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Florida: Fear in the Classroom, the Republican Goal

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2023 //
38

The Miami Herald published an editorial describing the climate of fear that’s descended on the classrooms of Florida. That’s exactly what Republicans want, says the editorial board. Once people start self-censoring, the battle for censorship is won.

The editorial board wrote:

The fear is the point.

Schools in Florida have been canceling — and then, in some cases, reinstating — Advanced Placement psychology courses for high school students because they’ve been told by the College Board, or simply believe, the classes would violate the state’s ban on lessons involving sexual orientation and gender identity.

The worry is understandable — and a bonus for a state intent on waging culture wars in schools and crushing any dissent. If you can get people to self-censor, you’ve pretty much won the battle.

School districts in Miami-Dade and Broward counties announced Wednesday that they would be among those offering the course, although in Broward it will be require parents to “opt-in.” The districts’ decisions came after Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., who is from Miami and once taught in the public schools here, said the class could be taught.

But the fact that school districts have to publicly announce their intent to teach a class that has been around since 1993 is indicative of the problem. Under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his lockstep Legislature, fear has seeped into schools. Teachers and school districts are rightfully worried about violating the Parental Rights in Education Act, the “Don’t say gay” law that outlawed sexual orientation and gender identity teachings. The penalties for a violation are potential career-enders, teaching licenses suspended or revoked..

This all happened after the College Board, the New York City-based nonprofit that manages AP courses in the United States, said last week that it wouldn’t recognize Florida’s AP psychology course and — critically — wouldn’t give students college credit for it because the state wanted any mention of sexual orientation and gender identity stripped out. Any course that censors required content cannot be labeled “AP” or “Advanced Placement,” the board said. Students applying for college rely on AP credits as a plus on their applications.

And school is about to start — next week in Miami-Dade and the following week in Broward.

So now the state says it’s OK to teach the course, but the education world is jittery, with good reason. Can the state be trusted?

In Leon County, where Tallahassee is located, Superintendent Rocky Hanna said the district would offer the class, but he is clearly wary. On Twitter, he wrote: “Our teachers have some concerns but we are going to take the commissioner of education’s word when he says that Advanced Placement Psychology may be taught in its entirety,” Hanna said.

He added that he has told the staff to “respect the law and follow the law but not to fear the law.”

This is where we are in Florida: Instead of supporting our public school teachers, we are instilling fear and worry. Instead of celebrating their hard work, we are threatening them with license suspensions if they dare to cross the power of the mighty state.

Teaching has always required courage. In Florida, it now requires a whole new brand of bravery.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Evil, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read

The Dallas Miracle! Superintendent Wants Joy in the Classroom, Not Test Prep!

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2023 //
22

Bethany Erickson wrote in D Magazine about the revolution in Dallas. The superintendent, Stephanie Elidzalde, declared that test prep is dead. She is determined to make school joyful. Imagine that! I have been waiting a long time for a superintendent with the brains and guts to do what she’s doing. The teacher shortage in Dallas has shrunk dramatically. Not surprising. What wonderful news.

Erickson writes:

School started at Dallas ISD today, and parents of students attending school at any of the 230 campuses may notice something different this year.

During her state of the district address last May, superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said the district would soon eschew the numerous tests designed to find out whether students were ready for the STAAR in favor of, as she put it, more “joy” in the classroom.

In last year’s address, she declared teaching to the test was “officially dead,” and added that some schools were testing as frequently as every few weeks in preparation for the STAAR test, and doing classwork in between those assessments that also practiced STAAR strategy.

“How about we put them all together and we have a huge bonfire?” she said.

That doesn’t mean that there won’t be occasional checks to make sure a student is understanding concepts learned in the classroom. But it does mean that Elizalde recognizes something many parents have been saying for years—the frequent testing only amps up anxiety about the test.

“Do kids need to know what the tests look like? Yes,” Elizalde said in May. “But do we need to be doing that once every six weeks, once every nine weeks? No we don’t. … Because we worry so much about the test, we have added pressure in a way that actually is hindering the success of how students do.”

And while there wasn’t an actual bonfire, Elizalde reiterated that stance last week in a note to students and parents.

 “As I said in my State of the District speech, test scores will take care of themselves if joy – and on-grade-level materials – are in the classroom,” she said. “We do not need to drill and kill to prepare for the state assessment.”

Elizalde said the amount of testing and preparation for testing had “gotten completely out of control.” The district tallied up all the time teachers were spending preparing for tests and testing, which equated to roughly 18 school days. 

