Bill Gates never gives up, and he sure isn’t abandoning his Common Core baby.
But he is not investing much. Only $10 million to train teachers to use Common Core curricula.
For this multiBillionaire, that’s not an investment, it’s more like throwing a few coins out there. Maybe it’s just a signal to his grantees that he is not yet ready yo throw in the towel.
Edweek reports:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to invest in professional development providers who will train teachers on “high quality” curricula, the philanthropy announced this afternoon.
The announcement fleshes out the curricular prong of the education improvement strategy the influential foundation laid out in late 2017, a major pivot away from its prior focus on teacher performance.
The investment, at around $10 million, is a tiny portion of the approximately $1.7 billion the philanthropy expects to put into K-12 education by 2022. Nevertheless, it’s likely to attract attention for inching closer to the perennially touchy issue of what students learn every day at school.
Gates officials emphasized that the new grants won’t support the development of curricula from scratch. Instead, grantees will work to improve how teachers are taught to use and modify existing series that are well aligned to state learning standards…
The grants build on the foundation’s earlier support for shared standards, notably the Common Core State Standards. All grantees, for instance, would have to orient their teacher training around a curriculum with a high rating from EdReports.org, a nonprofit that issues Consumer Reports-style reviews, or on similar tools developed by nonprofit groups like Student Achievement Partners and Achieve.
Those tools were directly crafted in the wake of the common standards movement with heavy support from the Gates Foundation.
EdReports has received more than $15 million from the foundation since 2015, while Student Achievement Partners has received about $10 million since 2012. Achieve has received various Gates grants since 1999, most recently $1 million in September to support its reviews of science lessons…
Gates’ investment comes in the middle of two diverging national trends in curriculum that have been unleashed, respectively, by the common-standards movement, and by an explosion of online, downloadable, and often teacher-made lessons.
Gates is still hoping to standardize Instruction and curriculum.
“Who Else Has Gates Funded on Curriculum?
Apart from its newly announced grant competition, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has long supported some curriculum providers and quality-control groups. Here’s a look at what it funded in that category in 2018.
RAND Corp.
$349,000
To support curriculum
Open Up Resources
$667,000
To support capacity-building
Pivot Learning Partners
$1.23 million
To support instructional materials
Illustrative Mathematics
$2.85 million
To support student learning and teacher development
EdReports.org, Inc.
$7 million
To provide general support
PowerMyLearning, Inc.
$500,000
To explore connections between tier one and supplemental instructional resources
Achieve, Inc.
$999,548
To increase availability of high-quality science materials
State Educational Technology Directors Association
$299,752
To support state education leaders in their selection of evidence-based professional development and quality instructional materials
Source: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grants database
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Will Common Core ever end?
Will our students, teachers and parents ever have peace of mind?
Who is listening?
Has the group against this nightmare become accepting thinking things will not change?
I think we need another awakening, but who can send the message?
He’s like an enabling parent of his crack addicted children.
All grantees, for instance, would have to orient their teacher training around a curriculum with a high rating from EdReports.org, a nonprofit that issues Consumer Reports-style reviews,”
Consumer Reports style, but thats where the anlogy ends.
Consumer reports is not paid by the companies pushing the products it is reviewing.
But it’s worth noting that the pattern described above is precisely one Gates used to get 45 states to sign on to Common Core sight unseen at the beginning, with Arne Duncan’s DOE playing the role of EdReports and all grantees of Race to the Top money having to orient their standards to standards approved by Arne Duncan.
Gates is do unoriginal that he keeps using the same play.
Standardized curriculum guarantees bigger profits if the Gates’ vision for education as a marketplace of “…brands on a large scale” wins out against America’s most important common good.
Americans who value democracy have been fighting and will continue to fight to extinguish the plots of billionaire oligarchs. That means fighting the “liberal”, Gates-funded Center for American Progress, the Kochtopus, and the richest married couple in the world.
Referencing the old training I had in UBD, Understanding by Design, we know Gates’ end game. It’s widespread personalized learning along with testing and data mining all the time. All of the standardization is leading to this goal. Anyone accepting Gates’ money will have to dance to Gates’ tune and accept his terms. Anyone considering applying for a grant should consider the bleak and unsuccessful track record of cyber instruction along with Gates’ record of repeated failure with his various top down, autocratic initiatives before signing on the dotted line.
Gates wants to standardize education, every aspect of it, to encourage marketing, branding, commercialism and competition among vendors.
Gates certainly doesn’t want “competition among vendors”. He’s a monopolist at heart.
I’ve been told a person can’t apply for a Gates’ grant without being asked to apply, first.
The way some nonprofits like Gates Foundation operate should be against the law.
They are getting a tax break on money they donate but at the same time, they can pick and choose whomever they wish to give money to, which means they can give money only to Nazis if they so wish.
The harm caused by a system that allows (1) the rich to pay family members from their tax-sheltered foundations (2) foundation employees to publish and get speaking gigs promoting policy recommendations as if they weren’t oligarchy, and (3) the rich to infiltrate government decision making, may well be the tipping point for control of the U.S. If Ocasio-Cortez leads the millennials in the crusade, God speed.
Best of all, none of this cottage industry of reform is based on evidence or unbiased research. It’s all an economic wheel to gain access to public funds in order to make our young people a profit generating enterprise for the already wealthy.
Unanimously, the comments that follow EdWeek’s article describe the Gates’ spending as nefarious. BTW, the EdWeek photo makes Bill look like a cadaver aka Dick Cheney.
Gates is obviously very sick and I bet he won’t last much longer.
What he is doing now is his last hurrah.
But I fear that his wife and children will carry on with the Program
Gates and the other Billonaire Boys(And Girls)use their vast wealth to undermine the public sector but they are enabled in doing this by the public sector itself–that is, 40 years of tax reductions on the super-rich and tax subsidies of their ventures by both major parties, which allowed these billionaires to accumulate such money power in the first place, which they have used to further enhance their private enterprises and fortunes. This is why Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s demand for a 70% income tax on the rich must be taken seriously, is public schools and the public sector are to be relieved from the private war against them.
A gullible commenter at EdWeek finds fault with Gates’ curriculum but refuses to acknowledge Gates is not an altruist. Why won’t some reporter ask Gates (1) Why are you still the richest man when you’ve spent 2 decades claiming to give your money away- prompt Gates with the words, Monsanto and Bridge International Academies (2) Why are strings attached to Gates’ “charitable giving”.
(3) What rationale justifies billionaire manipulation replacing American democracy.
Reblogged this on Nonpartisan Education Group.
