Dr. Stat

Elections

2007-11-26T21:18:00.000-06:00

Let's face it. The presidential election is a farce. The only people who can win are those who have lots of money backing them and a good share of the media as well. In order to get elected, politicians either have to lie or sell out.

I wish I could be president. Of course, I don't have any of the qualities. I'm not a schmoozer. I have been known to say stupid things in public. I'm not rich. I don't have political experience. I don't have an "organization." I have principles.

I wouldn't take any money. (Meaning, of course, that I couldn't win.) As soon as a candidate takes money, he owes somebody, and principles are out the window. We Americans have dug this hole for ourselves. We refuse to listen to principled candidates. We let the media drive the campaign, and the media runs on the sensational and the novel, not the principled. We make decisions on sound bites and perceived personality traits (i.e., who is the best actor).

Oh, how nice it would have been if we had listened to the founding fathers. They TOLD us not to elect the president through popular vote. They TOLD us not to tax individuals directly. They TOLD us that powers not enumerated in the constitution were reserved to the states, in order to keep the national government from becoming too strong. They TOLD us to maintain balance of power between the branches of government. They TOLD us to protect our nation's sovereignty. We are on the verge of losing everything. There are voices (other than mine) sounding the warning. For some reason, not many people are truly listening. They will pay--we will all pay--for this. We will pay with our lives and treasure. I fear time is growing short.

No Child Left Behind is a Failure

2007-11-15T19:57:00.000-06:00

as many of us have known, suspected, predicted, preached, whined, cajoled, cried, complained, and generally tried to get anyone to notice.

But, you know, anytime you have a big government program that "benefits the children" no one will pay any attention to the fact that it is bad, wrong, useless, harmful, inefficient, or even unconstitutional--which NCLB clearly is, as the federal government has NO AUTHORITY in the area of education. Paul Weyrich, in the linked article, explains again what is wrong with NCLB. The idiotic measure of "progress" have nothing to do with real progress or real education. Teachers all over the country know what we all should have known to begin with--the program causes wasted efforts to prove the school is proficient which, in most cases, only takes resources away from other important areas. Yes, some math and reading scores are up. A little. But they were on their way up before NCLB, and who knows if the trend would have continued or not? Meanwhile, science, history, geography, music, and art are shunted to the side. I know reading and math are most important. But not to the exclusion of all else, IN PARTICULAR, when reading and math can so readily be taught WHILE teaching science, history, geography, and maybe even music and art.

Local schools and local teachers can figure these things out, but large bureaucracies (expensive bureaucracies) can't. So more teachers are "highly qualified?" I wouldn't believe it. Maybe. Giving attention to teacher qualifications is important. But so many are receiving spurious or nominal certificates that come from completing some busy-work program that likely does nothing significant to improve their actual teaching performance. Good teachers have to be SMART. You don't get smart by attending a certificate program. Good teachers have to be GOOD WITH KIDS. This is an innate quality that I don't think anyone can be taught, certainly not by taking a few evening classes from an Ed. School.

I wish somebody would give me a chance to fix the schools. The first thing I would do is give the federal government the boot, right where it belongs.

Don't teach the Bible in public schools

2007-03-29T15:39:00.000-05:00

Christopher Ruddy (Don't teach the Bible in public schools) said, "Let's go back to the Bible in the classroom issue. Would you want public school teachers interpreting the Bible for your kids? In some schools teachers may promote the Bible because they are believing Christians. In other schools teachers with a secular humanist bent will undermine its legitimacy. The best place for faith to be taught to kids is in the home, church, and private schools."

Would you want public school teachers interpreting history for your kids? In some schools teachers may promote the a view of history that emphasizes the struggle for freedom and liberty and individual rights, together with a positive view of western civilization and the contributions of America. In other schools teachers with a socialist bent will undermine western civilization, denigrate America, and focus on issues of social justice and the benefits of socialism. The best place for history to be taught to kids is in the home, church, and private schools.

Would you want public school teachers interpreting literature for your kids? In some schools teachers may promote the classical literature because they believe it contributes to the development of the human spirit and timeless values. In other schools teachers with a secular humanist bent will use literature to undermine the noblest achievements of man and promote a pessimistic and defeatist attitude about modern and contemporary life, with a goal of eliminating the influence of religious belief and conditioning children for life under an all-powerful state. The best place for literature to be taught to kids is in the home, church, and private schools.

Would you want public school teachers interpreting mathematics for your kids? In some schools teachers may promote basic skills and fundamental knowledge that is useful in everyday life and serves as a base for advanced mathematical understanding such as our best scientists and engineers will need to have if we are to remain competitive in the world. In other schools teachers with a progressive bent will undermine the legitimacy of fundamental mathematical knowledge, if in fact, they understand it at all. They will teach fuzzy concepts and use of calculators and computers to do "advanced" tasks for which the students have no structural understanding. The best place for math to be taught to kids is in the home, church, and private schools.

Would you want public school teachers interpreting the sciences for your kids? In some schools teachers may promote understanding of a wide range of ideas and important issues, in some cases because whatever their religious beliefs, they believe that scientific thinking is best served by examining conflicting hypotheses rather than teaching current speculations as facts. In other schools teachers with a secular humanist bent will undermine free inquiry, and demand that students accept the currently-dominating views of what is legitimate science. The best place for science to be taught to kids is in the home, church, and private schools.

Fixing Math Education 3

2007-03-20T11:02:00.000-05:00

Testing.

Whenever you mention testing, there are people who get up in arms with all kinds of objections. Testing isn't fair. Testing doesn't really measure what kids know/understand/can do. Testing is biased. Testing is racist. Testing takes time away from real education.

Yeah.

Well, math is, probably more than any other subject, amenable to testing, fair and unbiased. We need to have meaningful standardized testing that is not just "high-stakes" for schools but for individuals. There has to be a way to require a certain skill level be achieved in each grade or the kids don't pass. The students have to be personally responsible for achievement, and the teachers have to be responsible if their students don't pass. They need to contribute the extra time needed to get their students up to speed when they don't pass. The tests should be comprehensive up to each grade level, the questions should not be known in advance, and they should be changed every year. Let's put the students and teachers together on the same team, fighting together to beat the tests.

Fixing Math Education 2

2006-11-27T19:12:00.000-06:00

The Back-to-Basics vs Constructivism feud

AKA "Drill-n-Kill" vs "Inquiry Based"

AKA "Traditional" vs "Progressive"

Notice how some terms just naturally sound better than others? Does that have anything to do with the substance of the ideas?

So there's really no general agreement on what constructivism is. Some people argue it's not curriculum or pedagogy, it's brain science. I simply use it to refer to those approaches of teaching mathematics that require students to develop their own mathematics from scratch. It might include "Problem Solving," "Discovery Learning," and "Inquiry-based Learning (IBL)." My apologies to those who will claim that I do violence to their pet definitions here. But there do seem to be two general camps. On the one hand we have those who think students should learn efficient, time-tested methods of solving problems, and learn them to mastery (automation). These I call "traditionalists." On the other hand, we have those who emphasize that students should learn to think creatively, develop strategies to solve novel problems, and develop deep insights into mathematics. These I call "constructivists."

The answer is actually simple. We need both. However, when sacrifices must be made, there is one approach that is essential, and one that is merely desirable. Unfortunately, reasonable people will disagree about which is which. This, however, is my blog, so my opinion is right.

The much-maligned traditional method is essential. We must first realize that there is a great deal of disinformation floating around about the traditional method. Its opponents claim the traditional method teaches rote memorization without understanding or thinking. Except perhaps in some isolated enclaves where stereotypically poor teaching took place, this has never been the case. All the widely used math textbooks of the 19th century, for example, emphasized "mental arithmetic," that is, the ability to think through multiple-step problems "in your head" and give the solution, not only without a calculator but even without a pencil. The kinds of thinking and understanding that were required differed from what is expected today, because the skill set expected of an educated person has changed. So in those days, being able to carry sums in your head was far more important than, say, sketching the graph of an exponential function. In honest debate, we must realize that "Back-to-the-Basics" or "traditional education" does not imply restricting ourselves to the content or objectives of a bygone era.

The primary features of the traditional method include: 1) Understanding a mathematical concept, e.g. "What does it mean to add two numbers?" 2) Memorization of basic facts/definitions/results, e.g. "the Times Tables." 3)Application of memorized knowledge to novel problems and more advanced concepts. 4) Review and maintenance of memorized knowledge.

The traditional method results in efficient learning and provides the foundation necessary for creative thinking, even if it fails to sufficiently address that objective, according to its critics. And yes, even educators from Singapore, whose students smoke the Americans in international tests, are looking with envy at the creativity of some of our students. This demonstrates that a commitment to the essential objectives may not produce all the results that are desirable.

It is well documented in cognitive science that the brain has a limited capacity to manipulate objects in "working memory." It is often said that we cannot process more than seven memory objects at once, which supposedly explains why phone numbers have seven digits (only now they have 10, but that's OK, because the phone remembers all the numbers for us). The working memory is where problem solving and creative activities take place. The working memory can access permanent memory for information it needs. However, any new information that must be taken in to solve a problem must occupy space in the working memory, thus taking away from the space available for creative activity. That is why we quickly become frustrated when trying to follow assembly instructions that include many terms with which we are not familiar. Even if the actual steps in the process are simple, if they involve several terms that are not defined in our permanent memory, those terms require space in our working memory which is then not available for solving the problem. This explains why the pedagogic fad of "learning to learn" is a failure. We do indeed need skills for learning--but such skills are utterly dependent on a reliable bank of information which can be accessed instantly and does not require the use of working memory. The first step in problem solving or creativity must be putting as much relevant information as we can into permanent memory.

Fixing Math Education 1

2006-11-16T21:21:00.000-06:00

Improving math education, I mean, really improving it, and not just pretending by doing change for the sake of change, is complicated. But it is more complicated politically than it is educationally. The things that actually need to be done are not as difficult to ascertain as some people think. The problem is, there is no political consensus on doing the right things. Every idea for a good or necessary change is shot down for one reason or another. So we muddle along in mediocrity.

The first thing we need is to put truly math-savvy people in the elementary math classrooms. The current crop of elementary teachers (not all of them, of course), whine because they don't know enough math and they want more "training." But the problem isn't really that they need training, it's that they need an intellectual capacity for doing math and a love for doing math that no training can give them. The best that any training can do is give them some techniques for presenting ideas to students at the grade level they teach. But what they need is a grand understanding of mathematics, including the development of mathematical ideas in the children they teach, but also including the future mathematical needs of these children...especially the ones who will go on to careers in the hard sciences, engineering, statistics, and even pure math. The average elementary teacher has no clue at all what lies ahead for these students. The result is an inability to foster the ideas and attitudes that are necessary for excellence in mathematics.

A political argument that will be made immediately is that not every student is going in this direction, or even has the talent for such a career. Yes, well, that is true. Is it really a solution to deny the necessary education to those who need it, because others do not want it? I find that unacceptable, don't you?

Black Wednesday

2006-11-08T09:49:00.000-06:00

The blood of those who have been murdered cries out for justice. "How long, O Lord, How long?" An enemy is being prepared, and is already prepared, to carry out the sentence. The enemy is moving methodically, without comprehending how its false beliefs and evil purposes are being used by the Creator of All to purify His Own. The sentence will be upon the by-standers as well as the guilty, for the inaction, the failure to stand in place of the innocents when the opportunity presented, is punishable as well.

The enemy rejoices that its stooges, complicit in the crimes which are to be punished, have attained positions of power, from which corruption will increasingly flow, making the punishment all the more certain. Our Lampstand is about to be taken away.

May God have mercy.

Self Esteem and Math

2006-10-24T09:59:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post has dared to print an article about a Brookings Institution report that contradicts the "prevailing wisdom" about self esteem:

Washington Post, 18 October 2006 (p. A02)

A report from the Brookings Institution suggests that schools that focus on keeping kids happy and self-confident may not be producing the best math students.

The report, authored by Tom Loveless, found that countries such as the U.S. that embrace self-esteem and real-world relevance in mathematics don’t score as high on international assessments as countries that ignore those aspects of learning.

Several Asian and European countries do better than the U.S. in math scores even though their students report less confidence in their math skills. The conclusions show that U.S. schools should question whether happiness is what matters in the classroom, Loveless said.

“It is interesting that people grasp this notion in other areas of self-improvement – eating healthy foods, getting exercise, saving for retirement – but when it comes to education, for some reason, the limitations of happiness are forgotten,” he said.

However, officials in Japan and Singapore have recently begun to complain that their graduates do not think as creatively as American graduates, noted Gerald Bracey, an educational psychologist. Therefore, they have begun to copy the very aspects of U.S. education that Loveless says may be unproductive.

But Chester Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, agreed with the report’s findings. “Schools should work on academics, not feelings,” he said.

The ed establishment has strayed so far from common sense and what people have known for generations, or millennia, really, about serious education, that now we actually have "serious" debates about things like this. Well, having a debate at all is a positive step, since for the last 40 years or so the debate has been rigorously squelched by the forces of uncommon nonsense.

Am I being too much of an optimist, when I pick out things like this as a sign that things are changing for the better?

The National Math Panel

2006-05-24T10:32:00.000-05:00

Education Week, 19 May 2006 (p. 08)
“Some Worry About Potential Bias on the National Math Panel”

President Bush has named only one K-12 teacher to his National Mathematics Advisory Panel, a group charged with exploring math teaching and learning. The lack of teacher representation on the panel has some observers questioning the group’s makeup and its objectivity.

Not me! It's great to finally see the experts on Mathematics being consulted on learning and teaching mathematics. We let that amateurs do it much too long.

The panel is weighted with experts on teaching mathematics at the college level, and does not represent “a balanced view of mathematics,” said Steven Leinwand, a principal research analyst at the American Institutes for Research. Some are concerned that the panel is biased toward one particular method of teaching math, the traditional approach that focuses on drills and computation.

In other words, experts who actually want our students to learn math instead of coming to college needing to learn fractions and decimals.

Even Vern Williams, the one K-12 math teacher on the panel, has a Web site on which he criticizes the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics for promoting what he calls “fuzzy” math standards.

Another panelist, Wilfried Schmid, a Harvard University mathematics professor, has also been a frequent critic of NCTM. However, Schmid says the two sides in the so-called “math wars” have begun working more cooperatively, and are finding common ground.

Tom Loveless, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution who was selected for the panel, dismissed suggestions that the panel has an agenda.

“It’s an opportunity to cut through a lot of the noise surrounding math,” Loveless said.

We can hope!

National Board Certificate

2006-05-24T07:40:00.000-05:00

Ha Ha Ha! I knew it!

No disrespect to those teachers who went through all the hard work of getting the National Board Certificate (many say it was a great learning experience), but I have never held any hope that it would really benefit education in America. I watched a presentation about this when it was new, and immediately concluded that it was just another "reform" program designed to get teachers to give up "old fashioned" (effective) teaching stratagies and replace them with all the latest fads.

Education Week, 17 May 2006 (p. 01)
“Study for NBPTS Raises Questions About Credential”

A year-old study only recently summarized on the Web site of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards concludes that board-certified teachers are no more effective at improving student performance than teachers without the credential.

The study, conducted by William Sanders, the statistician who came up with the “value added” method of evaluating teacher effectiveness, examined some 35,000 student records and more than 800 teachers in North Carolina.

The Sanders findings are important because the cost to date of certifying about 47,500 teachers is more than $600 million. A board spokesman said they do not intend to make the entire paper public, however.

Oh, no, we won't make all this public. There are 47,500 constituents out there who have benefited from the $600 million cash cow and they aren't going to let us end yet another boondoggle spending program.

Algebra I dumbs down

2006-05-24T07:23:00.000-05:00

See, it's happening already...

Philadelphia Inquirer, 18 May 2006
“New method of algebra solves an old problem”

The Philadelphia school district has developed a new algebra curriculum designed to make the subject more accessible to all eighth graders.

Called Algebra8, the curriculum melds portions of the ninth-grade Algebra I curriculum with the traditional eighth-grade math curriculum. Students use manipulatives like Algeblocks to visualize problems and algebraic principles. The Algebra8 instruction is added to their daily 90-minute math period three times a week.

At the end of the year, eighth-graders will take an algebra proficiency exam. Those who pass will move on to Algebra II or geometry in ninth grade, and those who fail will take Algebra I.

Did you catch that? the new curriculum is "more accessible" (easier) for "all eighth graders" (easy enough for the bottom eighth graders). Not only that, it includes "portions" of Algebra I (hmm, I thought 8th grade math already did, but then I'm from the Dakotas) not all of Algebra I, and if students pass they move on to Algebra II--which now has to be dumbed down, as well, because the students who pass the 8th grade proficiency test haven't had all of Algebra I.

Yup, it's the appearance of raising standards without the substance of raising standards, moving things earlier in the curriculum but reducing their complexity, in other words, politically motivated dumbing-down.

“High School Exit Exam Tossed”

2006-05-22T14:46:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles Times, 13 May 2006

Some 46,000 California seniors who failed the state’s high school exit exam may get their diplomas after all. An Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled Friday that the exam unfairly burdens students who attended low-income schools.

This is the first graduating class to have to pass the exam, which consists of eighth-grade math and ninth- and 10th-grade English. Jack O’Connell, the state superintendent of public instruction, called the ruling disappointing, and “a setback for students and for hard-fought school accountability in our state.”

So, our schools graduate high school students who can't read, write, or do 'rithmetic, and we respond by requiring them to pass a test to graduate. Not a high school test, mind you, just an 8-10th grade test. Then, just when we thought we had a fix for the problem, the court tells us we can't refuse high school diplomas to people who can't do 8-10th grade work. We might as well just do away with high school diplomas altogether, since they don't mean anything. Give them a certificate of attendance, if you want, but forget about the meaningless high school diploma. Students who want a real high school diploma can take the IB exam. At least we know that means something.

Are they starting to get it?

2006-04-24T11:10:00.000-05:00

SOURCE: Seattle Times, 16 April 2006
WEBSITE: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
TITLE: “Math comes with its own problems”

“The biggest problem we have with mathematics in the U.S. is there isn’t a clear mathematics program,” said Mike Riley, district superintendent, Bellevue, Washington. “If it is not clearly organized, and you don’t have agreement on what kids need to learn in second grade so the third-grade teacher can count on it, you get what we have: weak performance in mathematics.”

The key is to order topics over the grades such that they follow the inherent structure and logic of mathematics, and to ensure that kids reach a deep understanding of each mathematical concept before moving on, said William Schmidt, a math expert at Michigan State University. “The idea is to build ideas on each other in an increasingly complex way,” he said.

It sounds like educators are beginning to discover what teachers long ago knew and mathematicians have been desparately trying to tell them for years. Yet, they still haven't got it quite right. Deep understanding doesn't come in chunks, but is a continuous process that comes from review and integration. You don't stop where you are until everybody has a deep understanding, then move on. You wouldn't get very far that way. But you move on, and you come back. You integrate, refresh, and expand. You constantly check for understanding and look for those powerful "aha" moments when students suddenly comprehend what they learned about months before--you capitalize on the psychological rewards of mathematics.

Minnesota increases Math Requirements

2006-04-18T15:14:00.000-05:00

Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota's governor, wants to make Algebra 1 an 8th grade requirement, and Algebra 2 a high school graduation requirement. Teachers complain that they will need more training in math instruction. (The same teachers who say they don't learn anything useful in education classes, I presume.) They also say it will take more support from parents.

“The rigor has to start in the elementary schools and carry through to the middle schools or they will not be ready for algebra by eighth grade,” said Mary Hoffman, an Algebra 1 teacher at Apple Valley Falcon Ridge Middle School. “And rigor includes studying at home and parental support.”The new math standards will be implemented, at the earliest, in the 2008-09 school year, according to state education Commissioner Alice Seagren.

