early because people were just tired of your BS, your own self-importance that no one else bought into. Maybe your marriage failed as well. I wouldn’t blame someone for leaving you. You probably talk too much. Maybe that’s also why you have so much to write books on blog posts -no one wants to listen to you talk anymore.
Seems like you have nothing of substance to say, so you are forced to resort to really poor armchair analysis. I’ll think of you while I’m teaching tonight from 5 to 10 PM. One of us has had a (now) 41 year long career in education. It’s not you.
I thank you for the tip on Winnetka and Washburne. So sorry you don’t begin to understand the implications of . Small group work, used intelligently by competent teachers is hardly incompatible with individually-paced instruction. indeed, all the pedagogical methods I mentioned previously for structuring classes have an important and useful role in high-quality mathematics education. None alone is effective for all students. Luckily, reflective practitioners don’t need your approval for what they may or may not use.
I recall spending Memorial Day in 1994 working with another student on a set of homework problems from an Advanced Calculus course we were taking (in between enjoying BBQ). One particular problem entailed producing an example of a sequence that had a particular set of properties. We kept coming up with ideas individually, presenting them to each other, and having them shot down when the other fellow saw a flaw in the example such that it failed to fully satisfy all the requirements. It took us a couple of hours to ultimately find an example that worked completely. I found that a very gratifying experience, as I was reasonably sure that, working completely individually, neither of us would have found a correct example as quickly, if at all. Sometimes, collective work is greater than the some of its parts. There are countless examples in mathematics and other disciplines of the power of collaboration, teamwork, etc. When people who are motivated to find something, they don’t need to be enticed with phony rewards like grades, and they will not be satisfied by having someone else do all the work for them. They wouldn’t consider NOT pulling their own weight as much as possible, because they know they’d learn less that way. In math, if you can’t ULTIMATELY do the proof or solve the problem yourself, you don’t really have it mastered.
But how you GET to that point is another matter. It can of course be through individual effort done totally alone, but it can also be done by working with others, playing one’s thinking off that of other people, and possibly gaining more together than any one of the group or pair would have accomplished alone. You’ve never experienced that? Everything you’ve ever done in life was done individually from start to finish? Every idea you’ve ever had was 100% your own work?
Pull the other leg: it’s shorter.
And try working on your repertoire of insults. It’s not only predictable, it’s not particularly cutting. If it were, I’d have had to slink off by now in shame and grief, instead of feeling good that I learned about something interesting I’d either never heard of, failed to investigate adequately, or forgotten about. Did you learn anything here? Are you capable of that? Perhaps, but clearly you’re not open to learning anything. And the irony is that you accused me of being closed-minded. Want to prove me wrong? Stop giving phony excuses about the length of my comments and click on some of the links I provided on the Harvard Calculus Project, the Benezet Experiment, etc., and report back on what you learned. Wouldn’t that be a tad more productive than offering up more shallow, badly-spelled cheap shots? Or aren’t you capable of anything more than personal invective (and rather shabby amateur psychology that continues to miss the mark repeatedly)?
You are terribly self-unaware yet you keep going. No one is reading your drivel but if it makes you feel better about yourself and your station in life, have at it. I only have sympathy for you.
Funny how you don’t see yourself in the mirror you keep holding up to me. You never seem short of time to “retort” (not well, but never missing the opportunity to miss an opportunity). You never concede the smallest point, and given how much ignorance you’ve displayed about even your own “position,” your best defense would be . . . silence. Plus when you’re dealing with a windbag like me, wouldn’t the right move be. . . silence? But you can’t BE silent. You can’t grant me “the last word,” for fear some among the people NOT reading my comments (you’re sure of this how, exactly? Scientific survey of Diane’s tens of thousand readers? They all weighed in, even the ones you couldn’t possibly know about because they don’t comment and told you, “Oh, my, Ms. Jenny, you are surely right: we can’t stand to read that awful Michael Paul Goldenberg. He’s just THE WORST! In fact, we know he’s the worst because you and a few others say so, not because we actually read what he writes.”
Sure, Jenny. I am pleased to know that you feel sorry for me. It’s good to know that you feel for me at all. I’ll surely sleep like a baby tonight (senility and all that).
How’s that sense of humor coming?
So you’re one to want the last word. Who knew?
You know, I thought about your fond wish that your kids never have anyone like me for math and you’re right: they might learn enough to realize how little about mathematics you know, and that could cause all sorts of emotional stress for them.
I had a waitress at lunch who saw I was reading a book on abstract algebra. She remarked, “I wish my teacher read that book. He doesn’t seem to know much algebra.” I explained that what I was reading was probably at a different level from the class he was supposed to be teaching (at a local community college), and if the instructor was struggling with things in that course, this wouldn’t be the right book with which to try to get up to speed.
