Will PWC Have To Pay Up For Bad Math?

A couple of interesting events have occurred in the past week which should have PWC officials working over time. The first is the US Dept of Education’s Practice Guide on Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics and the second is the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Forest Grove case.

Let’s start with some background.

In 2004 Congress reauthorized the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA). Included in the act was something called Response to Intervention (RTI) for math and reading. RTI is a tiered system of instruction whose intent is to ensure that all students receive a high-quality instructional program and that students who are slipping behind are identified and provided additional, appropriate instruction to ensure that they don’t slip further behind. A child does not need to have an identified disability or special need to qualify for remediation – he / she simply needs to be struggling to keep up with his / her peers. RTI has been applied to reading for some time, with some success.

The practice guide provides advice to school districts in applying the RTI principles to math. The Guide provides eight steps schools districts should follow to ensure early and adequate intervention should a student slip behind in math (you can find those steps in Table 2 of the report linked above). Those steps conclude that explicit instruction and drills are the standard course of action for remediation.

Remember, Investigations doesn’t do explicit instruction and drills.

So what does that Supreme Court case mean to all of this? According to Justice Stephens “IDEA authorizes reimbursement for the cost of special education services when a school district fails to provide a free and appropriate public education and the private school placement is appropriate, regardless of whether the child previously received special education or related services through the public school.”

In the Forest Grove Case, parents of a child with ADHD pulled their child from the Forest Grove school system before he’d received remediation, and placed him in private school. They then sued the school district for the cost of private school under IDEA and won.

Enter PWC and the Investigations battle. Many parents have argued that Investigations remedial pace leaves their children behind their peers in other districts. That insufficient practice, inadequate direct instruction, and de-emphasis of fluency with basic math facts provides their children with an inadequate foundation in mathematics. Many parents have noted that their children are struggling with basic mathematics concepts like subtraction and division, and fractions are beyond their comprehension.

Under the RTI these students should be receiving remediation with direct instruction and drill on basic math facts and standard operations. But Investigations doesn’t do direct instruction or drill on basic math facts and standard operations. So what is the county going to do to intervene with these students, if the program they’ve chosen doesn’t do what the RTI recommends? Remember, your child doesn’t have to have special needs or a disability to receive remediation.

What does this mean for parents who have already given up on PWC schools and are teaching their children math at home? Those of us who have hired private tutors or purchased alternate instructional materials? Can we demand that the county reimburse us for the cost of tutors and alternate materials?

Alternate materials are readily available to the schools which provide for direct instruction and drill on basic math facts and standard operations. Those materials include programs like Saxon, Singapore, Sadlier Oxford, and others.

Does PWC have those materials available so that they can provide remediation to students who are struggling?

What about for students who are bored by Investigations because it moves too slowly. Does PWC have those materials available so that they can provide remediation to students who are ready to move ahead?

And if PWC does not have those materials available and does not provide the remediation these students need, is the county prepared to reimburse those parents for the cost of private school, private tutors, or home instruction?

We are not alone – Frederick takes on TERC

The video linked below is a Frederick MD parent discussing her experience with TERC. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it……..

Nationalizing the Public Schools

The article below is reprinted in it’s entirety, with the permission of the author and can be found here.

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Public education in the United States is broken.

American children spend less time in class covering fewer topics with less depth than children in many other nations.

American students are consistently outperformed by students from other nations in math and science, according to both the PISA and TIMMS assessments. American companies no longer look in America to find the best and brightest engineers and math minds. Fewer and fewer Americans are obtaining degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math (STEM).

American student literacy rates don’t even rank among the top 20 nations according to PISA. The US ranks 17th in adult literacy rates. According to the Fordham Foundation, “two-thirds of US children attend schools in states with mediocre standards, or worse.”

Yet, despite being routinely stomped by students from other countries on international assessments like the TIMMS and the PISA, student performance on state assessments and on The National Report Card show remarkable progress.

Public education in America is broken and failing our children.

If you were President and you were in a position to change that, what would you do? Would you convene a panel of the best and brightest minds in the nation to draft standards of academic quality each state should strive to achieve? Would you ensure that the identities of those on the panel and their qualifications were known to the public, that the panel’s deliberations were taped and open to the public so that citizens could express their concerns before any recommendations were set? Would you encourage states to consider incorporating the panel’s recommendations into their state academic standards?