What can I say? I'm cynical as usual. I'm all for improved standards and stronger requirements. But over the years, it has been evident that moving courses down in the grades makes them weaker, especially if they are required of all students. Already students who take Algebra II and Geometry do not compare with students who took these courses 30 years ago. In those days, calculus was rarely an option, now many schools have it. But are the students learning more, or are they already working at maximum capacity and just taking more courses and "covering" more material without actually learning more?

L.A. Mayor Links Dropout Rate, Civil Rights

2006-03-07T11:40:00.000-06:00

Los Angeles Time, 02 March 2006
TITLE: “L.A. Mayor Sees Dropout Rate as ‘Civil Rights Issue’”

The issue was brought to the fore by a Harvard University study estimating that less than 50 percent of L.A. students graduate in four years. The rate is lowest for Latino students. The school district has disputed the study’s figures, saying the overall graduation rate is closer to 70 percent. But Villaraigosa said neither figure is acceptable. “These are numbers that should put a chill down your spine,” he said.

It occurs to me that we should ask the question, "How many people should graduate from high school?" The way most people talk, it should be 100%. But that would be absurd.

Lewis Terman (1916) developed the IQ classification:

Over 140 - Genius or near genius
120 - 140 - Very superior intelligence
110 - 119 - Superior intelligence
90 - 109 - Normal or average intelligence
80 - 89 - Dullness
70 - 79 - Borderline deficiency
Under 70 - Definite feeble-mindedness

(http://www.wilderdom.com/intelligence/IQWhatScoresMean.html)

Now we can argue about the reliability of IQ scores, we can debate whether or not IQ tests are "fair," etc. ad nauseum. But everybody "knows" that there is something to the concept of IQ, even if we are a bit fuzzy about what it means.

IQ is normally distributed, but the distribution varies from place to place and from group to group (racial, socio-economic, etc.). Still, if we consider the overall distribution of the population,

"Adults in the bottom 5% of the IQ distribution below 75) are very difficult to train and are not competitive for any occupation on the basis of ability. Serious problems in training low-IQ military recruits during World War II led Congress to ban enlistment from the lowest 10% (below 80) of the population, and no civilian occupation in modern economies routinely recruits its workers from that below-80 range. Current military enlistment standards exclude any individual whose IQ is below about 85."
"Persons of average IQ (between 90 and 100) are not competitive for most professional and executive-level work but are easily trained for the bulk of jobs in the American economy."

Linda Gottfredson, "The General Intelligence Factor", Scientific American Presents "Exploring Intelligence", pg. 24, 1999, (reference in http://www.geocities.com/rnseitz/Definition_of_IQ.html)

Now let's be really clear about what that means. Ten percent of the population has IQ scores below 80, and those people were not smart enough to be soldiers in WWII and are not smart enough today to be recruited for any working-class jobs. (I assume this does not mean that they do not hold such jobs, just that employers do not seek them.)

THERE IS NO WAY THAT THE BOTTOM 10% OF THE POPULATION CAN LEGITIMATELY GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL, not if a high school diploma means anything at all. In fact, I would consider it unreasonable to expect this 10% of the population to graduate from eighth grade, if eighth grade completion means anything at all.

Therefore, we may conclude that high school graduation rates in the general population should by no means exceed 90%. Now let's try to get a better idea about the remaining 90%. According to Gottfredson, "Persons of average IQ (between 90 and 100) are ... easily trained for the bulk of jobs...." This suggests that we can expect people with an IQ of at least 90, which is about 75% of the population, to graduate from high school, though not necessarily in a college prep program. This is further refined by Jensen:

In his book, "Straight Talk About Mental Tests", The Free Press, A Division of the Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1981, pg. 12, Dr. Arthur Jensen cites the following four IQ thresholds:
(1) An IQ of 50 or below. This is the threshold below which most adults cannot cope outside of an institution. They can typically be taught to read at a 3rd or 4th grade level. However, they cannot normally function in the customary classroom setting, and they require special training programs.
(2) An IQ between 50 and 75. At this level of intelligence, they generally cannot complete elementary school. Most adults will need smarter help in coping with the world.
(3) An IQ between 75 and 105. Children in this IQ range are not generally able to complete a college prep course in high school.
(4) An IQ between 105 and 115. May graduate from college but generally, not with grades that would qualify them for graduate school.
(5) An IQ above 115. No restrictions.

(reference in http://www.geocities.com/rnseitz/Definition_of_IQ.html)

About 63% of the population is below the 105 mark in IQ, and thus not capable of completing a true college prep high school curriculum, according to Jensen.

So we now have the following breakdown:

below 75: Cannot complete 8th grade (5%)
75-80: 8th grade but not high school (5%)
80-90: High school uncertain (15%)
90-105: High school but not college prep (38%)
above 105: High school--college prep (37%)

Thus we can say that reasonable high school graduation rates, in an average community, are between 75% and 90%, no less, no more. That 15% span might be considered negotiable, and is mainly dependent on the rigor (or "dumbing down") of the high school curriculum.

Now, as I said earlier, IQ varies by group, and not all communities have the same IQ distribution. Therefore, if the distribution of a community is lower, the graduation rates should be lower as well. This is a very important point. WE CANNOT HAVE EQUAL GRADUATION RATES, with equal expectations, IN THE PRESENCE OF UNEQUAL IQ DISTRIBUTIONS.

I have long been an advocate of bringing back the eighth grade diploma, once the standard of education in the US, as a baseline level of education. I also advocate an intermediate diploma, say at the 10th grade level, which would give people who otherwise "drop out" a reasonable and achievable goal, and remove from them the stigma of being classified a "drop out" when there are jobs they are perfectly capable of doing. What is so magical about 12 years of school? For some people, 8 is enough, for others, 10 would be enough. Doing this would stem the tide of dumbing down the high school curriculum in order to get more and more people, who are not intellectually qualified, through 12 years of school. Furthermore, I advocate giving these intermediate diplomas other names, that do not relate to the years of school--so that some people may take more time and some take less to complete the requirements. Calling them, say, Basic Education Diploma, and Intermediate Education Diploma would be fine. The high school diploma should also not be rigidly connected with 12 years of school, as I believe there are students capable of attaining that level in considerably less time.

IQ	<75	75–90	90–110	110–125	>125
US population distribution	5	20	50	20	5
Married by age 30	72	81	81	72	67
Out of labor force more than 1 month out of year (men)	22	19	15	14	10
Unemployed more than 1 month out of year (men)	12	10	7	7	2
Divorced in 5 years	21	22	23	15	9
% of children w/ IQ in bottom decile (mothers)	39	17	6	7	-
Had an illegitimate baby (mothers)	32	17	8	4	2
Lives in poverty	30	16	6	3	2
Ever incarcerated (men)	7	7	3	1	0
Chronic welfare recipient (mothers)	31	17	8	2	0
High school dropout	55	35	6	0.4	0
Values are the percentage of each IQ sub-population fitting each descriptor. Compiled by Gottfredson (1997) from Herrnstein & Murray (1994) pp. 171, 158, 163, 174, 230, 180, 132, 194, 247–248, 194, 146 respectively.

(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ)

What about the correlation between low SES (socio-economic status) and the drop-out rate? We are frequently told that we need to increase the graduation rate because people who drop out are more likely to live in poverty. Of course, people who live in poverty are also more likely to drop out. Is there a cause-and-effect relationshiop? Is it cyclical? I believe that the conventional wisdom is incorrect in this area. Low SES and lack of a high school education are both related to two factors, namely low IQ and cultural attitudes about goal-setting (work ethic). Poverty, itself, is not a predicter of failure in school or in life. Next time you go to your local medical clinic, do an informal survey and find out how many of the doctors grew up in poverty. The results may surprise you. I, myself, grew up in poverty--we did not have an indoor toilet, TV, or built-in bathtub until 1973. Yet, today I hold a Ph.D. in statistics. But many who are more "succesful" than I have come from equally depressed childhoods, or worse ones. Poverty does not cause low IQ, or failure in school or life. Unfortunately in our society, low IQ is a powerful predictor of low SES, which can only be overcome by a strong work ethic. For low SES communities, it is there, and only there, that progress is possible. Students must be taught to work hard and strive for goals, so that they too can lead dignified lives.

Calculating Beyond Their Years

2006-02-13T09:21:00.000-06:00

While we complain about the low performance of American Students in international math comparisons, while we whine that educational standards continually decline, some high school students are getting more and more advanced math educations.

Calculating Beyond Their Years
For More High School Students, AP Math Just Isn't Sufficient
By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 6, 2006; B01

More than 500 students in the Montgomery and Fairfax school systems...are taking multivariable calculus, a course traditionally taken by math majors in their second year of college....

Driving the trend is a conviction that algebra...should be taught as soon as students are ready to learn it. Students with a flicker of math talent are taking the high school Algebra I course in eighth grade, if not before.

When the school tapped Moriarty to teach the new course last year, he had to search his basement to find notes he took on multivariable calculus as a sophomore in college almost 30 years ago. "So, we're in the learning stages, and I'm learning, as well as the kids," he said.

Possibly lost along the way: the rich variety of topics in algebra, plane and solid geometry, trigonometry and mathematical applications that once occupied students through much of their journey through high school. "Kids are missing out on some very important concepts that have been pushed aside to make room for calculus," said Alfred S. Posamentier, dean of the School of Education at the City College of New York....

"We got it," a group of girls boasted from the back of the class. One of them, 17-year-old Alice Chen, smiled and said, "I actually understand this."

Are the detractors right? Are we losing "rich variety," breadth, and depth in the curriculum in order to move students further along? Are we advancing students too soon into topics that they are not mature enough to handle?

Ironically, at the same time, colleges are burdened with ever more remedial courses in math (as well as reading and writing) for those students who did not learn even the basics sufficiently for an advanced education. We (the colleges) teach ninth grade algebra, or even 7-8th grade arithmetic, while the high schools teach second-year college math.

You know what I think? We should do away with the rigid 4-year notion about high school. We should define a level of knowledge as a target (something like the GED), and whenever students reach that level they should get their diploma and move on to college. If the state wants to pay for college courses until the age of 18, fine.

Of course, there is a drawback to that idea, and it is this: I am making the assumption that colleges do a better job of teaching college-level material than high schools do. This is sometimes the case, but not always. An experienced high school teacher, even one who has to go back to 30-year old notes, might be more effective at teaching Calc III than an adjunct college instructor with a fresh Master's degree, or a PhD professor whose heart is in research and who teaches only because he has to. However, college teaching horror stories might not be as common as they are popular in the retelling, and the corresponding horror stories about high school teachers who do not know enough and end up instilling students with incorrect concepts are far less likely to be heard.

In fact, college teachers routinely complain about students who have had calculus in high school, but learned it inadequately, either with too little emphasis on concepts (they memorized skills and tricks but never did proofs and cannot explain the meaning of their work) or with too much reliance on calculators, so that basic skills in calculation are underdeveloped.

What about the loss of "rich variety" in topics like geometry and trigonometry? Without knowing the actual curriculum being used, I can't really make a fair comment about the schools in question. However, even before the "calculus push" there was a great deal lost in these topics. Sometime during the 1970's and 80's, high school geometry and trigonometry were gutted and refurbished...and indeed one could question whether the changes have resulted in a richer curriculum or a poorer one. Mathematics has taken a hard hit from the near-removal of proof from the high school curriculum. The new topics that have been added may not be as important or beneficial. It seems clear to me that the changes were made to make math more "accessible" to students (i.e., dumbed down) as we moved to requiring more math for all students. In recent years, there seems to be a trend toward reclaiming some of the lost ground, and courses like "pre-calculus" may, in some cases, be as challenging and comprehensive as anything from the past. But I have seen no evidence that logic and proof have made a comeback in the high school curriculum. Without these, we cannot have a truly "advanced" high school mathematics program.

What do kids learn about politics in school?

2006-01-28T09:08:00.000-06:00

I live in a fairly conservative state that can pretty much be counted on to go Red in the presidential elections. I don't spend a lot of time talking about politics at home, but I thought I said enough to give my kids a pretty good idea where I stand. So it was quite a surprise to me when my 9th grader started making some comments about George Bush on the way home from school one day. The comments were all negative, all the typical liberal anti-Bush line. As I started to counter the things she said, she asked, "You mean you support Bush?"

Hmmmm. Not only didn't anything I said at home sink in, but apparently she was getting a straight one-sided view at school. Now, I know this is happening in other parts of the country, but somehow I was under the impression that things would be different here. I guess not.

Instead of (or in addition to) learning about Cindy Sheehan at school, why don't they learn about Lena Haddix?

Who, you say?

Lean Haddix, at age 72, went to Afganistan as a civilian volunteer to support the troops. She worked in the PX. Later she also went to Iraq. Her message is far more important to America than Cindy Sheehan's. But, so typically, the important messages are ignored in the media and the schools.

Read about Lina Haddix here:
http://newsok.com/article/1721215/?template=

Death Penalty for Rape

2006-01-09T09:42:00.000-06:00

Two girls, one 16 and one 17, were attacked by three men, who forced them to the ground and tried to rape them. The elder girl managed to pull a knife from her pocket, and stabbed her attacker in the hand, then, being attacked again, stabbed one of the men in the chest. He died from the injury.

The girl has been sentenced to death by hanging.

http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5184

We have far too many people in the US who defend and enable this kind of barbarism. Where is the feminist outcry? Where are the favored sons and daughters of Hollywood? Where are the billionaire bands with their charity concerts?

Soldiers fight Liberal Politicians

2006-01-09T09:10:00.000-06:00

Michelle Malkin posted these links to video from a townhall meeting hosted by representatives Moran and Murtha. Great stuff.

A soldier takes on Murtha and Moran
A veteran tells off Murtha/Moran

For scientists, environmentalists

2005-12-28T12:02:00.000-06:00

This is a must-read article:
http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speeches/complexity/complexity.html

The Closeness of Elections

2005-12-15T10:01:00.000-06:00

I have been asking myself this question for some time, “Why are elections so close?” I am surprised that this topic has not come up in any public forum. While it is not surprising for one particular election to be close, when we see that most elections, year after year, are close, is that not cause for questioning? Doesn’t it defy probabilistic expectations? I think so.

However, I don’t think the reasons are particularly mysterious. I do think they deserve discussion.

Obviously, we know that most campaign money is spent where candidates hope to win. We also know that issues and talking points are chosen to garner the most public support. I would argue that neither of these is good for democracy or for government. In any case, I have a sneaking suspicion that elections are closer than they ought to be, due to campaign manipulations that have nothing to do with issues or the “true” will of the people. It seems to me that these carefully crafted strategies are to blame for the trend of close elections.

Music and Video from the right

2005-11-17T08:25:00.000-06:00

From Bob Dylan to the Dixie Chicks, music has been used in many ways to promote leftist ideas. In Country Music, there has always been a fair amount of patriotic and right-leaning music. But apparently Air America is up in arms because a "rock group is using music to sway the opinion of the youth."

The group is called "The Right Brothers" and the song is:

Lyrics: Bush Was Right
Written by: Frank Highland

Freedom in Afghanistan, say goodbye Taliban
Free elections in Iraq, Saddam Hussein locked up
Osama’s staying underground, Al Qaida now is finding out
America won’t turn and run once the fighting has begun
Libya turns over nukes, Lebanese want freedom, too
Syria is forced to leave, don’t you know that all this means

Chorus
Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

Democracy is on the way, hitting like a tidal wave
All over the middle east, dictators walk with shaky knees
Don’t know what they’re gonna do, their worst nightmare is coming true
They fear the domino effect, they’re all wondering who’s next

Repeat Chorus

Ted Kennedy – wrong!
Cindy Sheehan – wrong!
France – wrong!
Zell Miller – right!

Economy is on the rise kicking into overdrive
Angry liberals can't believe it's cause of W's policies
Unemployment's staying down, Democrats are wondering how
Revenue is going up, can you say "Tax Cuts"

Repeat Chorus

Cheney was right, Condi was right, Rummy was right, Blair was right
You were right, we were right, “The Right” was right and Bush was right
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

© 2005 Pool Guy Music (ASCAP), All rights reserved

You can listen to a preview at
http://www.therightbrothers.com/

Conservatives have a new ad that lays bare the biportisan support for the Iraq war, putting the lie to the Democrat claims that "Bush lied." Watch it at
http://media1.streamtoyou.com/rnc/111505.wmv

And for the entertainment of the math minded (nothing to do with the above) we have the Klein Four Group, graduate students in mathematics and budding musicians:
http://www.collegehumor.com/movies/149448/

Bush Ends Public Education (Just Kidding)

2005-11-16T11:03:00.000-06:00

In her 10/20/2004 column, Michelle Malkin included the following quote:

Meanwhile, a teacher for Kerry complained: "If we lose the White House again, it is very possible we will lose public education."

Well, they "lost." It's been over a year now, and we still have public education. In fact, maybe we ought to take a look at how public education has done during the Bush administration.

Percent of All K-12 Students Enrolled in Public Schools (NCES)
1992--90.85
1999--91.42
2000--91.31
2001--91.19
2002--91.19
2003--91.17 (projected)
2004--91.16 (projected)
2005--91.16 (projected)

(Why is the NCES three years behind in statistics? Sure wish I had the current figures.)

Ron Hutcheson, writing for Common Dreams News Center today, says

In some cases, Bush pushed for spending increases. For example, federal spending on education, a top presidential priority, has increased 65 percent under Bush.

That money isn't being used to reduce the influence of public education.

Meanwhile, programs in school choice, ostensibly supported by the president, appear to have made little progress.

Kavan Peterson, at stateline.org, writes:

Utah in March became the first state since Florida in 1999 to pass a statewide voucher program, though it is limited to special education students. Ohio’s Republican-controlled Legislature is expected to send a proposal to GOP Gov. Bob Taft by June that would build on Cleveland’s existing voucher program. It would make state-funded tuition vouchers available to public school students with poor math and reading scores throughout the state.
Even with these additions, tuition vouchers will be in use within just six states and the District of Columbia . While Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have given their approval to tuition vouchers, state courts and state lawmakers still are putting up roadblocks.

Lew Rockwell summed it up pretty well back in 2001:

Republicans are cheering Bush’s education bill, but they should ask themselves this critical question: why is Teddy Kennedy smiling?

Women In the NeWs

2005-11-11T08:45:00.000-06:00

Conservative college women have a voice of their own. No longer will they have to grit their teeth and bear it when the media portrays NOW as the sole represenative of women. Now there's NeW.

Out With the Old, in With the N.E.W.
By Jessica Anderson

The glory of feminism, which engulfed waves of young women in the 1960s and ’70s, has increasingly lost its luster with today’s generation, many of whom have observed ts radical swerve to the left.
Many collegiate women have observed the detrimental effects of such attitudes, and just aren’t buying them. Being feminist is as out-of-style as crimped hair and big bangs; conservative college women are exposing today’s feminism for what it is: entangling ideology that needs to be toned down.
Karin Agness, a college senior at the University of Virginia, has become a leader of this endeavor. Tired of feminist propaganda, she founded the Network of Enlightened Women (N.E.W.) to foster education and leadership and advance conservative principles among university women.

A critique of Neoconservatism

2005-11-10T21:31:00.000-06:00

We've Been Neo-Conned
by Rep. Ron Paul, MD

The modern-day, limited-government movement has been co-opted. The conservatives have failed in their effort to shrink the size of government. There has not been, nor will there soon be, a conservative revolution in Washington. Political party control of the federal government has changed, but the inexorable growth in the size and scope of government has continued unabated. The liberal arguments for limited government in personal affairs and foreign military adventurism were never seriously considered as part of this revolution.