Diane —
The Gates Foundation has done incredible philanthropic work in areas such as combatting infectious tropical diseases. Frankly, I think it is nonsense to question whether the Gates family, Buffett, or their foundation is well intentioned. But I very much believe someone at the foundation should talk with cognitive experts about their education programs, and in particular their support for the Common Core standards in math.
In math, there are very few states with “high quality” state standards. Nearly all state standards are very close the Common Core standards, and those standards ask students to solve problems in ways science says emphatically that the brain of novice learners (students) cannot do.
During the ten years since the Common Core standards were written, cognitive scientists have agreed that “working memory,” where the brain solves problems, has an essentially unlimited ability to apply facts and procedures that have previously been well-memorized. However, at each step during reasoning, working memory can generally hold only 7 or fewer elements of data and/or not-well-memorized relationships, each for 30 seconds or less. (Clark et al., American Educator 2012). This puts a premium on thorough memorization prior to problem solving.
Unfortunately, the Common Core math standards were written at a time when the assumption was that with a calculator or the internet, you could simply look needed answers up. You can, but science has proven that if you need to, you tend to forget what you just looked up quickly, or that storing what you looked up in working memory bumps out the data you need to hold in memory to solve the problem. In 2019, this is uncontested among cognitive experts..
Common Core-type math standards, which most states use, ask students to solve problems extensively before they move the needed facts into memory. That asks students to solve problems in ways science says emphatically that their brains cannot do (see “Cogntive Science and the Common Core” at Chemreview.Net).
No amount of money will make schools work when state standards ask students solve problems in ways that their limited working memory, according to science, cannot do.
Minnesota did not adopt Common Core math, and their standards, which have been aligned for years with what science says about working memory, continue to result in exceptional math NAEP scores.
The low, flat scores in other states verify: On how the brain works, science is correct.
— Eric (rick) Nelson
nelson-
Read the Kim Smith interview in Philanthropy Roundtable – the goal of charter schools, “….brands on a large scale”. Smith is a founder of Gates-funded New Schools Venture Fund, Pahara, Bellwether and TFA. Gates and Zuckerberg are investors in the largest for-profit seller of schools-in-a-box.
The battle being waged against Gates, the hedge funders, Walton heirs, Enron’s “anti-pension John Arnold”, Charles and David Koch,… is between good and evil i.e. preserving democracy vs. privatizing America’s most important common good. If you understand that and don’t care then, put your head back in the sand where your voice can bounce off other particles that have no soul.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen spent $1/2 million to defeat the reelection of Washington state judges who rendered verdicts favorable to public schools. Paul Allen spent big bucks to elect the party of social Darwinists.
No, Linda. You cannot claim all the “foundations” are the same. Most of the money the Gates Foundation has spent on education has gone to public school systems. Ideas such as “break up large high schools into smaller units” did not work well, because they did not address curriculum that did not work, but clearly they were not malicious.
The fact is that states including Massachusetts and Minnesota, which around 2001 adopted math curricula which stressed “student recall of fundamentals,” which is what science calls “automaticity,” got incredibly high levels of student math achievement, with scores on the 8th grade TIMMS testing in numeracy that were tied with Japan.
But most U.S. states adopted standards which discouraged “automaticity” in math recall, and our national average on the TIMMS was abysmal. If two U.S. states get outstanding results in math, but nearly all others do not, shouldn’t we be asking why?
In the most recent OCED PIAAC testing, U.S. 16-24 year olds finished 22nd out of 22 developed nations in numeracy. Those scores threaten the ability of our nation to defend democratic ideals (which we have been called upon to do — see Omaha Beach) in a real world where multiple powerful nations are moving toward Orwellian regimes.
Analyze the data. For the kids’ sake.
— rick nelson
Rick,
Gates has invested billions in charter schools. He invested billions in breaking up large high schools into small high schools. He invested billions into Common Core.
The federal government has poured billions more into charter schools and closing public schools.
We have had at least 20 years of control by Reformers. And what is there to show for this investment?
Maybe we should consider things like half the school age children in the US qualify for free- and reduced-price lunch. About a quarter of our kids live in deep poverty.
Is there another modern nation that has those numbers?
Maybe the answer to our education problems is not in the schools?
By the way, when the first international math tests were offered in 1964, our students came in last in one grade and next to last in another.
If test scores determine our fate, we shouldn’t even exist as a nation anymore, says Yong Zhao, the great Chinese-American scholar.
And I should proofread more carefully. That should be TIMSS — the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study
Diane — Should not we be asking why Massachusetts and Minnesota did so well with science-recommended math standards, but other similar states did not? Should the data be important, giving the wide gaps shown between similar states? — rick
Diane — All those kids who came out of NYC schools in the 1920’s and 1930’s , went to CCNY, and were awarded a Nobel Prize: Did poverty stop them? No, but they were in a society where learning was valued — and experienced teachers decided the curriculum based on what worked. Did those NYC schools work despite poverty? Can we return to those school conditions that worked?
– rick
Rick,
Guess what? Times have changed. The combination of poverty and segregation is powerful. The history of racism is different from European anti-Semirism.
Rick, your last comment above highlights the one the great hypocrisies of Gates, et al. No American over the age of 30 was ever subjected to standardized testing that determined the fate of them or their teachers’ careers. Not one was subjected to a one-size fits all curriculum. Yet somehow, this nation’s public schools are the foundation of the most powerful economy in world history and the source of its innovative spirit. Not one Nobel Prize recipient was subjected to high-stakes testing, not one CEO, not one member of Congress, not one of the Silicon Valley titans, not you or me. Your equivocating and rationalizing is tiresome.
No, Greg. To get into grad school in the physical sciences, I took plenty of high stakes tests. And I’m not under 30. But the tests given today are often indeed unfair for all concerned, because to solve problems, kids need facts and procedures in memory, according to science.
And in math at least, teachers have been strongly discouraged from having kids do what is needed to move facts and procedures into memory, by standards set far above the level of the classroom teacher. Teachers should not be held accountable for factors over which they have little to no control. Standards imposed on teachers should not require the opposite of what science recommends as best practices in instruction.
To think, students must rely on knowledge that has been well-memorized. That’s uncontested science. The brain our species has been given was designed by natural selection, and is not what we might wish it to be.
Here is a thought, Rick. Tests don’t make students smarter. Making them harder doesn’t make students smarter.
All the disparagement of kids and teachers doesn’t explain how this country became the most powerful economic engine in the world.
You look down your nose at everyone who is not as smart as you. Not a good stance to take when you are writing on a blog read by thousands of teachers who see kids everyday who need eyeglasses, basic medical care, a decent meal, a roof over their heads. As FDR would have put it, “Freedom from want.”
I should have mentioned that I meant testing that did not include SATs, ACTs, or GREs. I figured you’d be smart enough to figure that out. My mistake. Those tests do not impact the careers of teachers, nor do they put added stress on 3rd through 8th graders.
Diane — We both spoke on an NYC panel in about 2007 on instruction, and we both agreed strongly on the importance of curriculum that worked.
You were the professor. I was the high school teacher. But despite that difference, I promise, Diane, I did not look down on you..
I look down on Nelson because he’s only willing to engage in a marginally significant, narrow topic area and, he is unwilling to criticize ignorant, billionaire prescriptions for other kids’ educations. The rich who are driving policy don’t fund community schools because they live in wealthy enclaves far removed and, they send their own kids to private schools. (BTW, Bill Gates lives in the state with the most regressive tax system in the nation.)
If Nelson and the villainthropists cared about productivity, economic growth, etc., they would focus on the financial sector’s estimated 2%. drag on GDP. Wall Streeters are quite proficient at math and they are leeches on American prosperity.
Nelson should identify for us the jobs expected to experience the greatest growth, not percentages, actual number of new positions and then, announce the level of math required in those jobs. He should enlighten readers about the maximum paycheck that most workers can expect from the men driving policy, like Gates, who oppose raising the minimum wage. He should tell us about accounting jobs, middle management jobs, etc. that used to hire Americans with math skills. (Think India now.) He should tell us about the loss of engineering jobs that required math skills when America transitioned to services instead of manufacturing.
I look down on Nelson because he won’t address THE problem as characterized by the following statistic, the Walton family has $144.7 billion more wealth than 42% of the nation combined and the Walton share is growing rapidly.
I’m with you completely on this one, Linda. I’m still smoldering about the false equivalence of comparing his GRE tests with high-stakes testing in public schools. Arrogant sophistry at its finest.
Analyze the data, for the kids sake
Those who have actually done just that have found that
Poor ranking on international tests misleading about U.S. performance
Socioeconomic inequality among U.S. students skews international comparisons of test scores, finds a new report released today by the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the Economic Policy Institute. When differences in countries’ social class compositions are adequately taken into account, the performance of U.S. students in relation to students in other countries improves markedly.The report, What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance?, also details how errors in selecting sample populations of test-takers and arbitrary choices regarding test content contribute to results that appear to show U.S. students lagging.
https://ed.stanford.edu/news/poor-ranking-international-tests-misleading-about-us-performance-new-report-finds
Rick asks, “Should not we be asking why Massachusetts and Minnesota did so well with science-recommended math standards, but other similar states did not?”
A more pertinent question: How is it, in an age when any state’s stds are available at the touch of a finger, that states weren’t simply encouraged to borrow MA’s or MN’s? How did we end up instead w/a panel of mostly non-K12-math-teachers– in fact, mostly testing co reps– reinventing the wheel, creating math stds that were in fact unfavorably compared to MA’s?
Hint: politics and marketing dominated the process.
Dear be3 –
On MA and MN, you hit the nail on the head.
On who to blame, I think we need to fix the problem, not the blame.
Politics, yes. Arne Duncan used RTTT $$$ to shove the CC down state throats. But then again, as bad as the CC math standards are, they likely are not worse in MOST states (MA, NH excepted) than the state standards they replaced.
Textbook publishers likely lose profits on new standards. New, different books cost lots to produce, but local K-12 districts have the same minimal budgets for books either way.
The 2009 CC math writers were 3, two good math and math/science experts, and one person who preached that kids are better off not knowing anything than having to memorize anything. Let’em reason and learn naturally, he said. And he was unopposed. The math 2 knew zip about how the brain works.
And to be fair, science did not reach consensus that the fairy tale of effortless learning did not work in the brain until about 2012, and research consensus takes a while to get around.
If the CC leaders had put a cognitive scientist on the math writing committee, they would have said, we are 90% sure that not memorizing fundamentals does not work. But 100% just took time and research dollars for new instruments to study the brain.
For the billionaires who have spent millions on “education reform,” it’s all been wasted and some of them admit that.
And privatizing education will never work financially for the profiteers. Public education will always be way less costly because teachers are willing to make some financial sacrifices to work in public service, and that subsidizes public schools bigtime. Anyone who has worked 5 minutes in K-12 know that.
So let’s focus on fixing the problem.
Diane’s lifetime academic contributions to understanding education have been incredible. Diane’s blog has 3 premises: Teachers deserve support, reforms have overtested kids, schools were doing fine before NCLB testing. And she’s right bigtime on the first two.
But those of us who were working in good K-12 schools from 1985 to 2002 NCLB saw them fall apart with our own two eyes. Kids suddenly got big problems in reading and math. We were pretty sure it was the curriculum, but could not explain why the “reforms” were not working.
The non-teaching curriculum establishment was seduced by the fairy tale that with computers, the kids would not need to know anything. So letter-sound correlation and times table drill went out, and knowing fundamentals went out with them. They were in charge, not teachers.
It took until 2012 for any educator journal (Clark, American Educator) to write that knowledge recallable from memory was essential for problem solving. At that point, for those reading, the reason achievement fell apart suddenly became scientifically clear
.
But in 2019, most educators still don’t know that science has proven the brain is very limited when trying to reason with not-well-memorized information, and memorization takes effort and time. That knowledge has frankly not been well summarized outside AFT’s American Educator. Plus, perhaps it is not in PD because folks prefer not to hear that learning is hard work.
Want to find blame? Blame wishful thinking. Blame computers. Blame the slow pace of science.
But would not our time better be spent asking: Knowing the new science, how can we help kids?
— rick nelson
Nelson’s perceptive blindness-
(1) “Our time would be better spent” ….No, the best expenditure of Americans’ time is guaranteeing economic opportunity and thwarting the concentration of wealth that strangles it.
(2) “Diane’s contribution”.. IMO, it is, foremost, an understanding of the threat to, coupled with her action to stop the erosion of, democracy. She recognizes authoritarian leaders and American oligarchs are a clear and present danger.
The Captain of the Titanic and Nelson share the same level of confidence.
There is no iceberg. “Privatizing education will never work….” Nelson’s perception- American oligarchs continue to spend and ratchet up spending because they are too stupid to understand they will fail. The public will not reach a tipping point where they defund education because their tax dollars (a) line the pockets of grifters i.e. the richest 0.1% who live in distant enclaves (b) fund religious blowhards operating charters (3) are used to foment trouble in nations like Turkey and (4) are too high to afford because their wages are so low. There is no iceberg- The public will not reach the conclusion that for most people the only jobs available will pay minimum wage and will only require minimal educational skills.
Nelson,
Read “Making Better Big Bets”, by Grant and Culwell, Winter 2019, at
The Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Gates and his money have hindered work in the area of tropical disease. It used to be that scientists from all of these countries would gather and collaborate and share their ideas on how to solve the problem. Old Bill showed up and threw his cash around and collaboration stopped. The company who developed “the cure” would get the Gates prize. He killed collaboration with competition and the poor people in these 3rd world countries continue to die from disease. Bill has done NOTHING good with his money. He deserves a hot place in HELL for all of eternity.
Exactly. Any “good work” Gates has allegedly done in any field has ulterior motives and negative consequences. Education is just the most obvious example because so many people are onto him (mostly teachers, students and parents who have suffered at his hands). Far fewer people have looked into his work with infectious diseases or water supply because (a) fewer people are affected (other than poor people in Africa who lack the means to investigate and fight back) and (b) it so damn hard to question the “noble” intent behind “fighting infectious diseases” and “providing clean water”.
No need to debate motives in the case of Gates interference with schools.
One need only look at facts.
Common Core was developed by people who lacked the relevant background in education and was imposed (untested) on millions of school children.
It was essentially a gigantic experiment on children, which was carried out with NO consent of parents or teachers.
The way Common Core came into being was through backroom dealmaking that was fully intended to subvert democracy. This involved what can only be called collusion between Bill Gates, David Coleman, the US Department of education and state Governor’s, with zero input or debate by state legislatures.
And I would only add that the experimentation continues on millions of school children to this day.
And as Bill Gates has said we won’t know if it worked until ten years have passed. He said that about 8 years ago, by the way.
Bill Gates motives are irrelevant.
What IS relevant is that he had NO RIGHT to perform experiments on other people’s children without their consent.
Experiments that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
And incidentally, Bill Gates never even defined what he meant by worked, so after ten years have passed he can claim his education stuff (which is what he called it) worked
This is pretty much par for the course. His experiments are not even legitimate scientific experiments because they don’t follow scientific protocols for hypotheses, tests, controls and the like so, even if the hypotheses were clearly defined at the start (which they never are with Gates) it would be impossible to determine whether the results refuted or supported the hypotheses.
Despite Gates pretense to being data driven and scientific in his approach, nothing could be further from the truth.
His idea of science is to throw jello at the wall and see if it sticks.
By the way, given Gates Foundations role in getting Common Core into schools across the country, i am a bit surprised that there has been no class action suit against Gates foundation over the Common Core brought by hundreds, thousands or even millions of parents.
Even if the parents eventually lost the suit (which is fairly likely given that Gates could hire all the best lawyers), what was exposed during the discovery phase of the legal process (eg, emails between Gates Foundation and US Department of Ed, Arne Duncan, David Coleman and various Governor s ) would be well worth the effort.
I know I would donate money to bring such a suit and I bet so would lots of other people throughout the country.
And on the offhand chance that the parents prevailed, it would be a good way to make money for the schools.
The suit could ask for an amount that was commensurate with what the schools throughout the country paid to implement Common Core and all the curriculum and tests that accompanied it. My guess is that amount would be into the billions if not tens of billions.
And, luckily, Bill Gates has enough to cover it.😀
Though he might have to sell some of his Microslop stocks, poor dear.
Of course, now that the 🐈 is out of the bag, the email purging will probably begin.
Rick, it’s good to hear a critique of CCSS-Math. We’ve long blasted ELA in detail, but haven’t heard much about math here for a while. The main issue was the emphasis on young elem students’ “explaining” math concepts. That trend in stds/assessments discourages/ squeezes time for rote work. The verbal/written explanations are age-inappropriate, often confusing for kids. Your info on cognitive science seems to back this up.
But that’s about the “math wars;” my kids’ ’90’s elem texts were full of the same thing. Back then teachers could find workarounds, better tools– & design their own tests. CCSS cast the “conceptual” approach in concrete in the stds, then boxed it in w/aligned assessments.
You can’t say “testing good, stds bad,” because annual stdzd tests aligned to bad grade-by-grade stds are going to bad, period. And tests for admission to grad school are “high-stakes”– (so far!)– only for the student. Scores on annual [3rd-8th plus 11th] tests reqd since NCLB do not “count” for students; they’re used to grade teachers and schools.
“And tests for admission to grad school are “high-stakes”– (so far!)– only for the student. Scores on annual [3rd-8th plus 11th] tests reqd since NCLB do not “count” for students; they’re used to grade teachers and schools.”
Yet under NCLB/RTTT/CCSS testing the actual test takers had virtually zero accountability. These tests did not even pass the “Does this count?” rule of teaching!
I give Gates credit for one thing- alone among ed reformers he doesn’t pretend public schools don’t exist.
He “gives” them things no one wants but at least he admits there are public schools in this country.
In that sense he’s way more in touch than any of the ed reformers in government, who work for a wholly theoretical privatized system that is their ideological dream.
At least he nailed down the basic “public schools exist” concept that seems to elude the vast majority of them 🙂
He wants them around so he can use young people as consumers of his personalized learning. He probably figured he can make more money inserting his cyber programs into public schools because public officials are cheaper to buy than anyone making a ton of profit from a charter school chain. The charter schools will try to protect their turf.
Honestly, I think Gates prefers public schools. If anything, he’d like the entire nation to be on a federal public school system. One large system is easier to work with (and profit from) than zillions of smaller schools and systems all doing their own things.
The entire nation, minus his own children, of course.
Yuh, precisely, dienne. Why would he look anywhere else? 85% of the market is there, all answering to one DofEd.
It really is nuts to have all the “impartial rankings” of Gates initiatives all funded by Gates.
That’s crazy.
10 million IS a tiny amount in this context. It really seems more like face-saving.
They spent a ton on Common Core. I don’t think such fancy people could ever admit that was wasted, so they’ll keep some life-support funding level going and hope no one notices.
As I have written before I don’t have any problem with national standards, which I know puts me in the minority here. That makes perfect sense to me – I’m simply not attached to “Ohio educational standards” – I don’t even know what that means or why it would be important to have different standards in all 50 states.
I would much prefer if one billionaire didn’t create and promote them, but that’s my only objection to the concept of national standards.
Chiara.
Since 2010, various groups have written standards for pre-K-12 education in 16 subjects/domains. Some standards are written for every grade level, some are written for a span of several grades.
I created spreadsheets to quantify this quest for standardization. Just for pre-k to grade 8 there were 3,558 standards, including some really scary standards for social emotional learning. Many of these standards were redundant, Some were contradictory. Most seem to have been based on the idea that if you write down as many standards as you can that exercise you will gain time in the curriculum.