The district is providing a full curriculum to teachers with lesson plans that will allow them more time to teach, Elizalde says. The aim at uniformity will also help a district where students often switch schools during the school year.

During her state of the district address, Elizalde said the goal was to provide a consistent framework, not to have teachers reciting lessons by rote.

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Anecdotally it appears that mileage varies on teacher experiences with the lesson plans. Some teachers have said they didn’t have all the materials their lesson plans required. But others said they felt they had a great deal of freedom to teach beyond the lesson plan, so long as they met their specific goals and taught the required skills. 

The other lynchpin in Elizalde’s joy ride is making sure every student has a teacher in their classroom on the first day of school. Earlier this month, she told teachers at the Dallas ISD’s New Teacher Academy held at the Winspear Opera House that the district had fewer than 140 open positions out of its 10,000 total teaching jobs. (Last year, that number was 220.)

She also reiterated to those new hires that they would not be teaching to the test. “This whole movement is going to allow teachers to truly feel both the science and the art that is teaching,” she said.

It will be interesting to see which provides the district with a path to success. As a parent of a student, I’m rooting for the joy plan, especially if we can also figure out a way to pay teachers what they’re worth, and the state legislature can come out of the next special session robustly funding public education.

Categories Courage, Creativity, Curriculum, Dallas, Education Reform, Joy, Standardized Testing, Texas

Rethinking Schools: The “Learning Loss” Hoax

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2023 //
8

The editors of Rethinking Schools wrote the following commentary on the media frenzy about the post-pandemic “learning loss.”

This school year, as teachers carefully construct unit plans, build community with students, and navigate ongoing staff shortages, they also have to contend with a barrage of media coverage catastrophizing about so-called “learning loss.” Headlines suggest the losses are “historic,” “devastating,” and that students are “critically behind.” This fearmongering comes not only from the political right; there is a dangerous liberal-conservative consensus. President Biden’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, said: “I want to be very clear: The results in today’s Nation’s Report Card [delivered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress] are appalling and unacceptable.”

The learning loss narrative shrouds itself in moment-in-time data from standardized tests, but it is not really about this moment. Rather, it is a weapon wielded against the past, to shift blame for pandemic school closures, and against the future, to narrowly frame the policy choices ahead.

The last few years have negatively impacted — sometimes terribly — young people’s lives. In what is likely an undercount, more than a million people in the United States have died of COVID-19. And the pandemic is not over; people in our students’ families continue to become debilitated or die. Each lost life is a thread in the tapestry of relationships that knit together families, communities, neighborhoods, and schools. The very groups that make up the bulk of public school families — people of color and poor folks — also disproportionately bear the burden of the pandemic, suffering the highest rates of infection, severe illness, hospitalization, and death.

Was the shuttering of schools and move to remote learning necessary? Yes. Did it exacerbate the emergency for families and young people? Of course. Schools matter. Schools are hubs of community and care, and without them we are all worse off. In a country that offers no public childcare to families, schools make it possible for parents and caregivers to work. In a country in which roughly 10 percent of the population struggles with hunger — again, disproportionately represented in public schools —schools make it possible for children to eat. And yes, schools are places where children learn: to read, multiply, and sing; to be a good friend and community member; to ask questions and seek answers — how photosynthesis works, what activists mean when they call themselves “water protectors,” and so much more.

Given the importance of schools, and the magnitude of the pandemic’s devastation, what is puzzling is not that students’ academic skills were impacted, but that anyone would imagine otherwise. We are almost three years into an ongoing health crisis that has shaved years off the average life expectancy in the United States. Of course it has left marks on us.

But the learning loss narrative does not invite reflection on the whole range of collective losses we’ve suffered, nor does it encourage asking why our government — and our political and economic system — failed so spectacularly in anticipating, planning for, and coping with the coronavirus.

Shifting blame away from the for-profit healthcare system and the government’s response to the coronavirus is part of what makes the learning loss narrative so valuable to politicians who have no interest in challenging existing patterns of wealth and power. It is a narrative meant to distract the public and discipline teachers. Here’s the recipe: 1. Establish that closing schools hurt students using a narrow measure like test scores; 2. Blame closure of schools on teacher unions rather than a deadly pandemic; 3. Demand schools and teachers help students “regain academic ground lost during the pandemic” — and fast; 4. Use post-return-to-normal test scores to argue that teachers and schools are “failing”; 5. Implement “teacher-proof” (top-down, standardized, even scripted) curriculum or, more insidiously, argue for policies that will mean an end to public schools altogether.

