No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up:

Ordinarily, I try to keep the focus here directly on mathematics education issues, but it's impossible to view what's going on in this country right now without seeing how a host of threads come together through almost any lens one chooses to look.

The situation in Wisconsin and the rhetoric being deployed by the anti-worker governor and his supporters would be funny if the stakes weren't so high and the incredible hypocrisy and cynicism so deep and real. However, there are times when it seems that the only source that completely captures just how unprincipled and transparently dishonest such influential sources as Faux Snooze are is THE DAILY SHOW. After viewing one of Jon Stewart's most recent broadcasts, I feel that there's really nothing more that I need say than to urge you to watch. If you have any doubts as to which side is lying through its teeth every time it says anything, just watch this Thursday, March 3, 2011 excerpt:

Daily Show: Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street

A Must-Read Book on mathematics education

Derek Stolp

I am nearly finished reading a truly remarkable book about mathematics education in the US, what we can do about it to make it more effective and meaningful, and a call for a return to democratic core values in our entire approach to schooling (okay, I'm not sure the author goes quite that far explicitly, but let me do so for him if he doesn't). The author is Derek Stolp, pictured above, and the book is MATHEMATICS MISEDUCATION: The Case Against A Tired Tradition. 

It's a definite must-read if you are concerned about just how off-base both traditional and many reform efforts are in US mathematics education. For example, Stolp makes a very telling point about NCTM's commitment to real-world mathematics in his examination of the article content in THE MATHEMATICS TEACHER from 2002, the year he was writing his book. Unsurprisingly, to me at least, he found a rather dramatic mismatch between NCTM's public commitment in, say, PSSM to real-world connections and the focus of the vast majority of articles that appeared two years later in MT. I suspect that a similar study regarding the productive, creative use of technology in mathematics teaching would show even greater disconnections between NCTM's talk and walk. But they are hardly alone in this regard. 

Stolp has a lovely website with a lot of curricular ideas that jibe with his philosophy of mathematics education. It looks like it could prove to be an excellent resource for teachers who want to create a similar sort of mathematics teaching and opportunity for students in their classrooms.

I have only one quibble thus far with Mr. Stolp: at several points in his book, he mentions as an example of the difference between conceptual and procedural understanding the importance that students "get" that multiplication is repeated addition. Regular readers of my blog will recognize that those are (nearly) fighting words to my ears. But, hey, I don't expect perfection from anyone, not even myself. ;^) So even if Stolp is at least temporarily in the MIRA camp, I hope he will come to see the limitations of that viewpoint, and even if he doesn't, he's got way too much of value in his writing for me not to promote it here. 

Finally, I'd love to see what Derek Stolp and Dan Meyer would make of each other's work and viewpoints. I see the potential for a very productive exchange and potential collaboration between them. But then, I always tend to think synergistically when it comes to math and math teaching: probably comes from knowing how little I'd know in this domain if it weren't for the brilliance and inspired work of a host of other people.

It Ain't Just Claptrap: Can We Meaningfully Critique Our Schools?

On an education discussion list I follow, Jonathan Groves made that I will not reproduce here, in which he was critical of many aspects of US math and literacy education, based on what he sees in his own teaching at the college level. One reader of the list replied to Jonathan's post, "This is just a repetition of all the claptrap, generalizing, and stereotyping [this list] is supposed to combat."


I think the situation, particularly from the perspective of mathematics educators, is a bit more complex than would allow the dismissal of Jonathan's post as "claptrap."

The fact is that if you spend time in classrooms where things are not going well (for a host of reasons, not merely the short list that the deformers cite, if those apply at all), you can't help but be frustrated at how poorly we are presenting mathematics to a vast majority of students there. In that context, I speak of places like Detroit, but that list includes many other poverty-stricken places, large and small, in this country.

Next, looking at many classrooms in less economically depressed districts, one sees teachers who don't know the mathematics they're expected to teach (particularly, but not exclusively, at the K-5 level); those who 'know' the math, but don't know nearly enough about how to teach it well and effectively to any but a small number of so-called "mathy" kids - generally those who already like math, particularly when math is reduced to quick, accurate calculation; and then the lovely but all-too-rare cases of inspired teachers allowed to do their jobs without absurd shackles placed on them by national, state, or district tests and other idiocy that has little or nothing to do with mathematics or education.

We also know that this overall inadequacy doesn't result in an under-supply of mathematically competent folks. There's no shortage of mathematicians, economists, engineers, physicists, etc. That was made crystal-clear in THE MANUFACTURED CRISIS, but those numbers are ignored by the deformers, the anti-progressives in the Math Wars, by Obama and his "Sputnik moment," and many others.

So the question becomes much more an ethical one about whether to teach mathematics better to more kids for its own sake (the pleasure, power, and beauty of mathematics), for the sake of equity (everyone has a right to become mathematically competent and rise to whatever heights she desires and is capable of reaching), and for reasons of core democratic values (an innumerate citizenry is one easily deceived by politicians, demagogues, advertisers, and other scam artists). It is NOT a question of "saving" the economy with a new wave of math and science folks. So many jobs in the predictable future will NOT require all that much math or, for that matter, what's typically viewed as a college education, though competition and raising the bar may make folks have to have college degrees to get jobs that don't really require much of what colleges generally teach and students generally study there (in other words, even if employers choose to make a college degree a basic requirement for a service job, that doesn't mean the course of study will better prepare anyone to DO that job).

What this all boils down to, for me, is the issue of criticism from the right versus criticism from the left - to use a crappy metaphor - when it comes to public education. Not being of the educational deform mindset, my back goes up every time I read or hear an attack on our public schools that comes from Duncan, Klein, Rhee, the usual think tanks and foundations, the typical education reporter, ad nauseum. At the same time, I don't think our current public educational model is sound, I don't think it's been sound for a long time, and I think we can and must do better.

The problem becomes how to level correct, meaningful, constructive criticism at the system that leads to real change without throwing in with the deformers or inadvertently winding up supporting their causes (it's rather unlikely that they will help ours, no matter what their rhetoric about choice, accountability, raising the bar, and a host of other catch phrases and buzz words).

It becomes exhausting to have to keep repeating that I don't want to see our public schools dismantled or privatized, that I don't want to see teachers sacrificed on the altar of real or phony economic shortages (and misplaced priorities), that I "get" why we have teachers' unions, that teaching is a very difficult job, etc., etc., and that I STILL know that there are many crappy schools, crappy teachers, crappy administrators, crappy tests, crappy politicians with their fingers in the education mess making it worse, and a bunch of greedy asshats trying to suck away billions from kids into their own pockets, all the while singing psalms about global competition, accountability, 21st century skills, and so on.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

A MUST read: "PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid"

"PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid" by Mel Riddile http://tinyurl.com/povertyandPISA My comments: The sky isn't falling in US public schools, folks. Some readers likely already knew that, particularly those who are followers of the late Gerald Bracey's work, amongst other debunkers of educational disinformation. The results of the recent PISA exams highlight this fact, but you wouldn't know it from US Sec. of Education, Arne Duncan or any other doom-sayer, bloviator, pundit, or deformer. And with good reason. Because what the numbers say is disturbing, but not because our schools are failing us. The facts are that our schools are amongst the best in the world, but to see it you have to compare apples to apples. And what's being done with the PISA scores for the most part is what's been done with so much other data: the wrong things are compared and the apparent results make our public schools look like they're at best doing a mediocre job. What is being missed or hidden by the 'experts' who want to convince us to fire teachers, bust unions, turn public education over to Wall Street, promote charters, hand out vouchers to parents (particularly rich and upper-middle class ones), and generally dismantle our public schools in order to turn them over to drooling private market entrepreneurs and (many) charlatans? The fact that the US has an enormous disparity between rich and poor compared with other industrialized nations, and the impact of poverty on the average scores. But disambiguate scores so that we compare similar economic strata across nations and suddenly we're just where one might guess: Number One. But please, don't take my word for it. Read a detailed analysis. Then consider why Duncan, Rhee, Klein, and so many others are SO invested in convincing you that it's our ENTIRE nation's schools that are in crisis, at risk, failing, collapsing, corrupt, incompetent, bleeding money, and all the rest of it. Why they look at the public schools alone as having failed to solve the effects of severe poverty in rural and urban settings alike. Or in other words, why they don't want you to realize that poverty and greed at the top of our economic system, not teachers' unions, is what's keeping the folks at the bottom from lifting themselves by their non-existent bootstraps. http://tinyurl.com/povertyandPISA

Another Cartoon Worth Tens of Thousands of Words

Does Arne Duncan Have A Soul?

"Not even this much of one."

You'd think that after the recent infamnia the LA TIMES perpetrated against teachers, Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education with no background or credentials as an educator, would have had the good sense to either repudiate this clueless act or at least keep his mouth shut about it. Instead, he outdoes himself with the following:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week urged school districts across the country to disclose more data on student achievement and teacher effectiveness, saying too much information that would help teachers and parents is being kept out of public view.

The education secretary told an audience in Little Rock, Ark., that schools too often aren't disclosing data on student achievement that could not only help parents measure teachers' effectiveness, but also help teachers get better feedback.

Mr. Duncan said his remarks were prompted by a Los Angeles Times series analyzing teacher performance through value added scoring to show which elementary teachers were helping students make the most gains. The secretary said he was not advocating posting the results online, as the Times plans to do, but he urged transparency.

 From Education Week [American Education's Newspaper of Record], Wednesday, September 1, 2010, Volume 30, Issue 2, p. 4. See http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/09/01/02brief-3.h30.html?r=1277642202

So what, exactly, is the difference between posting the results of misleading or meaningless data on-line and Mr. Duncan's vision of "transparency"? As he apparently offered no specifics, it's impossible to know how he distinguishes what the LA TIMES did and plans to do from something else. But of course, the problem isn't transparency versus secrecy. It's between meaningful data and utter bullshit. And using student scores on questionable tests and a phony formula with no credibility to rank teachers in terms of "effectiveness" is simply the latter: complete, utter, political bullshit.

How many times are we going to be asked to swallow the patent lie (speaking of 'transparency') that any of these pols and pundits are interested in learning about what kids actually know and can do, or in seeing that TEACHERS (as well as parents, kids, and other stake holders in education) get useful data that will potentially lead to more effective instruction and great student learning and achievement? For in fact, were that the goal of the folks at the LA TIMES, at various right-wing foundations,at the US Dept. of Education, or anywhere else where self-righteous 'experts' wring their hands over the results of fraudulent excursions into experimental statistics and psychometrics, then they would be calling for a very different sort of assessment and holding their peace until such assessments were being give and data collected from them. Further, they would all demand that the data be collected in ways that gave teachers, students, and parents specific feedback on each and every relevant data point: kids and parents would know how the student did on each item, what his/her answer was, what are the likely weak points or areas of confusion in the subject based on the answers, and what is recommended for that student to improve; teachers would receive similar data, but for both individual students and classes as a whole, as well as expert recommendations on how to address the weak areas. Something might actually happen to make things better. But such is not the case, nor is it likely that it will be until at LEAST 2014 when the folks being paid to make better tests to fit the Common Core Standards roll out their first products.

It remains to be seen what those "better tests" will look like, given the much higher cost in time and money that creating, administering, and particularly grading non-multiple choice, non-short answer, non-true/false items of a performance-task nature entails. Creating ANY good test item is challenging, but creating test items that actually tell us what we need to know to improve teaching, learning, and parenting when it comes to academic subjects is a major challenge. If the deform crowd is seriously committed to these goals (as opposed to merely paying them lip-service and instead focusing upon destroying teachers' unions and public schools in order to promote profit-based, private takeovers of public education - quite frankly precisely their real goals, on my view - then they must publicly and privately commit to paying the price to create excellent assessment and seeing that only such instruments that pass reasonable professional and public scrutiny are used for "high-stakes" purposes.

I'd prefer, of course, to see the whole notion of high-stakes testing interrogated with as much care and brutality as the pundits and deformers have been using on kids and teachers. I've said on multiple occasions that as things stand, the only fair way to go if we're going to stick with the multiple-choice nonsense and weak 'student-generated' and 'free-response' questions that dominate the current crop of high-stakes tests is to demand that the pundits and pols who advocate and vote for these tests be made to take the things themselves and allow their scores to be circulated on the internet and published in newspapers. Until then, I doubt that many of them, even those with truly good intentions, will start to look closely at what's being tested, how it's being tested, and what practical uses the results of such tests can be put to. If they really pay attention, they might start to see how antithetical to the alleged purposes of improving education - i.e., teaching, learning, parenting - these instruments are in practice.

Meanwhile, Mr. Duncan will no doubt continue to alienate the vast majority of educators with his ham-handed, anti-teacher proclamations. It would be lovely to see him placed under the same sort of microscope and held to the same sorts of standards he advocates for teachers. It would be more lovely still if President Obama would get his head out of his behind regarding education. For all his own experiences, none of which had a bloody thing to do with the sorts of garbage he and Duncan have been pushing on our nation's public schools, Obama seems purblind about education. While I didn't grouse when the Obamas chose to send their kids to Sidwell-Friends School, I'm now starting to wonder if a dose of ordinary reality isn't just what the doctor ordered for our "socialist" president.

Clearly, he's not a stupid man. Can he really believe that the more we test kids, the more we scapegoat teachers, the more we put weapons into the hands of privatizers and right-wing education deformers, the more we bully and bribe states, the better things are going to be for kids? For the country as a whole? For the future of American democracy? Or has that never really been the point of public schools?

The LA TIMES Cracks Out of Turn When It Doesn't Know The Shot

David Mamet*

I'm not sure what I was doing or where I was the day the LOS ANGELES TIMES went from being a newspaper to being a national leader in evaluating teacher quality. Perhaps it was supposed to be kept secret, like what was discussed and said at the meeting Dick Cheney had with Big Oil executives a decade ago. If so, several  TIMES reporters have blown it with a recent article, WHO'S TEACHING LA'S KIDS?

