Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Spreadsheets galore can be yours just write

I just ran 5 spreadsheets...

Broadview-Thompson really dropped off the map over the last four years

TT Minor Black males are already performing very poorly by grade 4 WASL Time.

Green Lake the pilot school for Everyday Math is an absolute Math disaster

North Beach using Saxon is an Academic Steamroller it has very little poverty.

All SPS elementary Schools were lumped together for comparison purposes.

If you want the sheets write me at

dempsey_dan@yahoo.com

I am posting the Green Lake School sheet HERE but it is
not very user friendly much better as an excel sheet.
Write if you want it.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

very interesting and the green lake link is pretty good considering it was a spreadsheet.

That's usually been the pattern of adoptions - upper income districts are persuaded by parents to select traditional curriculum (if saxon's 'incremental' approach can be considered traditional) while urban commumnities adapt everyday and connected.

Its possible to find some communities using TERC, but only if your district had a strong elementary math program using manipulatives back in the 70's.

dan dempsey said...

TERC/Invstigations is another NSF program along the Inquire and Explore lines that has students leaving grade 5 at about a grade 3 Math level.

Then today's Seattle Times thinks those same kids should have Algebra II to graduate from high school.

I read the News Paper but I will not tell the Times how to run one. I assume the person that wrote the editorial went to school. Clearly they have yet to teach the broad spectrum of American students any mathematics or they would not be offering such bizarre advice. Just because the SBE with no highly math competent members likes an idea -- lets not all fall down and play follow the leader just yet....

Dan

Anonymous said...

I wasn't trying to say TERC was a strong program - only that it appealed to some teachers, who I think had a previous training in a similiar curriculum, only I couldn't recall the name (it might have been through Addison-Wesley and it was used in the 80's?

Anonymous said...

Math our way. It was designed for K-3 and from this you have Family Math and TERC invstigations is some outgrowth of that I think, but I'm not an elementary person, except I remember my mom used it and her kids did real well - now she also taught traditional math with it (Addison-Wesley), so I consider it a blended curriculum.

dan dempsey said...

Until God provides us with uniform students who enter the classroom without original sin or genetic variation, it seems a blended curricula will be used by effective teachers.

The question is what to blend and how?

I doubt that an excellent answer to that will be coming down from too many District Offices.

Anonymous said...

I absolutely agree. She retired when they adopted TERC - it was the curriculum director that made the decision. Not the teachers.

Its interesting that teachers accepted Math Our Way - and the Poway teachers also enjoy using Family Math, but as you say at the elementary level its always been blended. It would be nice however to have something that was in one textbook and not 4 or 5. Not that is, unless if you were forced to use something so dumb as Core Plus.