The path ahead looks eerily like what Naomi Klein has called the “shock doctrine,” where powerful actors, like politicians, corporate tycoons, and pundits, use people’s disorientation following a collective shock — whether a devastating earthquake or a deadly pandemic — to push pro-business, neoliberal policies. The Washington Post quoted a statement from former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that the pandemic test scores proved children were “hostages” in a “one-size-fits-none system that isn’t meeting their needs.” Her solution, of course, is what she has long pushed: more “school choice” and privatization.

The Biden administration has offered some respite from billionaire free market fanatics like DeVos, but its policies are woefully inadequate. (See “Activists Mobilize for Waivers and Opt Outs as Biden Mandates Tests” in the Spring 2021 issue.) The latest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund allocated a relatively generous $122 billion to “help safely reopen and sustain the safe operation of schools and address the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the nation’s students.” But the law prioritizes speed — schools must spend all of the money by 2024 or forfeit it — over investments in teachers, counselors, school librarians, and nurses. Many school districts cannot quickly fill positions or, knowing that the federal windfall is only short-term, choose not to. According to Marianna McMurdock, a staff reporter at The 74, a recent survey of 291 district leaders found that districts are expanding hiring of substitutes, paraprofessionals, and tutors while shying away from hiring full-time teachers and lowering class sizes — reforms that would have more impact on student learning and better inoculate schools from the overcrowded classrooms that made shuttering schools necessary.

We know what comes next — a round of dismal math and reading scores and the right’s favorite chestnut: “See? Just throwing money at schools doesn’t work.” Schools are racing to spend short-term government funds before they run out. But the point is that adequate funding for schools should never run out. Tripling Title I funding, a Biden campaign promise popularized by Bernie Sanders, would only cost one-fiftieth of the $1.5 trillion in wealth U.S. billionaires have added to their fortunes during the pandemic. Truly confronting the many losses students in the United States have shouldered requires connecting the dots to the gains of the wealthy.

The learning loss drumbeat reveals the mainstream media to have more contempt than curiosity about what might actually improve schools’ long-term health. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, writing in The New Yorker, is an exception. Noting the recent teacher strikes in Columbus and Seattle, Taylor wrote:

A real plan for recovery from the devastation of the pandemic in public education can be found in the strikes initiated by teachers and their unions. Their demands — for smaller class sizes, better conditions within school buildings, more resources to attend to students’ mental health, and higher pay for teachers and teacher assistants — have created a map for how to boost learning achievement.

This pandemic has brought real losses, and like our friends in Seattle and Columbus, we know what schools need to help students heal from the traumas of the last several years: more teachers, counselors, and nurses; smaller class sizes; planning time for educators to develop curriculum and pedagogical strategies centering students’ lives and realities; beautiful spaces to learn, make art, garden, and play.

Let’s not fall for the learning loss trick that shifts blame from the catastrophic results of decades of disinvestment in public goods to the victims of that catastrophe and those organizing to recover from it. It is not students and teachers who are failing the test of this pandemic, but a political and economic system that puts profit over people.

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, Education Industry, Hoax, Standardized Testing

Big Tech Cashes In on Fears of “Learning Loss”

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2023 //
41

Alec MacGillis of ProPublica wrote recently in Raw Story about the feeding frenzy that accompanied Big Tech’s sales pitch: the tech industry claims that its hardware and software can cure learning loss. The salesmen dazzle teachers and administrators with promises and swag. The irony, as the story points out, is that “learning loss” was associated with remote learning, lack of personal interaction with their teachers. Why not more of the same that exacerbated the problem?

For the nation’s schoolchildren, the data on pandemic learning loss is relentlessly bleak, with education researchers and economists warning that, unless dramatic action is taken, students will suffer a lifelong drop in income as a result of lagging achievement. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” noted Eric Hanushek, the Stanford economist who did the income study, in ProPublica’s recent examination of the struggle to make up for what students missed out on during the era of remote learning.

For the burgeoning education technology sector, however, the crisis has proven a glimmering business opportunity, as a visit to the industry’s annual convention revealed. The federal government has committed $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds to school districts since 2020, and education technology sales people have been eagerly making the case that their products are just what students and teachers need to make up lost ground.

“We’re huge in learning loss,” said Dan DiDesiderio, a Pittsburgh-area account manager for Renaissance Learning, a top seller of educational software and assessments. He was talking up his company’s offerings in the giant exposition hall of the Philadelphia Convention Center, where dozens of other vendors and thousands of educators gathered for three days late last month at the confab of the International Society for Technology in Education. For DiDesiderio, who was a school administrator before joining Renaissance, this meant explaining how schools have been relying on Renaissance products to help students get back on track. “During COVID, we did see an increase across the board,” he said.

Renaissance is far from the only player in the ed tech industry that is benefiting from the surge in federal funding, and the industry enjoyed a huge wave of private funding as the federal tap opened: The annual total of venture capital investments in ed tech companies rose from $5.4 billion to $16.8 billion between 2019 and 2021 before tailing off.

The largest chunk of the federal largess, $122 billion that was included in the American Rescue Plan signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, requires that schools put at least 20% toward battling learning loss, and companies are making the case that schools should spend the money on their products, in addition to intensive tutoring, extended-day programs and other remedies. “The pandemic has created a once-in-a-lifetime economic opportunity for early stage companies to reach an eager customer base,” declared Anne Lee Skates, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a recent article. (Her firm has invested in ed tech companies.) The federal funds “are the largest one-time infusion of funds in education from the federal government with almost no strings attached.”

Five days before the convention, the National Center for Education Statistics had released the latest devastating numbers: The decline in math scores for 13-year-olds between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years was the largest on record, and for the lowest-performing students, reading scores were lower than they were the first time data was collected in 1971.

But the mood was festive in Philadelphia. The educators in attendance, whose conference costs are generally covered by their district’s professional development funds, were excited to try out the new wave of nifty gadgets made possible by the advances in artificial intelligence and virtual reality. “For a lot of us, it’s like coming to Disneyland,” said one teacher from Alabama.

One could also detect the slightly urgent giddiness of a big bash in its final stages. Schools need to spend most of their recovery funds by 2024, and many have already allocated much of that money, meaning that this golden opportunity would soon close. And summer is the main buying season, with the fiscal year starting July 1 and with educators wanting their new tools delivered in time for school to start in the fall.

Hanging over the proceedings was an undeniable irony: The extent of learning loss was closely correlated to the amount of time that students had spent doing remote learning, on a screen, rather than receiving direct instruction, and here companies were offering more screen-based instruction as the remedy. Few of the companies on hand were proposing to replace the classroom experience entirely with virtual instruction, but to the degree that their offerings recalled the year-plus of Zoom school, it could be a bit awkward. “A lot of people don’t like us, because we can do remote-school stuff,” said Michael Linacre, a salesperson for StarBoard Solution, before demonstrating one of the cool things a StarBoard whiteboard could do: He jotted 1+2= with his finger and up popped 3. “There’s a mixed feeling about that now.”

Most of the vendors were not about to let that awkwardness get in their way, though, as they cajoled teachers to listen to their pitch, often with the lure of free swag.

Categories Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Data, Disruption, Education Industry, Technology

Gary Rubinstein: What Should the Math Curriculum Be? Part 5.

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
10

Gary Rubinstein teaches mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, a highly selective school where admissions are based on one test. He has written a series about what’s wrong with the math curriculum taught today and how to improve it. This is Part 5.

Gary writes:

If you’ve read parts 1 to 4 of this series, you may be confused. I the first part I said that not much of the school math is useful. In the second part I listed a few of those useful topics. In the third part I listed some topics that I don’t consider so useful. If I ended it there, it would seem like the best course of action would be to cut the amount of math we teach by at least half. But in the fourth part I wrote about something that seems to negate the point of the first three posts. I said that some of that ‘useless’ math was just as important as the useful math because it is engaging in the way that art or music can be useless but engaging. So this fourth part could be used to defend the position that no math topics should be put on the chopping block and we should just leave the math curriculum exactly how it is, maybe cutting the topics that are deemed ‘useless’ and not thought provoking but maybe expanding the remaining topics so those can be learned to more depth.

If you’re worried that that’s where I am going with this series, you can relax because in this post I will suggest a radical change to the K-12 math curriculum. But before I can do that, there are three really important questions that have to be answered: 1) What is the current K-12 math curriculum? 2) What is the current K-12 math curriculum trying to achieve? and 3) What is the current K-12 math curriculum actually achieving?

I think I should answer question 3 first. What the current K-12 math curriculum is actually achieving is traumatizing the vast majority of students. We know this because the moment that math becomes optional for the vast majority of students, they never take it again. And they forget most of the math they learned and are left with a vague memory of how much they hated math.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, History

Gary Rubinstein: When Is “Useless” Math Useful? Part 4

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
8

Gary Rubinstein, a teacher of mathematics at Stuyvesant High School, wrote a five-part series about whether the math taught in school is useful. This is the fourth installment, in which he delves into the history of math.

