For your reading please over this holiday weekend, I given you Barry Garelick’s latest masterpiece - One Step Ahead of the Train Wreck.
The frightening thing for PWCS parents, EDM is light years better than Investigations.
If your child is in PWCS and you are concerned about the missing content in your child’s math program, then you should read this article. Just filling the gaps piecemeal isn’t enough. You need to take over teaching math at home.
Categories: TERC Investigations
On Wednesday May 20th, the school board voted to approve boundary Plan B1 for the 11th High School. You can find this plan on the PWCS web site.
The public hearing on the boundary recommendation was long. About 50 people spoke, with groups supporting plan C, C1, or B1.
Gil Trenum, the Brentsville District Board Member, proposed that the board adopt a revised version of Plan C1 which would have sent the Ashley’s Ridge community to the 11th High School and Great Oaks Community to Brentsville. Chairman Johns seconded the motion and added that he believed the Governor’s school students should be hosted at SJHS. The other board members commented that while they understood the parent’s concerns, they believed that opening a school at 106% capacity and allowing that school to rise to 115% capacity in just a few years was not advisable, especially when a nearby school would be below capacity. Chairman Johns noted that in the past board members have deferred to the board member from the affected district in boundary decisions, and that that trend was apparently changing.
Mr Trenum’s motion was voted down 6 votes to 2, with Chariman Johns and Mr Trenum providing the Yea votes.
Plan B1 was then proposed by Mr Trenum, and, after some discussion, approved by the entire school board.
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If you would like to comment about the board’s decision, please feel free to do so here. Comments on all other boundary threads are now closed.
Categories: PWC School Board
Below is a link to an amazing paper explaining, in detail, why TERC Investigations is much much less that we PWC parents expect from our children’s math program.
The paper was written by Jerry Jongerius, a gentleman who graduated Magna Cum Laude from Northwestern College with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science degree.
Categories: TERC Investigations
The Va DOE recently revised the VA SOLs for mathematics (note: The SOLs are reviewed and revised on a set, rotating schedule – 2009 was when the Math SOLs were scheduled to be reviewed and revised). Below is an review of the 2009 SOLs for grades 1 – 5 against the content provided in the 2008 edition of TERC Investigations, the version PWCS mandates for all public elementary schools in the county.
Note and Disclaimer: This review is not in any way, shape, or form compatible or associated with the assessment the State Department of Education conducts for content match with the SOLs and has no bearing to or relationship with that assessment.
The review is simply a list of content required per the 2009 SOL and, based on our review, missing or presented incompletely in the 2008 version of TERC Investigations. PWCS has conducted it’s own review of the 2004 edition of TERC Investigations to the VA SOL and is, reportedly, supplementing lessons where necessary to meet state standards.
Categories: TERC Investigations
The Directorate of Education at the NSF is one of the largest sources of cash for educational research and educational program development in the United States. If your child’s school uses Investigations, Every Day Math, Connected Math, or any other such “fuzzy” math programs, you can thank the good people of the NSF Education Directorate because much of the money to develop those programs came from them. Money from the NSF for more traditional programs, like Saxon, has been scarce.
The NSF has funded the development of virtually every constructivist / standards based/ reform math program in existence in the US. It’s done more than just fund the development of these programs, it’s funded the development of programs to convince school districts and parents of the need for them, to train teachers on how to teach them, and to assess how effective the programs really are.
And what does the NSF Education Directorate have to show for the hundreds of millions of dollars it’s spent funding research to assess the effectiveness of the math programs it developed and sold to school districts around the country?
Little to nothing.
You see, scientific research is supposed to, well, meet the minimum standards of quality to be reasonably relied upon. But the NSF Education Directorate, apparently, doesn’t require that the research it funds meet those standards. The result, bogus education studies that can’t be relied upon and wasted money.
The National Math Advisory Panel (NMAP) ran into this problem when they began assessing that state of mathematics education in the United States.
“The Panel’s systematic reviews have yielded hundreds of studies on important topics, but only a small proportion of those studies have met methodological standards. Most studies have failed to meet standards of quality because they do not permit strong inferences about causation or causal mechanisms (Mosteller & Boruch, 2002; Platt, 1964). Many studies rely on self-report, introspection about what has been learned or about learning processes, and open-ended interviewing techniques, despite well-known limitations of such methods (e.g., Brainerd, 1973; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Woodworth, 1948).”
So did the US Dept of Education’s What Works Clearing House when they attempted to gauge the effectiveness of the four most “popular” elementary mathematics programs. The WWC’s study was hindered by the fact that:
“No studies of Investigations in Number, Data, and Space® that fall within the scope of the Elementary School Math review protocol meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Investigations in Number, Data, and Space®”.
Amazing, isn’t it? Here are hundreds of supposedly scientific studies, funded by the NSF, which are supposed to gauge whether the new math programs are actually effective, and they can’t be relied upon.
Yet those studies are still being circulated and used by sales people to convince schools and parents of the need for these constructivist programs.
And it’s not just the NSF that backs bogus studies which show how wonderful constructivist program are. The textbook publishers are part of the game as well and debunking their claims is as easy as picking up the phone. Who can forget the research of one of our citizens which demonstrated that more than 60% of the schools cited as Evidence of Investigations Success by Pearson Publishing, Investigations Publisher, are no longer using Investigations. PWC Schools own department head defended Pearson’s bogus list.
As long as school board members remain complaint and refuse to do their own research and challenge the assertions of school system employees, as long as parents and politician’s prefer ignorance to knowledge, as long as teachers cower in fear of reprisal, our children’s education will continue to suffer.
1. National Science Foundation Systematic Initiativesby McKeown, Klein, and Patterson.
2. School math books, nonsense, and the National Science Foundation, by David Klein, Guest Editorial to be published in the American Journal of Physics, December 2006
3. List of a couple of the NSF Grants funding Connected Mathematics
9986372
9980760
Categories: General Education
There’s an old adage that if you want to learn what’s at the heart of an issue, follow the money and you’ll have your answer. With math Investigations, following the money isn’t as easy as it might seem, because some costs, like professional development, would be incurred no matter what.
But with TERC, the authors of Investigations, professional development takes on a whole new meaning. Teachers aren’t taught the math they’re expected to teach so that they have a better understanding of what they’re teaching, no, under TERC teachers are taught how to teach Investigations and Investigations is it’s own, unique philosophy.
TERC’s philosophy says that learning the standard algorithms is bad – that it undermines students developing number sense and understanding of place value. This, of course, ignores the fact that Americans in the 1950 were taught almost exclusively the standard algorithms and we put out more skilled and qualified experts in mathematics than ever before in history and ignores the fact that Singapore, which teaches the standard algorithm along side alternate strategies starting in Grade 2 consistently stomps the US on international mathematics assessments. So, in the wonderful world of TERC, the standard algorithms aren’t taught.
TERC’s philosophy says that understanding what common denominators are and how they’re used to solve problems involving fractions is bad. Again, this ignores the facts that for decades American children have learned what common denominators are, how to find them and how to use them with no apparent negative consequences other than a desire to be engineers and scientists and architects.
In TERC’s world we’re just supposed to take these statements on faith because no evidence is ever offered to justify these beliefs. So our teachers are taught how to teach Investigations, not math, they’re taught that changing Investigations will undermine the integrity of the entire program, and they’re taught that following an alternate program does a disservice to the children because Investigations is just so gosh darn wonderful.
In the wonderful world of TERC the thought that anyone ever graduated with a degree in mathematics or went on to pursue a career in a math dependent field like engineering before Investigations was created is mind-boggling.
All of this brought to your children by, well, you. You see TERC gets paid big $$ to train our teachers on how to teach TERC. Professional development costs paid to TERC for classes this summer will run over $80,000, excluding teacher compensation and facility fees, and I highly doubt the TERC folks will be providing instruction on PWC’s new balanced program.
And that payment is just the tip of the iceberg.
There’s the TERC Math Specialist Program at GMU, a program in which 26 PWC teachers are currently enrolled. Their tuition was paid for by a grant, but once those teachers graduate they’ll expect step increases and they’ll expect to be hired as TERC Specialists instead of classroom teachers. Costs for that program begin at an estimated $1.4 million a year.
There’s the TERC training seminars at TERC’s home office. There’s the In Service Training (IST) days where our classroom teachers leave and the county has to hire substitutes.
The Wonderful World of TERC is lush, green world – provided by each of us. To bad there isn’t a real math program somewhere in that lush, green world.
Categories: TERC Investigations
Title IX is coming to math and science. So says this article by Christina Hoff Sommers from the April 14, 2009 edition of the Washington Post.
Most of us know of Title IX as the federal law which requires that universities ensure equality in men’s and women’s athletics. And we’ve all noted the rise in women’s athletics as a result.
According to the article, in an October 2009 letter to women’s rights groups President Obama stated that Title IX had
“an enormous impact on women’s opportunities and participation in sports.” If pursued with “necessary attention and enforcement,” the same law could make “similar, striking advances” for women in science and engineering.
Sounds great, right?
Sure, if you’re a woman or have only daughters. But what about boys, our forgotten demographic?
No one questions that Title IX pushed Women’s athletics to heights it might not otherwise have achieved. But those advances came at a cost. A cost borne by male athletes.
The article cites Howard University as an example.
In 2007, the Women’s Sports Foundation, a powerful Title IX advocacy group, gave Howard an “F” grade because of its 24-percentage-point “proportionality gap”: Howard’s student body was 67 percent female, but women constituted only 43 percent of its athletic program. In 2002, Howard cut men’s wrestling and baseball and added women’s bowling, but that did little to narrow the gap. Unless it sends almost half of its remaining male athletes to the locker room, Howard will remain blacklisted and legally vulnerable. Former Howard wrestling coach Wade Hughes sums up the problem this way: “The impact of Title IX’s proportionality standard has been disastrous because . . . far more males than females are seeking to take part in athletics.”
What happens if we apply the same equity standard to academics?
While slightly more males than females obtain degrees in math or science related fields, like computer sciences and engineering, women now achieve far more Bachelor’s Degrees than men and out pace men by significant margins in obtaining advanced degrees in social and life science and education.
In the 2008 SAT, boys outperformed girls slightly by 33 points in math (and that gap has been closing rapidly), boys and girls scored statistically the same on critical reading, and girls outperformed boys slightly by 13 points in writing. Nationwide, girls have higher overall grade point averages and attend college at higher rates.
With higher grade point averages and virtually identical SAT scores, perhaps we ought to be asking why proportionately fewer women pursue degrees in science, math, and engineering than men, AND why significantly fewer men than women pursue degrees in social and life sciences and education before we enforce Title IX’s equity mandates on academics?
Remember the Howard example?
Title IX requires equity – if the school is 67% female, then 67% of the students engaged in sports must be female and only 33% can be male. Interest is irrelevant. What matters is complete equity, even if that means tossing boys sports.
Applying those same standards to academics, if 67% of the student population is female, then 67% of those obtaining degrees in engineering must be female. Interest doesn’t matter. So if 100 students apply to the College of Engineering, and only 20 of those 100 are female, in order to maintain equity and have 67% of the Engineering students be female, only 10 males can be admitted. 100% of the women applying to the program will be admitted while only 12.5% of the males will be.
That’s not equity. That’s sexism. And it means that boys will be kicked out of math and science to make way for girls.
Categories: General Education
The 2009 PWCS Math Survey has been sent to “randomly” selected families. The survey is intended to gauge support for the Investigations math program and identify areas of improvement.
If you were one of the lucky few to get a survey, please fill it out as honestly as you can.
There should be space for comments on the survey. If you support it, please let the school system know that you’d prefer an alternate, more traditional instructional program for your child.
Last year almost 13% of respondents indicated that they’d prefer an alternate program. The school board ignored that but imagine how difficult it would be to ignore 20 or 30% requesting an alternate program.
Categories: TERC Investigations
An informational item on the proposed Governor’s School in Prince William County has been added to the May 6th School Board meeting. You can find a link to PWCS’ presentation on the program here.
The school is slated to open in the Fall of 2010 and will serve approximately 120 – 180 11th and 12th grade students from Prince William, the City of Manassas, and Manassas Park. Students enrolled in the school will attend the Governor’s school in the morning for math and science, then return to their base school for the rest of the day.
From the report, the emphasis of the program will be on the “Earth”:
The content of instruction provided to students enrolled in the program will be adapted so that it will :
(a) Focus on the abstractions and concepts that unite facts and processes;
(b) Reflect the complex nature of knowledge from different disciplines; and
(c) Offer students opportunities to focus on different aspects, points of view, problems, or issues under a broader theme.
Three different strand or programs of study will be offered: Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Biology, or Environmental Physics. Each strand will feature prescribed science courses and a mathematics course that will be structured and presented in conjunction with the relevant science course work.
The projected instructional budget for the school in 2011 is $551,000. Transportation costs are estimated at $280,000 per year with an initial $300,000 in 2010 for new buses.
The school will be hosted on the PW campus of GMU. The report is unclear as to whether the instructional budget includes the cost of GMU fees or not. If those fees are not included, costs for GMU credits will run approximately $939 per student for 3 hour courses and $1,878 per students for 6 hours courses in addition to the other costs mentioned above.
Categories: TERC Investigations
For a number of years now there’s been a growing movement to establish national academic standards. The Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has come out in support of national standards, has expressed plans to revise NCLB to create those standards. Duncan claims that states would be allowed to choose whether to adopt the national standards, but choosing not to participate could cost the state it’s federal education funding.
The article from Bloomberg covers the Duncan’s statement.
What might national standards look like?
Achieve, Inc is a national education reform organization whose intent is to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments and strengthen accountability for students throughout the US.
To support that purpose Achieve has developed benchmarks (a code word for standards) for English and Mathematics. Take the time to read through them, because National Standards are coming our way.
Categories: General Education