Or would you launch an initiative to draft national academic standards, refuse to disclose the identities of those involved in the initiative and their qualifications, ensure that the deliberations of those involved were classified, and then make federal funding for public schools hinge on whether the states adopt the standards the initiative develops? Would you then extend the initiative’s efforts beyond merely drafting academic standards to include developing national assessments and allocate $350 million in federal funds to support the assessments development effort ?

Which approach do you think the US is following now?

On June 1st the Common Core Initiative was announced. It’s goal – to draft national academic standards which states could “voluntarily” adopt if they want to continue to receive federal funding for public education. The names and qualifications of those involved in drafting these so called “voluntary” standards are being kept secret. The first set of standards developed as a result of this initiative are set to be released on July 9th and the second batch is due several months later.

There are those who say that in the school’s, content is king. Once the Common Core Initiative has completed it’s work, that content will be dictated and controlled by the federal government. Textbook publishers will develop instructional materials which meet the federal standards and state’s will be allowed to select from the federally approved programs if they want to receive federal funding for their public schools. Student performance and accomplishments will be gauged based on the federal assessment.

Our public schools will be nationalized.

You may think that that’s not such a bad thing, considering the relatively poor job the states are doing at teaching our nation’s children. That those developing the standards must be wise and gifted in their respective fields. Thus far only one name has been leaked. The individual is supposed to be leading the effort to draft mathematics standards and he’s an English Major.

Why does the fact that that the person charged with drafting math standards for every public school in the United States is an English major, and not a mathematician, make me sick to my stomach? How am I supposed to believe in and take comfort in what the Common Core Initiative will be mandating for my children and for every child enrolled in public school in the United States when they conduct their work in secret and when the only person rumored to be affiliated with the math Initiative isn’t a mathematician?

Unfortunately there’s very little we can do to stop the federal government from nationalizing our public schools.

But we can demand, from our elected officials and leaders of the Common Core Initiative, that they stop operating in secrecy, that the names and qualifications of those involved in drafting the standards be released to the public for vetting now, that transcripts of the initiatives past deliberations be open for public review, and that future deliberations be open to the public. We need to demand that mathematicians be included in writing math standards, that Chemists be involved in writing Chemistry standards, that Revolutionary War Historians be involved in writing Revolutionary War standards.

Here is a link to the leadership team in the organization leading the effort to draft national academic standards.

NCTQ – Tackling the STEM Crisis

In it’s report, Tackling the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Crisis, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) sets forth five steps each state can take to improve the quality of it’s K-12 math and science teachers.

Those steps include the following:

• Raise the standards for what it takes to get into an education school.
• Improve the quality of undergraduate preparation.
• Recognize the need for creative and diverse solutions.
• Send qualified teachers to the schools that need them most.
• Remember that it’s the K-12 system which produces the next generation of K-12 STEM teachers.

The report is a quick and easy read and provides food for thought on why math education in VA is slipping.

Grade 4 Math SOLs

Determining the effect Investigations has had on 4th Grade SOL scores is going to be difficult because the SOLs have only been given to 4th grade students for 3 years.  The Spring of 2006 marked the first year the VA SOL was given to 4th grade students.

Generally test scores increase for a few years following the introduction of a new test before they stabilize because teachers learn what’s on the test and adapt lesson pacing and instruction accordingly.  That’s exactly what we’ve seen in PWC.  In PWC, Grade 4 Math SOLs, both pass and advanced rates, have increased each year since the SOLs were implemented in Grade 4 in 2006.

So what effect will Investigations have on the Grade 4 Math SOL pass and advanced rates? Much of that depends on what we would have expected had Investigations not been mandated.

By looking at the Grade 4 scores now, and comparing them to Grades 3 and 5, we can develop an expectation of what the Grade 4 scores should be.

In both Grades 3 & 5, grades where the SOL has been given to students for a number of years, the pass rate in PWC has been around 90%.  Until 2007, the advanced pass rate in Grade 3  averaged 57%.  In grade 5 the advanced pass rate for the past 3 years has averaged 53% (58% achieved an advanced pass rate in grade 5 in 2008).

Grade 4 achieved it’s highest pass and advanced pass rates of 88% and 47%, respectively, in 2008.  Because those highs are lower than the average rates achieved in Grades 3 & 5, it’s reasonable to conclude that Grade 4 scores will  continue to increase in 2009 by approximately 2 to 5%, respectively.  We’d expect Grade 4 pass rates to be around 90% and advanced pass rates to be between 53 and 57%.

So what happened with Grade 4 SOL scores in 2009?  We won’t know that until August when the VA DOE releases 2009 test scores.  But if Grade 4 pass and advanced pass rates are unchanged or decline, we may have cause for concern.