He begins:

Some of the most ancient math texts found on clay tablets from 1800 BCE in Mesopotamia are filled not with ledgers and bookkeeping but utterly ‘useless’ questions like “If you subtract the side length of a square from its area you get 870. What is the side length?” (BM 13901.2) along with lengthy algorithms for calculating the solution. Fast forward to 300 BCE in ancient Greece where they studied Euclid’s Elements, a Geometry book based mainly on using a compass and a straight edge to produce various Geometric shapes and then proving that the shapes created are what they were supposed to be like “Construct an isosceles triangle having each of the angles at the base double the remaining one. (In modern terminology to make a triangle whose three angles are 36, 72, and 72 degrees)” (Euclid IV. 10) Why the Babylonians cared to answer a question like this is not known though for the Greeks we do know that for them, at that time, Mathematics was a search for ideal truths.

In the 1700s and 1800s in this country, the only math topics taught were things that were ‘useful’ in life, like converting units of measurement and other things related to commerce. But over the past 300 years the math curriculum has grown so it has some topics that are useful (or potentially useful) and some that are more abstract and theoretical and certainly less useful than the others if not totally useless. In earlier posts I estimated that about 1/3 of the topics are useful while the rest are not.

In this post I want to examine the ‘useless’ topics and show why at least some of them have a value that transcends whether or not students will ever have an opportunity to use them in their adult lives.

In part 2 of this series I listed six topics that I felt were so useful that every student should master them before graduating high school. And if learning math that is useful is the only thing that matters, we could strip the curriculum down to just these things and the World would likely not end. As the parent of two kids who are now 15 and 12, I would be unhappy, though, if the only math my kids learned were these useful topics.

There are plenty of useless things that I want my kids to learn. When I was in school my favorite part of the day was actually not my math class but my band class. I loved playing the trumpet and took pride that I was first chair and I enjoyed practicing at home (though my family didn’t as much). I looked forward to the band concerts and band competitions we went on. But as much as I loved band and how it made me feel and challenged my determination and endurance sometime, is there anything more ‘useless’ than playing a trumpet? I suppose that some people go on to become professional trumpet players but not many. And I stopped playing the trumpet when I moved into a New York City apartment and now I dabble with another ‘useless’ instrument, the piano. The same could be said about Art. Aside from someone who becomes a professional housepainter, very few people will ever ‘use’ what they learn in Art class. What about poetry? If poetry just ceased to exist, would it really matter?

But of course the ‘use’ of poetry, art, and music isn’t that we are going to use them as adults but because they engage our minds. These creative fields offer us a type of challenge. Some people find these challenges fun. It causes our brains to release dopamine which is like a free drug.

For me, Math is a lot like playing a musical instrument. I like using my mind to discover some kind of pattern and then to see if I can prove that the pattern wasn’t just a coincidence. When I figure something out I get such a feeling of satisfaction. Often when something is too difficult for me to figure out myself I have to cheat and see how someone else figured something out and when I’m reading it it is, for me, like a page turner mystery novel. I’m getting near the end but not quite there yet and suddenly I can see where its going and even if I don’t, when I get to the end I think “Wow, how did I not figure that out myself, it seems so easy now.” And often the math topics that provide the most enjoyable adventure in trying to figure them out or just to understand why they work are the topics that are about as ‘useful’ as playing the trumpet.

In this post I’m going to briefly describe nine topics that are not particularly ‘useful’ but that I think all students should have the opportunity to experience. These topics, by the way, are already in the K-12 curriculum but they are mixed in with so many other less fruitful topics that they might get lost in the crowd. I’ll list these in order from earliest learned to latest learned

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Curriculum, History, Teachers and Teaching

Nancy Bailey: The Takeover of Houston Schools Is a Dire Warning for Other Districts

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
14

Nancy Bailey fears that the takeover of the Houston Independent School District should set off alarm bells in other districts. The new superintendent Mike Miles is taking steps to de-professionalize teaching and to impose untested programs on the schools. He is the tip of the spear of destructive education “reform.” Please recall that the Texas Education agency took control of the entire district because one high school—with disproportionate numbers of students who are in need of special education and in high poverty—was not getting the test scores the state expected (even though its scores increased in the year before the state takeover and the school rose to a C grade). Is Mike Miles a harbinger of the future or an echo of failed policies forged by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top?

She writes:

I think there is a likelihood that we will be seeing more state takeover of districts. 

~Kenneth Wong, education policy researcher and former advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, March 28, 2023

Houston faces harsh public school reforms, a sad example of the continuing efforts in America to destroy all public education and end professional teaching.

