Thursday, July 3, 2008

Looks Like Social Promotion is ending for Texas 8th graders

Check this out HERE

Goodbye social promotion!!!

Now look at Washington State's SBE their plan is for 24 credits for high school graduation but lets just keep moving those unqualified under educated kids into high school. Oh and lets be sure we have the legislature fund high school for 6 periods not just 5.

Hey I am all for better funding for schools if the schools will start requiring and assisting the students to learn more. Clearly under the last decade of Dr Bergeson's leadership there has not been more learning happening.. Where was the SBE standing while this took place?

I have not heard word one from either OSPI or the SBE about ending social promotion.
If the students are not prepared to enter grade 9 ... what is to be expected???

Check out TEXAS in the linked article and wonder what Washington is thinking ???

Where are those effective interventions??? We have clearly demonstrated with Segmented math that grade 11 is far too late to start trying to educate kids.
So we just change the rules .. still no need to provide the service that kids and families deserve.

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can't end social promotion if you don't have effective curriculum. More 19th century stick philsophy.

We'd like this to be true, but it isn't - they are not ending anything, because they haven't educated the child. I thought TASS was supposed to end social promotion? (it didn't). This article just makes Texas look more ridiculous.

What do you do with a high school drop out? Give him a GED and promote him? Hope he moves to a different state?

Anonymous said...

anon your jumps just really really miss me.

I realize that blogging is informal, but, almost everything you write jumps from thing to thing to thing ...

HOW is having effective curriculum NOT 19th century stick philosophy?

what is 19th century stick philosophy and how does it apply or NOT apply to social promotion ... ??

I don't have time for the other paragraphs in the other posts ... why don't you at least sign off with the same anon name ...?

interested but irritated.

Anonymous said...

Dear irritated:

I'll pretend you're a consultant from the DANA Center headed by thin-skinned Treisman 'texas math czar' and highly paid washington math consultant.

If your students aren't getting it, then how can that be effective curriculum. Why aren't they getting it? Well, the textbooks don't work (because....maybe kids don't understand what they're reading...um maybe the problems don't have anything to do with the TASS...maybe students are trying to learn something???? with IMP....)

So if you don't pass the TASS then what? You keep going to hs or maybe you drop out or maybe you go live somewhere else. Texas hasn't solved anything. That kid still has to go to school and get educated.

For every year a student fails math, it takes two years to relearn what should have been taught in the first place. Math builds and furthermore if you don't learn your times tables by the time you turn 17, the task triples in difficulty. Students have to exert more effort to learn mathematics.

Why can't Uri figure that out?

So a schtick means you punish kids for not learning. And that's pretty stupid if the kids don't learn anything anyway with the books they've been given.

And guess what Uri, for every 10,000 hs dropouts that's $6.5 billion per year that the state will never be able to recover. You have contributed to the ignorance of our society. Quack, Quack, Quack. I'll be happy to explain what a carrot is.

Signed,
Ms. Helot

Anonymous said...

I think California realized they had a problem after they had an explosion of teenage pregnancies and teachers decided the streets would be filled with young families if schools didn't start reaching out to assist the community and educate their kids.

My principal told me, she saw the light when she started seeing grandchildren of former students and she said her own kids were still finishing college. Yep.

If you're going to educate kids that have been neglected in school, then you have to reach out to them. Stop lying with fabricated research so you can get funded with NSF grants.

Viva la Raza

Anonymous said...

Dear Uri Uperty Nohoperty:

19th century stick philosphy simply means unproven methods of learning. It fails to account for cause and effect.

Early 19th century American science was concerned with explaining God's influence on the world. So the research was focused on looking for patterns in nature.

So one could present a paper that explained the path of a river by looking at the shape of a tree as proof of God's existence. American research during the Antebellum period is filled with research of that character.

So having a historical perspective allows me to see some of the same flaws found in textbooks, like Core plus or IMP, which contextualize mathematics - there are a multitude of arguments for why this approach doesn't work and I think the math reform artists who've resorted to jackarooing are either seriously deluded or on a sheep wagon.

Signed

A Kelly.

Anonymous said...

What was Freudenthal concerned with for most of his life?

a.Logic without causality
b.Communicating with ET
c.Math in Context
d.All the above


d is correct!

Anonymous said...

Who got paid almost $2 million to write Math in Context in English?

Ans: Tom Romberg

Former Chair of the "Commission on Standards for School Mathematics" for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics that led to the now flourishing standards-based movement in education.

Former Director of the National Center for Research in Mathematical Sciences Education for the U.S. Department of Education.

NISE bringing people together in intended ways. Bend a sheet before you follow the dag of a sheep's wagon. It'll make the trip more sweet.

