Thursday, July 2, 2009

About the Seattle legal Appeal

Seattle uses Everyday Math ... CMP2 ... and just adopted "Discovering Math" from Key Curriculum Press. It is this High School Adoption that is the subject of our legal appeal.

Martha McLaren has in her possession 1200 pages of documentation submitted by the SPS that was used by the SPS in making the “Discovering Math” adoption. In looking through these 1200 pages, some documents that should have been available and used by the stacked core-adoption committee are not present, so perhaps an unbiased selection process was not desired. {Big Surprise ..duh!!}

#1… State Board of Education Math Advisory Panelist Dan Dempsey's letter to Math Program Manager Ms. de la Fuente in early March alerting her to the fact that “Discovering Math” had been found “Mathematically Unsound” by the SBE consultants and alerting her to make this information immediately available to the core-committee was not present. The next core-committee meeting happened without mention of the SBE finding.

#2… The mathematician W. Stephen Wilson’s review of soundness was not in the SPS documents submitted on which the Discovering Math recommendation was made.

#3… The mathematician Guershon Harel’s review of soundness was not in the SPS documents submitted on which the Discovering Math recommendation was made.

#2b & #3b… The favorable review from OSPI’s favorites King and Bright was present although far less detailed than Wilson’s and Harel’s reviews. The State board of Education Consultant hired independent mathematicians to review matheamtical soundness but Seattle's adoption committee does not even read their work. … How do these things happen?

#4… The NMAP final report “Foundations for Success” the current most pertainent math document for k-12 math direction is also curiously absent. What is available is a reference to the "NMAP Report" in a PowerPoint. This one page was part of a power point entitled High School Mathematics Materials Adoption, presented on 4/22/09
With quotations from page 30:
"for all a content areas, conceptual understanding, computational fluency, and problem-solving skills are each essential... ."
and page 45:
"All-encompassing recommendations that instruction should be entirely
"student centered" or "teacher directed" are not supported by research..."

Particularly odd was Director Sundquist’s statement that he turned to NMAP for guidance when apparently the adoption committees were not using this document.

So how can a high school math adoption committee meet for over six months and not reference NMAP???? I hope this happens only in Seattle.

The public will have totally lost control of everything if these actions are acceptable. Should not Math Program Manager explain all this or resign? That would be accountability.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The math adoption is part of a bigger plan - to disenfranchise minorities from SPS and steer communities into charter magnet programs.

The furor over at Cooper Elementary is one example. This comment could be from a parent or staff member. But in particular singling out students of active parents should be addressed. This is not an isolated case.

"I too have been on the receiving end of the many tirades Kathy Rutherford regularly rips herself into. I’m so tired of working with someone who doesn’t like kids. I mean, we’re teachers. We’re educators, we support teaching and we support our school. Why have they given us someone who does everything in her power to make sure we fail.

The inability or refusal of authorieites to embroil themselves in these issues only shows how completely inadequate our system of justice has become, when we require the rulings of judges for the public to be heard by our elected officials.

Cooper’s internal structure has fallen apart under her leadership. Everything is done off the cuff and with little purpose or intention.

The principal ignored everyone, the teachers, the staff, the families and the kids!

She tried to destroy our former PTA president, and even went after her son, making his daily academic experience nothing short of hell. She has a set group of children in our building that she is constantly needling, constantly berating, constantly targeting. Surprise surprise, they’re ALL black.

She has broken so many distict policies I can no longer keep track. She is the worst employee manager I have ever had. Not only is she unclear with her expectations of us, but she talks to her staff members, including me, like we’re slaves, or droids- anything other than human beings that deserve to be treated with respect.

Cooper is not a perfect school, but it is a pretty damn good one. We would be better if we had a Board rep who actually news us and advocated for us, and we would certainly be doing better with a dynamic leader who wants to work with us.

Oh and I also think Steve Sundquist is a jackass. Thank you for pointing that out to everyone."

Anonymous said...

President Barack Obama's Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, was confronted in Chicago today by black teachers and their allies who charge that the Administration's "educational turnaround plan" is racially discriminatory.

The teachers charge that in his previous position as CEO of Chicago's public schools, Duncan's strategy (now at the heart of national policy), resulted in the firing of numerous mid-career and experienced black teachers who were replaced by less experienced white ones. Bruce Dixon of Black America Web, broke this story:


In May, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared the Obama administration's intent to close and "turn around" 5,000 "underperforming" public schools in poorer neighborhoods across the country. Duncan's last job was CEO of Chicago's public schools where he shut down dozens of neighborhood schools, practically all in lower income areas, and dismissed thousands of committed and experienced teachers, the vast majority of them African American women.

Anonymous said...

My own thoughts so far are that as real estate continues sliding downward, interest in reform (without results) will lose its appeal.

Interest in outcomes, like the WASL, are already dead issues.

Standards remains a worthless enterprise. More change in curriculum is needed than front-ending or writing about standards.

Focus on writing textbooks that work for our students. Educators cannot ignore the home languages of children who only speak English at school.

Goodloe and Sundquist are working with a trend that will only result in more teachers losing their jobs.

Anonymous said...

Let's just take a look at the difference between Washington's population growth and public school enrollment from 1997 and 2008. Over 11 years, Washington grew by 15%. However, school enrollment during those 11 years only grew 6%. The median age went from 29 to something like 35, showing the population had aged a lot. The number of teachers added (about 8%) roughly follows the trend of adding students. I don't see any changes there.

You would think that with fewer students per adult that academic achievement would go up, but its pretty easy to see from classrooms and WASL test scores that the level of academics has gone down. In addition, you would have to agree that there is more diversity, but that's not visually apparent in the more challenging academic classes that prepare students for college.

Anyway that's just more fuel for the fire - pretty sketchy.

dan dempsey said...

How can a high school math adoption committee meet for over six months and not reference NMAP???? I hope this happens only in Seattle.

The public will have totally lost control of everything if these actions are acceptable. Should not the Math Program Manager explain all this or resign? That would be accountability.

Anonymous said...

Yes, but we both know that no explanation will be forthcoming. Most administrators I know don't think about resigning, they just move on to greener pastures. We also know that NMAP won't ever be referenced except to push through a 'governors roundtable idiotic agenda' - so we'll have teachers and students up to their noodles in batteries and graphing calculators - they'll save the microchip industry and education at the same time (right!). Americans would do the world economy better by building and giving away bicycles.

dan dempsey said...

Anon said:
Yes, but we both know that no explanation will be forthcoming.

There may be some explaining happening in Superior Court in early 2010.

Hope we can raise enough funds to put Porter, McLaren, and Mass there in 2010.

We have been running down the email trails ... this is really going to be a show .... in Ed Sullivan's words a really Big Show.