kitchen table math, the sequel: 6/21/09 - 6/28/09

Saturday, June 27, 2009

NCTE presents: Phonics Phacts




That's a risk, alright.

"Phonics Phacts"

under the banyan tree

from Paul:
Years ago, when I was an engineering manager, I had this Indian guy working for me. He was a graduate of IIT, India's equivalent to MIT or maybe Stanford. To qualify for IIT you have to be in the top 1-2% of applicants. He was incredibly smart and unlike a lot of young engineers he was also able to think out of the box. He could push the enevelope. Where his peers were better at just executing somebody elses plan, he could come up with the vision.

One day I asked him about his schooling. He said that except for IIT his entire education took place under a tree in the center of his village with a village elder/teacher/wiseman type of guy. I'm just guessing here because at the time I never thought to ask, but my bet is that this guy didn't go to a fancy ed school. We're not talking marble halls, olympic pools, or multimedia classrooms. There were no bulletin boards, reflections, projects, or discoveries. There was no group work, spiral curriculum, or state standards either. Just a smart man, a willing student, and the transfer of knowledge, probably not unlike what took place for the 10,000 years before we started education research.

Makes me go hmmmmmmmm?
I've been wondering for a while now whether you reach a tipping point: is there a point at which you're spending so much money on a school that quality declines?

I don't know the answer but the question relates to Gawande's article on The Cost Conundrum in medicine.

iatrogenic LD

Vicky S asks:
What percentage of identified learning disabilities do you suppose is inadvertantly caused by our schools, their teaching methods, and curricula?
I've been trying to suss this out for a while now. This week I found an estimate of the percent of reading problems that could be prevented:
We estimate that the number of children who are typically identified as poor readers and served through either special education or compensatory education programs (as well as children with significant reading difficulties who are not formally identified and served) could be reduced by up to 70 percent through early identification and prevention programs.

Chapter 12: Rethinking Learning Disabilities (pdf file)
Reid Lyon, Jack M. Fletcher, Sally E. Shaywitz, Bennett A. Shaywitz, Joseph K. Torgesen, Frank B. Wood, Ann Schulte, and Richard Olson
Rethinking Special Education for a New Century
I have the impression that most kids identified as having learning disabilities are struggling readers but if palisadesk or Liz Ditz are around they can let us know whether that's correct.

advertisements for myself

from a longtime member of ktm, whose high school is as good as its ranking in U.S. News:
X. and I just returned from our local Barnes and Noble. Under a sign labeled "Required School Reading" were several copies of Animals in Translation. Other books on the table included For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Great Gatsby, Blink, Night, The Cannery, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, Romeo and Juliet (and lots more). We decided it was quite an honor to have one's book included with such famous titles.
I am thrilled!

Obi-Wan on what means 'teaching'

Personally, I find the whole thing deeply insulting.

For all the thousands of years of human existence, teaching has meant one thing, and one thing alone. 

For a few years, a bunch of hippies told us that "teaching" meant the exact opposite of that, and that we couldn't do that thing that used to be called teaching. We went through the motions of their BS while they were looking, and taught our kids the right way when they weren't.

Now, they've rediscovered teaching, think they need a new term for it, and my district thinks I need to attend a week's worth of in-services to know how to do it.

I've got two words for the whole educational theory crowd, and they ain't gonna like the first one.

Friday, June 26, 2009

next time, try Core Knowledge





That's the difference between me and Bill Gates.


However, these principles too often seemed unclear.   
You think?


Books are good.

Books are good.

That's not an answer.
According to Biros, the creation of assessments was problematic.   

They do what they do.
School of the Future: Lessons in Failure
by Meris Stansbury

eSchool News

But we don't feel like a failure...
Microsoft Lesson Plans

a definition of explicit instruction

Explicit instruction is instruction that does not leave anything to chance, and it does not make assumptions about skills and knowledge that children will acquire “on their own.”

For example, explicit instruction requires teachers to directly make connections between the letters in print and the sounds in words, and it requires that these relationships be taught in a comprehensive fashion. It also requires that the meanings of words be directly taught and be explicitly practiced so that they are accessible when children are reading text. Finally, it requires not only direct practice to build fluency, but also careful, sequential instruction and practice in the use of comprehension strategies to help construct meaning.