State takeovers aren’t new. Nor are they known for innovation, but for creating school voids, cutting services, and firing key staff, promising to close learning gaps. Takeovers usually only weaken schools, breaking them up and leaving communities with fewer and poorer schools.

The Superintendent

Superintendent Mike Miles has never been a classroom teacher. Miles replaces Superintendent Millard House II, hired in 2021, only there two years before being hired elsewhere.

As CEO of Third Future Schools, Miles ran a network of public charter schools in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana. The Texas Tribune describes his leadership in the Dallas Independent School District as tumultuous after six years as superintendent of the smaller Harrison School District in Colorado Springs.

The Dallas Morning News claims the district has few academic gains to show for all the disruption.

Miles participated in the Eli Broad program at Yale. On his LinkedIn page, another school reformer writes they matriculated through the Broad Academy now within the Yale School of Management.

The late Eli Broad pushed school privatization with a 44-page document to show how to break up public schools, originally reported by Howard Blume in the LA Times $490 Million Plan would Put Half of LAUSD Students in Charter Schools.

Those who subscribe to Broad’s philosophy disrupt public education to privatize it. Realizing Miles is a Broadie (name reflecting Broad’s agenda), makes what’s happening in Houston clearer.

Miles has degrees from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, served in the army, and attended the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. His degrees are in engineering, Slavic languages and literature, and international affairs and public policy. He has no known formal education about running a school considering student developmental needs.

The New Education System (NES)

Miles’s program is called the New Education System (NES) and HERE. Principals, teachers, and staff join.

Under the NES, according to the Houston Chronicle, administrators will handle discipline, stand in hallways patrolling, and make children walk in single file, quietly, and schools look sterile, cold, and cookie-cutter. If they use the bathroom, they must carry an orange parking cone. Teachers might get to keep their desks.

Compensation under the NES will be differentiated. Teachers will likely be evaluated with test scores, and their autonomy is stifled. Curriculum developers will provide lesson plans and materials for grades 2-10, removing the teacher’s instructional expertise. Student work will be graded by support personnel, even though teachers glean information about students by grading their work.

The district will hire apprentice teachers. They will expand the reach of the best and brightest teachers. How will they make this determination? Shouldn’t all teachers be hired with the credentials they need to do the job?

The plan calls for four periods of the staff performing duties each month (75 minutes each time), and this is unclear.

Replacing School Libraries and Librarians with Disciplinary Centers

Most controversial is that when principals join the NES they can lose their school libraries and librarians. From Click2Houston: 85 schools that have joined Miles’ program, and of those, 28 campuses will lose their librarians. The district said they will have the opportunity to transition to other roles within the district.

Instead of school libraries, children with behavioral difficulties will face screens in “Teams Centers” or “Zoom rooms.” There’s concern they’ll associate libraries as punishing. Students who misbehave need human interaction and support, not to be left to face screens.

Librarians with advanced degrees in library science will be removed, despite being knowledgeable and critical to a child’s learning. They could be transplanted to non-NES schools, which will get school libraries and librarians.

Miles states:

We’re not doing things that are just popular. We’re not doing things that we’ve always done, we’re not doing things that are just fun, we’re not doing things that are just nice to have or good unless we can measure its success.

He’s not doing what works! It’s common knowledge among those who understand children that when children have access to great school libraries learning results improve.

Losing Teachers: Moving to Online Amplify to Teach Reading

HISD is losing qualified teachers, school libraries, and librarians, and advertising for 350 long-term substitutes who don’t require a college degree. The online program, Amplify, will be used.

In State Legislative news in May, Education Bill “Amplifies” StatePower, Threatens Teacher Autonomy, Jovanica Palacios states:

Despite promises to the contrary, this bill [House Bill 1605] would cut a slice out of Texas’ education funding, taking money out of school districts and giving it to a vendor. The proposed legislation is actually dubbed “the Amplify bill” due to its association with curriculum development company Amplify, which received a $19 million emergency state contract during COVID.

At least 85 NES schools under Miles will use Amplify, which advertises the Science of Reading, an online program once owned by the education division of Rupert Murdock’s News Corp. and purchased by Laurene Powell Jobs. Where’s independent research providing proof that this program is effective?

Please open the link to finish reading her important post.

Categories Broad Foundation, Curriculum, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Texas

Gary Rubinstein: What Are the Useless Topics Taught in Math Classes? Part 3

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2023 //
41

Gary Rubenstein has been writing a series of posts on the question of whether the math curriculum is useful. Some parts of it are indeed useful, others not so much. In this post, he describes the “useless” topics.