Native American Students

2005-10-29T19:44:00.000-05:00

Title links to an interesting article about Native American students.

Darwinian Democrats

2005-10-29T18:13:00.000-05:00

Top notch--read the whole thing. An excerpt:

The Dover evolution trial, then, represents the effort of Mrs. Callahan and her allies to win in court what they could not win at the ballot box.
Please note that all the Dover board did was to require that the school provide a mild disclaimer about Darwinian dogmatism, and make available a supplemental text about pandas, to biology students in a small Pennsylvania town. Not content to dispute the issue locally (the Dover board is up for re-election Nov. 8), Mrs. Callahan and friends insisted upon a month-long sequel to the 1925 Scopes trial in the Harrisburg courtroom of U.S. District Judge John E. Jones.
The burning question is not whether life on Earth was created or evolved. Rather, the great mystery is why the content of ninth-grade science classes in tiny Dover, Pa., should merit the attentions of the federal judiciary.
I don't claim to be a constitutional scholar, but I'm pretty sure the Constitution doesn't say anything about schools or scientific theories. In fact, I think it fair to say that James Madison and his fellow Founders would have been horrified at the prospect of a federal judge telling folks in Dover what they should or should not teach their 14-year-olds. Yet the boundless ambition of undemocratic Democrats will not permit dissent.

Vouchers

2005-10-26T09:11:00.000-05:00

Here's something I wrote on vouchers years ago (1992). It's interesting to consider what still holds true, what progress has been made, and what has not.

MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT EDUCATIONAL VOUCHERS

Disclaimer: This work is intended to be a summary, not a research paper, and thus is not documented. However, nearly all of this information can be found in a 1990 book by David W. Kirkpatrick, former president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, Choice in Schooling. The book is well documented and includes an extensive bibliography on the subject.

Myth: Tuition vouchers are a new idea.

Fact: Tuition vouchers were supported by Adam Smith, Tom Paine, and Thomas Jefferson.

Myth: Vouchers are a conservative, or Republican, issue.

Fact: People from various parties, liberal and conservative, have supported tuition vouchers throughout our history. Only since Ronald Reagan (conservative Republican) supported vouchers against the opposition of the NEA (which supported liberal democrats) has this issue been perceived as conservative.

Myth: Tuition vouchers would be unconstitutional.

Fact: In 1930 the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana Law giving textbooks to public and private schools alike.

Fact: In 1983 The Supreme Court upheld tuition tax credits for all students and parents.

Fact: The GI bill, a tuition voucher for higher education, has been used since 1944 for both public and private schools. By 1958 over 3600 veterans had used the voucher to enter the clergy!

Fact: In Illinois, the state has provided vouchers for certain handicapped children to attend private schools.

Fact: In 1976, The California Supreme Court (Seranno II) rejected that state's present school financing system as unconstitutional. Among the 6 constitutional alternatives spelled out by the court was vouchers!

Fact: In 1983 (Mueller v. Alien) Rehnquist wrote for the Supreme Court majority: "A state's decision to defray the cost of educational expenses... regardless of the type of schools ... evidences a purpose that is both secular and understandable" (read constitutional).

Fact: In more than 30 Maine towns that lack high schools of their own, students have been allowed to attend public, private, or parochial high schools in other towns with their own town paying the tuition.

Fact: In 1985, Minnesota began allowing public school juniors and seniors to attend state colleges or private colleges at public expense for high school and college credit.

Myth: Tuition vouchers would permit the establishment of segregated schools or elite schools for the rich.

Fact: In 1958 (Cooper v. Aaron) state support of segregated schools was outlawed. Even private schools are subject to discrimination laws.

Fact: Typical proposed voucher legislation includes provisions prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race or economic status. One proposal says that an individual could not add funds to the voucher—so parents using expensive, elite schools would have to foot the whole bill.

Fact: Poor and minorities express the most support for vouchers.

Fact: We now have tuition tax credits which DO help the middle class and rich have choice in schooling, but do nothing for the poor whose taxes are not greatly affected.

Fact: The wealthy successfully establish elite public schools now by moving to exclusive communities and supporting schools with high property taxes which they then deduct from income. Open enrollment policies, short of vouchers, would tend to counteract this practice.

Fact: In 1974 Daniel Sullivan found the range of per-pupil costs in public schools to be from $200 to $14000! (How's that for elitism?) Vouchers would certainly tend to equalize these discrepancies.

Fact: Present nonpublic schools are not elitist. Lutheran schools, for example, are populated mostly by middle and lower class children. Some Lutheran schools do not even charge tuition to members, and since anyone who wishes may become a member, this is an non-elitist policy. Andrew Greeley compared the number of blacks in Catholic and public schools and found:
......................Catholic .............. Public
have few blacks...30% .............. 29%
half black ........... 21% ............... 28%
mostly black....... 22% .............. 24%
all black ............ 17% ............... 19%

Fact: In addition, recent Census Bureau reports say being white increases the probability of private school attendance by only 1%!

Myth: Parents would make mistakes in educational choices (cant be trusted or are too apathetic to make good choices).

Fact: Of course parents would make mistakes. But individual mistakes can quickly and easily be corrected. Government mistakes, affecting thousands or millions of students, often cannot be corrected for years, if at all, certainly too late to help those affected.

Fact: Parents are apathetic because they are powerless. Given choice, parents tend to be actively supportive of their schools.

Myth: Vouchers would destroy the public schools.

Fact: This has not happened in higher education, where the GI bill (a voucher), the Pell grant, and various government loans have made private education competitive with public colleges.

Fact: In other countries public schools thrive alongside state-supported private schools. In Denmark, only 7% of students do not attend public schools although homeschooling is allowed, parents may band together and start their own school which receives 85% funding of operating costs after the first year, and parochial schools are also supported. France and England also give government support to private schools but the majority of students attend government schools.

Fact: Those who make this statement do not even consider the possibility that destroying the public schools, as we know them, might be a good thing!

Myth: Tuition vouchers would hurt teachers.

Fact: The greatest result of the voucher system might be not freedom of choice for students but freedom of choice for teachers—to use individual differences, skills, and philosophy. In British Columbia, as Peter Brimelow reported in 1985, government subsidies given directly to private schools resulted in an unexpected blossoming of teachers declaring independence to start their own schools.

Fact: Phi Delta Kappan (the educators' honor society) members support vouchers by 46% to 41% opposed (1986).

Fact: In recent years the percent of school budgets for teacher salaries has declined from about 56% to 40%. A voucher system might result in higher teacher salaries while at the same time lowering educational costs by cutting bureaucracy.

Fact: In 1972-1974 a limited experiment in vouchers was conducted in the Alum Rock school district in California. Limitations of this study included that it was short term, only involved one district, only elementary, and only public schools. Still, the following results are interesting:
95% of parents said they liked having choice
75% of parents felt their children received a better education
96% of teachers said they had more freedom to be innovative
66% of teachers said parents should have more say about what children learn
66% of teachers said vouchers would help accomplish this
Central staff members began to function more as consultants than administrators
Principals functioned more as counselors and advisers
The prediction that there would be sweeping changes proved wrong—there was no chaos, no segregation, no brutal competition

Myth: Vouchers would encourage fraud or fly-by-night schools.

Fact: Schools receiving vouchers would typically have to be approved by the state anyway. Besides, isn't fraud a good word to describe graduating millions of illiterates, as the current system does?

NAEP results are out

2005-10-19T12:57:00.000-05:00

Highest honors in 8th grade math:
Massachusetts ---------292
Minnesota -------------290
North Dakota ----------287
South Dakota ----------287
Vermont ---------------287

Education vs Instant Gratification

2005-10-18T13:54:00.000-05:00

I think I have a new take on the "schools were better in the past" or "students were better in the past" argument. It's this: We live in a culture of instant gratification, and education doesn't fit.

Consider being a student a couple of hundred years ago. Suppose you were hungry. What would you do? Well, you would probably have to think of it in advance, and get prepared. Maybe you'd have to butcher a chicken, which you would have had to raise up from a chick. Maybe you'd have to go hunting for something, then butcher it, then cook it, and so, in a couple of hours, you'd have something to eat. If you wanted some vegetables, you'd better have planned ahead months in advance--planted a garden, tended it, put up and preserved the goodies. Then, when you're hungry, you could take it out and prepare it (which might involve building a fire, etc). It would take lots of effort and advance planning. Of course, as a student, you might not have done all that yourself. But, chances are, you'd have been part of the process, helping your parents do exactly those things. So you would get the idea that if you wanted to eat, you'd better be prepared to put some work into it.

Today, you run to McDonalds or throw a frozen dinner in the microwave, and in a few minutes, you can eat. It's pretty easy and doesn't take much planning or work.

Suppose you were a student a couple of hundred years ago, and you were cold. What would you do? Throw another log on the fire--but first, you'd have to chop the wood, stack and dry it. Or maybe you use coal--dig it out of the ground and haul it home. Or maybe you gather buffalo chips in the fall. Or, you'd put on more clothes. But where do you get them? Long ago, you would have gathered straw, spun thread, and wove the cloth, and finally sewed the garment. More recently, you'd still have to buy the cloth and make your clothes. It was a long process that involved planning and work, to make sure you'd have something warm to put on. You probably participated with your parents in all these activities. You'd get the idea that if you wanted to be warm, you'd better be prepared to put some work into it.

Today, you turn up the thermostat or run to Walmart and buy a sweater. In a few minutes, you're warm. It's pretty easy and doesn't take much planning or work.

Suppose you are a student a couple of hundred years ago, and you went to school. You'd know that everything important in life requires hard work and advance preparation. You'd take if for granted that nothing important comes easy. You'd automatically be prepared to work hard at school, just like everything else.

Today, every other experience of your life tells you that the things you want can be quickly and easily obtained. There is practically no chance that you would ever have to worry about not having your basic needs fulfilled, even if you do absolutely nothing. You see advertising that tells you how all the hardest jobs can be done without breaking a sweat, leaving you plenty of time to play and enjoy yourself. Unfortunately, there haven't been any major advances in education in the last 200 years. Learning proceeds pretty much just as it always has, with lots of hard work and advance planning. But you have no analogue for this. Nothing in your life has given you a context for it. So, you scoff at your teacher's admonition that you put hard work and effort into your learning. Life just doesn't work that way, in your experience. Certainly, there must be a way that you can flip a switch, or run to the store, or pop something into an appliance, so that your educational needs are quickly fulfilled, and you can get back to playing and entertaining yourself.

Is there really any possible way that today's students could be as good as yesteryear's?

Why Engineering Students Wash Out

2005-10-15T23:00:00.000-05:00

Please read this excellent piece at Kitchen Table Math:

Engineering school is a rude awakening for most college freshmen. Many students are surprised to learn that their previous thirteen years of formal schooling have not adequately prepared them for the rigors of engineering school. Sadly, about 2/3rds of them, some very bright motivated students, won't make it through the program. This is what you learn by the end of freshman year:

Why College Students aren't ready for Math

2005-10-15T21:22:00.000-05:00

MoebiusStripper reacts to an article in The Globe & Mail (Universities Trying to Cope With Students Lacking Basics 9/22/05).

My A-minus student does not have a C-level understanding of the grade twelve course that I took a decade ago, the one that prepared me reasonably well for my university math classes. He doesn’t even have a D-level understanding of such material. To say that an A-minus means anything in terms of a student’s understanding of the math they need to succeed in university is to say that there’s any correlation whatsoever between college level math and grade twelve math as it’s taught in BC. And there isn’t.
My student’s A-minus is a in fact pretty accurate reflection of his knowledge. My student does indeed have an A-minus grasp of the material taught in grade twelve math in BC. My student has acquired A-minus-level proficiency at storing formulas in his ... graphing calculator and memorizing the solutions to homework problems so that he can recall them when he faces the test. He’s quite good at all that, really. It’s just that this proficiency would help him not one whit if he were to take a university-level math class, taught by professors who naïvely expect their A-minus students to be minimally numerate, not to mention vaguely proficient in reasoning mathematically.

How much of the problem with disparity between expectations and reality is due to inadequate K-12 education, and how much is due to the simple fact that so many more people are going to college? I guess that's the million dollar question, and I guess the answer is, "What difference does it make?"

A high school diploma is supposed to signify some level of education, which, in the real world, means, "ability to perform." If you got a high school diploma (recently), there should be an expectation that you actually know the stuff that you are supposed to. It shouldn't be about demographics. It should be about achievement. And they shouldn't let people into college without that achievement. Colleges should start taking entrance exams seriously. Even though high schoolers in the US are told how important the SAT/ACT is, the fact is that you can almost always get around it somehow. Some college, somewhere, will let you in. After all, they NEED you. They need the enrollment numbers and the dollars that go with them. So they will let you in. Then, the professors will complain that you don't know what you are supposed to, but there's really nothing they can do about it. They have to deal with you. That's life in academia.

Fred's Column on Education

2005-10-14T09:40:00.000-05:00

If you haven't checked out Fred Reed' s column, please do so today. Described as a "curmudgeon," Fred has pretty cynical views about lots of things, but his writing is addictive!

His latest column describes an "irresistible current" in America. I think we'd better get busy and resist it.

Little while back, I found a story about how Toyota decided to put a factory in Toronto because Americans were too hard to train when they weren’t actually illiterate. Isn’t that why companies don’t have factories in Zimbabwe? “Look, Ma, we’re almost a third-world country. Can I have a spear?” After decades of trying to make every kid as dumb as the dumbest kid, I guess we did it.

Ever ten minutes a study appears saying that kids can barely read. Yes! In America, the richest most hooptee-whatever, leader of nations, etc. How is this possible? How hard is it to teach kids to read? Not very. It’s hard to keep most of them from doing it.

Thomas Sowell on Education

2005-10-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

I'm a little late on this one, but just read Sowell's Sept. 13 column which is on education. Some highlights:

-my efforts should be directed toward the slower or low-performing students.
-Unfortunately, the idea of treating the brighter or more serious students as a problem to be dealt with by keeping them busy is not uncommon.
-High potential will remain only potential unless it is developed.
-But the very thought that high potential should be developed more fully never seems to occur to many of our educators -- and some are absolutely hostile to the idea.
-People like this would apparently be satisfied if Einstein had remained a competent clerk in the Swiss patent office
-Most of the teachers in our public schools do not have what it takes to develop high intellectual potential in students. They cannot give students what they don't have themselves.
-Test scores going back more than half a century have repeatedly shown people who are studying to be teachers to be at or near the bottom among college students studying in various fields.
-Too often there is not only a lack of appreciation of outstanding intellectual development but a hostility towards it
-Maybe the advancement of science, of the economy, and finding a cure for cancer can wait, while we take care of self-esteem.

Bumper Sticker Seen

2005-10-07T16:50:00.000-05:00

GOD BLESS THE WORLD
NO EXCEPTIONS

That was a thought starter.....

What does this mean?
1. Obviously, it's setting itself up against the pervasive alternative, "God Bless America." So, the sticker is condemning the belief that we should ask God to Bless us over other nations. More specifically, there are no nations which God should not bless, or even bless to a lesser degree (that would be an exception too).
2. Indeed, it is proper to pray for God to bless the whole world. In particular, we ask that He bless all people with the Gospel, and thus that he send missionaries to all parts of the world. We pray that he break down all barriers that prevent people from hearing the Gospel or responding to it.
3. People rarely think of "God Bless " as a spiritual message. They are more likely to think of God's blessings in terms of physical and financial well-being. Applied to nations, it is more likely to imply that the nation should be strong economically, militarily, and in world-wide influence, as well as safe from threats to peace and stability. If this interpretation is applied to the bumper sticker, it implies that all nations should enjoy equal positions of strength and influence in the world.
4. If God were to bless all nations in this way, equally, it would mean that there would be no consequences for bad behavior. The bully who threatens his neighbors would have the same blessings from God as the most generous nation on earth, that has done more to establish world peace than any nation ever did. God's blessings, applied in this manner, would mean that the world would become an unstable, unsafe place (more so than now).
5. It is truly a blessing to the world if God blesses America. That is, as long as America acts in accordance with God's will and serves as "a beacon to the world." American influence has benefitted every country that has opened its doors. This is true physically and spiritually. In that sense, a prayer that "God Bless America" is also a prayer that "God Bless the World."
6. If America loses its special place of leadership in the world, there will not be equality among nations, or peace, or security. One or more other nations will rise to superiority, and there are few other countries that would use their position to benefit the world the way America does.
7. God Bless America, and use her to bring ever greater blessings to the whole world, without exception!

Languages Other Than English

2005-10-05T14:25:00.000-05:00

I was looking at some census data on languages spoken at home. I was particularly interested in the area where I grew up, so I started with North Dakota.

Looking at the 2000 census, for North Dakota as a whole, ages five and over, we have 565,130 who speak only English, and the top 5 other languages spoken in the home are as follows:

German 14,931
Spanish 8,263
Scandinavian 3,193
Other Native American 2,536
French 1,597

In Mercer County, we have 7200 who speak only English, and the top 5 other languages spoken in the home are as follows:

German 895
Spanish 103
Other Slavic 10
Scandinavian 9
Chinese 9

In Oliver County, we have 1866 who speak only English, and only two other languages as follows:

German 81
Spanish 14

I also thought it might be interesting to look at the rankings in each state for languages other than English. I tabulated the top first, second, or third most frequent language spoken at home, other than English, in all of the states.

Spanish, of course, comes up first in 42 states. But in two states German is first (ND and SD) and in four states French is first! "Other Native American" comes in first once, as does "Pacific Islander." Spanish makes the top three in all but one state, and German makes the top three in 31 states! French makes the top 3 in half of the states. All others are far behind.

The Slippery Slope to Polygamy

2005-09-29T16:13:00.000-05:00

So the conservative blogs are hopping over this article about a civil union of three people in the Netherlands. It has long been one of the talking points that if we give gays legal marriage or civil union rights, this will lead to further degradation of marriage in the form of polygamy and presumably other evils. One thing has always bothered me though....

Why is it that Christian people seem to think polygamy is worse than gay marriage?

The Bible gives no example of gay marriage and makes no comment about it. However, it does soundly condemn homosexual relationships. On the other hand, the Bible contains numerous examples of polygamy being practiced by faithful members of God's people. Nowhere do we find an outright condemnation or prohibition of the practice. Nowhere. Only two things I can think of argue against it: 1. Paul said that pastors (deacons, or whichever translation you want to use) should "be the husband of one wife." 2. Most of the polygamous relationships in the Bible led to problems, so the accounts of what happened can be taken to be advice against it.

Furthermore, there are cases where the OT law required polygamy. In certain situations, when a woman was widowed, her husband's brother was to marry her and raise children for his brother. It doesn't say "only if the brother is single" so this would lead to a polygamous relationship if the brother was already married.

I'm not defending legalization of polygamy, I just think we have the whole thing backwards. If polygamy is not good, then certainly gay marriage is far worse and shouldn't even be considered. Maybe our rallying cry should be "No gay marriage before polygamy."

Of course, the Netherlands case is a good example of moral problems all around. The married couple met a married woman in internet chat, got sexually involved with her, and as a result she got divorced and joined them. So the original couple here is guilty of marriage-busting, and of course, adultery. These three are obviously not going to be good poster children for polygamy.

John Taylor Gatto

2005-09-28T22:21:00.000-05:00

You have just got to read the article linked here.