Using Common Science and Common Sense to Teach All Children to Read by Holly B. Lane, Ph.D. University of Florida (pdf file of ppt presentation)

Michael Jackson does long division without a calculator

via Frederick Public Ed

interviewing Mary Hake in 3 hours

Yes, I know, this is ludicrously short notice, but I'm interviewing Mary Hake at 9:30 East Coast time - so if you have questions, let me know.

Here are some Comments at Homeschool Reviews (haven't read yet).

Also, if you have questions about portfolios & Writing Workshop / Reading Workshop, I'll ask those, too. I talked to her a bit about Writing Workshop & she may not have much experience with it - but I'm sure she'll have a lot to say about incremental teaching, aka skills taught in isolation.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Year-End Parent Survey Questions

Here are two of the survey questions I had to answer:

1. My child's school encourages me to be involved with my child's learning.

2. I have the information and knowledge to support my child's learning.

Strongly Agree
Strongly Disagree

At least they had a box at the end to include comments. I suggested that they ask parents about tutoring. Then I asked them how parents can support learning if everything goes into a portfolio and never comes home.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Not As Good As You Think

Catherine often writes that "it's worse than you think."

The Pacific Research Institute has a similar idea in their heads.
They have released a new movie, "Not As Good As You Think, the Myth of the Middle Class School"

From their website:
Not as Good as You Think: The Myth of the Middle Class School is a documentary that shatters the myth that “good” schools located in “nice” neighborhoods are shielded from the education crisis that pervades schools in poor, urban areas. Using available data on school performance and interviews with parents, students, principals, and school reformers, Not as Good as You Think confirms every parent’s silent fear: that their financial sacrifice and investment in an expensive home in a “good” school district is not yielding the achievement results needed to get their kids in good colleges and good jobs.

Based on the groundbreaking book Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice released by the Pacific Research Institute in 2007, the film features Lance Izumi, one of the nation’s foremost education scholars and reformers. Not as Good as You Think takes audiences on a tour of America’s best neighborhoods—from the posh areas of Orange County, California, to the hotbed of innovation, Silicon Valley, to the lush green hills of Tennessee—to reveal that schools in America’s middle class and affluent neighborhoods are not adequately preparing kids for higher education, or even operating under widespread corruption. The documentary also explores freedom and choice in public schools by venturing to Sweden, a socially progressive country that has successfully established school choice for all children, no matter the family’s income.

This is a different film than The Cartel, which Catherine posted about here.

You can buy the DVD for $19.95 from the above website.

Maybe we should all try to help set up a screening of the two films? A double feature? I'll bring the junior mints.

A model school's selling points: everything but the math

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

A year of activities: Spelling Bee | Talent Shoe | Musical | Science Fair | Fall Festival | 100 Days | Opera Company | Reading Buddies | Spring Concert | Valentine's Dance

So goes the text along the margin of the glossy school newsletter that came home yesterday on the last day of school--along with color photographs of smiling students and staff, and articles about the school and the community.

You'd never know that one of the school's activities was the Continental Math League club, run by yours truly and another parent volunteer, and attended 1 1/2 hours a week from October to March by 20 eager 2nd and 3rd graders.

Especially since, despite the principal's earlier assurances, the information sheet about next year's Continental Math League club (and ways to practice for it over the summer) somehow didn't accompany the above newsletter into students' backpacks.

Concerned that this might happen, I had sent said principal an email reminder the day before the last day. Then, when I bumped into her on the morning of the last day, I'd asked her about the email.

"I deleted it," she said, a big grin on her face.

I guess she's happy it's summer vacation.


For those who are interested in ways to polish up their math skills for Continental Math League, or for any other reason, here's what I spent several hours compiling for students at our school. Perhaps other schools and other principals will find this more worthwhile than ours did:


Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Middle Class Entitlement

Children can't survive in our modern world without shoes. It would be a catastrophe to be in a child growing up in the 21st century without shoes. These children would be deeply impoverished, backward, and their futures would be horribly limited.

That's why the government makes and distributes childrens' shoes, because how else would children all be able to have shoes?

