A parent in Mountain View, California, describes the disaster of the district’s digital math curriculum.
He writes:
“I live in Silicon Valley, which operates on the assumption that there’s no problem that technology can’t solve. It suffuses our culture here, and sometimes we pay the price for this technocratic utopianism. Case in point: Right now, I’m sending my kid to a public school in Mountain View, CA–the home of Google–where the administrators have upended the entire sixth grade math program. Last August, they abolished the traditional math program–you know, where students get to sit in a classroom and learn from a trained and qualified math teacher. And instead the administrators asked students to learn math mainly from a computer program called Teach to One. Run by a venture called New Classrooms, Teach to One promises to let each student engage in “personalized learning,” where a computer program gauges each student’s knowledge of math, then continually customizes the math education that students receive. It all sounds like a great concept. Bill Gates has supposedly called it the “Future of Math Education.” But the rub is this: Teach to One doesn’t seem ready for the present. And our kids are paying the price.
“A new article featured in our local paper, The Mountain View Voice, outlines well the problems that students and parents have experienced with the Teach to One program. I would encourage any parent or educator interested in the pitfalls of these “innovative” math programs to give the article a good look.
“If you read the article, here’s what you will learn. The Mountain View school district apparently budgeted $521,000 to implement and operate this new-fangled math program in two local schools (Graham and Crittenden Middle Schools). Had they adequately beta tested the program beforehand, the school district might have discovered that Teach to One teaches math–we have observed–in a disjointed, non-linear and often erratic fashion that leaves many students baffled and disenchanted with math. The program contains errors in the math it teaches. Parents end up having to teach kids math at home and make up for the program’s deficiencies. And all the while, the math teachers get essentially relegated to “managing the [Teach to One] program rather than to providing direct instruction” themselves.
“By October, many parents started to register individual complaints with the school district. By December, 180 parents signed a letter meticulously outlining the many problems they found with the Teach to One program. (You can read that letter here.) When the school later conducted a survey on Teach to One (review it here), 61% of the parents “said they do not believe the program matches the needs of their children,” and test scores show that this crop of sixth graders has mastered math concepts less well than last year’s. (Note: there was a big decrease in the number of kids who say they love math, and conversely a 413% increase in the number of kids who say they hate math.) Given the mediocre evaluation, the parents have asked for one simple thing–the option to let their kids learn math in a traditional setting for the remainder of the year, until it can be demonstrated that Teach to One can deliver better results. (Teach to One would ideally continue as a smaller pilot, where the kinks would get worked out.) So far the school district, headed by Ayindé Rudolph, has continued to champion the Teach to One program in finely-spun bureaucratic letters that effectively disregard parental concerns and actual data points. But the schools have now agreed to let students spend 5o% of their time learning math with Teach to One, and the other 50% learning math from a qualified teacher. Why the impractical half measure? I can only speculate.”
Read the article got links and stuff I did not post.
The district dropped the program, half-a-million dollars wasted.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Giant failure” is probably a good characterization of the vast majority of “new math” programs that are tried without any grounding in research and without testing.
I know that Common Core math has been a giant failure in the district where I live because I have witnessed its wreckage firsthand in my nieces and nephews, all of whom have been completely turned off to math, not incidentally.
Jason Zimba and Bill Gates should be dragged into court and sued for every penny they are worth for malthpractice.
“Malthpractice”
Math malpractice: Common Core;
Jason Zimba. Shut the door!
Keep the buzzing flies outside
Something stinks cuz something died
LikeLike
I like Common Core math. We had it here before it was “Common Core” so it wasn’t new to my youngest. He’s adept with it. It’s not at all strange to him- it’s the only thing he knows. He can explain it to me and he had to because I had no idea what he was doing 🙂
If they had followed thru on the promise to support public schools with the adoption of Common Core I would a supporter. But they didn’t and I knew they wouldn’t because I had kids in public schools for NCLB.
They’re not good on follow-thru, ed reform. They renege on their end of the bargain. I think it’s a profound betrayal of what are well-meaning and sincere people who buy what they’re selling.
Public schools need to get more demanding of ed reformers. Get the money up front. No “reforms” without enforceable conditions.