Written in Defense of ID

2005-09-26T09:09:00.000-05:00

It could be that mine is the only mind that exists, and that everything I perceive (including this board) is just a product of my imagination. Or, just as easily, of "The Matrix." Philosophers have pondered these and other possibilities. We don't really know how much of the "real world" is really real. Do we? In fact, whatever position you take on the role and interpretation of sensation, it is clear that all logical deductions and inferences are a product of the human mind (individual or collective). It is conceivable that such products have no relationship to "reality" or "truth" whatsoever. In fact, if the mind is the product of random, undirected, unintelligent processes, there is absolutely no reason that reason should produce anything reliable. It's just another random process. Belief in evolution leads logically to a rejection of science as a valid way of knowing.

HeyMath

2005-09-23T10:53:00.000-05:00

The International Herald Tribune
September 17, 2005 ; Pg. 7
HEADLINE: People who know math matters
BYLINE: Thomas L. Friedman

"HeyMath's mission is to be the math Google to establish a Web-based platform that enables every student and teacher to learn from the "best teacher in the world" for every math concept and to also be able to benchmark themselves against their peers globally.The HeyMath platform also includes an online repository of questions, indexed by concept and grade, so teachers can save time in devising homework and tests. Because HeyMath material is accompanied by animated lessons that students can do on their own online, it provides for a lot of self-learning. Indeed, HeyMath (see www.heymath.net), which has been adopted by 35 of Singapore's 165 schools, also provides an online tutor, based in India, to answer questions from students stuck on homework."

Louisiana Officials Indicted Before Katrina Hit

2005-09-19T10:34:00.000-05:00

Surprise, Surprise. There were already officials in New Orleans indicted for fraud with FEMA money before the hurricane hit. Millions of dollars for improving flood and hurricane preparedness disappeared....

Global Warming--A Cool Headed View

2005-09-19T10:00:00.000-05:00

Article by Bill SteigerWald, FrontPageMagazine.com:
Q: And global warming is something we should study but not get panicky about?
A: The thing to keep in mind always is that the natural fluctuations of climate are very much larger than anything we can ascribe – so far – to any human activity. Much larger. We lived through a Little Ice Age just a few hundred years ago. During the Middle Ages the climate was much warmer than it is today. So the climate does change all the time. We need to understand the scientific reasons for natural climate change. Most of us now think it’s the sun that is the real driver of climate. It has something to do with sun spots, but the mechanism is not quite clear. That’s what’s being studied now.

What is "Middle-Schoolism"?

2005-09-19T09:24:00.000-05:00

Not Middle Schools, mind you, but the philosophy that bred them. This is explained in a new paper by Dr. Cheri Pierson Yecke, Mayhem in the Middle. A few highlights:

She [Dr. Yecke] is superbly qualified to tackle this topic, having served, among other things, as a senior federal Education Department official, as Secretary of Education in Virginia—a state widely praised for the quality of its academic standards—and, for a brief but astonishingly fruitful period, as Commissioner of Education in Minnesota. As we go to press, Florida Governor Jeb Bush has just named her that state’s new chancellor for K-12 education. She also authored the fine 2003 book, The War Against Excellence, which simultaneously exposed the shortcomings of U.S. middle school education and the country’s strange and dysfunctional animus toward “giftedness.” (Information about that book can be found at www.waragainstexcellence.com.) As expected, her book was condemned by reviewers for the National Middle School Association, which branded it “part of a larger attack sponsored by ultra-right and ultra-conservative groups on colleges of education, NCATE, and the like,” thus sparing itself the unpleasant task of addressing Yecke’s substantive arguments and voluminous evidence.

Middle schoolism (definition): An approach to educating children in the middle grades (usually grades 5-8), popularized in the latter half of the 20th century, that contributed to a precipitous decline in academic achievement among American early adolescents.

The middle school movement advances the notion that academic achievement should take a back seat to such ends as self-exploration, socialization, and group learning.

If ever an education fad was a vivid illustration of dreadful timing, reaching its intellectual and political pinnacle just as lightning struck that very mountaintop from afar, that was “middle schoolism.” The key year turned out to be 1989, when the middle school bible, an influential Carnegie-backed report named Turning Points, was published just as the governors and the first President Bush were gathering in Charlottesville to place the United States squarely on the side of the standards-based reform that is antithetical to the central message of this education religion.

Rather than submit to the reality that America now demands schools with strong academic achievement and that such achievement is essential to secure not merely national prosperity but also the engaged citizenship that undergirds the republic, radical middle school devotees continue their efforts with fervent zeal.

Out with the old trigonometry

2005-09-18T19:21:00.000-05:00

Mathematics students have cause to celebrate. A University of New South Wales academic, Dr Norman Wildberger, has rewritten the arcane rules of trigonometry and eliminated sines, cosines and tangents from the trigonometric toolkit.

I have not read the book, "Divine Proportions," and cannot judge its value. However, I do have a comment on the notion that we could somehow dispense with teaching the trig functions in high school or college. Trig functions are not just about figuring triangles. There are many mathematical concepts that make use of trigonometry and have no obvious connection to triangles. Engineers and many other practical users of mathematics rely on these functions for many basic calculations. Is it possible to supplant the trig functions with something else, in such a way that it would generalize to all the other current uses of trigonometry in higher math? If so, how do we make the transition? Can we really have one generation of engineers who understand and write things in terms of sine and cosine, and another generation immediately following who have no knowledge of these things? Or one branch of the field that uses one set of definitions and another branch that can't communicate with the first because it uses another set of definitions? I won't say it's impossible to establish a new paradigm, nor that it should not be done. Just that it seems extremely difficult. Proceed with caution before eliminating something so basic from the mathematics curriculum. If it really is a good idea, work it from the top down--get the graduate schools on board first, then the undergraduate schools, etc. so the reliance on the old system can be weaned in an orderly manner.

If anyone is familiar with Wildberger's ideas, please add some comments.

Ambassador to Afganistan Math blunder

2005-09-16T09:17:00.000-05:00

This morning on NPR the US Ambassador to Afganistan was interviewed. He was asked several questions regarding the elections, one of which had to do with the fact that several candidates have been killed. His response: "Six out of 6000 candidates have been killed. That's .001%, a very small number."
Maybe it was just a mistake. Maybe he doesn't know decimals from percents. Or maybe it was a deliberate attempt to make a small problem seem even smaller.

ED Hirsch Book

2005-09-15T09:50:00.000-05:00

Like many other ed bloggers, I too am looking forward to E.D. Hirsh's new book, "The Knowledge Deficit." I have given a link to The Instructivist in the title as one example. He has copied the press release for the book in this article. Check it out if you haven't already.

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the ...Welfare State

2005-09-15T09:35:00.000-05:00

"What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men. "

Please read this excellent article by Robert Tracinski.

The Race of New Orleans

2005-09-14T09:57:00.000-05:00

Ambra Nykol says,

... accusations have centered on race, racism, and the neglect of black people, specifically by President Bush. .... As the front man, our President has taken a beating for such sentiment, but to be honest, considering the real issue at hand, I'm not entirely convinced that Kerry, Clinton or Gore would have handled things much differently. For the record, the reality stands: institutionalized racism currently exists. It's not some socialized problem [emphasis mine]. It is a stronghold that needs to be broken.

Condi Rice says,

"I find it very strange to think that people would think that the president of the United States would sit deciding who ought to be helped on the basis of color, most especially this president," she said. "What evidence is there that this is the case? Why would you say such a thing?" Ms. Rice said she was first impressed by Mr. Bush in the 1990's, not because of any foreign policy issues, but because he spoke of "the soft bigotry of low expectations" [emphasis mine] and the phrase meant something to her. She recalled being told by a high school teacher "that maybe I was junior college material" and added: "I know about the soft bigotry of low expectations. And it's not in this president. It is, however, deeply ingrained in our system, and we're going to have to do something about it."

Fred says

I was traveling in China when pictures of the looters in New Orleans began to appear on CNN. They were black of course. Looting and raping and burning are what blacks do when the lid loosens. Yes, I could phrase this more cautiously.... Yet it happens time and again. There was Los Angeles, burned in 1992. There have been Cincinnati, Miami, Seattle, Washington DC, Chicago, Detroit, Crown Heights, Watts, Newark, on and on and on. When the law loses its grip, the looting begins.... With the dismantling in the Fifties of apartheid in the United States, many hoped that blacks would rise, study, progress, and become genuinely[,] as distinct from formally[,] integrated into the country. I hoped it too, though my expectations were low [empahsis mine]. Southerners said it would never happen, but were dismissed as prejudiced. They were right. The melding of the races just hasn’t worked and, if examined honestly, shows few signs of working. Fifty years after the Brown decision, blacks remain unassimilated. .... Integration of the schools degraded the schools, but did little for blacks. Operation Head Start didn’t work. Racial quotas in the universities didn’t work, nor did the awarding of unearned degrees or the establishment of epartments of Black Studies. Compulsory integration of restaurants didn’t work. Quotas in hiring, enforced by the federal government, didn’t work. Welfare didn’t work. “Hate-crime” laws didn’t work. Nothing has worked.... Neither race shows much inclination to associate with the other. Left to themselves, they quickly segregate, in housing, on campus, in night clubs. Only heavy federal pressure produces an appearance of togetherheid.
As a police reporter frequently in the hearts of the big cities, I saw the failure with a clarity available to few. The black regions are huge, and they are purely black. Their denizens share little with a society of European derivation. In particular, with not enough exceptions, they seem to regard laws as restraints externally imposed instead of internally felt: When the police go away, so do restrictions on behavior.... Morally it is saddening. For blacks, for whites, for the country the best thing would be that blacks genuinely flourish.... Perhaps, as many suggest, a history of being wards of the state, of being given special aid and special privilege, of having nothing expected of them [emphasis mine], has inculcated passivity. .... Scholarship, reading, study do not seem to appeal.
Writers speaking of the looting in New Orleans regularly say that poverty causes looting, and that as a society we should do something about it.... With the inevitability of gravitation, commentators attribute the incompatibility with what we think of as civilization to oppression or neglect by whites. Oh? In Washington, the mayor is usually black, along with a majority of the city council and school board. The principals are black, as are most of the teachers, almost all of the students, and their parents. The funding per student is high. Yet the schools are horrifically bad.

Institutional racism today amounts to little more than institutionalized low expectations. Wherever attempts are made to raise expectations, the cries of "racism" arise, thus keeping expectations low and entrenching institutional racism. I think that about says it all.

Book Review

2005-07-18T01:09:00.000-05:00

I recently finished reading "Common Sense Economics" by Gwartney, Stroup, and Lee. This is an excellent little book and I highly recommend it for everyone. Really! It is non-technical, and explains things in, well, a common sense way. I finished almost every chapter with the feeling that I had just been told things that I already knew in my gut were true, yet had not consciously understood. There are important insights here about politics, in particular short-term thinking versus long-term thinking (you knew that too, didn't you?), as well as why nothing ever seems to get done in Washington. It's all economics, really. No kidding! And I became a statistician because I thought it would allow me to understand what politics was all about. Oops.

Catching Up a Little

2005-07-18T00:12:00.000-05:00

I guess someone is reading my blog....
Edwonk wrote in the comments,

Everything OK? I've been missing your posts...

Thanks! Yes, everything is OK. I am just busy with other things this summer and only have dialup access. Anybody know how we ever lived in a 56K (really only 24, that's all I get) world? I hate web surfing on dialup....web developers these days have no concept of limited bandwith. Ten years ago when we did web development it was all about conserving, doing the most with the least amount of transmitted information. Now it's all about sending tons of pretty pictures. bah, humbug.

Miller Thomas Smith wrote me a comment in the article below also. He disagrees with my industrial analogy for education,

Children are not the product in education. The quality of the education offered is the product.

Well, OK. Did you read all the posts in this series? You seem to have rather missed the point(s). He says choice is the answer, an observation with which I tend to agree. This, however, takes us into new territory which I have not addressed, and I don't intend to do so now, either.

The model offered is kin to saying that a fast food joint is responsible for the eating habits of its customers rather than providing clean and desirable food for the customers. If a customer throws that food at squirrls that is not a refection on the job of the fast food joint.

No, that's not exactly right. A fast food joint (FFJ) clearly produces food. We know what the product is. They do not pretend to sell something abstract, such as, for example, "satisfaction," "satiation," or "the ability to cognitively analyze and explain the effects of eating a hamburger." The customer of the FFJ is also clearly identified: he's the one in front of the counter, asking for food and paying money. The workers are clearly identifiable, they're putting the food together, packaging it, distributing it, and collecting money. And the managers are pretty much identifiable as well, although in an FFJ the distinction between worker and manager may be somewhat less clear than in other businesses. Mr. Smith is trying to turn my analogy on its head. He wants to say what an FFJ would be like if it were a school. That's OK, but not the purpose of my discussion. Still, let me run with this for a bit.

If an FFJ were like a school, then the state would pass a law that people of certain ages would have to go to an approved FFJ on a daily basis. The state would provide tax supported FFJ's to which people could go for free. Otherwise, people could choose private FFJ's for which they would pay, if they were not satisfied with the free ones. The purpose would be to produce health and growth in the attendees, which I will call eatents (a play on students). The eatents would go to the FFJ, where they would be greated by an eatcher (a play on teacher, are you getting this?) who would have arranged to have all the materials necessary for the eatents meals on hand and organized. The eatcher would have instructions, recipes, menus, etc., as needed, ready to go. The eatents would then be guided by the eatcher to prepare and eat their meals and clean up. Now suppose further that the meals were designed scientifically to be optimal for health, and not necessarily good tasting. Suppose also that some were quite difficult to make, especially for younger children. Suppose also that some require long, repetative effort to make. Now you have school.

Some students will not be hungry, because they will have eaten other things. Since this is free and compulsory, they will tend not to value the experience. Since the goal is abstract, that is enhancing health and growth, they will not immediately appreciate the activity. The sensation which should be the reward of this activity (satiation) can be obtained in other ways. Some parents will not be very supportive of the eatcher's efforts. Some homes will not provide the kind of supportive environment that leads eatents to value and appreciate health and growth. And of course, the whole enterprise will be plagued by constant budget problems. Now you have the problems of eduction.

In any case, this scenario provides the kind of confusion I have described regarding the roles of worker and customer. The eatents are the workers, as well as the recipients of the benefits (supposedly). The customers might be the eatents, or the parents, or society at large. It's not completely clear. The product is not simply food, it is health and growth, which incidently can be obtained outside the established institution.

If the product supplied by schools was simply information, they could be replaced by libraries or the internet. This would be analogous to the FFJ supplying food as its product. To say that "the quality of the education offered is the product" makes no sense. No one really sells quality, though it makes a nice advertising slogan. Quality is a characteristic of a product, not a product in itself. "Children are not the product in education," but changes in children are the product of education. The changes are non-tangible and not readily valued by the children themselves. Furthermore, these changes only occur if the children do the work required to produce the changes, and they occur most effectively if the work is guided by competent managers called teachers.

My belief, and the purpose of writing these articles, is that by understanding education in these terms we can be more effective in analyzing and solving problems in education, and in improving the quality of education. However, I wouldn't want to make yet another "education theory fad" out of it!

An Example of Economic Analysis

2005-05-30T21:56:00.000-05:00

Jenny says in her comment below,

What do teachers do [to] produce in students acquired knowledge and skills? Are [t]here rules, protocols, studies? Do all teachers follow them, as do accountants and doctors? No, there is little if any uniformity of practice. So how can I design an economic model if I can't measure or quantify the inputs or the functions that produce the product? And if we can't measure them, then how can we generalize about them at all?

Teachers provide the management that enables students to produce knowledge and skills. Just as in any industry, there can be a great deal of variation in the management practices that are applied. Some may be more successful than others, and most are probably situation-dependent. What is successful with one group of workers in one environment may not be successful with another group in another environment.

In order to carry out a quality analysis of an educational process, we will have to focus on an example involving a specific product, that is, one lesson. Let us choose, for today's lesson, the introduction of the multiplication tables (facts). The students will have already done multiplication in the sense of counting up groups or rows and columns of objects. Now it is time for them to learn that we do not have to count everything all the time, because we can memorize some information that will always be true and useful to have at our "mental fingertips."

Managers make choices (decisions). Some theorists go so far as to say that is their primary function. So now the teacher, as manager, must begin to make these choices. First she must clearly define the product. What is it that the students will "know" or "do" after this lesson that they did not "know" or "do" before? How many facts should be introduced in the first lesson? What level of mastery should be expected? What will be expected of students who are "ahead" or "behind?" (The fact that the textbook authors have already determined some of these things will be ignored in this discussion. The teacher may not make all of these decisions on a daily basis, but still has the responsibility to determine what is appropriate, that is, whether the textbook should be followed or alternative lessons used.) Obviously we are talking about goals and behavioral objectives in educational terminology, and product specifications in industrial terminology.

Second, the teacher must design a production process, or in educational terms, a lesson plan. Should worksheets be used? flashcards? a computer program? Should the students work in groups and quiz each other? Should there be a contest, or should it be a non-competitive activity? Note that the teacher is planning how the students will WORK! (Remember the question, "Who are the workers?") Also, note that I have given a list of possible "rules or protocols" that are well established in the industry. Indeed, it is likely that there are numerous studies of the effectiveness of these techniques available in the education literature, as well as in the multitude of unpublished master's and doctoral theses in math education. To suggest that there are not well-established procedures or techniques available in education is absurd, and we are churning out research on the available alternatives at a rate unprecedented in educational history. Having alternative production procedures available should not be considered a bad thing. Uniformity in industrial practice might suggest, in some cases, that the best possible practice has been found, but it might also suggest a lack of incentive to improve. Indeed, improvement is impossible if uniformity is enforced. Furthermore, lack of uniformity in practice may be a reflection of varying conditions under which production occurs. That is to say, students are different, schools are different, and teachers are different. It makes sense that the process would vary as well.

Third, the process must be implemented. The workers must be informed of their functions, given motivation or incentives to accomplish the task, and the tools, materials, and environment to carry out the work. Again, these are management functions.

Fourth, Quality Control (or Improvement) must be carried out. In education, we call this assessment. Assessment occurs on two levels, and they have clear analogies in industry. One level is the assessment of individual students, or grading. This corresponds to product inspection. Management decisions must be made on how to handle defects. In other words, what should be done with students who did not meet the objectives? The other level is institutional assessment, which is really the goal of quality improvement. We want to evaluate the process, perhaps generating descriptive statistics of the performance of the group and compare them with statistics from other groups who used a different process. If we don't have numbers, we rely on the teacher's judgment of the results. Is she satisfied, or will she try something different next time? Unquestionably, this is the point where we want to apply statistical analysis and yet, will find we have great difficulty in the educational setting. In industry, the comparisons are done on data acquired from randomized experiments, so that hypothesis tests are a reasonable basis for a decision. Using data from non-randomized trials is extremely problematic, due to confounding variables and the inability to determine cause-and-effect relationships.

As for the question about "if I can't measure or quantify the inputs or the functions that produce the product," I would have to say that difficult does not equal impossible. Indeed, we can measure inputs and other aspects of the process. There has been a great deal of progress in the field of cognitive psychology recently, where carefully designed experiments are conducted, and the theory that develops can be applied to processes carried out in the classroom. Unfortunately, education theorists do not always take notice of the results from this field.

Economic Analysis

2005-05-23T10:13:00.000-05:00

The business/management analogy I discussed previously could be considered a sort of economic analysis. Economics doesn't just mean money. The idea is that people engage in goal-directed activities in order to realize a gain (profit) of some kind. Even altruistic activities can be seen this way, if intrinsic rewards are also considered profitable.

Really, this is nothing more than a way of analyzing goals and the processes required to achieve them.

Many of our institutions are structured so that the activities carried out in them are expected to result in a profit. This is even true of non-profit organizations, because the term "non-profit" really means that the profit isn't in the form of money, but some other desired outcome, such as alleviated suffering, happier communities, etc. Government institutions are structured to profit society as a whole in various ways. Schools are no different.