But the reality is that no matter how well a teacher may know a particular bit of mathematics, knowing it well is necessary but not sufficient for teaching it well. There’s more to teaching mathematics than knowing content. And no one has every bit of information s/he’d probably love to have to successfully teach something to all students. There are just too many different sets of holes in mathematical knowledge that show up in classrooms. So the best thing to do is to consider a lot of ways of thinking about particular mathematical ideas and concepts, then try to get a line on what is blocking a given student from understanding. The more ways a teacher has of thinking about and grappling with a math topic, the more likely it is that s/he’ll be able to reach a wide range of kids. And last I checked, that should be the goal of teaching, not winning debates with people, particularly not people whose personalities and intellectual perspectives make even uncordial conversation pointless.
What’s YOUR goal, Jenny? You surely must think you’re getting something out of all this or you would long ago have stopped trying to get in one more shot at me, monster that I am. Think you’re a dragonslayer, do you? Or if, as you alternatively claim, I’m just pitiful, what does it say about you that you continue to engage me? I don’t expect to move you one angstrom towards a different viewpoint, any more than I expected to do so with another recent antagonist here who claimed that I’m desperate to do just that.
For me, these arguments quickly cease to be about the opponent. If someone really doesn’t want to teach or learn anything, then either I’m writing to work through my own thinking on one or more issues, and/or I’m writing to put my ideas out for more “friendly” people to deal with. “More friendly” doesn’t mean necessarily those who agree with my every thought and word (particularly since I don’t always agree with such things myself, sooner or later) but those who engage with intellectual honesty. You don’t, in my opinion.
You try really hard to be hurtful. You’ve made a grand effort at that with me. If I were the weak, vulnerable person you fantasize that I am, you might even have gotten in a decent shot or two with your scattergun approach. And then I’d be trying to respond in kind, attacking every weakness or potential weakness I see in you. That I’ve not done is simply because the weaknesses in your arguments are transparent, and I’m confident that many teachers and parents see that. You’re not a serious person (though you are a humorless one, I must say), and so I guess it really doesn’t much matter what your agenda here is. But for your sake, I hope it’s a bit more complex than merely yelling repeatedly about the “evils” of group work in math education. You’ve certainly said nothing in that regard that I haven’t heard many times before, usually developed more thoroughly and articulately, and with fewer personal insults. That doesn’t make those other presentations more true, but at least they don’t come of merely as obsessive. (Oops, seems like some of your amateur psychoanalysis is rubbing off. Have to watch that).
Your responses certainly reveal a lot about you . You are lonely, needy, and want people to think you know a lot. Unfortunately for you, the more you write, the more people see your characteristics that aren’t flattering. But feel free to tell this blog more about yourself.
On a separate note: laziness and cheating. I have taught mathematics in various capacities since the late 1980s. I’ve had students cheat. I’ve had students cheat so nakedly that I had to bite my tongue not to laugh in their faces when they claimed otherwise, then tried to account for the fact that their answers matched those of a neighbor (who had a different set of problems than those the cheater was assigned). No group work. Just pretty pedestrian exams. I had students in English at the University of Florida in the mid-1970s (long before the Internet and cheating services that now abound) turn in word for word plagiarized papers. Because the assignment was on Nathanael West, not Shakespeare, it took me less than an hour in the U of Florida library to track down the books and journals from which they’d copied. No group work there, either.
Or to be more blunt: cheating has been around in various subjects for a long time. Maybe even before 1935!!! It wasn’t something that came about with small group assignments, in mathematics or any other subject. If students cheat, teachers have to decide how to deal with it. So do parents, if the students are not adults. So do students. Instead of pinning the blame on one particular sort of pedagogy or on a recent set of standards, regardless of one’s overall view of them, why not come to grips with what it is about the United States and our system of education that has led students for generations to cheat.
My son graduated h.s. in June 2013. I never spoke with a teacher about his grades in his 13 years of schooling. My concern has always been with him, not his grades, and that remains my concern. My sense from reading your complaints is that we don’t live in the same universe when it comes to education. Fortunately, it’s not necessary that we do so.
The kids are encouraged to cheat and be lazy during group work – that’s why the concept was scrapped. My Dad has been a Math teacher since the 1960’s and learned how to teach the “new Math” in the late 1960’s. He said an entire generation of kids were hurt from this “new Math.” He says Common Core reminds him of that “new math.” He teaches at the community college currently and saw how that group math experiment failed the students. Again, the college scrapped the group math idea because it didn’t work.
“First, the disparity between various state standards/curricula and the Common Core in mathematics isn’t huge for the most part. ”
You need to look at the just released studies from AIR, link below.
Your anger is palpable and in my judgment not only unfair to Mercedes Schneider but a pretty comprehensive statement detailing your cynicism about the history of math education in the United States, education in the United States, with the CCSS math standards part of that.
I am not an expert in math, but I do know that “the useful residue” of research, with boots-on-the-ground relevance to teachers, is almost less than hoped for by persons who want some consensus of scholars or huge body of empirical evidence to justify this or that practice. There are many reasons to be skeptical about the CCSS, especially with the non-stop marketing campaign, and end game of a nationalized system of education.
http://www.air.org/news/press-release/education-performance-standards-vary-widely-among-states-some-cases-several-grade
Laura, if you, by your own admission, are “not an expert in math,” and I assume you’re not an expert in mathematics education, its history over the last century or so in the US, or the significant body of research in the field, I find it hard to be too concerned with your judgment about what I wrote. Your pronouncement of “cynicism” should be unpacked if you expect it to be taken seriously or, more importantly, to have any meaning to me or other readers who aren’t squarely aligned with Ms. Schneider’s every word. I am not, for reasons I’ve made plain here and elsewhere, and in brief, that is because she is utterly inflexible: everything Common Core is anathema to her, a position I find dangerous and intellectually dishonest, and all too much like the Mathematically Correct/HOLD folks who have repeatedly made statements like, “Nothing good in education is new and nothing new is good,” and variations upon that theme. Really? We’ve figured out NOTHING better in even the last 100 years about how to teach mathematics? These are also almost without exception part of the phonics-only crowd when it comes to literacy, strong supporters of former “reading czar” (under GWB) Reid Lyon’s nonsensical and utterly failed reading program, the same Reid Lyon who when asked how to solve our problems in education stated, “If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education.” Intriguingly, this same Mr. Lyon was well-connected in the Chicago Public Schools while they were run by a fellow named . . . Arne Duncan.
The problem with making cut-and-dried pronouncements about educational policy, practice, standards, etc., particularly when one does so from primarily political and ideological rather than pedagogical and child-centered reasons, is that one generally winds up saying a lot of things that turn out to be manure. And when it comes to mathematics teaching and learning, I fear that Ms. Schneider’s passion to overturn everything about the Common Core blinds her (or maybe, based on the few times she deigned to answer anything at all I raised with her on her blog (before she was added to the roster on the At The Chalkface group, where I, too, have been blogging for the last 16 months or so), it’s her loathing for progressive mathematics education methods and materials that helped drive her utter hatred of the Common Core.
That said, I’ll once again remind readers here that I’ve opposed the Common Core Initiative from the first time I heard that it was in the works, and I’ve blogged repeatedly about problems with the “big picture” as well as specific problems in the Math Content Standards (I’ve never been negative about the Standards of Mathematical Practice and likely never will be given their heritage, having derived for the most part from the excellent Process Standards in various NCTM volumes published from 1989 into the mid-2000s). So while it has become a predictably knee-jerk tactic to accuse me and anyone else who won’t just offer blanket condemnation of anything and everything with the words “Common Core” attached to it of being either an evil corporate shill (I forget who is supposed to be signing those fabulous checks I am allegedly receiving – Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, the head of Pearson, David Coleman, Barack Obama, or Satan), or a clueless academic who doesn’t have children (despite my rather advanced age – 64 as of July – I have one child, and he is 19 years old, attended public schools in Dexter and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and as far as I can judge by his grades and various test scores, is a kick-ass student in mathematics with aspirations to go into areas of the sciences in which his father was sadly pathetic, namely biology, genetics, chemistry, and possibly in the long run, pharmacology, though his interest there has more to do with the work of Alexander Shulgin and Albert Hoffman than the Big Pharma folks some people no doubt immediately assumed). And he did this having had the first four years of his math education via the TERC “Investigations in Number, Data, & Space” curriculum, which Ms. Schneider would no doubt despise as much as she does EVERYDAY MATHEMATICS, both of them being anathema to the Mathematically Correct/NYC-HOLD traditionalists.
I guess it’s okay for Mercedes Schneider to be rip-roaring enraged about Common Core and anyone who says anything at all good about any aspect of it (and please note, my good words are about things that weren’t invented by Common Core, predate it by decades, and unfortunately, are now tainted for at least a generation by being included in aspects of the CCSS Math Standards, through no fault of mathematics educators who helped develop those ideas in the 1980s and beyond), but not for me to be enraged by what I consider to be ill-informed and/or ill-considered attacks on practices that do in fact have a body of positive research behind them, but which certainly have never gotten the sort of “Gold Standard” double-blind studies that we’d all like to see, namely because you can’t DO those sorts of studies in the social sciences with human subjects, and any attempt to even do pilot studies of such programs is now met with cries about “experimenting on kids,” “intellectual child abuse,” “mad scientists,” etc., while traditional methods that were never field tested or, if they were, certainly were not tested any more scientifically than the programs decried by Mercedes Schneider and others, are grandfathered in. It seems that crappy math teaching and books are fine if they have been around long enough and if enough folks who made it in spite of the poor math education the average American has been getting for over a century say that all the new materials and methods are “fuzzy crap,” etc. Just as history is written by the winners, America’s views on math education are written by people who would have “made it” in the esoteric world of research mathematics regardless of what books were used or where they saw them. Not a very sound basis for widespread decisions about math teaching and learning, but hey, as I’ve written recently, math is the one subject that every American seems to think s/he knows about, no matter how bad at the subject s/he is or how much s/he loathed it in school and ever since. No one ever said that there’s no irony in this country, even if the “joke” is on all of us, particularly our kids.
I have a great deal of appreciation for Mercedes Schneider’s writing on the behind the scenes sponsorship and financing of the Common Core.She is an excellent writer and has a penetrating investigative eye. I don’t doubt that she is a fine English teacher either.