The file below contains the Math SOL scores for each school in PWC for Grade 4.

GR-4-MATH-SOL

National Standards Sausage Making

Anyone concerned with the potential disaster looming over National Standards ought to read this article on Jay Greene’s blog about the Common Core Initiative (what the government is calling the effort to draft National Math Standards).

You can find the article here.

Below are a few comments from the article from Dr Sandra Stotsky, who served on the National Mathematics Panel.  Bolding is mine for emphasis.

… instead of choosing nationally known scholars to chair and staff these committees–to assure us of the integrity and quality of the product–the NGA and the CCSSO have, for reasons best known to themselves, treated the initiative as a private game of their own. The NGA and the CCSSO haven’t even bothered to inform the public who is chairing these committees, who is on them, why they were chosen, what their credentials are, and why we should have any confidence whatsoever in what they come up with.

One person has announced on his own to the press and to a state department of education that he is chairing the mathematics standards-writing committee. He has not been contradicted by anyone at NGA or CCSSO, so we must assume he’s for real. It turns out he is an English major with no academic degrees in mathematics whatsoever. No one has yet announced on his/her own that he/she is chairing the English standards-writing committee. One wag has already wondered whether this person might be a mathematics major with no academic degrees in English. But it’s possible the sad joke in mathematics is not being repeated in English.

You read that correctly – the head the committee drafting mandatory national mathematics standards has a degree in English.

J.K.Rowling is no more qualified to write mathematics standards than Albert Einstein would be to write English standards.

Fifty years ago the world looked to the US for the best and brightest math minds. But with the advent of the NCTM and professional educators dictating mathematics content and standards instead of mathematicians, our standing in the world has fallen. Colleges and Universities now recruit and accept more candidates from outside the US than from within for engineering and math or science dependent programs.

The United States no longer provides the best and brightest math minds.

Maybe, just possibly, that’s because we have English majors writing the math standards instead of mathematicians.

Advanced Pass Rates Drop with Investigations

One common criticism of the Investigations math program is that it’s slow pacing and lack of practice results in fewer students achieving an advanced score on the SOL exams. District wide in PWC, the percentage of students achieving an advanced score on the Grade 3 SOL was unchanged at 49% in both 2007 and 2008.

But just looking at the county wide score and at the change from 2007 to 2008 doesn’t tell the full story.

To get an idea of the effect Investigations has had on the percentage of students achieving an advanced score in PWC you have to look at the changes in each school from 2007 to 2008 and go back to the Spring of 2005, the last pre-Investigations year when we know that only 2 schools, Neabsco and Mountain View, were using Investigations as the primary text.

So what do those numbers indicate? They indicate that the county has experienced a sharp decline in the percentage of students achieving an advanced score since Investigations arrived.

Prior to 2005 the percentage of students achieving an advanced score was increasing in PWC schools. In 2002 only 37% of PWC students achieved an advanced score on the Grade 3 math SOL.  That percentage increased each year and by 2005 61% did.

But with the Spring 2006 test, that upward trend reversed and the percentage of PWC students achieving an advanced score began decreasing.  By 2008 the overall percentage of students achieving an advanced score in PWC had dropped 12%, to 49%. Those downward trends from 2005 weren’t duplicated in the state or in neighboring districts.

For overall Prince William County and state data, see here Grade3-Math-SOL-PWC-and-VA

County wide 57% of schools saw their percentage of students achieving an advanced score drop from 2007 to 2008 while 37% saw their rates increase. But when compared with 2005, 86% of schools saw their percentage of students achieving an advanced score drop while only 14% saw an increase.

For school by school details, see here PWC-Grade3-VA-SOL- Advanced

Hot Air from PWCS officials about the SDMT

PWCS official’s statements regarding test results have been conflicting. They’ve stated emphatically that Investigations has closed the achievement gap while also claiming that one year just doesn’t provide enough data to make any conclusions about the Investigations math program. When asked to provide data to quantify their assertion that Investigations has closed the achievement gap, PWC officials have cited the SDMT and comparisons of SOL test scores from 2002.

Unfortunately, it seems these claims of success are little more than hot air.

National Standards Coming to Your State Soon

The effort to develop and mandate national academic standards is in full swing, according to this Washington Post article.

The identity of those developing the standards is classified, for now, supposedly to protect those individuals from public scrutiny. I tend t think that the government does far too much in secret and that transparency in government is a good thing, so I disagree with this decision.

I do hope that those involved in developing and reviewing the standards are actual experts in their given fields, not just educators.