We would like to improve our schools. We want to make instruction better and more efficient. By defining the activity in economic or business terms, we can have some hope of achieving these goals. It is not that business terminology is necessary to do this. But the quality control literature has provided a framework for improvement that has had phenomenal success in the last forty years or so. Some people would object that reducing an activity as personal as education to the cold, dry terms of economics is unreasonable or even immoral. The idea that economic analysis is cold and dry, though, is not necessarily accurate. Nor does such analysis, properly done, eliminate the human element of the process.

Let's look at another trend in education. The use of "research" and "statistical analysis" has become predominant in the education literature in any discussion of improving education. Yet, in the past, people objected that such scientific analyses were inappropriate for education. This kind of research is limited in its effectiveness because of the large number of confounding variables present in any study. It is also rare that randomized experiments can be carried out in education, therefore results can be biased and statistical methods appropriate only to randomized experiments are often used inappropriately in the analysis.

Scientific research and economic analysis are by no means mutually exclusive. They are complementary. Economic analysis provides a conceptual framework in which to implement and interpret research.

More on the management analogy

2005-05-22T19:37:00.000-05:00

I have been carrying on a discussion with JennyD in the comments section of my May 5 article, Are Teachers Responsible for Student Learning? She didn't like the industrial analogy to education very much. However, in answering her comments, I have been more convinced that the analogy is valid. My article should be read carefully, and with thoughtfulness. Don't be trapped by "jargon" and misinterpret or misrepresent what is written. No analogy is perfect, and this one isn't meant to be either.

Saying the teacher has the role of manager does not mean that all teachers do is "classroom management," a term that has a rather narrow meaning in educational parlance. Managers have roles in planning, motivating, promoting, selection of resources, production targets, and many other things.

I have said that education is the only business where the customer is the product. That's not exactly right, but it does cloud the issues for this analogy. It also explains part of why education is a "messy" business. In quality control (Demming, Taguchi, etc.) the production process is broken down into small steps or stages. The team at each stage needs to analyze its part in the process, defining who its customers and suppliers are, what the customer requirements are, and what parts of the process can be changed to reduce variation in the product, as well as to streamline the process. The customers and suppliers can be internal or external to the company, and are found at various levels. Suppose you work in a factory attaching wheels to lawn mowers. Your immediate customers are the workers at the next station down the line. Your intermediate customers might be retailers, and of course the ultimate customers are the people who buy the lawn mowers to use them. The quality of your work can be assessed by inspection and customer satisfaction surveys.

Suppose now you are a 3rd grade teacher doing a lesson in math. The students are customers who have certain requirements (as expressed on their behalf by parents and school board). The product they request is a mathematical concept or computational skill. Now I ask you to consider: What is it you have been hired to do? Can you produce the concept or skill and transfer it to the customer? Or are you a middleman, transferring the knowledge or skill from some warehouse that others have stored it up in? Certainly not. Only the students, by their own mental effort, can construct a concept, or practice a skill until it is automated. The teacher cannot do this work for them. Therefore, the students are the production workers. They make the product (learning) happen. What then, is the role of the teacher? The teacher provides an environment in which the work is to be done. The teacher analyzes the product requirements and plans a process that will produce the product. The teacher guides the students to do the necessary work, and is responsible to motivate them and evaluate the quality of the result. These are all MANAGEMENT functions.

I do not propose this as some kind of new fad for modeling instruction. It is just one way to understand some aspects of what happens in education. You can use other analogies to explain other aspects. I said earlier that this model explains why education is a "messy" business. Several business functions are muddled. The customer is the product. The workers are not the ones being paid to get results. The raw materials are highly variable, input quality cannot be controlled, and quality of the product is difficult to measure, in part because the product is never really finished.

Summer Schedule

2005-05-22T19:35:00.000-05:00

I will try to post occasionally this summer but I will be at a location with only dial-up access and that makes all internet work painfully slow. Web sites just aren't designed for dial-up any more.

Are Teachers Responsible for Student Learning?

2005-05-05T21:26:00.000-05:00

JennyD asks the question, linked in the title. There are many good comments on her article. Please visit her site and read them. I want to relay this story from a colleague of mine, which I think is very relevant.

Dr. L teaches Quality Control. The students are mostly in Mechanical Engineering. When he talks about analyzing a production process, he asks the students what role they take, and what role he takes, in the production process. The roles to consider are Manager, Worker, Customer, and Product. He says that invariably, they say that he is the worker and they are the customers. This leads to a lively discussion.

OK, if you are the customers, what is the product you are buying? Knowledge.
So, if I am the worker, then I create knowledge in you? Yes.
Do I really have that ability? Don't you think that if I could actually create knowledge in you I wouldn't be here, I'd be on the lecture circuit making megabucks selling my secret? Well....
So who really creates the product? We do.
That makes you... The workers.
And then I must be... The manager.

I'm not sure if he answers the question of who the customers are. In a sense they could be the students, the parents, the future employers, or society. All of these have a role in paying for the product, and all benefit from it.

But my main point here is that the students are almost stunned to think of the teacher as the manager rather than the worker. They have been led to believe, all through their educational experience, that the teacher is their employee, and is responsible for providing them with a product. This example shows that is not quite the case. The role of the manager is to organize work in a productive, efficient process that will result in a quality product. The teacher does not produce the product himself, he organizes the work of the students so that they will produce it. If he is a good teacher and has a good workforce, the product will have high quality. Otherwise...

See also the Instructivist's article on this subject.

[Apologies--I didn't realize I was referencing articles a couple of months old. Still, it was a good excuse to post this story.]

More Moore

2005-05-02T20:24:00.000-05:00

On the second day, Ted Mahavier talked about sources for Moore Method Course Materials. There is much available on the web. There was a report on a project called Uteach, and another on a study comparing Montessori and Moore methods (Montessori has expanded into middle and high school). Apparently they have much in common.

Ed Burger, of Williams College gave tips on teaching Moore-style.
1. Everybody submits written (typed) proofs for each problem. If he has two sections, he has the other section anonymously referee.
2. Curb your comments!
3. Allow presentation of only one proof and discuss it. The only questions are, is it clear? correct? complete? Students will want to show alternatives, but that is restricted to their written versions.
4. Always look dubious. Question everything. Don't give inadvertent clues about whether it is right or wrong.
5. Never look at the speaker. Scan the class instead.
6. Use index cards for each student to assess. Keep track of passes, record proofs presented, with little notes of anything you want to remember when grading.
7. Most problems are given with instructions to "prove and extend or disprove and salvage."
8. Assess failure--have them write up an essay on how they learned from their failures.

In the afternoon there were K-12 sessions. Bill Jacob presented on "Using Video of Children Engaged in Inquiry in Courses for Pre-Service Teachers." I had to leave early to catch my flight after that.

'No Bureaucrat Left Behind'

2005-04-30T07:39:00.000-05:00

Good one from Scrappleface

R.L. Moore Conference

2005-04-29T22:35:00.000-05:00

I am in Austin, TX, attending "The 8th Annual Legacy of R. L. Moore Conference."

Everyone interested in Math Education should know about the Moore Method, or, as it is sometimes called, the Texas Method.

I first learned of the Moore Method when I was a Secondary Math Education major taking my "transitional" course, which was called Set Theory. We were required to read the autobiography of Halmos, "I want to Be a Mathematician," in which he briefly describes the method.

Some people refer to the Moore Method as the Discovery Method, but it seems to me these should be kept separate. They are similar in philosophy and purpose, I guess, but for me, the Discovery Method applies to Elementary School (maybe Secondary too), while the Moore Method is appropriate for upper level college and graduate studies. The lines are no doubt blurry. I asked some of the presenters questions about the difference or distinction between the methods, which generated some discussion but ended without any clear answers.

Let's see, what did I learn today?

One of the first presenters gave us a problem to work on while he was getting set up. He called it the "McDonald's Problem." Say Chicken McNuggets come in boxes of three and boxes of 20. What is the largest number of nuggets that you can't get?

We heard from Cathy Seeley, President of the NCTM, who talked about how important we are to restoring the glory of American Math Education (my words, not hers) and Rodger Bybee, Executive Director of Biological Science Curriculum Study (an organization going back to the 50's which is apparently responsible for introducting evolution into the curriculum). Bybee gave us a copy of the organization's journal, "The Natural Selection" which has articles about the TIMSS and PISA studies of 2003 (international assessments).

Hyman Bass talked about "Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching." He has been doing research on specific knowledge that teachers in K-12 need to do their jobs--not mathematical content, but profession-specific stuff, like how to analyze wrong answers and quickly recognize what the problem is. Also, he said they have to analyze right answers to see how students are arriving at solutions. Another thing is how to craft questions that reveal what the teacher wants to know about the student. An example was given of arranging 4 decimal numbers in order. Two of the choice could have been done correctly if the student ignored the decimals. Another point was that teachers need to use definitions that "don't lie later." He talked defining even numbers as an example. You might say "A whole number divisible by 2" but what happens when the students get to negative numbers? He has been working on assessment tools to measure teachers' strengths in these types of knowledge. Some of the stuff he said reminded me of what Liping Ma wrote in Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, and also Hung-Hsi Wu on teacher preparation, but I wondered if he was familiar with these works.

Peter Jipsen talked about using online tools for teaching. He uses "Moodle" which is a free software like WebCT or Blackboard. He has written a couple of java utilities that make it easy to post mathematical equations and graphs in web pages. They are apparently downloadable and are called "ASCIIMath" and "ASCIIsvg." I will be checking these out.

Well, there was more (Moore) but I think that's all I'll say for now.

On Religious Tolerance

2005-04-29T18:18:00.000-05:00

There is a saying, "Falsehood can tolerate any amount of truth and still be false, but truth cannot tolerate even the smallest amount of falsehood and still be true."

Excessive tolerance necessitates embracing falsehood.The fact that various competing and mutually exclusive truth claims exist does not prove that they are all false.

Religions are not equal (in validity or truth). However, they are all complicated. None of them can be understood in sound bytes or short quotes. It is possible to evaluate the relative merits of religions logically and historically, by careful study. It is probably not possible to come to a conclusion of truth by this method.

Western Civilization values religious tolerance, and that idea of tolerance was promoted by Christians and enshrined in the laws of the United States by Christians. It was not easy for the colonists to realize that tolerance was good or necessary, but they did it, in spite of their deeply held religious beliefs. However, tolerance for others to believe and practice as they like does not extend to agreeing with their beliefs. Many liberals require that we treat all religions as equally valid (but implicitly they mean "except Christianity") but to do so is to insult them all, because if they are all equally valid they are all false.Christians who are actually living their faith do not persecute others, but they do seek to share the Good News that constitutes their religion. If this is offensive, so be it. Seriously, now, what kind of friend would I be, if I knew my friend was going to hell, but refused (out of "respect") to tell him how to avoid it? Only by denying the truth of my own religion could such a thing be considered! But there is absolutely no point in "forcing" someone to become a Christian. The historical claims that such things happened are either false or the events were orchestrated by someone for political purposes who did not understand Christian faith.

On the other hand, Muslims have a long and rich history of forcing people to become Muslims. Atheists also have a long and rich history of coercing people to become atheists--that is to say, persecuting them in an effort to make them give up their religion. The current work to promote atheism in the American educational system is incredible.

Claims that all religions are equally war-like, that is, that people make war because of religion, are incorrect. Some religions do this (Islam being the most prominent example), but most do not. There is nothing in Christianity that would encourage starting a war for religious reasons. The Christian religion was explicitly pacifist for the first three centuries, agreeing to war only after Constantine mingled the Christian religion with politics. Most Christians now believe that they may support defensive military actions, which are sometimes mis-characterized by the detractors of Christianity as offensive. However, political people have always used religion to their advantage in promoting their causes. This must not be attributed to the religion itself, except where the religion truly is the source of the aggression.

NCLB in the News Again

2005-04-28T23:49:00.000-05:00

Michelle Malkin comments on Bush's press conference. Here is part of what he said:

The system for too long had just shuffled children through and just hoped for the best. And guess what happened? We had people graduating from high school who were illiterate -- and that's just not right in America. It wasn't working.

If you've read any of my blog you know I'm not very positive about our education system.

You also may know how I feel about NCLB.

But I'm starting to get really teed off about Bush's own illiteracy. Let's just get right down to it. How many, really, how many high school graduates in, say, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming are illiterate? Go ahead. Find one if you can. (I'm sure there are a few--the exceptions to prove the rule, though.) So what business is it of the Federal Government, really, to interfere in the successful workings of state educational systems, where they are doing fairly well? What right is it of the Federal Government, to burden these rural states with inappropriate, ineffective, misguided regulations that actually take money away from budget items that help students??

Oh, "It wasn't working." Like in Texas? Where Bush's state program achieved a statistical success because schools figured out how to manipulate the results? (9th graders who didn't pass a subject were "held back" and didn't have to take the statewide test in 10th grade, then they were promoted to 11th grade after making up their failed subject, and again avoided the test.)

See also NoNCLB. I disagree with lots on that blog but we have a common enemy.
More good stuff at Shut Up and Teach.

Byron Dorgan's Comments. Go For It!

How to fix education

2005-04-27T14:08:00.000-05:00

I am in general despair about the state of American education. There are so very many things standing in the way of quality education. Many of them come from within the schools, others come from communities, and others come from politics. So many obstacles prevent the schools from doing what is needed. I see the results coming into the colleges--and it's not pretty.
Teachers (including professors) have always complained about the quality of students, and it is difficult to fairly ascertain whether there has actually been a change, but I am convinced that there has. Unfortunately, I think that the causes of the problem have been misdiagnosed. There have been major changes in the maturity of high school graduates. Compared to high school graduates of the 1950’s, many no longer know how to set goals and work toward them, and most no longer take responsibility for their own learning. In fact, there is a widespread attitude that education is something the teacher/professor does to them or for them.
This is unfortunate both because it is false and because it hinders the student's ability to obtain a true education. Students essentially want to be entertained for four years and then be given a diploma for it. These are attitudes they learned in K-12 education. In the last 20 years, K-12 education has become far more entertainment-based than it ever was before.
I used to review teacher-ed students' portfolios, and time and again I would see that their educational philosophy was that "learning should be fun."
I'm not against having fun in school, since it is a great motivational tool.
But what students really need to learn is not that learning is fun--rather, that hard work is rewarding. It is no different than being on the football team. When you go to practices, the coach says "No pain, no gain." He makes you work hard, he makes you exert yourself to your maximum potential--and from that you learn, grow, and ultimately you find that the struggle itself is fun. K-12 has missed this point by a mile. This is the true meaning of education--learning how to exert your mind to reach new heights, new capabilities, and doing it because it is both rewarding and necessary.
Some people talk about the class differences as a factor in education, but I would argue that they often miss the point of class differences. There are no fixed classes in America. By far most people do not finish life in the class they started out in. We have class mobility. However, what keeps people in the lower class is not the lack of opportunity; it's the lack of attitude. As long as people think of themselves as victims, being held down by society, or the dominant race, or some such thing, they will fail to address the true problem and thus fail to solve it. People's attitudes about education have to change. That's priority one. Neither NCLB nor any other major player in the education game is addressing this, mainly because you always run into problems with "political correctness." Telling the truth here becomes racism.
And of course, racism is a "killer word," an epitaph that kills any idea no matter what its true merit or worthiness.

NCLB is defended on the basis of achieving equity in education between the races or classes. I have been asked how any government founded "for the people" could allow inequity in education. That's a good question. A better question is, how dare the government step into the people's lives, take the responsibility for education away from the parents by force, make the kids go to schools that teach things the parents do not believe in and would not tolerate in their own homes, destroy the religious basis of the society, and finally, destroy the work ethic of an entire generation by teaching that you should feel good about yourself no matter how lazy you are or how little you accomplish? Anyone who is concerned about the education of black children (or lower class children) ought to take a look at how black people a hundred years ago taught their children to succeed and contrast that with what is happening today. The contrast is stark, to say the least. It is black and white, to risk a bad pun. Look at George Washington Carver. What were his educational opportunities? What did he say black people should do? Look at the statements of all the leaders right up to Martin Luther King, Jr. They all stated that it was the hard work and perseverance of the individual that mattered. I think King called it the "Quality of our Character." Today's black leaders don't say that at all.
They keep talking about getting the government to step in and straighten things out. But government won't succeed, because government can't get at the root of the problem. Simply put: individuals have to take responsibility for their own education. There is no other way. K-8 is the time when these attitudes are formed. If you haven't done it by then, it's unlikely that it will ever be done.

Higgleytown Heroes

2005-04-13T14:14:00.000-05:00

Hmmm...

I saw a bit of a certain children's show this morning. I don't know if I'm spelling it write* or not. Honestly, I have problems with most children's TV that I see. Maybe I'm too cynical. Anyway, apparently they portray different people in the neighborhood as heroes in every show. This time it was the grocery store clerk who turned out to be a hero because he helped the kids find star-shaped noodles.

OK, I'm glad he could help the children find their noodles. But is that heroic? Don't we want the word "hero" to actually mean something out of the ordinary? If everyone is a hero for doing his or her day-to-day job, then we are creating a situation where all are special and therefore none are special**. So the children are learning that to be a hero just means to be a nice person doing a job in the neighborhood. What, then, do we make of people who make great personal sacrifices in service to their communities, or risk their lives on the battlefield to bring freedom to others? What about the people who died to give us a lifestyle that enables us to expend energy worrying about the shape of our noodles? What about the people who go to far away lands and risk their lives to help the poor and sick in inhospitable environments (natural and human)? Are they heroes too, just like the grocery store clerk? Just like the grocery store clerk, who risks...what exactly?...to find us our star-shaped noodles. And now, we have no word to honor a "real hero" since the term "hero" has been taken by...everyone.

I highly suspect, however, that the children's program in question would hesitate to apply the term "hero" to many of the people I consider "real heroes." Forbid that a hero might carry a gun... Let's not forget that a hero is supposed to be a person who sacrifices himself, without expectation of reward, for the benefit of others. The grocery store clerk is getting paid to "be a hero."

And to round off the insult, they have to include a dose of grammatical nonsense, as they sing the theme song with the line "so we can be a Higgleytown Hero, just like you."

Oh...and of course the clerk sings his own praises calling himself a hero. A tale of mediocrity, bad grammar, and pride thus comes to a greating* conclusion.

*intentional mispelling :-; (in case you didn't get it)
**paraphrase of a line from "The Incredibles," a show I was surprised to find I liked very much. See also Metaphilm's story.

Educational Socialism

2005-04-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

Rep. Trent Franks, quoted in World Magazine (Apr. 9, p. 48):

The American educational system is one of the last experiments in socialism left on earth and, on its present course, it will take its place in the succession of socialist wreckages that litter the highway of human history."

Daylight Saving Time is a Peeve of Mine

2005-04-08T14:03:00.000-05:00

And many of our esteemed legislators have fallen prey to the absurdity:

"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," said Markey, who cited Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day. (In an April 7 AP article quoted rom CNN.com.)

What???

The California Energy Commission has a nice article called Saving Time, Saving Energy which explains the history and advantages of DST.

It seems convincing, but I'm not yet convinced. First of all, it is not true that changing our clocks changes the amount of daylight available. Therefore, it is not automatic that extending DST would save oil. Second, the statement, "The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," appears to be false. I obtained monthly electricity usage data for the US for the years 2001 to 2004. The amount of daylight available varies across the country, but as an operational "average," I used the number of minutes from sunup to sundown in Omaha, Nebraska on the 15th of each month. A simple linear regression of electricity usage to minutes of sun shows a significant (p=.03) positive relationship of 66 million kwhrs per additional minute of daylight! (That's about .02% of the monthly average). The explanatory power of the model is poor (R-square=.0981).