LikeLike
well duh….because CC was just a set of standards and that’s how they sold it to the teachers and school systems to get them on board. No curriculum was written to go along with it (because that was against the law) so every ed tech and text book company had free reign to willy nilly what they think kids need in order to make a quick buck. The kids suffer but Bill Gates (etc.) gets rich. I don’t think the “idea” of Common Core was a bad thing, but it just remained an idea and went no further. I’m sure there are school districts that took the standards and did good things with them, but the majority did a horrible job especially in the math. I have a 9th grader in Alg II that absolutely hates math now (and has to take 4 yrs as HS grad requirement!). What I see of her homework/classwork looks nothing like Algebra to me or her engineer father….it looks like test prep. She doesn’t even know the purpose/use of Algebra. It’s deplorable. And this is being taught by a teacher. I can’t even imagine what it would be like if this were on line learning.
LikeLike
“It’s not at all strange to him- it’s the only thing he knows. ”
He is then one of the very few kids who know it, though I have my doubts even about these few kids. Just the size and weight of the books are enough to stop the madness.
Main problems with CC
1) The material is only vaguely outlined.
2) Only the material is outlined, not how math should be taught.
3) Completely age inappropriate.
4) The material is rushed; teachers have no choice but mostly lecture with minimal interaction with students.
5) Tied to teacher and student “accountability”.
I have been teaching kids who come out of learning CC in high school. About half of them are proficient with math technology but when it comes to understanding (which is supposed to be the utility of math for 99% of the population) even fractions are problematic.
Way too technical math education has always been a problem in this country, but CC, despite its promise, has made it worse.
Last semester I taught CC to students who want to be elementary school teachers. There is no way, kids in K-8 can comprehend the material, especially the way the books present it. I see the next generation of math haters growing up.
LikeLike
Chiara
I don’t believe that the people selling Common Core were at all sincere.
The back-door method that was used to get states to adopt Common Core says it all.
If you actually believe that something has merit, you have confidence that it will sell itself. There is no need for massive ad campaigns filled with hype and certainly no need for back-door introduction methods.
That Gates, Duncan Coleman and Zimba felt the need to back-door Common Core says they lacked such confidence — because they KNEW it was not all that it was cracked up to be.
LikeLike
My problem with Common Core is not that I don’t understand it (I am educated as a physicist).
Many of the methods (use of arrays in lower grades, for example) used for getting answers to what are really very simple problems are quite contorted and do absolutely nothing to clarify mathematical thinking. On the contrary. I have seen my nieces and nephews needlessly confused early on by concepts and methods that were better left to later on
I don’t think I ever encountered arrays until I was in high school and it certainly did not set me back mathematically speaking.
My main problem with Common core is that it makes things needlessly complicated. Why do something in a contorted nonintuitive way if there is a straightforward simple way of doing it?
And I don’t buy Jason Zimba’s argument that it was just poorly implemented because it’s not possible to separate the two if one doesn’t make specific plans for implementation ahead of time (whichZimba and others never did)
The irony is that it actually slows down the students with an aptitude for math and turns them off to it.
Can/do/will students survive Common Core?
Sure, just as they have survived all the other fad math programs.
LikeLike
“Sure, just as they have survived all the other fad math programs.”
If you call math haters survivalists, you are correct.
But you are correct in your assessment.
LikeLike
I also have seen needlessly confusing CC math, especially the over emphasis on needlessly long multi-step word problems.
It takes a lot of patient cheerfulness to calm the student’s worries and remind them they are capable. I explain that the problem isn’t them, it is the curriculum. I explain that to figure out the word problems you must find the trick hidden in the question. Usually there is an obvious (to an adult) distraction the writer threw in, which has nothing to do with computation skills. Often word problems are written two grade levels above the current grade. A right mess.
LikeLike
“Usually there is an obvious (to an adult) distraction the writer threw in, which has nothing to do with computation skills. ”
Which serves no purpose. The rub is that basically all students can figure out a word problem, if given time, but they are not given time. Why not, is beyond me.
LikeLike
The math program under discussion has been funded from the get go by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with funding going to New Classrooms Innovation Partners, Inc.
In 2011, $992,800 to support the development and spread of a highly innovative, personalized learning model for middle school math
In 2014, $300,000 to further develop a skill map for a next generation learning model in math
In 2014, $6,285,000 to support New Classrooms’ efforts to expand the reach and impact of its middle school math model, Teach to One: Math
The program does not seem to have been reviewed by the What Works Clearing House.
LikeLike
Common Core is actually much worse than simply a poorly designed, poorly executed math program.
It was a way of creating a crisis situation in schools for which the schools had no other choice than to buy curriculum and tests from companies like Pearson.
Arne Duncan and Bill Gates knew that the Federal government was forbidden by law from dictating curriculum so they came up with a clever way of getting around that which achieved their goal of making schools into a market for textbooks, hardware, software and tests
They got governors of states to accept the standards with RTTT knowing full well that implementation/curriculum and assessment would essentially be left to the textbook/ test manufacturers like Pearson if the CC standards were imposed quickly on schools. Who else had the resources to undertake such a crash curriculum development program? Certainly not the schools.
LikeLike
We have parents pushing back against this locally too and we’re nowhere near as affluent as Mountain View.
To me it’s a measure of how out of touch DeVos is that she believes people are clamoring for this. They’re just not. This “demand” is created by salespeople.
If you’re in a lower income district the trade-off is blatant. Your high school language teachers mysteriously start to disappear as soon as the super-duper online class “world languages” appears.
They think we’re morons. Schools are actually small. They’re local, not national.
People NOTICE things! 🙂
The programs never die either. I saw New Hampshire just purchased BUZZ. BUZZ was a massive failure in Detroit. It doesn’t matter. They’re still in business. It’s garbage. Expensive garbage, too!
LikeLike
Parents are going to have to fight back as Silicon Valley buys access to our young people to use them as guinea pigs. When parents see damage done in the name of so-called innovation, they need to organize and complain to the local board of education. At least in a democratic organization, parents, students and teachers have the opportunity to express their concerns. These parents are fortunate they were able to stop the harm before the ineffective program became entrenched. Had this been a corporate charter school, parents may not have been able to address their concerns and resolve the problem as quickly as they did. Local public schools are more likely to be responsive to the needs and concerns of a community than a corporate controlled charter.
LikeLike
I don’t know how long you have been retired, but I will tell you that parental access to a child’s school work has been greatly diminished in lots of districts. All through Elementary school I was not allowed to see a math test that my children took (I got a slip of paper with the grade!). Homework was minimal and classwork stayed in school in a binder. They said that I could copy it and give it to my next child in a lower grade? No, what the county did was develop every single test (and classwork paper)for every student in the county and they didn’t want the parents to find out about it. Grade 4 was taking the same unit math test in every school at about the same time. If parents knew the scheme, they would get angry and protest…..and we can’t have protesting parents because that just gums up the wheels of the money making process. Parents have been pushed out of the equation, teachers have been threatened for talking. Parents don’t know what is going on so they don’t know that they need to be angry. What they do know is that little Johnny/Susie got and “A” or “B” and that says that they are learning something…..NOT!
LikeLike
“All through Elementary school I was not allowed to see a math test that my children took (I got a slip of paper with the grade!). ”
This pisses me off the most. With the CC tests at the end of the year, we don’t even have any means even to see our kids’ scores, let alone to see our their actual work.
Who controls our kids??
LikeLike
That’s why I REFUSE the CC tests!
LikeLike
I’d argue that Silicon Valley execs are not even treating kids as guinea pigs.
They are treating them as nothing more than consumers.
Despite the lovely claims to be preparing kids for the future, students are little more than $$ to these folks.
Schools are markets for their products.
End of story
LikeLike
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
LikeLike
Adding my vote on the anecdotal evidence. High schooler was forced to take Edgenuity French 4 due to a scheduling conflict. It is absolute “drill and kill” at an inhuman pace. He says half the kids failed. Needless to say he hated it. My middle schooler used to be confident and like math. Then they put her on some platform called Math Insights or some such. Apparently this program randomly jags between the algebra she is supposed to be learning and 4th grade math. She now hates math class. When will these folks realize kids don’t learn like this?
LikeLike
I have to make a correction to addendum at the end of the article Ms. Ravitch. That money was not wasted, it accomplished two things.
#1. It made the public school look bad, which will open up the possibility of replacing it more.
#2. The company made profits. Which is the entire point of #1.
LikeLike
Plus I think it secretly gives many superintendents gratification when they spend on tech rather than teachers’ salaries –knowing that the tech spending shrinks the pool of available money for salaries. Tech doesn’t talk back.
LikeLike
I think you have to look further up the chain to our legislators. In many states spending is at or below 2008 levels, but the cost of living has not stopped and the workforce is aging out. Further there is constant sniping about the exorbitant cost of all those pension and other benefits that were promised, but apparently there is no no intent to actually deliver.
LikeLike
BINGO! But I think we all know drill by now. Thanks for saying it.
LikeLike
“What a waist”
One man’s waste
Is another’s waist.
One man’s cursed
The other’s graced
One is tossed,
And often drained.
One is lost,
The other gained.
LikeLike
Cross posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Trainwreck-This-Math-Curr-in-General_News-Bill-Gates_Common-Core_Diane-Ravitch_Education-170207-47.html
LikeLike
Computer programs can’t do what teachers do to keep students engaged. I taught for 30 years (1975 – 2005) and a day didn’t go by that I didn’t have to monitor the attention of all of my students in every class to keep them focused on the lessons I was teaching that they learned from.
Thanks to TV, video games, texting, etc. attention spans are short and it is easy for children’s minds to wonder off the lesson and think about something else; to be distracted by just about anything. For instance, all it would take is another child burping or passing loud gas, and the lesson falls apart as the class crumbles in chaos.
I even had one student who, without warning, broke up a lesson that was going great, when out of nowhere, he said, “I wonder what it would be like to have sex with an elephant.” It took almost a half hour to settle the class down and get back to the lesson, and that was after I sent the offending student to the office, again. He was often tossed out of every class he had every day for outbursts like that one.
It often felt like I was the ringmaster in a daily ten-ring circus show with an average class load of 34 students in each of 5 different classes with 7-minute breaks between classes.
It was mentally and physically exhausting to stay that focused for that many hours dealing with a multitude of challenges in each class. If I lost my retirement and had to work to feed myself and keep a roof over my head, and the Marines wouldn’t take me back in my 70s to fight somewhere in the world, I’d probably shoot myself before I’d go back in the classroom to that intense, never-ending pressure.
The United States treats skunks better than it treats its teachers.
LikeLike
Last year I had a student like your “elephant” student. With a kid like that, you become blind to all the quiet, cooperative students. That one dominates your consciousness and thereby weakens your effectiveness. Here’s an area where liberals live by “alternative facts”. To them suspension is “depriving that child of an education” when in fact it’s radically augmenting the education of the other 33 kids. True, the disruptor will not be getting an education outside the classroom, but neither will he be inside the classroom. To liberals, the teacher who suspends is feeding the “school-to-prison” pipeline –as if the suspension, rather than the student’s habit of breaking rules, will lead him to run afoul of the law later on. So we keep these kids in the classroom and education degrades. This is such nonsense. It’s the sort of thing that makes many people exasperated by liberals, and leads people to agree with Betsy De Vos that parents need alternatives to the public schools. I’d love Dems to come out saying, “Let’s crack down on the chaos-makers in the classrooms” not just the chaos-maker in the White House. Anyone who truly cares about the survival of public schools should be uttering these words.
LikeLike
The high school where I taught had an in-house suspension center. I understand it is gone now. The teacher-administrator who ran the center reported that year-after-year, 5 percent of the students earned 95 percent of the 20k or more referrals. He saw the 5 percent so much, often from every class every day, he knew them all by name.
Critics, both conservative and liberal, continue to ignore reality, even double down on it, and keep making a teacher’s job more difficult with the flawed assumption that every child arrives at school hungry to learn and cooperate and the only way any child isn’t learning has to be because of an incompetent and/or lazy teacher.
LikeLike
Lloyd, Ponderosa,
What’s the solution to the 5% rotten student problem?
LikeLike
One of my suggested solutions is not going to go over well with people who wear the humanitarian badge “Bleeding Heart” on their chest like a medal.