Anonymous said...

Does anyone even know what math in context looks like? I sure don't. Is real math real?

Anonymous said...

stick philosophy = science without causality = school reform

OSPI needs a full-time psychiatrist, not another psychic.

If Washington did what was right and adopted a curriculum that had high standards (like Singapore) then reformers wouldn't be defrauding taxpayers. This is fraud because its being done intentionally for federal grant money that's seeding the textbook purchases.

Anonymous said...

Dear Helot - Raza - Kelly,

thanks a bit. I've got more of a clue what you are talking about.

thanks for jumping to the conclusion that I'm one of the kool-aid drinkers.

I was under the impression that in the 19th century, if you failed 2nd grade you sat there until you passed it. There was a stick - you didn't want to sit with second graders when your friends are in the 4th, 5th, 6th, ... grades.

Was there any science on which they based their decisions? Probably little.

Given the caliber of 'research' that is permissible in colleges of education, I'd be hesitant to snear at people who based their decsion making on the shapes of the clouds and the fevers in their brains.

un-irritated, but...

Anonymous said...

That's it - I'm after the geniuses behind all this misery that's being planted in Washington's schools. I see what you mean about 'stick' more than one meaning was being used - there's a method behind all this, but sometimes its difficult for others to understand when you are not in the business of deconstructing reform movements.

Anonymous said...

You can't separate schooling and religion in 19th century America. Learning to read was important for all Christians because otherwise you were labeled a sinner. This is true for Islam as well.

The split that occurred in American education had to do with teaching Irish-Catholic immigrants on the East Coast, and the Irish revolution started in 1846. Historians refer to this as the time of American mobbing (1821-1861).

Fenians were waging war with England by crossing into Canada from New York. As in the San Juan Islands, US and British troops were stationed to prevent Fenian attacks waged against Canadians.

It was one of the reasons the Irish joined the Union to fight against the Confederacy, a British ally.

Irish-Americans were demanding not only better working and living conditions but also that their children be taught and eventually they resorted to the Catholic church for help and these schools became so popular that the curriculum was mainstreamed into American culture.

Catholic is what you call traditional or continental education (Napoleonic/modern) and Protestant is progressive/reform or values-based teaching which uses Greek old testament ideas to educate children.

The geometry that is currently taught in middle school for instance primarily covers platonic solids and discrete geometry. However, graphing a coordinate axis is given less emphasis in reform math.

Napier, a Scottish self-taught mathematician, wrote a popular math textbook that used algorithms similiar to what is shown in Everyday Math. In addition, he spent enormous amounts of energy inventing statistics to uncover the date of the apocalpse by analyzing passages of the Bible.

There are good reasons why our textbooks are the way they are and it has to do with religion.

So the way you were taught mathematics had to do with your faith (Catholic or Protestant). You still see some of evidence of this in Southern Mexico provinces, where people use long division but the algorithm looks slightly different than the way its done in N. Europe or the US.

Anonymous said...

Social promotion (progressive) and promotion by merit (continental) help characterize the nature of a reform movement (sometimes its difficult to tell).

The world promotes students based on merit, but its partly based on their lack of resources; the US does not.

Why? I think its because our schools do the separating of students already by using different curriculum for different students. The US does not have a national curriculum and that's why we have social promotion.

Testing (standardized) in this country has to do with where money gets spent in schools, not where children go to school.

But the first test (normed) is taken to determine where students enroll in college, but its only taken by kids who know, some as early as fourth grade, that they will be attending college (they're in a college track, and once there, they rarely leave that track).

In the US, parents choose where their kids attend, not the government. So the process we use to separate kids, without normed-testing, looks very arbitrary, wasteful, and unfair to the rest of the world.

I think we should be doing what the rest of the world is doing, since I believe its going to be necessary to remain competitive.

Anonymous said...

ANON at 04:14, 4 July

Where did you come across the Irish Catholic impact on education info?

I was very aware that religion had a strong influence on education in our country, I'm from Massachusetts - people learned to read so they could read the Bible.

(Ever heard of Mary Dyer, hung on Boston Common in 1660 for being from that sect the Quakers? )

However, I didn't know about this Irish Catholic angle in the evolution of U.S. education thinking - kind of cool !!!

I'm a devout atheist, but, you have to be aware of religion to understand culture, and I did attend a Protestant prep school for a year and I did attend B.C. for 1.5 years. Each school had a religion requirement, I took survey classes, and I have ZERO regrets.

So what is reform ... ??? Depends on the time frame you're discussing and it depends on who is telling the history, no?

rmm.

Anonymous said...