Indeed, my calculations are rough and the Transportation Department probably had better data and did more extensive analysis. However, if the real issue in saving energy is the number of hours of lighting needed, it is still not necessary to change the clocks! People who can benefit from a change in rising and retiring times should adjust their schedules accordingly. If businesses can influence this factor, they can change their hours of operation. None of this requires a change in clocks. In fact, we could change business hours at any time throughout the year! NOTHING prevents that. Why not start work one hour after sunrise no matter what time of year it is? Or perhaps time the start of work in such a way that people have to get up eight hours after sunset. It seems to me this would result in the maximum electrical savings. Indeed, it is often managing the peak of electrical usage that is most important to saving energy. This is best accomplished by having different people in the same region on different schedules!

Truck and Barter has some supporting thoughts here.

University Presidents on Academic Speech

2005-04-07T15:09:00.000-05:00

I would like to start a collection of University Presidents' speaches that promote freedom of speach, or academic freedom, or free exchange of ideas (without interference).
South Dakota State President Miller
Butler University President Fong

The Power of Family

2005-04-07T13:55:00.000-05:00

Ambra Nykol writes today in Parents who Don't Parent:

By the end of the one-hour show, the parents are in awe of the results of fairly stand standard disciplinary principles employed by the "Supernanny," as if to say, "You mean when we discipline our children, it works?"
Why yes you fools. It does.
As the days go by, I am more convinced that almost 95% of our country's problems could be solved in the family. I've said it before and I'll say it again. We don't have crime problems; we have family problems. Family dysfunction spills into the streets, and eventually we pay for it with our tax dollars and more painfully--our time. Rarely do we make that glaring connection. Instead, we collectively throw our hands up in the air, wondering where our society went wrong.

Yes!!!!

I like to criticize the schools, in particular various forms of progressive philosophy, for their failings, but I am aware that the schools do not exist in a vacuum.

It is self-evident that not all the products of the schools are educational failures. Some children come through the system fairly well, although questions remain about whether even the best are "all they can be," to borrow a slogan. In homes that support achievement goals for their children and give them sensible discipline, we find children succeeding in spite of the quality of their schools. Where schools are failing, there are also significant numbers of families that do not provide such support. This causes deterioration of the learning environment for all students. Without adequate numbers of parents insisting that the school do a good job, there is simply no way it will get done, not in a public institution at least. Church schools have an advantage here, in that they are accountable to the church, which has an important influence on the school environment. Other schools are accountable to parents and the government, so if the parents are not very concerned or involved, we are left with government. And "left" is a great word to use in this situation!

Bad schools (parents) set up a vicious cycle. If parental support is inadequate, the schools will be bad. The students will not get a good education, and most will not develop mature and success-building attitudes from either home or school. Not being "upwardly mobile," most will not leave the neighborhood, and will quickly provide the next generation of children without good parental support and with ever-deteriorating schools. On the other hand, those who do develop mature and success-building attitudes, are not likely to stay in the neighborhood and provide any counter-effect to the declining situation.

So one solution to the school problem is to change families. But don't expect the "outreach" programs of the schools to accomplish that. Don't expect the government to do it, since government interference is also a large part of the problem. Can the church be a positive influence? Yes--but not the various liberal branches, which have also had their hand in undermining the discipline and authority in the family (by starting with undermining the authority of God).

We can make schools better. But if we don't have good parents, I'm afraid the effect will be very limited.

Minuteman Project

2005-04-06T12:18:00.000-05:00

From the Minuteman site:

April 4th. Border monitoring officially began. Hundreds of volunteers are now monitoring the border. A number of illegal aliens already have been reported to the Border Patrol. A group of 18 were encountered and reported to the border patrol. Earlier this weekend, an illegal alien from Guatemala stumbled into the bible camp where the MMP is operating. He inadvertently wandered into the hornets' nest, but it turned out to be his lucky day. He was tired and dehydrated and MMP volunteers gave him medical attention, food and drink before the Border Patrol was able to arrive.

Yeah, President Bush, just like you said:

I am against vigilantes in the United States of America. I am for enforcing law in a rational way. That's why we have a Border Patrol, and they ought to be in charge of enforcing the border.

Let me join the many voices now being raised in saying, if you were doing your job, volunteers wouldn't have to, but when you to insinuate that civilian volunteers legally helping the (grossly understaffed) border patrol is somehow wrong legally or ethically, you are way out of line. You claim to be fighting a war on terror, yet terrorists can freely enter our country in any number of ways that you have not even begun to address. You said you would fight them on foreign soil so we wouldn't have to fight them here. Then why do you keep letting them in? And you keep talking about illegals doing jobs that Americans don't want--well fine, if that's the case, let them immigrate legally. If they are here illegally, send them back and let them come through proper channels. You are the one making excuses for illegal activity while condemning honorable citizens for doing their constitutional duty to protect our borders.

Highlights of 1st Quarter 2005

2005-04-02T08:49:00.000-06:00

A Rigorous Education is Un-American?
State Math Standards Questioned (with reference to probability and statistics)
US vs Singapore in Math
Learning Styles
NCLB Unconstitutional?
Bill Gates on High Schools

Choosing Textbooks in West Virginia

2005-03-31T16:19:00.000-06:00

From "Math texts get careful scrutiny, Kanawha takes more time because of different views on teaching strategies," Charleston Daily Mail (West Virginia), March 28, 2005. By Charlotte Ferrell Smith:

Math problem number one: How much is 45 divided by 3? Math problem number one, again: Three children have a jar of 45 marbles. If shared equally, how many marbles will each child get?"Instead of giving children 45 divided by 3, you give them a situational task," said Olivia Teel, math curriculum specialist for Kanawha County. "They learn the concept of putting the marbles into sets. That is how it could be done differently as opposed to 45 divided by 3."

This is the old false dichotomy we hear about so often--one side decries rote memorization, calling it "kill and drill." The other side says reform methods (like problem-solving, group projects, etc.) leave too little time for actual mastery of skills. These are two sides of a coin, two approaches that should be used together in an appropriate way. You start with a situation to motivate a mathematical concept (how many marbles will each student get?), then you master the skill by practice (45 divided by 3), then you come back around to the situation--now you understand that you can quickly find out how many marbles each student gets by dividing 45 by 3. If you read the math textbooks from circa 1900 they did both kinds. What people in those days knew intuitively was necessary, we now have cognitive psychologists to tell us it is still necessary. It's not us against them, folks. It's what WE need to do to fulfill two complementary aspects of the learning process. Every good teacher knows this (intuitively).

I wouldn't even mention this except that this false dichotomy keeps coming up in one article after another. I haven't looked at the books, and it's probably true that some of them don't balance these things the way they should.

And by the way, the teacher above is misusing mathematical language. She should not be talking about putting marbles into sets. That is an inappropriate use of a mathematical term. Things like that worry me. Does it indicate a level of mathematical ignorance unacceptable for someone choosing a textbook? She may not be ignorant, merely careless in this particular instance. But if she is a math curriculum specialist, the burden upon her to be accurate is particularly great. She needs to be able to spot errors like this in the textbooks she evaluates.

Educators are trying to choose textbooks for students in kindergarten through fifth grade with math that offers the best of both worlds - a book that includes the basics as well as situational tasks. While that might sound simple, consider the fact that the number of possible books to choose from is mind-boggling. The county's textbook adoption committee managed to subtract a bunch and narrow it down to 10 different publishing companies with materials to review for grades kindergarten through five. New math books are to be adopted for schools throughout the county in May at a cost of $ 4.9 million.

I didn't know there were so many choices. I thought there were only 3 or 4 textbook publishers left after all of the mergers! Ah, but I'm not accounting for the startups, grass roots efforts, and the experimental curricula. Singapore Math (I like), Everyday Math (I hear good things but suspect short on drill), Saxon Math (highly criticized for too much drill but very successful) are some examples of those. Most likely when you have a 4.9 million dollar budget to spend, publishers come out of the woodwork. Things like that don't happen in my neighborhood.

Teel ... said children need a balance of basics, situational tasks, justifying answers and investigation ... the textbook adoption committee actually considered adopting two books for elementary students to get all of that included.

Good! (Well, not the part about needing two books.)

The ultimate goal is to boost test scores, said Teel, the math curriculum specialist, who said the current way of teaching math has become stagnant. Instead of the bulk of emphasis being placed on memorization, practice and drills, students need a better understanding of how math relates to situations, she said.

I just can't help thinking: What is making it stagnant? Are the teachers really placing "the bulk of emphasis on memorization, practice and drills?" If so, why? Better yet, what exactly do we mean by this? Practice is a major portion of the necessary learning process in math. Failure in math is largely due to lack of practice. Somewhere around 3/4 of the time should probably be spent practicing. That's not a bad thing. Maybe there's a problem with the kind of practice? Maybe we are practicing too much on topics that we already know? I don't know. It would take a detailed analysis of classroom time usage to understand this. The goal should be to build understanding of mathematical concepts and enthusiasm for the subject, not "The ultimate goal is to boost test scores." Well, that's not MY ultimate goal. I want to boost test scores too, but only because higher test scores are a measure of how much we have achieved in meeting our REAL goals, i.e., students who are GOOD at math and LIKE it. See, we should not base instruction on secondary goals. If you strive for the right goals, the test scores will come along automatically.

According to an article in Phi Delta Kappan, a national educational magazine, math education in the United States has received "blow after blow from recently released studies." Among the issues educators are weighing: too much or not enough arithmetic, calculators or no calculators, problem-solving or calculation.

Indeed.

Why Can't Teachers Write?

2005-03-23T08:44:00.000-06:00

Bill Hennessy writes (link in title) about the poor quality of a letter received from his child's principal. I think most people with children in school have encountered this problem. Of course, everyone makes mistakes (there are probably some in this article), but the level and frequency of errors found in communications from teachers is a bit of a concern. This is professional correspondence, and the quality of writing should reflect that fact. In addition, these teachers are entrusted with developing the writing skills of our children; therefore, an expectation that they demonstrate good writing skills is not out of order.
I have occasionally corrected letters from teachers (the "sign and return" types) and included a note regarding my concern about the language quality of the letter. I have never received a "thank-you" for my efforts. The most irritating problem I find is the use of plural pronouns where singular pronouns are required. For example, a field-trip permission slip included the sentence, "Your child should bring their lunch." Obviously, the language is falling prey to PC in an attempt to use non-sexist language. What irritates me most is that the error is so unnecessary, since it can easily be fixed by saying "The children should bring their lunches," or "Your child should bring his or her lunch." The latter is probably deemed "awkward," but surely it is not as awkward as the blatant grammatical error?
I think we may lose the battle for singular pronouns in the end, since Zondervan, in its latest revision of the Bible (TNIV), has embraced the use of "they" and "their" as singular pronouns in its fanatical, over-the-edge, who-cares-what-the-original-intent-is subversion of the English language and the Christian religion. Historically, as the Bible goes, so goes the language.
All of this would have been prevented, had the old standards of the normal school, where teachers were expected to be able to speak and write with impeccable grammar, been upheld. But the modern (or is it post-modern?) ed schools have long since renounced any such standards. English and math are out, self-esteem and problem-solving are in.

A Study of Inflation

2005-03-22T19:40:00.000-06:00

“Everything is so much more expensive now.”
Really?
Prices have gone up. So have wages (the price of labor). So has the quality of many goods purchased. How can we compare today with yesterday, when we are not talking about the same things? Take wages, to begin with. We can compare per capita incomes between two time periods. Or we can compare median family incomes. But is the work the same? Are the hours worked the same? Is the investment (mainly education) in employability the same? Are the sources of income the same (employment vs investment, inheritance, etc.)? In fact, none of these things are constant over time, making comparisons about changes in wages very difficult.

What really matters, though, is what you have the power to buy using the resources readily available to you. Most often, we think of the resource of personal labor, although the use of capital that you control is also a resource. We assume that all capital is built up through the application of personal labor at some time in the past. Therefore it is reasonable to think about how much can be bought using some unit of labor as a standard. However, the capital in an economic system has the effect of increasing the productivity of labor. That is, an hour of labor in the absence of capital is not the same as an hour of labor expended in the presence of capital, such as by using a sophisticated machine. Capital can also be abstract, in that a worker with education or experience has more “human capital” than a worker with neither. And then there are activities that are not easily valued in monetary terms, such as the labor of an artist, whose work may not be valued until he is dead. Some would like to measure the value of labor by “how hard it is,” but even that is not clear since our standards of “hardness” change over time, and what is hard for one person may be easy for another. Furthermore, there is much labor that is not counted in the economy, especially in the past. Consider a farm family circa 1900, with a farmer, his wife, and six children. We would be likely to count this operation as the labor of one man, yet it is likely that there are eight people doing the work. Consider that today, a stay-at-home mom is doing work she is not “getting paid for,” while the same work, being hired out by a “working” mom, is counted in the economy.

There are difficulties in comparing the things that we buy, too. Say we are comparing houses. Is a house bought in 1900 the same as a house bought in 2000? Even if it has the same square feet? No way. And as we look back on this from our vantage point 100 years in the future, our perceptions of this house are not the same as the perception of the original owners. For example, we might think the oak woodwork is extremely valuable, because it would be expensive to replicate today, while the original owners considered it to be quite ordinary. We would consider the lack of an indoor toilet to be a severe deficit, yet the original owners might have considered an outdoor toilet more practical, if they would even have considered anything else. How about a car? Is a Ford Model T equivalent to a Ford you can buy today? Or, how about a horse? Is a horse of 1900 the same as a horse of 2000? Even if the horse is the same, its purpose and value might be very different.

People often think of inflation as being a general trend of rising prices. This is not exactly true. Inflation is actually an increase in the supply of money, which is controlled by the government. When the money supply is increased, the money units are devalued and therefore buy less. In an expanding economy, it would be normal to increase the money supply to keep pace with the increasing value of goods available in the economy. If the money supply increases faster than the value of goods, the result will be a general rise in prices. Contrary to popular belief, government does have very good control over inflation. This control is not immediate in its effect, but over a period of one or two years the government can manipulate inflation to its liking and for its own purposes. Why does the government want inflation? Primarily for two reasons: 1) The government carries a huge debt. As money is devalued, so is the debt. 2) Inflation allows the government to collect more taxes through “bracket creep.” Furthermore, when the public cries out because of bracket creep, the government looks “good” by generously increasing deductions and thus pretending to lift the tax burden. The general population may also have the perception that they are better off because of inflation. This is because they see their incomes “rising,” and although they are aware that prices of goods are rising too, this is not as concrete in their minds as the increase in wages which they can probably recite from memory.

New York HS Math Reform

2005-03-18T12:33:00.000-06:00

March 16, 2005, The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York)
REGENTS APPROVE MATH COURSES; THREE NEW MATH SEQUENCES REPLACING "MATH A" AND "MATH B" TO BE PHASED IN.
By Debra J. Groom and Maureen Nolan
A new approach to learning math was approved Tuesday by the state Board of Regents.The board decided to replace the high school courses "Math A" and "Math B" - each a year and a half long - with three yearlong courses called "Algebra," "Geometry" and "Algebra 2 and Trigonometry."

"A New Approach???" Isn't this how practically everyone else does it?

The state says the course titled "Algebra" will include some geometry, measurement, statistics and probability in addition to algebra, while the "Geometry" course also will include some algebra, measurement, statistics and probability, in addition to geometry.The Regents said this will ensure that at the end of ninth-grade algebra, students should know as much math as they do at the end of Math A."This is not a lot," McSweeney said. "High-performing countries already ask their kids to do this. And if we're going to compete globally, we have to have rigorous math courses."

The article points out that there were problems under the old curriculum with different schools doing different things, so that students who transferred were missing topics. "Math A" and "Math B" were actually exams, rather than courses, and schools designed courses to prepare students for the tests.

Math curriculum is a difficult problem, or perhaps all curriculum is. There is not good agreement on what should be included or how it should be taught, and it is very important to have some uniformity because of students transferring and also because of college expectations. There does seem to be a trend to combine the threads from algebra, geometry, and such things as measurement and statistics, into one sequence rather than separate courses. I have nothing against the approach, in fact I think it is good to integrate these things so that relationships can be discussed and the topics can be used to strengthen each other. It does, however, make things more difficult when students transfer. It used to be that if a student had Algebra I or Geometry you could be fairly sure what he studied. Now it is much less clear, and much more difficult to decide what courses to place a transfer student into.

College, university freshmen lack math, English skills

2005-03-14T13:00:00.000-06:00

Sarah Schmidt, The Ottawa Citizen, March 9, 2005:

Ottawa's colleges ... are ... dealing with increasing numbers of ill-prepared freshman students who require remedial classes in everything from English to math. ... the growing gap between expectations and skills is forcing institutions ... to take action.... According to officials at Algonquin College, administrators of the print journalism program don't even bother to look at applicants' grades when reviewing applications. Instead, they admit students who score at least 22 out of 30 on a language diagnostic test that reviews basic grammar and spelling and requires a short writing sample.... No more than two in 10 ... meet the admissions threshold.... schools are dumbing down first-year English courses to include segments on basic grammar, composition and writing skills once reserved for high school classrooms. "The competency level of students coming into our programs has dropped over the years," said Janet Gambrell [of] Sheridan College.... "What we don't want to do is point fingers and blame our high school colleagues, saying, 'Why are you graduating those folks?' "

But why not? Obviously the problems described here are not only applicable to Canada, for the same problem is rampant in the United States. This problem exists largely because we subscribe to two conflicting goals for education, which are, "Everyone should graduate from high school" and "The meaning of a high school diploma should be that a person has achieved a certain level of education." These goals are conflicting because we are unwilling to admit that not everone is capable of achieving that certain level of education, and secondarily, that not even everyone who is capable of achieving it is willing to achieve it. There is a fear that by admitting that not everyone can achieve at a certain level, we will be, in effect, discarding a large class of students, an excessive proportion of which will be minorities. In fact, by denying the truth, we hamper efforts to find real solutions. By hiding the facts that everyone knows, we make it impossible to address and solve problems. So let's admit it and deal with it. Then we can talk about what should be done to get "every child" to succeed. But success must be a meaningful standard, not merely a social promotion. A high school diploma MUST be made to mean that a certain minimum level of skill and knowledge has been gained. Those who cannot attain the standard need an honorable alternative path, which can still lead to success in life without the pressure to perform academically at a level that is not reasonable. This can only happen if strict standards are enforced at various levels in the educational process. Let's bring back the 8th grade diploma, for example. A true eighth grade education is all that is required for a large number of jobs that need to be done by somebody. Why not provide this as an honorable alternative to enter the work force?

Bill Gates on High Schools

2005-03-02T18:04:00.000-06:00

On February 26, Bill Gates spoke at the National Education Summit on High Schools. His speech is available on the Gates Foundation site here. The whole thing is well worth reading. Although many media outlets have covered the speech, and various excellent quotes have been highlighted, it is better to go to the source and get the full context. I will provide a few small quotes relating to issues I want to discuss, but they will not be representative of the whole message. I substantially agree with Mr. Gates, but there are some things I would rather take in a different direction, or provide another focus. Gates is under fire in some quarters, for some of the things he says. I am not generally in sympathy with his critics from the education establishment.

America's high schools are obsolete ... designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age.

In all the talk about reforming education, one rarely hears a statement as far reaching and profound as this. We act as though our system of education is timeless, that it is a feature of America as permanent and intrinsic to our society as the very constitution. Yet, this is hardly the case. Gates reminds us that today's concept of a high school is a recent invention. There is nothing sacred about it. There is no particular reason why we must have a system shaped like the one we have. However, an institution, once established is hard to change. While some conservatives call for the elimination of public education altogether, on the basis that the system is flawed, failed, and hopelessly immoral, most people do not think in such far-reaching terms. Gates isn't saying that, either. But he is bringing a new concept to bear on the debate (at least I haven't heard it expressed quite this way): the business/industry concept of obsolescence. We had something that worked for a while. It doesn't work anymore. Let's invent something new. That just makes sense.

But what would it look like?

The idea behind the old design was that you could train an adequate workforce by sending only a third of your kids to college ...

Bill believes all children should be taught (or "trained," perhaps--he seems to focus on education as preparation for employment) to be ready for college. Here is where he and I will disagree. I have children of my own. I know their abilities. There is one I hope will go to graduate school. There is another that barely got through high school and is not going to college. This happened in spite of years of effort to turn things around. But in the end, her abilities simply are not at that level. We have to face this as a fact of life. The rhetoric presented by Bill Gates, which is, in this regard, similar to the rhetoric of No Child Left Behind, seems to be based on the notion that all children are born with equal abilities and come to school with equal abilities. This flies in the face of common sense and science alike. Children differ in many ways, and notable among these differences are vast differences in educational potential.

Of course there are dangers. It is wrong to label a child as lacking potential without justification, or on false premises such as socioeconomic status. It is clear that this happens in schools now. But it is also wrong to deny that differences exist. Not all children can go to college. Not all children should go to college. In fact, not all children with the ability to do so WANT to go to college. Bill Gates himself is not suffering greatly from the lack of a college degree. It is also wrong to push people too hard in directions they do not want to go. And I'm sure that Microsoft would hire any high school wiz kid with an amazing gift for programming without requiring a college degree, at least the Microsoft of the past would have. Perhaps things have changed.

I believe strongly that too many people are going to college today. This would come as a great surprise to Bill Gates, but perhaps he should listen to the rest of what I have to say. We still have, in this society many, many jobs that do not even require a high school education. Yet employers hesitate to hire people without a diploma. This is based on real-world experience, because people who do not finish high school rarely have the qualities needed to be good employees. So, a high school diploma is serving as a proxy for something else--a measure of dependability or employability. However, we find that a high school diploma doesn't guarantee the kind of skill set employers expect, when their actual need is a high school level of performance. So, they bump up the requirement to a college degree for what should be high-school level jobs. Like the high school diploma, the college degree is a proxy for something else--an insurance policy for a high school level of achievement and a greater level of maturity.

In the early 1900's, a young lady could become a school teacher (grades 1-8) by going to a normal school for a short period, in some cases 9 months. She then had the skills necessary to teach everything through eighth grade. I have examined many textbooks (mostly math) for elementary school from that era. It is true that the topics have changed, but the most amazing difference between the texts of that era and today are found in the difficulty level. Much of the eighth grade math I found in those books would be very difficult for today's high school students. Now, the truth is, it was out of reach for many of those eighth graders as well, and many people did not get that far in school. I have also examined 1940's and 1950's high school textbooks, and consistently find that even the mathematics intended for non-college bound students would be considered college math by today's standards.

Once we realize that we are keeping low-income and minority kids out of rigorous courses, there can be only two arguments for keeping it that way--either we think they can't learn, or we think they're not worth teaching. The first argument is factually wrong; the second is morally wrong.

So, I find that Bill Gates is spot-on when it comes to rigor. There is no excuse for the depths to which we have let education fall, at all levels. We have "dumbed down" the schools. We have taught to the "lowest common denominator." We have shunned and stigmatized rigorous standards and meaningful assessments. We have engaged in "social promotion." This is not part of the system, this is part of the culture. It is deeply imbedded in the indoctrination that colleges of education foist upon their students. But Bill is wrong if he thinks all students can learn equally. That is simply not true. Failure to recognize and deal with innate differences means that some students will be unable to keep up with expectations, while others will not be challenged to use their talents to the fullest. Children cannot all be taught alike, not without damaging those at both ends of the ability spectrum (or would you rather say, "spokes of the ability wheel?"). And that is another fallacy of the obsolete system, which at first allowed tracking, then rejected it. Some kind of choice or alternative pathway is absolutely necessary to enable all students to learn at their maximum potential. We are letting the politics of class dictate what is and is not permissible in education--and the children are worse off because of it.

...we must stop rationing education in America.

Here we have a deliberate use of an emotionally charged term. In what sense, if any, is it accurate? Rationing implies that there is a shortage, and not all can have full access. Actually, the intent of rationing is to restrict everyone's access so that all may have a minimally sufficient amount. Does this describe education? Well, first, there is no shortage. Certainly the entire country is well-staffed and well-equipped with buildings and supplies. I realize there are complaints in some schools, but shortages are not due to lack of funds, rather to misappropriation. In terms of dollar count and body count, there is certainly enough to go around. But much is wasted or spent foolishly.

Instead of determining that all children should go to college, we should raise the bar for eighth grade and 12th grade education. We should make those 12 years count for much more then they currently do. We should examine the process and strip away the waste, both in resources and student time. Find out what is really important and then focus on that. Set standards that require actual learning, not just seat time and participation in fun activities. I say, bring back the eighth grade diploma, and make it mean something. What passes for a high school proficiency exam today, in states that have them, is much more appropriate for an eighth grade level. Let's stop kidding ourselves. If that is enough education to get a high school diploma, then why not let eighth graders who can pass the test graduate (I have little doubt that about 10% of eighth graders could pass the high school exit exams in states that have them)? A good standard for a high school exit exam already exists. It's called an IB or International Baccalaureate. Students graduating from high school in an IB school already have the equivalent of an AA degree in a community college. This can and should be done, nationwide. This kind of diploma would be sufficient for many jobs that now require a college degree. And then, let's go on and raise the bar for a college education. Weak programs whose requirements include little more than busywork and ideological indoctrination should be eliminated. Scientific, technical, and engineering fields can be made internationally competitive in their rigor, where they are not already so.

Then too, we need to give students varying amounts of time to accomplish the goals according to their abilities. Surely we are smart enough that we can figure out a way to do this? Students shouldn't have to "flunk" or be "held back." The idea of repeating a whole year, of all subjects, is absurd. If students need more time, more practice, give it to them. But hold them to one standard. When they meet it, they move on. Those who are having trouble need extra intervention. Give them what they need. Honestly, I can't believe this is so hard! It is the rigidness of the current system that prevents finding workable solutions.

In the end, we will never succeed if we do not overcome the cultural barriers. Bill Gates' goals cannot be met by students who have no desire to meet them, whose parents do not expect it of them, and whose peers actively discourage them. This is where the real crux of the problem lies, and it is absolutely central to the racial and class differences we see in educational attainment. Frequently overlooked are the facts that not all minorities are equally affected by educational disadvantages. Many (though not all) Asians, as well as blacks coming from certain African countries, lead the pack in educational attainment. It's not discrimination, rationing, or obsolescence--it's culture. That's what has to change. The culture of dependence, that says "You owe me" and "I'm entitled" and "I just want to have fun" instead of "I want to contribute" and "What can I do to repay" is the problem. We need to get back the work ethic, and we need to actively teach it to our children. Otherwise, there will be no progress, no matter how much money Bill Gates or anyone else pumps into the system.

NCLB Unconstitutional?

2005-02-24T08:46:00.000-06:00

From Michelle Malkin, I found the most amazing story about No Child Left Behind that I have seen in a long time, or maybe EVER.

The bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures is coming out with a devastating report tomorrow that reportedly shreds the Bush administration over the No Child Left Behind Act.
Most interestingly, the report tomorrow comes to the conclusion that the No Child left Behind Act is unconstitutional.

I have been trying to call attention to this issue for at least two years now. I sent the letter below to all the state legislators (that I could get email addresses for) in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana, and also sent it to several newspapers. To my knowledge, no newspaper printed my letter. Obviously, I am not alone in this opinion, though whether or not I had an influence on the legislators, I cannot say. I did receive numerous replies at the time, many of which expressed sympathy with the ideas but claimed they could not afford to fight against NCLB because of loss of revenues to the state. Maybe the tide is turning. I hope that states are ready to begin asserting their rights in this and other issues where the federal government has intruded on reserved powers.

I also brought up this issue at a public hearing with Senator Daschle's staffer on education about a year ago. She claimed that she had not heard of anyone saying the law was unconstitutional. She and others seem to be of the opinion that the law is constitutional because it is addressing a civil rights issue. I find that quite a stretch.

Here is my letter:

March 1, 2003

An Open Letter to State Senators, Representative, Governors, and Educators,

Oppose Federal Control of Education

The time has come for the individual states to take a stand. I call upon you, as a leader of your state, to act with strength and conviction to oppose the tyranny of the Federal Government which has acted unconstitutionally and irresponsibly with its so-called “No Child Left Behind Act.”

Your state should not be required to act alone, but it must act, for only if individuals have the courage to lead can the strength of the many be brought to bear—for ultimately, all states should join together in refusing to allow this well-intentioned, but nevertheless intolerable, law to stand.

Let us address the issues. First, the law is unconstitutional. Our constitution clearly forbids the Federal Government from engaging in activities which are not specifically prescribed for it, and education is notably absent from the list. Education is the responsibility of the states, to be discharged in a manner they individually see fit. The Federal Government has been violating this provision under the guise of various excuses for many decades. The time has come to say “NO MORE.” It is true that a great need for national standards exists, and states should cooperate to produce such standards. It is not the Federal Government’s business, duty, right, or responsibility to participate in this process in any capacity whatsoever. Let us respect the Supreme Law of our Land, enforce it as our founders intended, or change it by the process of amendment—not by setting it aside through legislative whim.

Second, the law is fiscally irresponsible. At a time when most states are facing severe budget crises together with their own individual problems in education, money and resources are being diverted from necessary and useful educational activities to meet the arbitrary, questionable, and sometimes illogical requirements of the law.

Third, the law contains absurd requirements which will ultimately have the effect of reducing the quality of education in some places. There are many such requirements, but to list just a few, we note that some states are scrambling to lower standards so that their schools won’t “fail,” that the law takes away resources from schools that need them most, and that the requirement that results hold across all subgroups is impossible in some cases and ridiculous in others (e.g., one or only a few children in a subgroup; special education).

The law is a result of good intentions and most of its goals are noble and perhaps even shared by the states. I have no doubt that some sort of national effort is needed to improve our schools. This isn’t it, but even if it were, it would still be incumbent upon us to resist the spread of federal tyranny and insist that the constitution be followed as it was written and as it was intended.

Please help to preserve our freedoms!

Larry Summers, President of Harvard

2005-02-18T08:40:00.000-06:00

OK, so the transcript has been released. Where is it???? The New York Times reports on it, gives us its spin, but doesn't give us access to the document?

Update: Thanks to the commenter and Wizbang, I have found it here.

This is good stuff: Fred Reed mentions Summers.

Well, now, this blogger says Summers has now been vidicated by a newly released study!

Learning Styles

2005-02-17T18:17:00.000-06:00

What are "Learning Styles" and why do they matter?

According to some education theorists, "learning styles" are distinct categories of behaviors within which individual students have various "preferences," which may roughly correspond to "efficiencies" in terms of educational achievement. David A. Kolb developed a theory of learning styles which is common in education textbooks today. He actually is said to have believed that learning styles are on a "continuum," but in practice the theory leads to a discrete classification scheme. A reasonable short summary of these ideas may be found here. However, the thing that is most clear about learning styles theory is that there is no agreement on what learning styles are. Most of us in the "Ed Biz" more or less intuitively believe that there are, in fact, "visual learners," "hands-on learners," "book learners," etc. We may have other ideas or labels. We also recognize that some people like to work in groups, and some people like to work alone. Furthermore, I think that good teachers have recognized things like this for a long time, independent of what any theorists said. So what good teachers have been doing, with or without David Kolb, is creating learning activities that cater to different learning styles, whatever they may be.

I don't claim that it has always been like this. I am quite sure that there were times and places in which teachers simply assumed there was one way to teach (the right way) and all students had to adapt or suffer the consequences. But it would be a mistake to assume that such an attitude was universal in any period in history. The balance between rigidity and flexibility may have shifted, but both approaches were in existance. And I claim that it has always been a mark of a good teacher to try a variety of techniques in the educational process.

Now, this is not to imply that nothing further can be gained by scientifically studying "learning styles" and attempting to develop verifiably effective methods of exploiting them. Such efforts may be fruitful and worthwhile. On the other hand, if such ideas are not empirically based, and the research is unsound, we will have gained nothing but jargon (more of a loss than a gain, really) and we will still know nothing more about using learning styles than the good teachers of yore.

I want to make a point here: I don't view learning styles in the same way most education textbooks do. Their emphasis always seems to be on how the teacher must adapt to the learning styles of the students. By suggesting that good teachers have always used techniques that play to different learning styles, I have not meant to imply that they did so primarily to adapt to their students' needs. In some cases, particularly when students are having difficulty, that is precisely what good teachers do. But not always. I would like to turn this around, in a way that I have never seen it done in an education textbook (of course I have not read them all). We make much of the phrase "learn how to learn." This supposed to be a primary purpose of modern (postmodern?) education--because knowledge changes so fast we must be lifetime learners. Yet, the "learning styles" dogma suggests that we meet students where they are, and adapt teaching to the student's currently preferred method of learning. This is not "learning how to learn," it is "learning how to stay in a rut."

My proposal is this: There are many ways to learn. If we are to be lifetime learners, it is best that we get as good as we can at all of them. We should not, however, focus on all of them equally. It is quite clear that some methods of transmitting knowledge are more efficient than others. Efficiency, here, has several components. To evaluate efficiency, one has to have some idea of costs as well as outcomes. While most of the research on educational methods is done in schools, it behooves us to look at the situation in business, where efficiency is forced to count most (far more than in schools.) Costs there include materials, equipment and facilities, but the largest components are often labor--specifically the teacher's labor (an expert whose time is particularly valuable and must be minimized) and the time of the learners before they become productive. The primary method of transmitting knowledge in business is still the lecture with visual aids. If a skill is to be transmitted, there is some variation depending on the situation, but for the most part the method is demonstration followed by guided practice until proficiency is attained, as measured by some objective and immutable standard. Hardly ever do we see business employ a "discovery method" or "constructivist approach." Independent reading may be involved, but cooperative learning and games are examples of activities that are less common in the business world. I argue that, because business places a premium on efficiency, the practices of business are an excellent indicator of what learning activities are most efficient and most useful as life-long skills. The free market forces inefficient practices out. Of course, we cannot ignore the differences between (motivated, mature) adults in the workplace, and children, whose motivations may be elsewhere, and whose maturity, by definition, is not at the same level.

The proper use of learning styles, therefore, is threefold: 1) To take into account differences in maturity and motivation among students at various ages and social stages, 2) To overcome individual difficulties in learning, and 3) To prepare students to be efficient life-long learners as adults. I believe that the first two uses are necessary, but the third is the most important. I believe that we should actively, intentionally, and directly teach students how to learn effectively from lectures. I mean by this that we should do much more than just use lecture as a tool to teach. I am aware that some teachers (and counsellors in study skills, etc.) teach students note-taking and organizational skills. These are important and valuable. However, I am reminded of stories about the "ancients" who are said to have been able to repeat long speaches or poems after hearing them once. I don't know if this is true, but I do think that people in the past have been much better at repeating what they have heard than we commonly can today. In fact, I am convinced that our children are capable of doing this much better than they do, because they can often retell large portions of television shows, or give detailed renditions of inane conversations that they have had. Frankly, I don't think they ever consider the possibility that they might be able to recall a lecture, or a story read to them, in the same way, and they are seldom or never challenged to do it.

There are probably a number of reasons that we don't encourage this kind of activity in school. No doubt one of them is that this is a difficult task and there is no sense, in the current educational literature, of its importance. There is also too little emphasis on the need for accurate and complete recall of facts relevant to a discussion, because the prevailing notion is that knowlege can be "looked up" so easily that we don't need to remember it. This is a profound fallacy. In truth, it is impossible to process information unless it is available in memory, and reasoning and critical thinking require instantaneous access to enough relevant information to be able to evaluate ideas and determine what new information should be sought out. This is why political campaigns run on soundbytes--people can't remember enough of the content of a speach to rationally evaluate it anyway. And they can't remember enough because they've never been taught that it's important to remember.

Terri Schiavo

2005-02-15T18:22:00.000-06:00

Swift action is urgently needed.

We have not been told the truth about Terri Schiavo by the Main Stream Media.

She is not brain dead. She is not in a coma. She is not on life support. She responds, smiles, and purses her lips to kiss her parents.

Her husband (I'd like to say "husband" in quotes, but he is still married to Terri while living with another woman and fathering two children with her) wants her dead. He won around 1.7 million dollars to use for health care for her and has now spent about a half-million on lawyers fees trying to kill her.

This is a big test case for the right-to-die crowd, whose true identity is revealed as the right-to-kill crowd. Please check out the link in the title of this article.

This is an educational issue. For, if we do not educate ourselves, we will surely be "educated" by the propaganda machine of the MSM to believe many things which are simply not true. This one life is a showcase of the fight for truth and civilization that we must not let go.

In recent days we have seen several victories for the truth. Journalists are being held accountable for their actions and inactions in ways that were never before possible. Perhaps we citizens can use this same power in the Schiavo case. Michael Schiavo is planning to commit legalized murder in one week (2/22). If he succeeds, the door will be opened for many more such murders. Are we comfortable with the idea that people who are conscious and very much alive may be killed because they are unable to communicate? Are we comfortable, not knowing how far this practice will extend? Some people oppose capital punishment because of the possibility of new evidence overturning a conviction, and demand that we keep vicious criminals alive at great expense to society. Yet, an innocent person, likely even the victim of a (possibly capital) crime, is not worthy of being protected and kept alive. The hypocrisy is too great to bear.

Achieving Highest Honors in AP Calculus

2005-02-14T12:49:00.000-06:00

From: Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario, CA), February 14, 2005
HEADLINE: Diamond Bar High outshines World

Diamond Bar High School got the distinction of being named "Best in the World" by the AP (not Associated Press) Exam company, College Board. This DID NOT happen in the USA.

But being named best in the world is less the result of how bright these students are --though they are -- and more the dividends of ambitious thinking. Instead of being the aspiration of a few, they wanted calculus to be a destination for all. In May of last year, 300 of the 3,150 Diamond Bar students passed the calculus exam with a score of three or higher, out of five points possible.... When the school retooled its curriculum four years ago to offer an International Baccalaureate program, it collaborated with its middle schools to lay foundations for a path that would lead students directly to [calculus]. [The teachers] developed teaching techniques when the school opened in 1983 that question the conventional wisdoms of the classroom. First, there's the music. Instead of silent austerity, downtempo beats pulse from a stereo, even as the students squirm over an exam. Also, at the beginning of each session, students watch a one-minute movie clip that has nothing to do with calculus. "Mr. Alcosser makes everything so interesting with the things he says, even the clips from those bad movies," said junior Shashank Ravi, 17.... And it seems to be working. The five teachers' classes are packed, some with close to 40 students....

Readers unfamiliar with the International Baccalaureate are urged to visit http://www.ibo.org/ibo/index.cfm.

I maintain that we know how to achieve high academic levels. The ingredients are not a secret. For some reason, most American school districts are unwilling to use the recipe.

Math Phased out in UK

2005-02-12T18:11:00.000-06:00

The Guardian (London) , 2/12/2005, Guardian Home Pages, Pg. 13

HEADLINE: University to shut maths department

Hull University has announced it is to close its maths department.... The university said it was phasing out its degree course because of a shortage of UK-based undergraduates and reduction in funding. Four other maths departments in England have closed since 1999 and the number of students has fallen by more than 2,200 in the same period.... more than a third are overseas students, compared with an average of 16% on other courses. The vice-chancellor, David Drewry, said that by closing the department the university was "doing our utmost to protect the interests of staff and students".... Nottingham Trent University has confirmed that it is reviewing its maths provision and the LMS said academics at several institutions, including Birmingham, Salford, Essex and the University of Wales, had expressed concern about the future of the subject.

How can this be? At a time when the importance of math as a foundation for technical and scientific progress is greater than ever, major industrialized nations are struggling just to maintain college math programs. They don't have enough students.

Mulan II

2005-02-12T12:29:00.000-06:00

Mulan was bad enough. Mulan II is far worse.

In Mulan, we see a young Chinese girl of an ancient dynasty defy gender roles to go fight in the army in her father's place. Not only that, she becomes a hero and saves China. Along the way, we have a positive portrayal of the ancestor-worship religion such as Disney would never allow for Christianity. OK. It's just a kids story.

However, the real theme of the movie is marriage--at the beginning, Mulan is going to see the matchmaker so she can be matched with a husband. She objects to arranged marriage and ends up botching the interview anyway. She meets her "match" during her war adventures.

Now we have Mulan II. In this story, Mulan is now a national hero and all the little girls want to be like her. The major themes are "follow your heart" and "marry for love, not duty."

In the story, Mulan and her fiance Chang are called upon by the emperor to save China again. The emperor's three daughters are to be escorted to another country to marry three princes and cement an alliance to protect China from the invaders. Mulan, Chang, and three comical bunglers from the first movie are to quietly escort the princesses to their destination. Immediately, Mulan starts in on the princesses, questioning them on how they can get married to men they haven't even met. The princesses make patriotic statements about their duty. However, it is not patriotism and duty that are going to win the day in this movie. No, the princesses fall in love with the three buffoons, and in the end "true love" triumphs and the kingdom is saved as well.

This movie teaches disrespect for culture, responsibility, patriotism, and marriage. It reinforces the foolish notion that infatuation is all that is really needed to make a successful marriage. No serious consideration of the wide gulf of experience and expectations between the princesses and soldiers is given. The princesses even sing about their new-found freedom. Wait until reality hits! I wonder if they will invent divorce in Mulan III? In the end, it is modern American pop-culture values triumphing over old-fashioned, out-moded tradition.

Math, Music, and Computers

2005-02-10T16:19:00.000-06:00

From: Business Wire, February 9, 2005

Headline: Non-Profit Organization Brings Proven Math Education Process Developed by Internationally Acclaimed Scientists to Texas Elementary Schools

After six years of testing and refining the program in California schools, this is the first time that the "Math + Music" program is being offered in another state. The process combines music instruction and computer math games to dramatically enhance students' mathematical and problem-solving skills. It focuses on building the brain's spatial temporal reasoning capability -- the ability to think visually several steps ahead in patterns and pictures. "Math + Music" is based on 30 years of brain research and offers a new, engaging and more effective way to reach students who have historically struggled with math.
The MIND Institute is a community-based, non-profit research organization formed in 1998 and based in Costa Mesa, Calif. It is dedicated to brain research and to preparing students in grades K-12, regardless of cultural or socio-economic background, for success in school, work and society. The Institute has successfully integrated more than 30 years of breakthrough academic research on the brain at he University of California, Irvine, into applied education programs for elementary school students.

Sounds Interesting.

Ward Churchill: Worse than we Thought

2005-02-10T13:27:00.000-06:00

I dismissed Churchill's lunatic ravings as just more left-wing rhetoric. I didn't think it would have any lasting impact. I may have heard of him previously, but didn't remember the name when Bill O'Reilly did a piece on Fox News demanding that his appearance at Hamilton College be cancelled.

Last night, my eighth grade daughter brought up that she had been taught in history class about the distribution of small-pox infected blankets to the Indians in North Dakota in a deliberate attempt to spread the disease. I discussed this a bit with her, because I didn't think the story was credible, though I'd heard it before. While not denying that smallpox might be spread by blankets, I said that smallpox is a highly contageous air-borne disease and that is how it is usually spread. An infected person merely needs to walk through a room and breathe to spread the disease. Also, I questioned who had done this deed--white settlers? they were not in close contact with Indians at this time. Fur traders? That would destroy their livelihood. Soldiers? Was the army active in the area at that time? I didn't know enough to definitively answer any of these questions, but I said that such things need to be questioned and not taken at face value. This is a highly suspicious story.

It turns out I was right-on. This report by Thomas Brown of Lamar University is a must read. Unbelieveably, the same Ward Churchill, who claims the 9/11 victims deserved to die and the terrorists are right, INVENTED the story of smallpox genocide on the Dakota plains.

We don't need to call upon his university to fire him for inflammatory remarks, slander, or any such "mild" offenses that are being bantered about around the blogosphere. He must be fired for fruadulant research and perjury. That's a real, legitimate, legal, uncontestable reason for a university to fire somebody. It has nothing to do with free speach or academic freedom. There is no academic freedom to dessiminate fraudulent research, whether it's inflammatory or not.

PS. In defense of my daughter's history teacher, it turns out that my daughter got mixed up... they learned in class about the 1763 attempt by the British to distribute smallpox-infected goods to the Indians. They were not referring to the epidemic on the great plains. BUT Churchill was...

Condi's Paris Speach

2005-02-09T19:28:00.000-06:00

I can't resist linking Dr. Rice's speach in Paris (click on the title). She's quite a diplomat. I hope she's our next president!

US vs Singapore in Math

2005-02-08T14:16:00.000-06:00

American Institutes for Research (AIR) has released a study (funded by the US Department of Education) comparing Math Instruction in Singapore and the US. The full report is available here. Singapore is a world leader in quality of math education. Its textbooks have been the focus of much interest among conservative educators and home schoolers in the US. American versions of the Singapore math books are now available.

AIR headlines, "U.S. Trails, But Both Nations Could Learn from Each Other."

The main conclusions are

 Singapore’s textbooks and assessment examinations are more demanding
 Their teachers are more skilled mathematically
 U.S. approaches often put more emphasis on certain important 21st century math skills.

In the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, Singapore came in first, while the US was 16th out of 46 participating countries. Well, we've been hearing news like this since at least 1983, haven't we? Remember "A Nation at Risk?" (But for a critique of that report, see here.)

“It is unreasonable to assume that Singaporean students have mathematical abilities inherently superior to those of U.S. students; rather, there must be something about the system that Singapore has developed to teach mathematics that is better than the system we use in the United States,” says Steven Leinwand, the lead AIR author.

Maybe it should be explained why such an assumption is unreasonable, but I'll accept that we need not entertain the "inherent superiority" theory. And I'll agree that the school system, including textbooks, standards, and teacher preparation is the primary place to look. However, there is a third factor, namely cultural values and support, that might be influential. The full report discusses this briefly too.

“And in the process, we came across some things Singapore might think about addressing. For example, the U.S. frameworks more often include high-order thinking skills critical to competing in the 21st century, though they are not obviously taught well enough here.”

I don't think we need to export our non-working theories about what is important in mathematics education to a country that's doing so well. This arrogance is out of place. I believe that the attempt to teach high-order thinking skills in place of critical basic skills is a large part of the problem. But then, I'm making an arrogant assertion as well.

The study also includes initial results from four pilot programs that used the Singapore mathematics textbook in place of their regular textbooks. The pilot programs involved students in Baltimore, Md., Montgomery County, Md., North Middlesex, Mass., and Paterson, N.J. The study found two pilot sites produced sizeable improvements in student outcomes, but overall the study observed mixed results because “the pilot sites, to varying degrees, encountered problems with teachers who lacked the educational preparation needed.” Student mobility also limited prior exposure to the Singapore mathematics curriculum, a serious problem in a curriculum that teaches to mastery and does not repeat content.

Translated, that means 1) our teachers don't know enough math to effectively use a real, results-oriented math curriculum, 2) the real problem is that we don't insist on mastery at each level so we can never count on a student being at grade level, and 3) in spite of hese shortcomings, the Singapore curriculum got "mixed results" with half of the pilot sites showing "sizeable improvements." I think what we are really seeing here is that (the Singapore curriculum)+(qualified teachers)+(insistence on mastery)=(impressive results in mathematics education).

A few other noteworthy points:

 Singapore offers an alternative mathematics framework for lower-performing students that covers all the mathematics topics in the regular framework, but at a slower pace and with greater repetition, and with support from expert teachers.
 Textbooks: Singapore’s textbooks build deep understanding of mathematical concepts while traditional U.S. textbooks rarely get beyond definitions and formulas.
 Teaching: Singaporean elementary school teachers are required to demonstrate mathematics skills superior to those of their U.S. counterparts before they begin paid college training to become a teacher.

And then we have:

 U.S. Strengths: Although the U.S. mathematics program is weaker than Singapore’s in most respects, the U.S. system is stronger than Singapore’s in some areas. The U.S. frameworks give greater emphasis than Singapore’s to developing important 21st century mathematical skills such as representation, reasoning, making connections, and communication. The frameworks and textbooks also place greater emphasis on applied mathematics, including statistics and probability.

For reasons I would like to explore further at another time, I do not accept these "Strengths" as legitimate. While there is nothing particularly wrong with anything on the list, I believe we are seeing an inordinate emphasis on these things, which is driving more necessary activities and emphases from the curriculum. If I am correct about that, then Singapore's supposed deficiency actually contributes to its strength.

State Math Standards Questioned

2005-02-07T13:51:00.000-06:00

1/5/2005, The Albany Times, by Rick Karlin:

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation said, in reference to New York and about a dozen other states it studied, that the state math standards "offer vague and overly simplistic guidelines for teaching K-12 students."

"All of us were awestruck by the levels of ignorance that we saw," in math standards nationwide, said David Klein, a math professor at California State University at Northridge, who headed the math research effort. In general, Klein said, states place too much emphasis on concepts such as probability and the use of calculators at the expense of basic skills like adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. "Many state standards don't allow students to learn enough arithmetic," Klein said.

I am completely mystified by the emphasis on teaching elementary students concepts like mean, median, and mode, some of the graphing activities that are included in the curriculum, as well as the probability. These ideas are presented without an adequate context in which to understand and use them, and they lead nowhere--they are conceptual dead ends until students get to Introductory Statistics in college. At that point, we expect them to know these basic concepts (because they were taught in elementary school) but find we are in a quandry because a) if we assume this knowledge, they will in fact not have complete or adequate concepts and b) if we assume they don't know, they are bored and disinterested because they think it's simplistic material. I think statistics and probability should be delayed until a good enough foundation exists to pursue a reasonably complete development of the concepts. Of course, arithmetic must come first. Working out averages is a fine exercise in arithmetic. Is it necessary to call it the "mean" at this point? I doubt it, unless you are going to discuss geometric means or other measures of central tendency too. Students in college-level Introductory Statistics often lack algebra skills and important background concepts like summation notation, unions and intersections of sets, etc. It would be much better to make sure these things are taught well, rather than to teach shallow and isolated portions of statistics before the students are really ready for them.

A little fun with ethical philosophy

2005-02-06T15:56:00.000-06:00

Take the ethical philosophy Quiz at SelectSmart.com. Results are relative to best match, which is given 100%.

Here are my top 10

1. Aquinas (100%) Click here for info
2. St. Augustine (88%) Click here for info
3. Jean-Paul Sartre (85%) Click here for info
4. Spinoza (84%) Click here for info
5. Plato (81%) Click here for info
6. Jeremy Bentham (80%) Click here for info
7. Aristotle (79%) Click here for info
8. Kant (79%) Click here for info
9. Ockham (78%) Click here for info
10. Ayn Rand (75%) Click here for info

Mixture Problems

2005-02-05T21:23:00.000-06:00

My daughter has been asking for help on mixture problems in which they use little tables to arrange the available information. I used to teach this method myself, in "Intermediate Algebra" at the college, with great enthusiasm, I might add. Now I have my doubts.

In case you are not familiar with this method, here is an example.
Suppose I have a solution of 50% alcohol and another solution of 25% alcohol. How much of each of these solutions should I mix to make 2 liters of 40% alcohol?
The table is arranged with an equation across the top that relates the quantities in the mixture, and rows underneath for each component of the solution and the final result. The student is instructed to fill in all the known information, then assign a variable based on the question.

	Amt Sol	%Purity	Amt Pure
First Sol	x	.50
Second Sol	2-x	.25
Final Sol	2	.40

Next, the student will apply the equation across the top to calculate the last column, whose first two entries must add up to the entry in the result, thus generating the algebraic equation to solve:

	Amt Sol	%Purity	Amt Pure
First Sol	x	.50	.50x
Second Sol	2-x	.25	.50-.25x
Final Sol	2	.40	.80

Thus .50x + .50 - .25x = .80.25x = .30x = 1.20
Therefore we should use 1.2L of 50% alcohol and .8L of 25% alcohol.

This all works out beautifully. It seems very elegant. Unfortunately, it's also a gimmick. My daughter doesn't understand why the table is set up the way it is, nor does she really understand why this table results in an equation that gives the solution to the problem. I think this is fairly typical of students who are taught this method. Furthermore, it applies to only a limited set of problems, although it's true that they do vary somewhat from this example. Especially interesting are the variations that involve replacement of part of the mixture (how much weak antifreeze to drain out of your radiator and replace with pure antifreeze to get it right). The method can also be used with Distance=Rate x Time problems. These seem to be even more confusing, though.

My belief is that this type of problem is best approached as a system of equations in two unknowns. Let's see how this works with the example. I have to mix two solutions, let's say x of the 50% solution and y of the 25% solution and get 2 liters. Then x+y=2. The key feature of mixture problems is that there are two things that you can keep track of. In this example, one is the total amount of solution, the other is the amount of the pure stuff (alcohol) in the solution. We have an equation for the first, now we need one for the second. That will be (.50)x+(.25)y=.80. This system of equations is easily solved by substitution, resulting in an equation just like the one generated by the table method. However, the conceptual differences could be significant. If we use the system of equations, the focus is on reasoning about the relationships in the problem, while with the table the focus is, well, how to fill out the table. Teachers can stress the concepts underlying the table and perhaps bring the students to the same understanding, but they may not always do that. Too often, there is more of a focus on "learning the procedure/pattern" than on the essential "why."

One reason that this is a far superior method of teaching these types of problems is that it requires students to think about the sources of their equations. When students get to real applications in science or engineering classes, for example, it will be a VERY common thing to solve a problem by saying something like, "I have two unknowns here. I know one equation, where can I get another?" They should be practicing this kind of thinking in algebra.

The tables are now standard fare in high school algebra, though I used to be surprised when some of my college students said they hadn't seen them before. Now, I just think they are a gimmick that we would be better off doing without.

Let's Follow FDR on Social Security!!

2005-02-05T19:53:00.000-06:00

From FDR's message to congress on Social Security: "It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans. "

See, it was intended to be privatized from the very beginning... not only partially, but the whole retirement portion! Let's just ask the Dems to keep their promises, shall we?

It's just too ironic how the Democrats gathered around FDR's statue to protest the "assault" on Social Security.

Thanks to Oxblog.

Is Freedom of Speach Returning to the University?

2005-02-05T10:48:00.000-06:00

Is the tide turning with regard to free speach and diversity of opinion at the universities? Michelle Malkin quotes from "Inside Higher Ed" about Brown University's president, Ruth Simmons, encouraging students to "engage in civil, open debate, on every issue possible."

I found another example of a university president speaking on this subject. Anyone know of any others?

President Peggy Miller, of South Dakota State University, included the following comments in an address to the faculty at the beginning of the 2004-2005 school year:

Regrettably, our nation is fiercely divided over many issues surrounding that war. If we are ever going to be able to resolve those and other important national issues, thoughtful open minded discourse is sorely required. In much of the public media to which our students are exposed, there are few examples of earnest efforts to find understanding of differing points of view or to reach common ground.

I am growing increasingly concerned that the kind of unbiased deliberation, espect for competing ideas, active listening, problem solving and honest searching for the truth of issues and the better idea, are becoming indangered behaviors. As academics, we have been trained through the rigor of our individual disciples, to engage ideas... but more importantly, to sort fact from opinion, test hypothesis, and gather all the data required to reach good decisions. Sadly, it may be only here in the university that students will be able to observe these behaviors consistently used. I think we have no more important challenge in the next year, and those that follow, than teaching and demonstrating to our students the wisdom of these intellectual values. If we can do so successfully, we will have provided them powerful tools to use to protect and defend our democratic society. If they learn to use them well, perhaps neither they, nor their friends, nor their classmates will again be called to harm's way to do so.

That is no small hope, but I have a quote under the glass on my desk that reminds me every day to, "Believe that a small group of hardworking committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

These bold and courageous words seem to indicate a turning point in Academic Freedom. As universities around the country are increasingly pressed to provide students with "fair and balanced" learning opportunities, as well as opportunities for freedom of expression (even for conservative students) one welcomes such statements of support from the highest levels of administration.

However, there is a caution in this tale. To the liberal mind, this speach could be interpreted as an attack on conservatism. (Use your imagination, it's a stretch, I know.) Many liberal professors who use their classes as bully pulpits simply don't recognize that they are promoting one side to the exclusion of others. Calls for "free and open discourse" fall on deaf ears to these people. The only realistic way to expose students to multiple points of view is to have a diverse faculty who each promote their own point of view to the best of their ability. This is extremely difficult to achieve when whole fields of study are dominated by a particular ideology (consider evolution in the biological sciences, government redistributionism and interventionism in the social sciences, religious studies at state institutions, etc.). How can the universities achieve a diverse faculty when over 90% of all academics in a particular field subscribe to one point of view? We have to generate new faculty who have different points of view! But where will they come from, when they have to earn their advanced degrees from the same people who already dominate the field?? Although it's not true that someone with a minority view can't get through a Ph.D. program, the problem has more to do with self-selection. People who don't agree with the dominant ideology don't want to stay with (or even start) the program. How many conservatives would put 4+ years of advanced education into "Women's Studies?" Yet, you can't become a Women's Studies professor unless you do. "Global Studies" is a similar example. And what happens when someone does go through this process and maintains a minority point of view? Once in the profession, he or she has to advance as a scholar by publishing articles in journals that are ideologically based and tend to reject works that challenge the mainstream thinking.

True academic freedom is a difficult thing to achieve. But let's keep it coming.

A Good Blog Article on Teaching History

2005-02-03T22:13:00.000-06:00

Check out Betsy's Page.

State of the Union

2005-02-03T08:51:00.000-06:00

"Today, Social Security is strong, but by 2013, payroll taxes will no longer be sufficient to cover monthly payments. By 2032, the trust fund will be exhausted and Social Security will be unable to pay the full benefits older Americans have been promised."

George Bush is such a pessimist ....

Wait ....

That was Bill, in his 1999 State of the Union. No Democrats Booed.

But they booed when George said this last night:

"Thirteen years from now, in 2018, Social Security will be paying out more than it takes in. And every year afterward will bring a new shortfall, bigger than the year before. For example, in the year 2027, the government will somehow have to come up with an extra 200 billion dollars to keep the system afloat — and by 2033, the annual shortfall would be more than 300 billion dollars. By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt. If steps are not taken to avert that outcome, the only solutions would be drastically higher taxes, massive new borrowing, or sudden and severe cuts in Social Security benefits or other government programs."
(Quotes from Six Hertz House of Pain)

National Public Radio this morning, with Carl Castle, said that a major portion of the president's speach was dedicated to Social Security. Funny. I thought it was just a little piece. I heard much more about Iraq and freedom in the world.

I must admit I'm feeling a little funny about the privatization scheme. It seems to me like it really doesn't have any major impact. We already have private retirement funds that are partially funded by our tax dollars...they're called IRAs. