Archives for category: Curriculum

Sarah Sparks writes in Edweek about a curriculum company that is suing a parent in Wake County, North Carolina, for criticizing its math program. The company says the parent is defaming its product. The parent’s lawyer says the company is attacking the parent’s First Amendment rights.

As the story notes, this is a SLAPP suit, a suit meant to silence public criticism. The last time I encountered this sort of thing was when a charter company filed a suit against a school board member in California for negative criticism. The ACLU came to her defense. It should defend this parent too, who is using his Constitutional right to disagree with a program adopted by his district.

A group of families in Wake County, N.C., have pushed for months to get the district to stop using a controversial new curriculum. Now the company behind the curriculum is suing one of the most vocal parents for defamation.

It’s a surprising move that some say could have broad implications for parent advocacy around curriculum and instruction. A win by the company “would certainly cast a shadow on the idea that parents have a right to participate in their own children’s education, to criticize schools for buying particular textbooks, to voice their concerns about instruction and curriculum,” said Tom Loveless, an education researcher formerly at the Brookings Institution, who is not involved in the case.

The Mathematics Vision Project, a nonprofit provider of open source math curricula, filed a complaint this summer against Blain Dillard, a parent in the Wake County public school system. MVP has accused Dillard, an outspoken opponent of the math program, of libel, slander, and “tortious interference with business relations.”

The company alleges that Dillard has launched “a crusade against MVP” through his online criticism of the curriculum and advocacy with school officials and employees.

In a written statement to Education Week, Jeffrey Hunt, Dillard’s lawyer, wrote that the lawsuit “has no legal merit.”

“It is alarming that a parent would be sued for defamation for expressing opinions and making truthful statements about his son’s high school math curriculum,” Hunt said. “The lawsuit appears to be an attempt to silence Mr. Dillard and other critics of MVP, and to chill their First Amendment rights to speak about MVP’s services.”

The district is entering its third year using the MVP curriculum, which received a favorable evaluation from the curriculum reviewer EdReports. The open source curriculum emphasizes problem-solving and collaboration—students learn by working through problems, and teachers are expected to act as facilitators.

For months now, parents have spoken out against lessons that they say are confusing and poorly structured, lodging complaints with the district and making statements at school board meetings. Parents said their children weren’t getting enough direct instruction and were encouraged to rely on their classmates for help. As a result, they said, students who used to get As and Bs were now getting Cs and Ds, which would have long-lasting effects on their grade point averages and college prospects.

Barbara Kuehl, an author and consultant at MVP, said that the organization’s materials encourage a variety of methods. “Our curriculum not only supports well-timed direct instruction, we advocate for it,” she said. Kuehl declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing pending litigation.

Pushback from parents over a new curriculum, and particularly a discovery-based program, is nothing new, said Loveless.

“There have been all kinds of programs that have been oriented around that philosophy, and they have been quite controversial,” Loveless said.

What is new? A curriculum provider suing parents over such complaints.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Freedom of Speech, North Carolina

Bob Shepherd: Assessing E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Cultural Literacy

By dianeravitch

July 12, 2019 //

Bob Shepherd writes here about E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s work, and how it was wrongly appropriated by conservatives in their fight for the canon of “great white men.”

I first met Don Hirsch in 1983 at a conference where we both spoke. We became good friends. We even served on the Koret Task Force together at the Hoover Institution, which we both quit, perhaps for different reasons or maybe for the same reason. While there, we had a public debate with Paul Peterson and Caroline Hoxby. The topic was: Curriculum and instruction are more important than markets and choice. We argued for the proposition, and they argued against. Given that we were at the Hoover Institution, the audience favored the negative. Of course.

Bob Shepherd writes:

There was a lot of willful (e.g., intentional) misreading of Hirsch’s work, which wasn’t helped by the fact that his work was embraced by far-right conservatives who thought that he was all about defending the canon of work by dead white men against multiculturalism. And, unfortunately, his Core Knowledge Foundation had a brief flirtation with Common [sic] Core [sic] advocates, which Hirsch later renounced as a mistake.

So, here, a brief tutorial on his major ideas:

Hirsch first made his name as a proponent of a particular approach to literary interpretation, or hermeneutics. He was a champion of the traditional notion that the meaning of a literary work lies in the intention of the author and that the practice of interpretation is about recovering that intention, which requires not only close reading but also familiarity with the author’s life, the social and historical context of the work, and the literary genres and tropes employed in the work. Well, this poem was written by a courtier, sick of court intrigue, who longed for a simpler, more noble, more real, more honest life and adopted the pastoral mode as an expression of these longings.

In other words, his was a defense of a traditional view of interpretation that required considerable knowledge of the text in context.

Then, Hirsch became interested in freshman composition (which is interesting because, by that time, he was a well-placed public intellectual, and those freshman comp classes are usually foisted off on people low on the academic totem pole). He soon realized that people who don’t read well can’t write well, and this led him to think carefully about the problems he was seeing in his comp students’ ability to read. He soon realized that a major problem, overlooked by “reading specialists,” was that poor readers didn’t have the background knowledge that the writer had assumed they would have.

This important insight led him to formulate a theory that a culture is bound together by inherited, shared, common knowledge. The members of this Amazonian tribe have a shared knowledge of the uses, medicinal and otherwise, of hundreds and hundreds of indigenous plants. People in the English-speaking West are bound together by shared knowledge of things like Mother Goose Rhymes (“Simple Simon said to the pieman”), the Bible, a few plays by Shakespeare, and so on. So (and again, this is rare among English professors) Hirsch set out to conduct studies of what educated people in the United States know. He chose as his representative group lawyers because they were an easily identifiable group of educated professionals. On the basis of those studies, he came up with a list of stuff that educated people in the U.S. know. This list became the core of his best-selling book Cultural Literacy.

Unfortunately, this book hit at the very time that multiculturalism was making great headway in U.S. education, and Hirsch was perceived by many to be a reactionary figure in opposition to that movement. This bothered him a lot because politically, Hirsch was always a liberal.

Here’s what Hirsch was definitely right about: knowledge is an essential component of reading ability. Any approach to ELA that discounts knowledge, that considers the field to be all about the teaching of abstract skills, is doomed to failure because writing and reading and public speaking are extremely dependent upon both descriptive knowledge (knowledge of what) and concrete procedural knowledge (knowledge of how).

It’s possible, of course, both to embrace multiculturalism AND Hirsch’s core ideas. You want to understand Emerson and the Transcendentalists? Well, then, you better understand the Hindu Upanishads, that great spring from which Emerson drank.

Categories Curriculum

Oh, Lordy! Bill Gates Will Invest in Common Core-Aligned Curriculum

By dianeravitch

January 9, 2019 //

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

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Education Reform, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

New York: Long Island District Shows that Problem-Based Curriculum Produces Better Results than Test Prep

By dianeravitch

July 27, 2018 //

Comsewogue is a small district on Long Island in New York. Its superintendent, Joseph Rella, is an outspoken critic of standardized testing and “one-size-fits-all” education.

His district developed and applied a problem-based curriculum to prepare students in high school.

“Teaching to the test” is a concept that no longer computes in Comsewogue School District.

Administration and faculty in Comsewogue, for the last two school years, have experimented with a problem-based learning curriculum for small groups of interested ninth- and 10th-graders, an alternative to the traditional educational strategy of focusing assignments and assessments toward the goal of performing well on state-mandated standardized tests at the end of the year. Now, Superintendent Joe Rella has data to back up his notorious aversion to one-size-fits-all education and assessment.

In all subjects, Comsewogue students in PBL classes passed 2018 Regents exams, scoring 65 or better, at a higher rate than those in traditional classrooms, according to data released by the district. On chemistry, geometry, algebra II, global history and English 11 exams, PBL students achieved mastery level, scoring 85 or better, at significantly higher rates than their non-PBL classmates.

“We played in your ballpark — we scored runs,” Rella said of how he interpreted the data, meaning students taught by alternative methods still displayed an aptitude on the state’s required tests.

Though Rella and the district have taken steps to try to have PBL assessments replace Regents exams, no avenue to do so has been greenlighted by the New York State Department of Education to this point for Comsewogue. Emails requesting comment on the significance of Comsewogue’s test results sent to the education department and Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) press office were not returned.

During the 2017-18 school year, about half of Comsewogue’s ninth- and 10th-graders, roughly 300 students, took part voluntarily in PBL classes, which emphasize hands-on learning and real-world application of concepts as assessments — similar to a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation — as opposed to the traditional “Regents model.” The students were still required by the state to take the Regents exams as all students are, and their performance has inspired the district in year three of the pilot to expand its PBL curriculum offerings on a voluntary basis for 2018-19 to its entire student body — kindergarten through 12th grade.

The superintendent said the impetus for the district to experiment with PBL started three years ago, when he and about 20 Comsewogue teachers spent a day at the New York Performance Standards Consortium in Manhattan. The organization was founded on the belief that there was a better way to assess student learning than dependence upon standardized testing, according to its website.

Open the article to see the stunning results of the district’s problem-based curriculum.

Rella has proven that student learning is created by asking questions that stimulate curiosity, not by checking the “right” box or responding with a canned answer on a standardized test.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Curriculum, Education Reform, New York

Michigan: Politician Proposes Controversial Revisions for State Social Studies Curriculum

By dianeravitch

June 25, 2018 //

Educators and parents are upset in Michigan because a Republican politician wants to impose revisions to the state Social Studies curriculum that reflect his own partisan views.

“The new curriculum draft cuts out references to gay rights, Roe v. Wade and climate change. It also slashes the word “democratic” and replaces it with “republic.”

“Behind the draft is Republican State Senator and Gubernatorial candidate Patrick Colbeck. He said his suggestions were motivated by concern that some standards are not politically neutral or factually accurate, and to ensure students are exposed to multiple points of view, reported Bridge Magazine, which first broke the news.

“According to Bridge, crowds of people have gathered to voice their objections to the changes already and the period to comment lasts until June 30.“

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Michigan

LAUSD Chief Picks TFA-Broadie from Nation’s Lowest Performing State as Chief of Staff

By dianeravitch

June 24, 2018 //

Los Angeles Superintendent Austin Beutner, new to the education world, has defined himself by his first big hire. He selected Rebecca Kockler, the Louisiana Department of Education’s assistant superintendent for academic content to be his chief of staff. Like her boss, John White, Kockler is both TFA and Broadie. (For the initiated, that means they both got a little bit of teaching experience as recruits for Teach for America and are “graduates” of Eli Broad’s unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, whose “graduates” are taught top-down management, the value of closing schools and replacing them with private management, and other reformer tricks of the trade. John Thompson recently wrote a series of posts here about the dismal record of Broadies.)

Mercedes Schneider, researcher and high school teacher in Louisiana, reviews Kockler’s TFA career in TFA here, which was mysteriously absent from the LAUSD press release. Also unmentioned in the press release was her Broadie history. Mercedes knows more about the Louisiana Department of Education and its new chief of staff than LAUSD. To be fair to the person who wrote the press release, Mercedes notes that Kockler deleted her Linked In bio that describes her TFA history. But Mercedes has it.

Both the LAUSD press release and the Broad Center agree that Louisiana is one of the “fastest improving” states in the nation.

But is that true? Nope. Its NAEP scores declined significantly from 2015 to 2017.

What is especially irksome about the LAUSD press release linked above is that it refers to Louisiana’s academic standards as “a national model.” Who would look to a state that scrapes the very bottom of NAEP rankings as “a national model”? Maybe it is a model of how to fail while boasting of success. Maybe it is a model of Trumpian rhetoric that turns lemons into lemonade.

Consider this report in the New Orleans Advocate on 2017 NAEP.:

“In the latest snapshot of education achievement, scores for Louisiana public school fourth-graders plunged to or near the bottom of the nation in reading and math.

“In addition, eighth-graders finished 50th among the states and the District of Columbia in math and 48th in reading…

In 2015, fourth-graders finished 43rd in the U. S. in reading and 45th in math….

“But both scores dropped five points – to 212 and 229 out of 500 respectively – during tests administered to 2,700 students last year.

“That means fourth-grade math scores finished 51st while fourth-grade reading scores are 49th.

“The group that oversees the exams, the National Center for Education Statistics, said both drops are statistically significant.”

Why not tell the truth? Beutner hired the academic director of one of the lowest performing states in the nation, where NAEP scores fell in the latest assessment. He was impressed by her credentials in TFA, and she came highly recommended by his friend Eli Broad.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fake, Los Angeles, Louisiana, Teach for America

Mathematics: Why the iReady Assessment Is “Dangerous”

By dianeravitch

June 18, 2018 //

Is it possible that a math test could be dangerous? This teacher educator, Kassia Omohundro Wedekind, says yes. She says the iReady Assessment is dangerous.

She explains:

This school year Fairfax County Public Schools, the 10th largest school division in the United States, adopted the iReady assessment as a universal screener across all of its elementary schools. Students in grades K-6 take these assessments individually on the computer three times per year, and the results are made available to both teachers and parents.