Adding to this mischief is the work of tech lobbyist Ken Kay who twice tried to get his 21st Century Skills meme hardwired into Federal legislation. He also wanted tax breaks from corporations that would endorse the agenda.
There is what he offered up–gleaned from human resource handbooks and what his tech company friends sought.
21st Century Skills. Eleven “core” subjects (English, reading or language arts, world languages, arts, mathematics, economics, science, geography, history, government and civics)
Plus five to seven Interdisciplinary literacy themes: Global Awareness; Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy; Civic Literacy; Health Literacy; Environmental Literacy.
Plus four to six Learning and Innovation Skills: Creativity and Innovation; Critical Thinking and Problem Solving; Communication; Collaboration.
Plus three to five Information, Media and Technology Skills: such as: Information Literacy; Media Literacy; Information, Communications and Technology Literacy.
Plus five to ten Life and Career Skills: Flexibility and Adaptability, Initiative and Self-Direction, Social and Cross-Cultural Skills, Productivity and Accountability, Leadership and Responsibility.
You may recall that under the Goals 2000 Act, various groups were induced to produce “world-class” voluntary national standards. There were some competition between history and social studies standards groups. The outcome was this: Standards were written in 14 broad domains of study, encompassing 24 subjects, 259 standards, and 4100 grade-level benchmarks. I read and commented on all of those standards in an unpublished paper. The history standards were bizarre and on some matters of arts/culture had errors of fact.
That Goals 2000 compendium may still be availble here: availableContent Knowledge: A Compendium of Standards and Benchmarks for K-12 Education, “Process” Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning. Current website http://www2.mcrel.org/compendium/ or ask me for a copy of a conference paper “Some Hidden Meanings in all of Those Goals 2000 Standards.“
What we do not need are more national standards. We need more ample and aspirational visions for education with attention to purposes and values beyond the “college and/or career” meme marketed as if written in stone. Life is larger than going to school and getting a job.
Chiara, I think we just don’t have the type of govt [strong states’ rights] or policies [loosely-regulated capitalism] or culture [ornery individualism] to support a concept like “national education standards.” The sheer number of “standards” contained in CCSS or the proposed schemes noted by Laura tell the story. They are not really stds at all, they’re attempts by one group or another to to dictate content (& even pedagogy) according to agendas like selling sw/hw, &/or religious/ political/ ed-bee-in-bonnet ideology, peddled as workforce skills or what have you.
Compare to industry stds, organized by discipline under natl prof orgs, w/each std reviewed/ appvd/ tested w/feedback- update loop by all members. Members are spread across companies w/competing designs/ markets; consensus requires broad enough stds to allow variation/ innovation in achieving them.
Or compare to other countries’ natl ed stds. The only ones I’ve reviewed are from Netherlands (as they’re online), but I suspect they’re typical: broad guidelines allowing max flexibility/ creativity/ innovation to achieve. Possible in a socialist democracy – doesn’t hurt that they’re smaller & more culturally homogenous – where public goods are managed by central govt, w/considerable review- feedback- update from all stakeholders.
Nothing ever changes. The money wins.
I am so disgusted like Trump ‘acting ‘presidential’ –Watching Trump mouth platitudes he can’t possibly believe isn’t comforting. It’s horrifying. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/09/trump-tried-play-normal-president-television-result-was-very-strange/?utm_term=.6ee8e17c3163&wpisrc=nl_act4&wpmm=1
Gates has a huge ego problem. If he didn’t have this issue, he would just GO AWAY and build his perfect city in the desert. But, he can’t. He’s like dump in many respects, just not as FAT.
Given how sick he obviously is, I suspect he will be going away sooner rather than later. He actually looks older at 64 than his father who is almost 90.
No one will miss him (except maybe his wife and children).
Certainly not the millions of students, teachers and parents who were forced to be Guinea pigs in his toxic education experiments.
Well, I am one of the recipients of half of the $10 million. I got this in my email.
From: BILL GATES www.w@forest.ocn.ne.jp
Greetings You have been gifted $5 MILLION USD From Mr Bill Gates. Contact me at this email for your claim: mrgates29@gmail.com
I hope this information meet you well as I know you will be curious to know why/how I selected you to receive a sum of $5,000,000,00 USD, our information below is 100% legitimate, please see the link below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
I BILL GATES and my wife decided to donate the sum of $5,000,000,00 USD to you as part of our charity project to improve the 10 lucky individuals all over the world from our $65 Billion Usd I and My Wife Mapped out to help people. We prayed and searched over the internet for assistance and i saw your profile on Microsoft email owners list and picked you. Melinda my wife and i have decided to make sure this is put on the internet for the world to see. as you could see from the webpage above,am not getting any younger and you can imagine having no much time to live. although am a Billionaire investor and we have helped some charity organizations from our Fund.
…
As you can see, Gates is now located in Japan. Their, the life expectancy is greater than in the US, so that may be the reason for his change of headquarters.
Surprised he is not in Nigeria.
Some of us wish he were.
But I would not wish that on the Nigerians.
Im sure they have probably already had more than their fair share of Bill and Melinda.
Did he ask for your bank account number by any chance?
Not yet. On the other hand, the amazing thing about the email is that it does imitate the basic style of Gates: it says that I should use the money to help the poor.
To facilitate the payment process of the funds ($5,000,000,00 USD) which have been donated solely to you, you are to send me
your full names……………..
your contact address………
country :……………
your personal telephone number……………
SEND YOUR ABOVE DETAILS TO mrgates29@gmail.com
so that i can forward your payment information to you immediately. I am hoping that you will be able to use the money wisely and judiciously over there in your City. please you have to do your part to also alleviate the level of poverty in your region, help as many you can help once you have this money in your personal account because that is the only objective of donating this money to you in the first place.
When I was teaching CC for students at the university who wanted to be elementary school teachers, both the students and I found the book inadequate. So I wrote up some notes for them. Here are the (incomplete) notes for fractions.
Click to access 1480fractions.pdf
As you can see, the concepts are very difficult to explain even for university students, while kids in low grades certainly can start developing a sense for this stuff.
I think this is the main observation about CC: it is one thing to teach a concept to kids so that it makes sense to them, and it’s an entirely different thing to ask them to explain the concept. Understanding of a concept has many levels, and the ability to explain is close to the highest level. Kids even in high school shouldn’t be expected to be at this highest level.
Teachers have many ways of checking kids’ level of understanding, but inviting a clear explanation shouldn’t be one of them. Thinking that somehow tests can do this job is beyond me.