I’d have the schools do two things. 1st, hire counselors specifically to work with the 5 percenters and their families to identify what was probably the cause of this behavior: genetics and/or home environment, and come up with solutions.
If that didn’t work, I’d pillory the parents/guardians of the 5-percent at lunch every day in the area where the rest of the children eat lunch and set up baskets of rotten food to throw at their faces. If the parents/guardians didn’t show up for their lunch period pillory, then the children would be sent off to prison-like boot camp schools where the only way to get out and go home is to dramatically change behavior in the classroom and then keep that behavior when back in the public schools.
LikeLike
Mate:
With the students at my mixed-income suburban school, I think a lot of the 5% could be brought into line with something as simple as a daily in-school suspension room to send disruptive kids to (something RageAgainstTheTestocracy advocates).Kids don’t like being separated from their peers, so this is a punishment that would make many of them think twice about disrupting. But even that is frowned upon in this corner of Northern California. We had it two days a week a couple years ago and then it was axed.
The education establishment propaganda tells us that discipline doesn’t really work. I’ve heard this so many times that I half-believed it for a long time. “Threats” and “punishment” are taboo words in the education world. Yet, by golly, nothing works magic for me more than the threat of a one-hour after school detention (always preceded by a phone call home). The mischievous kids do cost-benefit calculus in their heads: if the cost of acting out exceeds the benefit, they’ll control their behavior. If the benefit exceeds the cost, they’ll act out. Teachers need to make the cost pretty high, because the benefit –peer adulation –is extremely high. The more “costs” you allow a teacher to impose, the easier it is to teach.
For the really hard-core cases, I think we need to set up special public schools with very small class sizes that will harbor these kids. In rural areas they would be regional schools that several districts could chip in to fund. These schools would not be expected to meet API or AYP. Their primary focus would be to ameliorate anti-social behavior.
LikeLike
Lloyd, ponderosa: Expulsion is not an option in such cases? These are rare cases, right?
Even at a university setting, things can get tricky, and math apparently is more contentious than most other subjects. I have the policy that during a test, either hats need to be taken off or at least the bills need to be turned back. Once a student, a football player, refused to do this, so I didn’t give him the test. He got mad, stood up, and started walking down the stairs towards me. Dead silence in the classroom. 100 students. I thought “What now? Am I supposed to fight this mountain of a man?” Luckily his gf, also in the class, stopped him. She even slapped him on his face. Brave woman.
In the end, it was all good, the guy went home, came to my office next day, apologized, and caused no trouble after. I don’t know what I could do with a persistent disruptor, though—those you guys have to deal with on a daily basis.
LikeLike
Don’t fight. If this happens, when the aggressive male student gets close enough, fall to the ground at their feet, and grab their groin, pull and squeeze really hard. Then stand up and lead them out of the classroom. I saw this happen in the Marines. It’s really effective.
LikeLike
Mate –you professors are reaping the fruit of poor discipline in the K-12 system. Students become habituated to flouting rules and dissing teachers. It’s outrageous that college students act like that, but I hear similar stories from many of my professor friends.
While Lloyd’s suggestion may be effective, I fear it might also get one charged with sexual assault, especially in light of our honorable president’s recent imbroglio.
LikeLike
Lloyd made more than one suggestion. Are you talking about all of them or just one and how could any of them be defined as sexual assault?
1st step: focused counseling, that includes parents, designed to come up with methods to change the child’s behavior.
2nd step: If #1 fails, then pillory parents and/or guardians during the school’s lunch period and provide rotten fruit and vegetables for students to throw at their faces. A box could be provided behind the pillory to protect the rest of their bodies.
3rd step: If #1 and #2 fail, the child is taken out of the home and placed in a juvenile boot camp school where the children wear uniforms, live in barracks like the military does and must follow military discipline. The only way to return home is to demonstrate a dramatic change of behavior with a focus on cooperation and learning what they are taught. Boot camp schools actually existed in California back in the 1980s and they worked. The repeat offenders that were sent to these boot camp schools by a judge were only allowed to return home if they demonstrated what I described above and caught up to their literacy grade level. Most of the teens in these boot camp schools gained several years in one year in literacy skills and the recidivism rate was very low. Almost 80-percent of these teens changed their behavior dramatically and managed to stay out of trouble and continue to learn. They wanted to stay home. They didn’t want to stay in that juvenile book camp school.