In contrast, I don’t agree with quite a bit of her writing on mathematics and science education. It’s not consistent with the views of our district’s math educators, math educators in our county, or math leadership in our state. Our folks would be right at home with Michael, however, and so am I.
This is not to discount in any way Mercedes’ overall critique on the politics of the Common Core.
Stiles, for me, the primary issue with the math is the CC “paradigm shift” that is being forced upon parents across the country. There is no choice; it is being forced. If math instruction does not convert to practical use, I don’t buy it. I am fine with others’ holding a different view; however, I fully side with parents who feel betrayed and confused by the short-sheet, sleight of paradigm that has occurred via a CC. Parents nationwide are rejecting the likes of EngageNY/ Eureka math. That is not just my opinion.
I can’t help but ask, Mercedes: in what era of American education were parents given a choice about what books, content, or teaching methods teachers used at any level in K-12 math classes? I’m only 64, and took a graduate course at the University of Michigan in the history of “reform” efforts in American school mathematics that began around the time of the First World War. So no doubt I have overlooked this Era of Great Parental Choice to which you indirectly refer. I’m always looking to enhance my knowledge of the field, so please: share with me and others, if you will, when American parents got a menu from which to choose math books, the content of those books, and the teaching methods teachers employed.
Further, I must have missed the period when teachers on the whole had complete choice about what textbooks to use and how to use them in K-12 mathematics instruction. Seems to me that school districts make those selections (often a committee involving some teachers and some administrators, sometimes a completely top-down administrative decision, but not “every instructor for him/herself.” There are district course descriptions that reflect state curriculum frameworks. Teachers who color too far outside the lines are generally disciplined, particularly if their “free choice” ticks off the wrong people in or out of the district and/or building administration. None of this is the invention of the Common Core, though having the lines drawn nationally and by corporate folks is a new wrinkle, one that we both abhor, though I’m not quite sure anymore if that’s for quite the same reasons. And let’s not forget states like Texas and California that have long prescribed specific short lists of acceptable textbooks from which districts must choose, and which, thanks to their large size and populations, exert undue influence on what’s even published in the first place (that has become worse as the number of educational publishers from which to choose started shrinking in the 1980s due to mergers and acquisitions by a few now gargantuan beasts; kind of as if US laws were made entirely by the House of Representatives, with no Senate, no executive branch, and no judiciary. That didn’t start with the Common Core, either, and won’t end when we’re no longer seriously discussing CCSSI, Duncan, Obama, etc., and have moved on to arguing over the latest failed attempts to change math and other areas of instruction.
Finally, I had been operating under the mistaken impression (not saying it’s due to you trying to lead anyone astray on this point) that you taught elementary mathematics at some juncture and hence had direct experience with the EVERYDAY MATH program you have frequently bad-mouthed on your blog. But a few hours ago, I read over your self-description at that blog and realized that in fact you’ve never taught elementary grades (as far as I could ascertain; please correct me if I’m NOW getting it wrong), or mathematics as a secondary teacher. So I’m even more puzzled at the hostility you have expressed towards EM. Does that come from parental experiences? You’re too old to have had it as a child. Maybe friends/family complained to you and your were able to determine that it’s badly flawed? If so, it would be ever so helpful to your followers to know how you made that decision.
Putting this last point together with my earlier questions about the last century or so of US math education and various attempts at reform, I remain more puzzled than ever as to what drives you to be so negative about ideas and practices in mathematics education that I and many more experienced, more gifted, and more creative colleagues of mine believe to be a distinct improvement over the more limited set of techniques, tools, and pedagogical practices that comprised math education in the first 80 or so years of the 20th century, a set that many of us, long before the Common Core was started or thought of, found overly-narrow, discriminatory, and ineffective for a majority of American children. Since as far as I know, the “choice” issue is, historically, a red herring, I can’t tease out from your extant writing on these issues what bothers you so much.
Stiles, I appreciate your comment. In my quarter century in the math education arena, I’ve found that there are more teachers today than there were in the late 1980s who have some clue about options to the style of math teaching I was made to endure in K-12 in 1955-68, an approach that made me at best indifferent to mathematics and determined never to take another mathematics or related course once I graduated high school. Such an odd set of factors that made me change my mind in my 30s and completely change professional focus in my 40s and thereafter.
Sadly, though, there are still far too many people teaching math and science who are stuck in a time warp. And they are supported by the “common sense” views a lot of average citizens bring to the table, as well as some very dedicated traditionalists who would sooner die than let progressive mathematics teaching and learning have any sort of breathing room. The “choice” Mercedes speaks about is doubly ironic in that in every single instance I’ve seen since the early 1990s, when a district has adopted a progressive textbook series at ANY grade level, the forces for choice have worked relentlessly not simply to get options, but to eliminate or at least marginalize the use of those books and any teaching methods that are in harmony with it. Choice always turns out to mean, “Our way only,” even when couched in the language of democracy and freedom. And intriguingly, these are quite frequently the same people who push for “school choice” via vouchers and the ever-expanding growth of charter schools. This is at heart a conservative and reactionary enterprise, no matter what rhetoric is used, and while I, too, admire much of Ms. Schneider’s investigative work on the inner-workings of the CCSS Initiative, I have come, sadly, to completely distrust her claims and the motives behind them when it comes to STEM education. There seems to be an unstated agenda at work that I wish I understood but frankly do not.