According to Curriculum Associates, the company that makes iReady, these assessments are an “adaptive Diagnostic for reading and mathematics [that] pinpoints student need down to the sub-skill level, and [provides] ongoing progress monitoring [to] show whether students are on track to achieve end-of-year targets.”

The Fairfax County Public Schools website further asserts that iReady is a “tool that has the potential to streamline Responsive Instruction processes, promote early identification and remediation of difficulties and improve student achievement.”

While I have found this assessment deeply troubling all year, it has taken me a while to be able to articulate exactly why I think this assessment is so dangerous, and why I think we need to use our voices as teachers, administrators and parents to speak out against it.*

So, let’s get back to the claim in the title of this blog post. iReady is dangerous. This might sound like hyperbole. After all, this is just a test, right? In this era of public schooling, children take many assessments, some more useful than others, so what’s the big deal with iReady?…

Based on the scores, iReady generates a report for each student for each of the domains. The report offers a bulleted list of what the student can do and next steps for instruction. However, if you take a look at the finer print you’ll learn that these reports are not generated from the specific questions that the child answered correctly or incorrectly, but rather are a generic list based on what iReady thinks that students who score in this same range in this domain likely need.

The teacher can never see the questions the child answered correctly or incorrectly, nor can she even access a description of the kinds of questions the child answered correctly or incorrectly. The most a teacher will ever know is that a child scored poorly, for example, in number and operations. Folks, that is a giant category, and far too broad to be actionable.

But above all else, the iReady Universal Screener is a dangerous assessment because it is a dehumanizing assessment. The test strips away all evidence of the students’ thinking, of her mathematical identity, and instead assigns broad and largely meaningless labels. The test boils down a student’s entire mathematical identity to a generic list of skills that “students like her” generally need, according to iReady. And yet despite its lumping of students into broad categories, iReady certainly doesn’t hesitate to offer very specific information about what a child likely can do and what next instructional steps should be.

Read on. See her examples. What do you think?

Categories Creativity, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

Arkansas: Walton-Funded School Board Refuses to Buy New Science Textbooks

By dianeravitch

June 16, 2018 //

The Walton family, which controls most of Arkansas, invested in the purchase of the Pulaski County School Board. At a recent meeting, the board voted 3-2 NOT to purchase new science textbooks to replace obsolete ones. The majority said the district could not afford the $1 million cost, even if stretched out over three years.

The School Board for the Pulaski County Special School District voted 4-2 Tuesday against the immediate purchase of new science textbooks to replace books that are more than a decade old and do not match the state’s new science standards or the district’s science curriculum.

A committee of district teachers, school administrators and others had recommended earlier this year that the district purchase new science books for kindergarten-through-12th grades.

Jennifer Beasley, science program administrator for the district, returned to the board Tuesday with that recommendation but at a newly discounted cost of slightly more than $1 million, and with an alternative option that would spread the purchase of the new science books over three years.

In the first year of the three-year plan, classroom sets of textbooks and digital subscriptions to those books would be purchased for high schools at a maximum cost of $409,544.

Textbooks for middle schools would then be purchased for the 2019-20 school year and for the elementary schools in the following year.

“The committee’s rationale for allowing the high schools to be first to adopt books was that all of our high schools have a D on the state report card,” Beasley told the board, “and committee members agreed it is important for students and teachers to have resources aligned to the new standards.”

The high schools will be teaching to the new state science standards for the first time in this coming school year. The elementary schools incorporated the new standards in the previous two years, Beasley said, and the elementary teachers feel they are better prepared to continue with the instructional materials and lessons they’ve developed. Additionally, the elementary schools typically earned A’s and B’s on the state report card.

The Walton members should have asked their patrons to help out.

Categories Arkansas, Curriculum, Funding, Science, Walton Foundation

Kate Raymond Challenges Depiction of Common Core Mathematics

By dianeravitch

June 3, 2018 //

130

Kate Raymond of the University of Oklahoma challenges the claim by Mate Weirdl of the University of Tennessee that the Common Core is deeply flawed in the early grades.

As a mathematics educator, I was disturbed by recent comments made by Dr. Mate Wierdl on your blog site and felt the need to contact you to respond, educator to educator.

It is interesting to me that Dr. Wierdl ended this comment by saying he is not an expert on ELA; implying that he is an expert on the teaching and learning of mathematics. While Dr. Wierdl is a mathematics Ph.D., nowhere could I find any reference to education he has received or research he has done on teaching and learning.