That is so excellent, Mâté! I wish you had been my teacher in 3rd & 4th grade.* And this statement is on-the-nose– common sense yet elusive for non-teachers– proving that non-teachers wrote CCSS-math: “Understanding of a concept has many levels, and the ability to explain is close to the highest level. Kids even in high school shouldn’t be expected to be at this highest level.”
*My mother was both artsy/ creative & math/ science-oriented. She was a bit flummoxed at producing a dghtr so similar to herself yet lacking the math side. She always blamed it on the teacher-churn in my rural schoolhouse 3rd-4th gr classroom, pinpointing “fractions” as the key foundation not properly established 😉 However I was good at hisch geometry– &, working as a young adult in constr/engrg admin, became handy w/mental math, large-scale estimating, amortization et al. [Also better than Ma at fine arts] I think I was just more visually-oriented. Might have been a decent math student, had I been taught per yr linked guidelines!
Furthermore, explaining the “why” of math is independent of using it properly.
Understanding of a concept has many levels, and the ability to explain is close to the highest level.
The demand for young children to explain how they got their answers was what bothered me most about cc math.
I will never forget the day one of my nephews came home in tears because he had failed a math test, not because he had gotten the answers wrong, but because he had not provided the explanation for how he got his answers that the teacher was looking for.
What a load of manure.
CC killed both his interest in math and confidence in his ability to do it.
When I learned math back in the old days, the answer was what mattered, not whether you could explain how you got the answer (and in several different ways, as was required of my nephews).
I had a similar story with my son. Even worse: in 6th grade, he used to come up with his own methods to solve math problems, and I saw that he was very gifted. But the teacher wanted him to give explanations every time he solved a problem, and since my son couldn’t give an explanation for his method, the teacher wanted him to learn the explanations he taught in class. My son was convinced that he was just not smart enough to comprehend that stuff, and lost interest in math forever.
The demand for explanation in math is similar if kids were asked for grammatical structures for all the sentences they write down or speak. Since math is a language, it should be taught with similar methods and patience as parents teach the first language to their kids. Kids learn English as they do lots of activities, play, hence math should be mostly taught through activities.
Teach a language mostly through grammar and memorizing words, and you get what I got after 10 years of learning Russian: I can read, I can recite grammatical rules, but I can only speak English with my Russian friends.
We can detect kids’ understanding of math similarly to how we can detect their understanding of the rules of English. My daughter used to say “I eated a banana” and refused to say “I ate a banana” since, she said, “It makes no sense to say ‘ate’ when I can say ‘eated’ like with all the other words.”. She caved in faster with “ran” since it was not easy to say “runned”, though she did try for a year or so.
Your analogy to for-lang pedagogy is closest.
By the time your native-Eng-speaking kids are studying Eng grammar, they are already fluent speakers, and have an intuitive grasp of its structures. Formal grammatical instruction in native lang will help with reading complex literary works, producing refined writing, learning other langs.
But old-fashioned US for-lang pedagogy was [still is in too many places] an extension of teaching Latin/ Greek, i.e., reading comprehension was the primary goal. Early-start methods focus first on listening comp & developing basic conversational skills. Grammar gets pieced in as they need it to say what they want to say. It still takes a lot of class-hrs to develop some fluency, & only if conversation is foundational in upper levels too. But no question: initating/ responding in conversation (&writing down yr thoughts) is a totally “other” skill-set from grammar/ reading – just as explaining how you did it/ why it works is a different skill from doing the problems.
My nephew was in fifth grade when he failed that test.
I can only guess at how many others were turned off to math like your son and my nephew.
Far from teaching people how to think, CC turns people off to thinking.
Máté, you had to pressure your song into explaining his method. Giving an answer without explanation is not an answer, as a math teacher you should know better.
“The demand for explanation in math is similar if kids were asked for grammatical structures for all the sentences they write down or speak.” — You are absolutely correct. This is what they do in other countries, this is what they used to do in this country a hundred years ago. Not anymore. Now people write “would of” instead of “would’ve” because this is how they hear it, and no one explained them proper syntax.
I am amazed you are suggesting neither teaching nor testing English syntax. I am amazed that your students – college students no less – need a brochure on fractions, 6th grade material, and you consider this is just fine. If this is not a failure of their schools that what is it? Are they all mathematically disabled? Right, so let’s spend more money, hire more teachers to use the same non-working methods in our schools. As long as this is something not offered by Bill Gates.
Everything at the right time, BA. Are you saying, BA, they used to teach English to 2-year-olds by explaining grammar to them? When was that?
Are you saying 3rd graders should explain how and why common denominators work?
Are you saying, your generation (whatever it is) can explain fractions and the arithmetic operations with them to other people?
Are you saying, your generation didn’t have math anxiety?
Are you saying, there is no need to explain low grade teachers how fractions work so that they can survive in the climate of the CC system?
Please stop twisting my words. I am all for explanations—at the right time and at the right level.
And, yes, it’s foolish to think that tests can give meaningful feedback on kids’ understanding of math.
Did I say that? I said that whenever one is taught to write, one is taught grammar. This is how I was taught. I cannot recall when exactly grammar has started, but no later than 2nd grade. Are you one of those who write “would of”? No, you write correctly. Why? Because you know grammar. Now go to elementary or middle school and ask kids whether they are taught formal grammar. They will laugh in your face.
They should explain the algorithm they use, this is good enough. Whether they understand how this algorithm works is another matter. Many teachers do not understand it themselves.
The algorithm itself – yes, of course. It is like “press right pedal to go, press middle pedal to stop”, this is good enough for explanation, I don’t need to know how the engine works. But simply saying that the car goes because I tell it to go does not cut it. Is this simple enough explanation for you?
The anxiety was not as high, yes, also because we were regularly called up to the blackboard to solve a problem in front of the class, which is a taboo in modern American system. This deprives a teacher of learning about student’s thought process; written bubble tests do not provide enough info.
There is such a need, of course. But it is another question how they became teachers without knowing this.
The same I am asking of you.
“The algorithm itself – yes, of course. It is like “press right pedal to go, press middle pedal to stop”, this is good enough for explanation, I don’t need to know how the engine works. But simply saying that the car goes because I tell it to go does not cut it. Is this simple enough explanation for you?”
What you are describing has nothing to do with understanding fractions, and hence unacceptable under CC. CC does “suggest”, kids do look under the hood.
Could you point to a specific section in CCSM that requires to “look under the hood” and that does not take algorithm for an answer? And by CCSM I mean corestandards.org, not something like Pearson or EngageNY or whatever else, because you know, implementations.