Mercedes, I get that. Parents place a lot of trust in us and it is important that we are able to explain to them the choices we make in terms of instructional resources and teaching methods and why we believe this approach will help their children learn mathematics or any other subject. Math isn’t the only potential lightning rod, as the current AP US history controversy and the ever present book ban stories show us.
Our district has used Everyday Math for a long time. We initially adopted it in 1999, a year after the first edition was published, and are currently piloting the 4th edition. We routinely receive parent questions and our teachers supplement it as needed. With 15 years of experience, I am comfortable in saying Everyday Math is a strong set of math materials. Our secondary level teachers see well prepared students in middle and high school and our students perform well as a group on any assessment measure. We now have a few graduate cohorts of students who had Everyday Math in elementary school that have transitioned successfully to college and the world of work. This is not to say that Everyday Math is a panacea, but they are good materials.
I’m not impressed by the EngageNY or Eureka materials either, but there are better options like Everyday Math, Math Expressions, enVision, Math in Focus. I don’t know what private schools use at the elementary level, but I am confident that if you checked to see what elementary math materials high performing suburban schools use that most would be using one of these four titles.
As Paul notes, almost everywhere that contemporary or progressive math materials have been introduced there has been criticism and pushback. Advancing this approach to mathematics education through mandate (CCSS) with inferior materials (EngageNY) only intensifies the pushback. Despite the pushback, however, more school use materials that reflect this “paradigm shift” than twenty years ago because for most students it is better than traditional approaches.
Thank you for all of your investigative work on the Common Core.
@Stiles: My son’s school district used TERC’s Investigations in Number, Data & Space program for his K-3 grades. I don’t know if they dropped it when he was in 4th grade (2005) or simply weren’t using it in upper elementary grades at any point, but he liked it well enough and certainly he was well-prepared for everything in mathematics he’s encountered thereafter. Now, n = 1 isn’t an overpowering amount of data, and he had the theoretical advantage of having a father who is a mathematics educator, but we didn’t spend much time working on mathematics homework together, and on those occasions when he did ask me about something, it was later on, and as I recall entailed things I didn’t know about from my own studies, like “front-end estimation,” something that simply took me a few minutes of reading to get. I’ve seen comments from angry parents who never learned that either, but their reaction is usually rage, not “Oh, another perspective on this particular issue.” I think that really has a lot to do with the differences between how I tend to look at anything new to me in mathematics (oh, that’s just another term for this other idea I already know,” or “Hmm, never thought about that before!” or “Wow, that’s an amazing connection that I’d never seen, but now that it’s been made, it feels natural and almost obvious”) and the way a lot of other people do (“When did Satan start writing mathematics textbooks?”)
It’s (almost) funny that there are some Christian fundamentalists in this country who produce math curricular materials that explicitly reject “modern mathematics’ starting with that good old New Math favorite, set theory:
and
“Unlike the “modern math” theorists, who believe that mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute. Man’s task is to search out and make use of the laws of the universe, both scientific and mathematical.
A Beka Book provides attractive, legible, and workable traditional mathematics texts that are not burdened with modern theories such as set theory. These books have been field-tested, revised, and used successfully for many years, making them classics with up-to-date appeal. Besides training students in the basic skills needed for life, A Beka Book traditional mathematics books teach students to believe in absolutes, to work diligently for right answers, and to see mathematical facts as part of the truth and order built into the real universe.”
See? You didn’t realize that how we think about mathematics in the 20th & 21st century turns out to be ungodly!!! I guess they can’t quite go to a literalist theory of math education, though, because then they’d have to reject all mathematics that isn’t mentioned in the Bible, and I suspect not teaching or preparing students for calculus might alienate some of their less religious mathematical friends (e.g., Wayne Bishop, R. James Milgram, etc.)
Hmm, maybe the link @democracy offered earlier to Mercedes Schneider’s religious precepts is more relevant than I first thought.
But here’s a puzzler: A Beka is very proud of its spiral curriculum in mathematics. So is Saxon Math. But “spiral curriculum” is anathema to people like. . . Mercedes Schneider (at least when it’s used in Everyday Math) and all those Mathematically Correct/NYC-HOLD folks, too. They make no bones about the evils of spiral curriculum. They also hate the use of diagrams to teach elementary mathematics. But the legendary bar diagrams that are at the heart of a lot of Singapore Math’s K-5 textbooks? Oh, those are ‘sound’ diagrams, it turns out.
I’m not saying that a lot of folks on the conservative/reactionary/traditionalist side of the Math Wars are transparent hypocrites. I don’t have to say it. Their own words and deeds demonstrate that.