He writes:

I’d estimate that about 15% to 20% of school time in K-12 is spent on math. Elementary and middle schools often have their students do 90 minutes of math a day. And it is common for students to take a math class every year throughout high school.

In my last post I listed a meager six math topics that I consider ‘useful’ and by that I mean that those math skills are really needed by adult consumers and also, to some degree, in a lot of professions. And if you believe me about this and you think that any math that is not useful should not be taught in school you might wonder how much time should be dedicated to those topics throughout a students schooling. Now I’m not saying that I think that we should cut all topics besides these few but if I had to answer how long it could take to teach those, I’d say that we could do it in about 1/3 the amount of time. Math would be a thing like music, art, or physical education.

It’s still an interesting thing to think about, though, because it gets to the fundamental question of ‘what is the purpose of learning math?’ or ‘what is the purpose of learning anything for that matter?’ or ‘what makes this thing better to learn than that thing?.’ I will eventually provide my opinions on these questions.

But before we cut 2/3 of the time that we dedicate to math, we should take a look at what sorts of things would we be depriving the students of and whether there would be negative side effects of these discarded topics.

In Part 2, I mentioned a topic that I said was not ‘useful’ of finding the prime factorization of composite numbers. While it is true that hardly anyone in their adult lives are ever asked to break 555 into 5*3*37, maybe the ‘use’ of this skill is not so direct. The ‘use’ of some ‘useless’ topics is that they are prerequisite skills to more complicated topics in future years and those more complicated topics might be ‘useful’ in some science applications. So some ‘useless’ topics might have some utility as scaffolding to other topics.

Another reason that something like factoring has more ‘use’ than it at first seemed is that prime numbers are really important in more advanced math. They are the building blocks of all other numbers. Maybe someone who loves factoring eventually becomes a math major and they use advanced factoring to create a new cryptography method based on it.

Open the link and keep reading.

Categories Curriculum, Teachers and Teaching

Gary Rubinstein: What Part of the Math Curriculum Is Useful? Part 2

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2023 //
38

Gary Rubinstein is writing a series on whether the math taught in school is useful. Americans typically study math every year, yet don’t remember most of what they learned. This is part 2, in which he identifies the “useful” part of the math curriculum.

He begins:

What if your house was burning down and you could only save one box of your things? What would you save? Fortunately most people will never have to make this decision but it is still an interesting exercise where you think about what it is in your life that really matters.

As a math educator I sometimes think what if I could only choose a small collection of the most ‘useful’ math topics to save from the entire K-12 curriculum. As I argued in the previous post, I think that at least half of the school math topics are not really ‘useful’ in the sense that you will ever actually ‘use’ them in your life. With this narrow definition of ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ an example of something that is pretty useless is to find what’s called the ‘prime factorization’ of a number like 555 and write it as 3*5*37. There might be some uses of prime factorization in some other math topics but certainly on its own it isn’t a very useful skill.

But some math topics are very ‘useful’ and I think that all students should learn them at some point throughout their schooling. In this post I’m going to make an annotated list of what those topics are. These are like the box I’m saving of ‘useful’ math. The list isn’t going to be very long which leads to the question about whether the math curriculum could be compressed so that it doesn’t take 13 years or if some of the less ‘useful’ topics should still be taught for other reasons.

In the old days, like the 1700s, a big thing that math was used for was converting different units of measurement for commerce. So converting ounces to pounds and things like that were very important and you practiced with difference currencies and things like that. Well here in the 21st century we aren’t doing those sorts of conversions very much but in this new world there are different kinds of calculations we have to do. In the news all the time we see different statistics and sometimes two different news sources interpret data in different ways so an informed citizen should have some basic ‘numeracy.’

#1: Basic adding, subtracting, multiplying, and some division. With all the options we have as consumers, it is important for us to be able to look at two competing options and decide which one is better for you. There are different ways to teach these things and I’ll address those later, but these things should be mastered by everyone.

#2: Percentages. Though percentages are really just an application of division and multiplication, I think everyone should have an understanding that 50% of something is the same as half of it while 10% of something is one tenth of it. So 50% of 400 is 200 and 10% of 400 is 40. And once you know about 10%, you can easily calculate or estimate other percentages, like 30% of 400 will be 3 times 10% of 400 which is 3*40=120. Also see how that is a little more than 25% of 400 which is one fourth of 400 or 100. Calculating tips and understanding when businesses offer 30% off or a loan that has a 2.75% interest rate and things like that are really important so consumers can make informed decisions.