But if looking under the hood you mean things like “Understand a fraction a/b as a multiple of 1/b” or “Understand a multiple of a/b as a multiple of 1/b” then I see nothing wrong with explaining it and even with demanding understanding of this. This is very easy to explain on handmade paper models.
BTW, according to CC, fractions are 3rd and 4th grade material, not 6th.
Are you telling me, BA, that this page
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/4/NF/
is only asking a poor fourth grader to add and multiply fractions? Are you saying that none of this stuff have made it into actual tests?
The CC math standards (CCMS) do not ask students to be able to recall from memory ANY subtraction or division facts. Cognitive scientists are emphatic that ALL fundamental math facts must be “automated.”
The CCMS ask students to do multistep calculations in first grade, but do not ask that they know their addition facts until the end of second grade. Cognitive science is clear that, due to measured, verified limits in working memory, most students will not be able to do such calculations in first grade. This means by the end of first grade, most have decided they are dumb at math, and the rest of math becomes very difficult to teach.
For the many ways science says the CCMS ask students to solve problems in ways science says their brains cannot do, see http://www.ChemReview.Net/CCMS.pdf .
No one on the team that wrote the CCMS had any knowledge of what cognitive science has learned about working memory. At the time, the science was new and not widely disseminated, so the writers deserve some slack. But in 2019, it’s clear the CCMS in many places need to be revised to come into alignment with how science says the brain works, or the U.S. will continue to have grave difficulty graduating STEM majors.
“At the time, the science was new and not widely disseminated, so the writers deserve some slack. ”
No, they don’t. The wrote up a theory of standards, without research backing it up, and then this theory was forced on millions of kids. I give out no slack for this whatsoever.
Mate, I have absolutely no problems with the page you linked to: http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/4/NF/ I don’t know how much of this is going to be on a test, because again, CC is just a bunch of specs and recommendations, not a full-blown curriculum with corresponding textbooks, teacher books, problem books, tests, etc. But all of this in one or another fashion must be understood by 4th graders, they are not 1st grades anymore. And by the way, this all can be easily explained on paper models, all you need a sheet of paper, pencil, maybe scissors and maybe color markers. Cheap and visual. Too bad this is not in CCSS, they shot themselves in a foot by not producing a complete curriculum.
” I don’t know how much of this is going to be on a test, because again, CC is just a bunch of specs and recommendations, not a full-blown curriculum with corresponding textbooks, ”
It’s fruitless to pretend, CC is just a set of recommendations. States were bribed to adopt it along with the evaluation and accountability system based on it. Even now that CC has such a bad rep, states like mine don’t dare to drop it, just renamed it.
The most ridiculous thing about the requirement for an explanation is that some of the greatest mathematicians of all time could not explain how they came up with what they did.
As I am sure you probably know, Ramanujan came up with bizarre infinite series for pi that he claimed had been given to him by an Indian goddess in dreams!
Good observation, Poet. I can always ask a kid “How did you get that”, and it’s amazing to hear all the different explanations they give, including lots of “I dunno”s accompanied with shrugging shoulders.
It’s entirely possible that when CC wants kids to be able to explain their work, it only means to ask the teacher to listen to all these individual and highly varying explanations kids give, but since CC is accompanied with tests, these explanations demand clarification and standardization.
As a mathematician, I go through this process all the time: I come up with an idea to solve a problem, but then I may spend a long time to clarify it enough so that I can explain it to my collaborators. A very difficult process. And then, when we write down our ideas in an article, we have to translate our ideas into standard math language. This part is the worst.
Yet, we want kids, from an early age, to learn to do these standardized explanations and reproduce it quickly on tests. I am telling you, it’s insane. Only math profs could have come up with such an idea; teachers in the trenches know better.
Cogntive experts call this the difference between explicit and implicit understanding.
In math, we need a few people who can “explain their answers.” That’s why we have math majors, and in the U.S., we graduate about 18,000 a year.
But the U.S. need about 2 million people a year who can use math as a tool to solve problems (carpenters, plumbers, scientists, engineers, accountants, health care workers) even if they can’t explain why. Science calls that “implicit” understanding. The brain knows how to solve the problem, but the information is not allowed into your conscious memory — which needs to be reserved for problems where you haven’t learned to do the right thing automatically.
Can you explain how to tie your shoes? Drive a car? Write machine language programs for your cell phone? Nope. Yet we can use these tools quite well.
Science says making students “explain why” is a big waste of time (unless you are a college math major), time that is needed to practice so your brain can learn to do the right thing intuitively.
And yes, that’s another way the CCMS is at odds with what science says are best practices in education.
Maybe the grant writers might fund some PD helping teachers learn what the new science says the best practices are…..
Eric, I am reading your report now. Bonus points for implicating NCTM in decreased attention to math facts and algorithms, and in promoting calculators. I deduct points for not implicating NSF, which funded NCTM’s math programs. Anyway, if you are saying that 2+3=5 must be automated knowledge, then you already failed this kid, because this is not math, this is pure memorization of symbols. It should all start from combining || with ||| getting |||||. Now we assign symbols to all these quantities, then we assign symbols for combining the piles, then we realize that we will need infinite amount of symbols if we keep going like this, so we introduce place value as a logical step, and select the base (10 in our case), then create ten symbols, and go from there. What CCSS says about learning by heard addition of single-digit numbers and nothing else is completely right to me. That is how I’ve been taught, this is what I know. I was not taught “division facts” or “subtraction facts” because they can be derived from addition and multiplication facts. If I did not know what 56/8 was I would keep trying 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 until I get the answer or somewhere nearby. Or I would do 8*10 then divide by two and go from there. There are many approaches to get the result. I am completely in agreement with CCSM in this regard. On the other hand, I don’t get where calculators came from. You say that if a student cannot get the result from LTM, he would use calculator. Why? This is what the algorithms are for.
“There are many approaches to get the result. ”
Yeah, but low graders probably would get frustrated trying to deal with all these approaches.
The basic question is what part of math needs to be memorized and how, and this needs to be broken down for each grade. Whatever cognitive scientists come up with needs to be compared with teachers’ actual experience.
The argument that “to make efficient, effective calculations, facts need to be memorized to the level of automation” is not exactly convincing for the entirety of math, however adequate it sounds for learning the basic arithmetic algorithms. This argument seems to consider speed as an essential factor in learning math and solving problems, and that is simply not the case. Calculating speedily is essential only in tests which are about speedy and accurate calculations—like the standardized tests associated with CC or ACT. Very few people need this ability, and the purpose of learning math cannot be adjusted to these people’s needs.