Stiles, thank you for your response. If you would like to write a guest post for my blog regarding your district’s experiences with Everyday Math, I would be happy to post it. If you choose to take me up on the offer, be mindful that many of my readers are parents who have been blindsided by CCSS-couched mandate that “the way they learned to do math” is no longer valid, and they are frustrated and angry.
To reach me privately, just leave me a message in the comments section of any of my blog posts.
Mercedes is excellent. In practice, the common core and related teacher evaluation system is so far from the reality of the classroom, that I wonder about the sanity of those continuing to support the effort. Sure, their egos are wrapped up in CCSS success, but the standards are so poorly written and based on who-knows-what, I can’t see why they continue to argue for the myth of CCSS.
The problem for Schneider is that she is arguing from a rational position. Common Core supporters are no longer rational. You can present contrary evidence and point out absurdities all day long and it does no good. It has degraded to “just because”.
Mathvale:
You are right. The rationale for CCSS is now “just because” or “the train has left the station.” Too late to have a say!
I’m curious, MathVale: does that mean that if I disagree with Mercedes Schneider in any particular, that I’m both a supporter of the Common Core both irrational?
I’m afraid that I don’t believe she’s flawless in her arguments, nor is anyone I know of who is human. Not on issues of education or anything else of significance, particularly when something as variable as human learning is concerned. I’ve gone so far as to criticize Mark Naison, and even Diane Ravitch on occasion. Bold stuff, eh?
No problem here with peer review. Just wish we had real evidence on CCSS to review. My observations and experience as we move into this obsession with standards and testing reveals the complete lack of perspective and rationality. Here in our state, what comes out of the mouths of legislators and govenor is unbelievable. Even those on the education committees. Teachers having to put this fiasco into practice are just shaking their heads and going through motions. The whole testing/standards effort is being taken to extremes. It is like a collective insanity when it should be obvious “reform” isn’t working, but people still forge ahead. In our state hearings, one argument for CCSS was “we can’t stop doing the wrong thing just because what we’ve been doing is wrong”. Bizarre.
I’m not sure that we’ll ever get the sort of evidence that I value as an educator or parent or human being. And not just about the Common Core. That’s what bothers me about certain aspects of the debates that have flared into all-out wars in the last 25 years or so (and, of course, many times before the late 1980s): the folks I consider to be progressive can’t escape the same trap that the conservatives and reactionaries fall into: buying into the myth of strictly quantitative data for evaluating phenomena that don’t quietly cooperate with strictly numerical measurement. Way back in the mid-1990s, when I was working on graduate degrees in mathematics education at the University of Michigan, I realized through experience in both quantitative and qualitative research methods classes that neither lens had the market cornered on “truth,” or provided adequate information about vital educational issues by itself. This was, I soon understood, yet another part of the burgeoning Math Wars and the well-established Reading Wars, where one side (the traditionalists in math & phonics advocates in literacy) claimed to value only the so-called Gold Standard of double-blind, random-sample research, but had no such data to speak of in support of long-established curricular materials and teaching methods that had been in place for decades. Having gotten the high ground by being there first, they saw no need to prove or debate on the same terms as they held their critics whether these grandfathered-in approaches and products were really the best we could do. Or else they cherry-picked facts and abused the hell out of “objective” data to draw conclusions that in fact were not really supported by the studies they cited. In particular, I’m thinking of how the Direct Instruction advocates at the University of Oregon and their supporters elsewhere used a very questionable take on Project Follow-Through to “prove” that the direct instruction approach, of which their capitalized system was simply one implementation (this kind of move, naming a particular program after a more generalized method, will be chillingly familiar to those of us who’ve noticed that there’s a math program we’ll all be hearing far too much about over the next couple of years that has managed to get the name Common Core attached to itself, as if somehow it is THE definitive treatment of the Math Content and Practice Standards, a feat that is of course impossible to pull off if one takes seriously the difference between standards and actual curricular materials and plans that can at best represent a particular implementation within the parameters available, not a flawless translation as if from Plato’s notion of ideal forms to the One True manifestation on Earth (something that contradicts Plato’s entire scheme, but never mind that, since I’m not a big fan of those notions in the first place). So this company, which I suspect has deep ties to some well-known and some less-known players in the corporate privatization aspects of the Common Core, will no doubt try to become THE dominant force or at least one of the dominant forces in the delivery of various styles of curriculum for math (and other subjects, though my focus has been and will continue to be mathematics).
Now, even if these were people I knew well and trusted deeply based on my direct knowledge of them as educators and human beings, I’d never sit still for this sort of scheme. It simply represents some of the worst fears of many critics of national standards, regardless of whether the materials and philosophy behind them is good, bad, or indifferent. I certainly consider it to be so egregiously bad an idea that it makes David Coleman’s parlay into the head of the College Board from leading the creation of CCSS look perfectly above-board. I may wind up liking some of what they put out, but I’ll never support them or this slimy backdoor move.
If I’ve not made it clear by now, let me take yet another crack at getting my point across: there are, to my mind, some really horrid people doing some really horrid things that are intimately entwined with the “big picture” that is the Common Core INITIATIVE, and unavoidably those things have spilled over already into aspects of many of the materials and workshops and test prep and tests, as well as policies connected to how CCSS was created, written, promoted, and “sold” (rather badly, wouldn’t you agree?) to the country. It’s fundamentally flawed in a host of ways and I’ll NEVER EVER support it for that reason.