#3: Basic Geometry. Knowing how to find the area of a rectangular or triangular floor is something that everyone should know. Put that skill together with multiplying and dividing and you can figure out how much carpet to order and how much it will cost.

#4: Basic statistics and probability. When you make an investment, including whether or not to play the lottery, you are taking a risk. So having some ability to measure this risk will help citizens make the right choices and not get taken advantage of.

#5: Basic ‘data science’. Nowadays we hear so many numbers on the news, but people can’t interpret these numbers without knowing how to think about them. Like we hear that crime has ‘doubled’ from last year and it sounds pretty bad. But someone who has studied this kind of data science knows what the other relevant information is. Like in this case, if crime went up from 1 incident to 2 incidents, that’s a lot different than if crime went up from 10,000 incidents to 20,000 incidents even though they are both ‘double.’ In the education research that I have done, I’ve come across papers that claim that an educational strategy resulted in ‘110 additional days of learning’ which can really mislead a reader who is not aware of the assumptions that go into these sorts of calculations.

#6: Interpreting graphs. So often, especially nowadays, data is presented in a visual form. There are scatter plots and pie charts and so many ways to use pictures to represent information. An educated citizen should be able to look at these and understand them.

Open the link and keep reading.

Categories Curriculum, History, Teachers and Teaching

Gary Rubinstein: Is the Math Taught in School Useful? No.

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2023 //
69

Gary Rubinstein teaches at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. In this post, he questions whether the math taught in school is “useful” and concludes that it is not. This is the beginning of a series of posts in which he explains why he is disappointed in the usual school math and what he thinks should take its place.

Gary writes:

I’ve dedicated my life to teaching a subject I love and have loved since I was a small child.

This country, and throughout the world really, a lot of resources are dedicated to teaching students math. From Kindergarten to 12th grade almost every student takes math and in many elementary schools math is taught for ninety minutes a day. And then in college students often have to take some math, sometimes a Calculus class, as part of their degree, even when the degree is in something like business. And for all the time and money that are put into math in this country, when it is all done very few adults remember anything about math. Maybe they know a little about percentages and vaguely something about how the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.

Yes, the same could be said about some of the other subjects, like how much Chemistry or Physics do most adults remember from high school, but the difference is that math is done for 13 years so you would think that more of it would be retained. Fo all that we invest into math in this country, we are not getting the ‘bang for our buck.’ I think I know why this is. I think about this on a daily basis since it is my life’s work and I’m so bothered by it. I’ve written about this before but I want to go deeper into this and explain what the issues are, what it would take to fix the problem, what the obstacles would be in improving math instruction, and whether or not it might be better to diminish the obsession that we have in this country with math instruction.

Part of my evolution in thinking about these ideas comes from watching my own kids who are now 15 and 12 go through the standard math curriculum. They have had decent teachers throughout the years and have always gotten 4s on the New York State tests so you would think that I’m thrilled but when I look at the things that they learned (because they were part of the curriculum) and the things that they have not learned (because they were not part of the curriculum) it frustrates me. Many parents who are not math teachers might feel the same way when they look at what their children are learning in math but they don’t dare question it. It reminds me of The Emperor’s New Clothes, nobody wants to seem like they aren’t smart enough to know why we have to learn how to multiply mixed numbers with different denominators. But as a math teacher who thinks about things like ‘what is the goal in learning this concept?’, ‘Is this concept needed to learn a more difficult concept?’, ‘Does this topic provide opportunity for the students to have ‘aha’ insights for themselves?’, I am constantly critiquing what I see my children learning about. And within my own teaching I am always trying to teach whatever topics are in the curriculum in a way that gives my own students an experience where they get to use their reasoning skills and not just blindly follow an algorithm.

The title of this series is: Is most school math useless? Depending on what you think ‘useless’ means, you will have different answers to this question. There are different ways to define ‘useless’ but the most straight forward way is to say that something is ‘useful’ if you will one day have an opportunity to ‘use’ it for something in your life or your job. We hear all the time that if you don’t know math you won’t be able to compare two competing cell phone plans or you won’t know how big of a ladder to buy so that when you put it at an angle it still reaches the height you need it to. We are told that math is ‘useful’ in this way and while it is true that some math is useful in this way (like knowing the difference between a loan that has a 2% interest rate vs a 20% interest rate, for example), the vast majority of the math that is taught in school is absolutely not useful.

To follow Gary’s thoughtful reasoning, open the link and read the rest of his post.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Teachers
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