Saturday, June 7, 2008

Black Educator's Blog Link

Food for thought from another blog

HERE
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is about bellvue's adoption but it is something that was posted last summer on the WTM Bellevue - and they succeeded this year in adopting a curriculum other than TERC or Everyday - but I believe they were the first district in the region to use integrated math and the people suffered plenty for it. Where did all those people go, who touted it so highly? And what happenned to the people who's lives were changed because of it. This is why I find the integrated movement insufferable. Minority enrollment dropped substantially and I blame that shift in demographics on Core Plus.

Mike Hammer (Inverness Research) — Standardized curriculum is like a “monkey wrench” thrown into a classroom. “If you really want to understand how a machine works, you should throw a wrench into it.”

I used a state database to find another school fitting my former school’s profile using the following assumptions:

1. high reading scores
2. larger than average Hispanic population
3. Core plus implementation before 2000.

I found only one in Bellevue that fit my assumptions — an alternative school that interestingly advertises itself as a school that is academically friendly to Hispanics.

It no longer has “alternative” attached to its name. From 2000 to 2005, this schools reading scores more than doubled — 10% to 24.4% (these are still low numbers).

However, during the same time frame Hispanic enrollment dropped from 45.3% to 14.8% while white/asian student enrollment increased.

But get this, total student enrollment dropped from 364 to 209 and the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunches increased from 26.8% to 41.7%

This is not coincidental — but once again a deliberate misrepresentation of what is really going on in Washington’s schools. It is a return to segregated classrooms and high failure rates of students.

The Bellevue math teachers were initially against the Core Plus adoption and they only agreed with the superintendent at the last adoption meeting, so long as teachers were allowed to supplement their instruction.

NSF funded research on curriculum does not address the achievement gap. For instance, students with high absenteeism were subtracted from the data. At what point are students considered high risk — this was just one of the ways achievement data was manipulated to create better than average results.

See Tom Romberg on research relating to Core Plus - “..the [achievement] gap is only in the means, not in terms of the variances…race and gender shouldn’t be co-variant for achievement.”

This was an excuse for using Core Plus, not an advantage!

Bellevue became a national training center for Core plus - they made a substantial amount of money for their sacrifice. But who was sacrificed for it? students and teachers.


Dr. Riley owes Washington an apology. OSPI owes Washington an apology.

Will adopting a traditional track improve Bellevue's test scores? Of course, and it will once again rise to the top as it always did.

What about the families who were driven out of the community for failing to find schools that would educate their children?

Everyday Math is a joke. It should not exist, all I can say is its better than TERC but that's saying less, not more.


Is Bellevue resegregated? Yes, so back to traditional textbooks they go.

If Bellevue had a vision they'd have adopted Singapore and proven to the world they know what it takes to be the best, but then Windows isn't Apple either. Traditional math like Windows. Hah.

June 13, 2008 at 12:32 AM

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