What? You suggest that companies should make and --gasp-- SELL shoes? How could you? You must be against the children having shoes to wear! And WHO would supply children shoes if the govt stopped doing so? Which people? How many shoes stores? How would the shoes stores be capitalized? How many brands would there be? What materials would they use? What pricing arrangements would be in place? WHO WOULD REGULATE THE SHOES TO MAKE SURE THEY MET OUR STANDARDS? How would those stores be sure to meet our requirements on sizing and stitching and hiring of shoemakers! How would poor children ever get a pair of shoes?! Suppose a poor person didn't have the money to buy a pair!

I'm paraphrasing and borrowing from Murray Rothbard in For a New Liberty. He isn't speaking of public education per se at this point, but just what happens when someone tries to suggest that the government should get out of a certain services and let the private sector handle them. These questions are absurd about shoes. We KNOW that we have more shoes now, at lower prices, than ever before, and that WalMart, Costco, and Target alone mean that even the poor can afford to buy comfortable stylish shoes for their children.

But what if we applied this to education?

Children need an education! They can't survive without it, and how else would all kids get an education?
What??? You suggest companies could SELL education? Private schools? Private tutors? Who? Which people? How many schools? How would they capitalize them? But but but...what standards would they have? How would we be sure they were teaching what the govt says should be taught? Who would regulate them? How could a poor person ever get an education then! You want to deny the poor an education!

Public schools were created in an era of industrial growth and immigration when a) states wanted to inculcate certain values into all of their populace, including the immigrants' children; b) parents by themselves, particularly poor parents, were viewed as not valuing education on their own enough to educate their children out of poverty; and c) there was an interest in stopping or discouraging the use of child labor (thereby remove competition from the workforce for adults); and d) there was no other entity (but the Catholic Church) massive enough to be able to create a system to educate as widely and deeply as was desired.

The public schools of the current middle class have nothing whatsoever to do with that model. We don't need them to inculcate values--or the values being inculcated don't match up anyway. We absolutely, positively, value education without question. We have moved as a culture to a place where child labor is practically unthinkable. And there are dozens? hundreds? thousands? of entrepreneurial and technical resources now in the private sector that could educate children, even on a massive scale.

Why then do we need public schools at all?

We don't. They are middle class entitlements. The middle class doesn't want to pay for schools, and doesn't feel it should have to. Yet, of course, some of them ARE paying for them, to the tune of 20k plus per student in Irvington and St. Paul, MN, but exactly who bears that burden is probably disproportionately those without school aged children. For others, it's simply the daycare issue--they want taxpayer funded daycare, and schools provide that. How else would they manage? How else could we all conceive of functioning!

The existence of the govt schools at such a low cost drives out the private money. It drives out low cost private schools, and in the end only leaves the boutique ones standing. The same as govt shoes drive out any competition, and leave only the Fendis of the world to purchase. If we had no govt schools, the private sectors--the Green Dots, the Kumons, etc. would still exist, and would expand. The religious schools would exist, and be affordable, too.

But but but! The poor! Who would educate the poor! We need vouchers, see!

No, the private sector could educate the poor; the Church did it in the past; other orgs could do it now. WalMart has done more for the poor getting good shoes than welfare vouchers ever did. If WalMart taught math and reading in DC, do you think poor kids would learn better than they do now? Even so, vouchers for the POOR are a vastly different claim than vouchers for EVERYONE. There is no place else except medicare healthcare, another entitlement for the middle class) where everyone gets covered.

The main argument of school vouchers boils down to this: the government is bad at making shoes that I want! They have the wrong style and they fit badly. They are ugly to boot. I want better choices in shoes!

I know! let's have them still make shoes and give them away, and then also have vouchers so I can buy real private market shoes that aren't ugly and aren't terrible but make the taxpayers pay for them, because they are SOOO expensive, I don't want to do it on my own!

I'm not suggesting we can actually abolish govt schools. And I'm willing to give DC vouchers just because they've got nothing else, even though I see general vouchers as a middle class entitlement that needs to die. But recognizing that the reasons public education was needed in the past have little to do with our current culture can help us to see the real problems we create for ourselves when we come up with convoluted solutions that leave the govt in charge of schools, and keep them in charge of the funding.