So the question is what cognitive scientists have to say about learning math beyond the level of elementary calculations. Math is not just a collection of algorithms and, more importantly, it’s not (it shouldn’t be) that important to whip out correct answers to problems quickly (“efficiently”).
In my experience, this demand for speed is the primary reason for math anxiety.
Just yesterday my daughter asked me to explain a formula to her. I asked, “Why didn’t you ask the prof?” She said, “I did, but he said, just memorize the formula and learn how to apply it.”
I think the older a child is, the more they want to know why they should learn something.
Ideally, this is what elementary school is for – to absorb it all slowly. Pace is increased in high school, so by that time all the needed skills and algorithms must be learned. Frustrated? They get frustrated from anything now that has response time longer than half a second – this is the ADHD generation.
Exactly. And I am in agreement with CCSS that only addition and multiplication of single-digit numbers must be memorized, and how the decimal place value works – this is it.
I beg to differ. Exactly the opposite: it is the math profs who do not need the ability to quickly solve a differential equation, but someone who needs to figure out change or 15% discount from a $20 purchase must do it in a split second. Yes, modern cash registers do it automatically, but hilarity ensues when the register breaks. I’ve seen it, this is a sad picture, I had to leave the store without my groceries because the clerk was too slow trying to work out change. Or you may be a carpenter, or mason calculating number of bricks, or a nurse. There are many situations requiring quick calculations using very simple formulas. And this is what basic arithmetic for, after all, it was invented thousands years ago because people needed to count stuff in real life.
She should have pushed further. The fact that she backed down confirms her inability to stand for herself. Kids nowadays are not called up to the blackboard to solve a problem in front of the class because it is too intimidating. This practice produces snowflakes.
” beg to differ. Exactly the opposite: it is the math profs who do not need the ability to quickly solve a differential equation, but someone who needs to figure out change or 15% discount from a $20 purchase must do it in a split second.”
For whatever reason, you keep talking about low level arithmetic, exactly like the cognitive scientists. ACT and high school are not about that, but speedy calculations and formula memorizations are still emphasized over anything else.
It’s another matter that kids don’t learn to calculate so that one day, when they sit behind a cash register which breaks down, they can calculate the change the customers deserve, or, in case they become a carpenter (less than .03% of the population), they can estimate distances or building materials. And they certainly don’t learn about how to add fractions because they may need it in their job with way less than 1% probability.
The pragmatic value of most math content learned in k-12 is close to zero for well over 90% (probably close to 99%) of the population.
As for demanding explanations for formulas: most math and other science curriculums are packed with much more formulas and procedures than there is time for the teacher or prof to explain. The CC supposedly addressed this issue, but it didn’t. Teachers are in a greater rush than ever before due to the demands of the tests they have to prepare the students for.
Because you were talking about fractions.
After this statement I see no reason to continue this argument. Let’s just leave it at that.
BA and Mate –
Science and our experience agree that the rules for learning speech are very different before and after puberty. All hearing children automatically learn to understand and speak a dialect (or two) that they hear extensively. In humans, learning a language as a child is powerfully instinctive. You don’t need to know rules for grammar to speak.
After adult instinctive drives (whatever they are) kick in, learning a new language becomes difficult, like learning math at any age. Knowing grammar rules can help in adult language learning, but learning reading and writing initially, a new language after age 12ish, and math at any age, is tough because it is not what the brain evolved to do. Speech gave our ancestors a better chance at survival in hunting and defense. Knowing more math than counting to 5 apparently did not. So learning math requires focused effort.
And BA – being able to recall math facts automatically, withOUT calculating, is not necessary mathematically, but IS necessary cognitively because of limitations of what the brain’s working memory (where you think) can do. That’s why the CCMS are wrong because they claim students do not need to know automatic recall of subtraction and addition facts. Recall of all basics must be automated because of working memory limits with all non-automated information.
To teach math most effectively, you need to know both math AND how the student brain works. Both are necessary. Neither are sufficient. For a quick write-up of what science knows on how the BRAIN works learning MATH, see http://www.ChemReview.Net/CCMS.pdf .
— rick nelson
“Recall of all basics must be automated because of working memory limits with all non-automated information.”
No doubt, some automation of basics are needed to be learned in low grades, but this doesn’t mean, heavy emphasis on memorization of facts needs to continue in math all through K-12. As far as I can tell, this heavy reliance on working memory is needed at tests where answers need to be provided rather (and most of the time, very) quickly.
I read your article and Willingham’s writings on the topic. The conclusions seem to imply that students with the best “automated” knowledge of facts should be the best in math or science. This is most certainly not the case, though it does have relation to scores on timed tests.
Knowing formulas well has very little to do with understanding math, and since the need for understanding math increases with grade level, I do not see the strict relevance of the paper you cite, though for solving problems on tests, I have no doubts about their relevance. The way math facts are presented to students, how it enters their memory is much more important than the fact itself. It, of course, is possible to tell kids “if you flip a coin 100 times, you expect 50 heads” and ask them to memorize this fact, but a much better way is to ask them to actually flip a coin 100 times and count the heads. Of course, the former is a much faster, more efficient way for the kids to learn this fact, but which way ensures an appreciation and understanding better, not to mention the joy attached to it?
It’s close to useless for students to recite “The three medians of a triangle are concurrent at a point called the centroid.”, in fact, in such form, it may scare the heck out of them. The actual meaning of the fact is much more important. But this understanding and appreciation of the meaning takes time, and cannot and shouldn’t be tested.
Here is what I started writing on this subject 2 years ago
Click to access classrooms_not_ER.pdf
Mate –
Unless you are only teaching math graduate students, society is not paying you to produce the “best” in math and science. We are paying you so that the majority of our citizens know how to solve the many math problems that most citizens encounter on the job and in life (including handling loans, credit cards, and grocery shopping).
Even to be a grad student in chemistry, I did not need to understand math. I needed then and now to be able to solve problems, not to explain WHY I took the math steps I did.
Math teachers need to be able to explain why, but what nearly all of the rest of us need to remember is what works, and not why it works.
Science says those who use math as a tool need intuitive, not explicit, understanding, because the brain runs on unconscious understanding. And to the extent you disagree with scientific experts on how the brain works on questions of how the brain works, they are by definition right, are they not? Isn’t science about what is true?
Can you diagram the sentences you write? Even those of us who cannot manage to apply the complex rules of grammar correctly, because of the unconscious understanding that the brain of our species evolved to learn and apply.
Mathematicians need to understand math. Math instructors need to be experts in both math and the science of how we teach the student brain to solve problems.
— rick
Oops. Should be: CCMS are wrong because they do not require recall of subtraction and DIVISION facts.
No doubt, that’s one of the problems.