On the other hand, there are math education issues that predate and supersede the Common Core as a policy, as a set of standards, and as a brand. I won’t address its other explicit curriculum areas or its alleged anti-American approach to US history/social studies (in the case of the latter discipline, I don’t buy the Tea Party conspiracy theories – they run counter to both my experience and common sense about US corporations and their interests, and instead seem to be far more about Obama and general right wing paranoia than any sort of reality), but when it comes to math education, it all feels like a bizarre game of musical Math Wars chairs in which a few players seem to have switched sides (notably Hung-Hsi Wu of UC-Berkeley and Dick Askey of U of Wisconsin- Madison, along with the Fordham folks and the Core Knowledge people, so that they are supporting some things that smell strangely like what they’ve fought against for a long time (in the case of those two mathematicians) or which have resulted in their allying with some strange political bedfellows in the case of the Cultural Literacy and Fordham folks, few of whom, if any, I can imagine having voted for Obama in 2008 or 2012; however, most of the most vehement opponents of NCTM/NCSM progressive approaches to math education are still out there screaming against it, and they’ve given solace to a whole new wave of pissed off parents, many (but not all) of whom bring a Tea Party viewpoint to the table and who tell or repeat tales that no doubt fuel their own worst nightmares, with lots of flame-fanning by such usual suspects as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but also more marginal players on the fringes of “Washington wants to eat your kids’ brains and moral compasses in it’s mad scientist-filled GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS,” most notably Charlotte Iserbyt and Beverly Eakman, though there are lots of others out there.
Put them together with the Math Warriors of 1989 – 2008 and you have a true horror show, one that is dedicated to fighting anything and everything that doesn’t smell just like math in their experience.
Mathvale, one recent tactic is to state “how long” CCSS has been “around.” Petrilli is saying four years. Our state superintendent is saying five years– as though that justifies continuing with what is a real-time experiment that is fraught with problems, as you point out. Plus, the years “implemented” are misleading. In 2010, 46 states and 3 territories barely knew what they had signed on for. In Louisiana, we didn’t begin to know what CC required of us until 2012– and of course, the CCSS assessments have not hit full force.
What I hope is that the cost of this “experiment” will awaken legislators and other officials and knock the illogical CCSS stars from their eyes. The mainstream media also needs to develop a conscience about allowing corporate sponsors to sell a false CCSS message.
In Louisiana, business (including the “business” of “school choice”) is really pushing hard for a pro-CCSS message.
Mercedes, is it mere accident that your comment, while directly addressing someone else, appears to be somehow a reply to me, even though I’ve never said anything vaguely akin to what you describe as a recent tactic of defenders of the Common Core? And since in fact I don’t defend “the Common Core” and am on balance consistently critical of it, as I’ve repeated in a host of places, whatever are you on about in making that comment in apparent response to me? Careless? Lazy? Or flatly disingenuous?
Michael, you mistakenly said “I’m afraid I don’t believe she’s flawless in her arguments, nor is anyone I know of who is human.”
Are you excepting yourself here? I have read your words for many years now and rarely have I encountered such a level of self-satisfaction, hubris, and general disdain for the opinions of others, always couched in eloquence.
When you apply your critical light to yourself I will be an eager reader. Until then I take what you say with a grain of salt since nearly everything you write and say figures only in your own anecdotal experiences and you quickly dismiss anything that stands outside of that rarified atmosphere.
In other words, I don’t care if you question Mercedes because you are not a credible critic. Your personal experiences do not reflect nor acknowledge anything outside of a very specific and isolated teaching world.
My statement excludes no one. I’ve publicly critiqued my own practice, including in a talk I gave at a national conference of mathematics teacher in which the subtitle was “Don’t Be Like Mike.” So there was no error in my assertion, your ad hominem attack on me notwithstanding, and my critiques of Ms. Schneider stand or fall on their merits, not on your take on my personality.
Priscilla, I banned MPG from my blog because he writes with a sneer.
He does not believe that I have a right to decide not only with whom I engage in dialogue, but to what degree.
If I believe that dialogue will neither change my mind nor the mind of the one with whom I am engaged, I cease the discussion. That is just how I choose to function.
He so desperately wants to hammer into me his position, and I am not up to being hammered.
The deciding moment for me was some months back when he left a callous comment in regard to a personal post I wrote about my experiences with a tumor I had.
He has yet to catch onto this fact.
Michael Paul Goldenberg,
Please take your rage against Mercedes elsewhere. It is not a fit topic for this blog.
I copied the critical part of a comment I made on a thread of this blog, 9/11/2014, under the posting—
“Embrace the Common Core? A Debate” — in order to underscore the last sentence of the last paragraph of this [today’s] posting.
To wit: “Whalen’s biggest mistake, the same one made by Carmel Martin in the ‘great debate’ about CCSS, was to insist that states were free to change CCSS and that many have done so. Not true. The CCSS are copyrighted by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. States agree to change nothing but may add up to 15% of their own content. For defenders not to know that is indefensible.”