Perhaps if he had such an education, he might have avoided some elementary mistakes he made in his critique of the common core. While I am by no means a proponent of, or an expert in, common core mathematics, the baseless and inaccurate assumptions Dr. Wierdl only serves to muddy the waters when it comes to a discussion of standards, curriculum and assessment in mathematics education. In large part, this is because Dr. Wierdl fails to distinguish between standards (which can generally be thought of as goals), curriculum (the experiences of students) and assessment (a measure of students’ understandings). Most fundamentally, Dr. Wierdl has conflated Common Core Standards with the standardized tests referred to in the article that compares Finland and the US. The tests referred to in that article were not written by the creators of common core, and the literature in mathematics education already documents that they are not well aligned with the intentions or the content of common core; the article itself references this problem when it speaks to the fact that Pearson, a for profit company, developed both textbooks series and standardized tests for the state of New York. So to critique the common core based on these tests is simply illegitimate.

More disturbing however, Dr. Wierdl makes several assumptions that, had he had an education in teaching and learning, he might have avoided. For example, he states that young children can intuitively understand the difference between 12 and 21. While I am sure this was intuitive for him as a young student, research shows that for the vast majority of students, this is not at all intuitive. Young children often see the difference between these two numbers as akin to something like * # verses # *.

Would you necessarily see these two as fundamentally differently? Would you intuitively know that one is larger than the other? As the article that Dr. Wierdl points out, students are just learning to read in grade one; that includes learning to read numbers. Many mathematics standards, including Finland’s, as it turns out, place an emphasis on “properties of numbers” and “the use of manipulatives to break down and assemble numbers” (language I quote from a description of the Finnish mathematics standards, see http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2015/encyclopedia/countries/finland/the-mathematics-curriculum-in-primary-and-lower-secondary-grades/) in order to help students build a schema for understanding numbers. While many (but not all) students may be able to successfully add relatively small numbers without such a schema, those who do not begin to have difficulty in adding and/or multiplying large numbers. For example, if asked to add 3472 and 1248, students without such schema struggle to remember when to “carry” (or “borrow”, for subtraction), because they have not build the concept that 2 and 8 make one whole ten (so that they can carry a one to the tens place) or that that carried ten, the 70 in the first number and the 40 in the second number combine to be one whole hundred and two extra tens, so that a 2 should be placed in the tens column while a 1 is carried to the hundreds column.

The difficulties become even more pronounced when students are asked to multiply 54 times 19. I would imagine Dr. Wierdl, like many mathematicians, is fluent enough to understand that he can multiply this in a number of ways, including multiplying 54 by 20 (which is a much more simple problem due to the round number) and subtract 54 to get 1080-54= 1026, rather than a long step by step procedure which often makes very little sense to young children. I imagine that Dr. Wierdl finds such flexibility with numbers intuitive, but research shows most students do not. However, students’ ability to be flexible with numbers can be greatly improved if they learn to communicate mathematical thinking. Vygotsky’s social constructivist theories of learning have been proven time and again in mathematics education research; students learn by reflecting on their own thinking and the mathematical thinking of others. This is reflected in Common Core and other standards by emphasizing the development of students abilities to communicate mathematically, a skill by which Dr. Wierdl makes a living. However, contrary to Dr. Wierdl’s assertion, I challenge anyone to find a set of standards that requires students to “explain the difference every time they see it”.

Given all of that, I do agree that “fake” real life questions are a significant problem in US mathematics instruction. However, while standards promote application of mathematics to real problems, nowhere do the standards promote the use of contrived “fake” real life scenarios. Those scenarios are largely the result of textbooks (which are generally not developed by writers of standards) and teachers who do not have the educational background or mathematical strength to apply mathematics in more authentic and interesting ways. This is again a problem with the curriculum, not the standards, and one that is being addressed by many leading experts in mathematics education (see https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover, for example).

While I have a Master’s degree in mathematics, I would not presume to present myself as an expert in the field of mathematics. Since Dr. Wierdl has no background in education, I would respectfully ask that he do the same and that the community at large be wary of opinions put forth by ‘experts’ who have no background in teaching and learning.
Sincerely,
Dr. Kate Raymond

Kate Raymond, PhD
Department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum
Mathematics Education
University of Oklahoma
Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education
820 Van Vleet Oval, ECH 114
Norman, OK, 73071
kate.m.raymond@ou.edu

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Education Reform