In it, three reporters, Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith, present ratings of "teacher effectiveness." In particular, they single out one particular fifth grade teacher, John Smith, and claim he is the least effective teacher for his grade level in his school. Mr. Smith's photo is at the beginning of the article that purports to know, based on kids' scores on administrations of a single standardized test, which teachers are helping their students, teaching effectively, and making a positive difference, and, of course, which, like Mr. Smith, are allegedly failing to move their students ahead. 


I wrote the following to these reporters today and will be fascinated to see if any of them respond. I know that were I John Smith, I'd be speaking to my attorney and considering lawsuits against several parties, not the least of whom are Jason Felch, Jason Song, and Doug Smith. As I am not, the best I can do is try to point out how wrongheaded, how irresponsible, and how ultimately counterproductive is both their article and the methods they employ to smear the professional integrity of many fine teachers who for any number of reasons may not "measure up." The professional integrity I call into question, however, is that of these reporters, their editors, and others who profit from the publication of this sort of cheap-shot, ignorant journalism. 

If you start with the absurd assumption that multiple-guess
standardized test scores tell us anything (let alone EVERYTHING) we
need to know about teacher effectiveness or student learning of
subject matter or all the other things that teachers and schools are
about (not all of which are good, but that's another debate entirely),
then it follows that the LA TIMES is as qualified as anyone else with
no expertise whatsoever in psychometrics to determine which teachers are "most
effective" and which are "least effective." Further, with the same
starting assumption, there's nothing unconscionable about reporters
and editors  from that noble publication choosing to print a photo of
a so-called "ineffective" 5th grade teacher and include the following
in the article:

Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the

other down the hall. The difference has almost nothing to do with the

size of the class, the students or their parents.

It's their teachers.

With Miguel Aguilar, students consistently have made striking gains on

state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third

of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, according to

a Times analysis. John Smith's pupils next door have started out

slightly ahead of Aguilar's but by the end of the year have been far

behind."

But if the assumption is false, then what the TIMES and its reporters have done is to pillory one 5th grade teacher on the wheel of meaningless test scores. They have, in fact, violated two  fundamental principles of psychometrics: never use a test designed to measure one thing (e.g., student achievement) to measure something it was not designed to measure (e.g., teacher effectiveness), and never use a single test score or measurement type to draw definitive conclusions (particularly not in the social sciences). Further, they have made the fundamental error of assuming that correlation (Teacher A's kids scores are higher than Teacher B's scores) equates with causation (Scores rose primarily BECAUSE of the superior teaching skills and methods of Teacher A).

In fact, the above-cited article is so fraught with error and leaps of logic (and bad faith) as to be utterly, irredeemably worthless, not unlike the test scores upon which its false (and probably libelous) conclusions are based. But then, the article's authors began with a patently incorrect assumption, and  they very likely had its conclusions well in mind to begin with.

So I am moved to ask: may we expect in the near future an article by the same reporters on which LA TIMES journalists are "most effective" and "least effective" based on how sales of the paper are impacted by their articles and reportage?

May we expect that the reporters will be taking, say, the tests given to high school kids in LAUSD (I assume all these journalists graduated from college) or perhaps the SAT or ACT (or, Darwin forbid! the GRE) and publishing the results in the paper? How about the politicians who pushed and voted for using these tests as fair measures of a host of things they were never designed to assess? (And I include in that list not only state and local officials, but every US senator, congressperson, US Department of Education secretary, and every US president from William Jefferson Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Hussein Obama who has supported these tests as the measure of all things.)

Let's shed more sunshine on the test-based competence of our reporters and politicians. Publish and publicize their scores. Threaten, meaningfully, to hoist these folks by their own petard and we'll see some critical examination of the assumption that the tests are valid and reliable, as well as adequate measures alone of effectiveness or lack thereof. My suggestion is no worse than what politicians and reporters are doing now with kids, administrators, schools, districts, and, of course, everyone's favorite scapegoat, public school teachers.

Until such time, shame on Messrs. Felch, Song, Smith; shame on the LA TIMES. Shame on anyone and everyone who buys into the ridiculous test-mad nonsense that has this country by the throat.

Michael Paul Goldenberg

p.s.: Lest someone suggest otherwise, my last official GRE scores, taken in October 1991, are Verbal 800; Mathematics 780; and Logical Reasoning 720. I feel safe in putting those scores up against those on any comparable test of the three reporters, any member of the LA TIMES staff, any current legislator in California or the United States Congress. I've spent over 30 years preparing students for various standardized tests and debunking many of the myths surrounding them. I'll happily meet anyone on the standardized test battle ground, No. 2 pencils aready at dawn or high noon.

*For those wondering what David Mamet's photo is doing at the beginning of this blog entry, it has to do with the title of my post. Mamet is very fond of the language of con artists. Apparently, our intrepid LA TIMES reporters are not unfamiliar with both the short and long cons. Or perhaps it's just their editors, the publisher, and others with vested interests in destroying US public education.