[START RECOPY]
From pp. 45-46 of the transcript file:
[start quote]
Female Speaker: I have a quick question. I’m the mother of a special needs child. I am also a teacher of English language learners. But my question is, are these standards copyrighted? And as a result of that, can teachers veer off the script? That’s my question.
John Donvan: Let’s take it to Carmel Martin.
Carmel Martin: Yeah. They are not copyrighted. They’re open. And teachers — I think where we see Common Core being implemented effectively, teachers aren’t following a script. What we see is that the — as I said in my opening, the standards create guide posts, a destination. And teachers are able to then construct lessons so they can differentiate for the children in their class. We have heard very positive things from teachers of special ed students, that in some ways, they’re better than the old way because it allows you to get the answer through different methodologies — and math, for example, it’s — allows for different ways to get to the answer.
So, I would say that they should not feel scripted. I do think, in some places, with that — with those bad instructional leadership, they’re being given scripts and told to follow the script. But I don’t think that’s the right way to implement the standards. And I don’t think the standards themselves dictate that. I think the standards really try to shift in the direction of giving teachers more freedom, like the teacher that I quoted in my opening had mentioned.
John Donvan: Carol Burris.
Carol Burris: The Common Core standards most certainly are copyrighted.
[applause]
They are. And I really — all of you. Go online tonight and look. You’re going to see that they’re copyrighted. They’re not allowed to be changed. When they’re adopted by states, states may add 15 percent, but they cannot change any of the standards. That’s one of the problems. Second, in terms of scripts, if you look, in New York State, Engage New York, we spent over $28 million for curriculum.
And that curriculum is full of script. And those scripts — at Engage New York, at least you publicly praised when you’ve talked to — I think it was the Governor’s Commission, you said how wonderful Engage New York is. They truly are scripts. And we find so many teachers who are so afraid to go off-script, to not teach exactly what —
John Donvan: All right.
Carol Burris: — Engage New York says —
John Donvan: You’ve made the point —
[end quote]
The “copyright” issue is not brought up again.
[END RECOPY]
If anything, the owner of this blog is bending over backwards in that last sentence to be polite.
But make no mistake about it: this is on par with the words and actions of Dr. Candace McQueen that, well, as a blog posting here of 3/23/2014 entitled “Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!” put it—
“This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.”
This is what passes for intelligent and informed commentary by the “thought leaders” of the “new civil rights movement of our time.”
But no wonder, when the defenders of CCSS base their entire public debate strategy on bedrock Marxist thinking about researching the facts:
“From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it.”
😎
P.S. ¿? It goes without saying—Groucho, by far the most famous.
I have to add that my reply last night to Mercedes Schneider’s blog post sits awaiting moderation on her blog, while other commenters’ remarks are routinely approved. I’m not surprised that she doesn’t want to engage me in conversation (despite making it seem like she is in a very strange way here on Diane’s blog), but to just leave a comment in limbo that is not vulgar, ad hominem, or anything of the sort seems odd and unfair.
@ Michael:
You can read more of Mercedes’ cognitive shuffling with a commenter – crazycrawfish – here:
That was a fascinating read, @democracy. Thanks for the link. Not sure I understand her any better, but maybe that’s just not possible at this point.
Democracy, Jason France (crazycrawfish) is a friend of mine, I knew discourse would not change his mind, and it would not change mine, so I did not engage. My choice, and he understood.
That noted, I am sure if you scour any comments to my posts, you will find some means of establishing that I am Less Than.
How’s that for a nifty math allusion?
Yikes almighty. Well, I suppose that figures.
Still, she’s a national treasure, she has a degree in statistics, and of course make sure to buy her book blah blah.
“Yikes almighty”?
Do you realize the irony of your word choice??
Love it!
Actually Mercedes, I don’t think he did understand because he very specifically made this statement to you:
“I would have thought a teacher would have enjoyed such an orderly discussion more.”
Of course, there was also this interchange with a commenter named Joe:
Joe: “Sorry, but creationism and intelligent design are not science, they are myths and false stories. I’ll stick with real science, evolution. Creationism and I.D. have no place in public schools or science classes. We don’t teach astrology side by side with astronomy or alchemy side by side with chemistry.”
Mercedes: “If you want to use your intelligence to argue that you did not originate from intelligence, who am I to stand in the way? Enjoy your willfully chosen, non-intelligent origin.”
I can see why crazycrawfish (and Joe) might think that you prefer not to engage in critical thinking and discussion.
When attending the NEA RA in Denver this summer, I conducted a completely unscientific poll: I asked everyone I encountered on buses, in the streets, in shops, in eateries the following question: “Thumbs-up or down on the Common Core?” The ONLY teachers (I confirmed this part) who gave it the much-coveted “Fonzi” were those who could implement as they saw fit. They were given professional “freedom” by their local and state superintendents to combine their knowledge of their students and years of experience and expertise to utilize the standards as a point of aspiration (not leading to the lack of).
If only they knew….