Charter schools are a different issue. Charter schools are more like Medicare. More on that later.

21st century skills

Flypaper has decided to try videos ---

Speaking turnarounds from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.

I'm sold!

I've gotten to know Debbie Stier a little bit, and this is what she does at HarperStudio. She sits her authors down on the couch, takes out her Flip camera, interviews them, et voila.

Enjoy the Good Things in Your Life: A Conversation with An Oncology Nurse

Random House Sales Rep, Ann Kingman, Talk about Blogging, VEA, and her Favorite New Book

Debbie sent me off the the board meeting the other night with 4 Flips & a tripod so I could tape the proceedings in a form all of us could actually use,* but I chickened out.

* long story

Customer Review

Just left this review of Work Hard. Be Nice. on Amazon:
By the end of Work Hard. Be Nice., I found myself weeping in every chapter. I think this book may become a classic.

I hope teachers will include Work Hard. Be Nice. on summer reading lists for upper middle school and high school students. Boys especially may cherish this book given how feminized our public schools have become.

Mike Feinberg and David Levin are teachers, yes, but they are fighters, too. They broke rules and they crossed lines. In this era of character education and "collaborative learning environments," the story of two young men who refused to collaborate with a failed system is strong medicine.
I need to get my Amazon review of Dan Willingham's book written, too. (Preview: 5 stars)

a beautiful book

Work Hard. Be Nice.

It's incredible. By the end I found myself weeping in every chapter.

This book may become a classic.

palisadesk on private schools for the poor

Any idea what the % of students in poor and developing countries go to private v. public schools?

In some "poor and developing" countries" it is 100%, for the simple reason that public schools are a) not available at all, or b) not available in that region, or c) not affordable.

In those cases, however, families often have to select only one child to educate, and that child may have to leave school if the family needs his (it's usually a he) wages or cannot afford the fees.

Many families in my school population have immigrated from countries where public education is not available, period. If available, it is in the cities and not in rural or mountain villages.

An uplifting read on one American's campaign to change this situation is Greg Mortensen's Three Cups of Tea.

private schools for the poor

Allison on trusting schools and doctors




doctors & patients














That doesn't work.



Sunday, June 21, 2009

private schools for the poor

Schools for the poor are the obsession of James Tooley's book, "The Beautiful Tree." An education specialist with a severe case of wanderlust, Tooley had always believed that in developing nations, the upper classes attend private schools while the poor rely on public ones. But during a drive through the slums of Hyderabad, India, in 2000, he came across an unexpected phenomenon: an unending line of small, no-frills private schools catering to poor kids.

Tooley began seeking out and finding private schools for the poor across the developing world, interviewing students, principals, parents and officials in China, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Somaliland and beyond. Parents everywhere cited similar reasons for paying the small fees for private schools rather than sending their kids to state schools. For some, especially in rural areas, the public schools were too far from their homes. To others, teachers and administrators in private schools seemed more attuned to their concerns. And despite the foreign aid and state spending on public school facilities, many parents simply felt that their children learned more in private schools. "What's the point of having such nice buildings," asked a mother in a fishing village in Ghana, "if learning doesn't go on?"

The officials Tooley encountered in his travels often denied the existence (much less the superiority) of private schools for low-income children. "There are no private schools for the poor," a bureaucrat in China's Gansu province told Tooley, "because the People's Republic has provided all the poor with public schools. So what you propose to research does not only not exist, it is also a logical impossibility."

Undeterred, Tooley spent years surveying private schools across the developing world. He found that, on average, they had smaller class sizes, higher test scores and more motivated teachers, all while spending less than public schools. With the zeal of a convert, Tooley invokes the market's "invisible hand" to explain why private schools perform better: When parents pay the fees that keep a school afloat, he reasons, the school becomes more accountable to them. Tooley blasts development experts for recognizing the problems with public education and still insisting that more investment in public schools is the way to go. "Why wasn't anyone else thinking that private schools might be part of a quicker, easier, more effective solution?" he asks.

Schools, Weddings and Funerals on $2 a Day
By Carlos Lozada
Friday, June 19, 2009 8:27 PM
via Cato