Even the staff wore uniforms like Marine Corps drill instructors. The students marched in squads keeping in step everywhere they went.
LikeLike
I was (mostly) joking Lloyd –about your crotch-grabbing defense strategy.
I didn’t know about these boot camps schools. They sound exactly like what we need.
LikeLike
:o)
LikeLike
“The United States treats skunks better than it treats its teachers.”
Was there a time when it was good for teachers?
“each of 5 different classes with 7-minute breaks between classes.”
It’s now 6 classes and 5 min breaks.
LikeLike
Lloyd is right on all counts. The single biggest problem we have in our lab where students are recovering credit or doing on-line classes is exactly the same problem he describes above, the problem of keeping fragile attention spans engaged. The single biggest problem we have in teaching is total student load. 34 students in 5 classes comes to seeing 170 students a day. Yet never have any of the attempts to characterize what we do in evaluations by accreditation panels considered total student load for the teachers. Laws have variously existed to regulate size of class, but never student load.
I have a friend at a private school who told me he never had a student load that exceeded 60. Maybe DeVos will bring some of that magic to us.
LikeLike
WHY teacher unions accept computer programs giving
“credit recovery” is beyond me. They should be SCREAMING! If computer programs can count for credit, why have teachers at all?
LikeLike
This program is working exactly as designed. It’s called agile cloud computing. It’s all the rage. You make the program available online, it doesn’t matter if it works or not, and it won’t work, it never does. Yet the product manager can still claim they meet their the go to market target date.
Then they let the customer do all the beta testing. Customer reports the bugs, a ticket gets opened and goes into a queue where a $4 an hour off-shored programmer will fix it, eventually, maybe, well maybe not. No, they wont ever fix it. I can show you multiple technology based education products that have curriculum errors and those errors have been in those products for years.
This problem is just getting started. It’s not going to get better until it gets much worse.
LikeLike
What you describe is the Microsoft model for software development, which is why so many people I worked with in software development referred to it as Microslop.
LikeLike
Unless the computer programmers are not curriculum experts. Unfortunately they’re convinced they are. No school should implement any computer assisted learning programs without extensive testing and analysis of what curricular materials were used to create the program.
If no educators (teachers, professors, curriculum writers) had input into the final product, BEWARE!!
LikeLike
“But the schools have now agreed to let students spend 5o% of their time learning math with Teach to One, and the other 50% learning math from a qualified teacher. ”
This what always happens: our kids get attacked by some policy or program, we get outraged, and then we are offered a compromise, which we accept because “we want to be good sports and good politicians”. But the end result is that we lose more and more ground.
So I say, enough of the compromises.
LikeLike
“Half-way meetings”
To meet “Reform” halfway
And halfway there again
Oh, what would limits say
About the final end?
LikeLike
Ah, SomeDAM, this is the same principle as used in the takeover of schools in the lowest 5%, and of course this is what works for radioactive decay. Decay everywhere.
LikeLike
Education policy is driven by fads and admin is typically too embarrassed to admit failure. I’ll be curious how long they cling to this.
LikeLike
Common Core is a set of mediocre standards with no pedagogical rhyme or reason, devised by amateurs with no K-12 educational experience.
All Common Core textbooks I have seen so far are basically curricular crap, with one exception: The Eureka Math. But even that has to follow Common Core lack of rhyme or reason and hence it often has to meander and fill time with unnecessary and overly complex units. To make things worse, most elementary teachers dislike Eureka as it expects them to understand elementary math in depth and many are not up to that challenge.
Bottom line, it is disaster in the making that effectively swept all the country, and the nationwide drop in 2015 NAEP results — first in decades — already starts to show it.
https://americanprinciplesproject.org/education/new-white-paper-why-students-need-strong-standards-and-not-common-core/
LikeLike
Math is a tool to achieve understanding not a separate subject until graduate school for most people. .Few people need algebra or any “advanced” math and they do not teach any other skill,- abstract thinking. Math has become a cult simply good for all. One learns math when needed same with reading.
LikeLike