An excellent resource is Out of the Flames which is about the life of Severtus who was burned at the stake with his books for writing heresy.

I think its an inspirational book for math teachers. Unfortunately for Severtus, he was a polyglot, and that included Hebrew, so it made him an authority on the Bible.

When New Netherlands (NYC) was ceded to the British in 1664, the Dutch Calvinists went south to KY before going west to Grand Rapids (this took generations). And yes, the Dutch were not very kind to Quakers, especially those who converted to other faiths. This was a very closed society.

I only have read about Anne Hutchinson and her daughter who I think (I'm probably wrong) was the person JF Cooper used in his book Last of the Mohicans. She was spared for having red hair.

Anonymous said...

The best way to understand the textbook industry is research the bibles they publish.

Anonymous said...

Here's something else I found that looked worthwhile.

This year will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Roland Bainton's Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, still a model of how to combine solid scholarship and vivid prose and still in print, at less than half the price of Out of the Flames.

Reviewed by William C. Placher, professor of theology at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

Anonymous said...

The economics of catholic schooling is a reversal of the past tradition of anowim, protecting and serving the afflicted and oppressed.

Anonymous said...

Michael Scrivens boasted socially-constructed truths could not be deconstructed. That was the NCTM's purpose behind establishing the DOE's list of exemplary curriculum. It is built on an ethics that's incomplete and can't be rationalized. So when I say I'm deconstructing math reform, the joke was on Scrivens.

Anonymous said...

If you go to Chiapas or Vera Cruz, you will still find some influence of French colonialism in their system of education. The long division symbol is written upside down. The rest of the algorithm looks pretty much the same, but there are a few variations. It didn't take long for the Scotch to figure out which algorithm was superior - partial quotients or long division. As with everything else, Americans are having to rediscover everything all over again.

Sometimes we overlook the differences between Newton and Leibnitz that they both discovered calculas, but I'm not so sure anymore.

Anonymous said...

This is a good link explaining the early history of irish immigration - not much is there on education but it does explain why there was a need to create an alternative school system and I think Philadelphia provides an excellent example of how the school system would have evolved. Changes did not really occur until after the Civil War, when because of the draft, veterans demanded rights.

http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/alt/irish6.html

There are also excellent resources on Baltimore, but you see there are two histories and in 1821, Baltimore was the Catholic Archdiocese and there were about 10,000 freed/enslaved African Americans mostly from Haiti as a result of the Planters revolt (1791?). Records show African-Americans were attending school in Baltimore as early as 1842 and Catholic priests were conducting services in French.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1026/is_4_165/ai_n6077619/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

In Philadelphia the history is explained a bit differently - competition for low wage earning jobs between African Americans and Catholic Irish (or Black Irish) kept their communities apart. Catholic Irish supported Democratic candidates. African Americans joined up with Lincoln Republicans.

I'm still trying to look up some more resources so feel free to post your own.

Anonymous said...

Here's some definitive proof from the previous reference on baltimore

In 1828 Jacques Hector Nicholas Joubert de la Muraille (1777-1843), a Sulpician priest, asked Elizabeth Clarisse Lange (c. 1784-1882) and Marie Balas (d. 1845), experienced black teachers, to establish the first formal school, as opposed to Sunday school, for black children under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church. (4) Both emigres from Saint Domingue. Lange and Balas had previously taught children from a wide economic spectrum of Baltimore's black French-speaking community.

If you look carefully for Baltimore's first public school about 1846, you will see another school established for African Americans, but the dominant community by then are the Ulster Irish so its looking more like a Federalist school system or what one might see in Connecticutt.

Anonymous said...

Since I was a kid I wondered what 'black irish' meant and I finally found something that confirms my suspicions - it originated in America, not Ireland. And it was also used with 'white negro'. In fact it was worse, because Irish were not considered property, so they were hired for all sorts of dangerous work.

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art55967.asp

Since the term "Black Irish" is mostly of USA origin, it is not outside the realms of plausability that the phrase had its origins in the 1800's when the distain for "bog Irish" became so great that the common vernacular for anyone from the Emerald Isle was "White Negro" (actually a more reprehensible word was used),placing the Irish on the same "bottom rung" social status as the Black American Slaves.

At this time in American history,it was generally believed that the Irish and Negro Slaves held genetic similarities and that their intermarital unions would produce a new race of "Black Irish". It took only a short period of common slang usage for the new term of "Black Irish" to be born and carried over into everyday language.

The truth is that,though bound through a common hatred from the rest of society,each race separated from the other and thereby maintained their heritage and generational purity. Sadly, the derisive term stuck with the Irish until recent living memory.


So its a racist theory that explained differences between different groups of Irish - Protestants and Catholics.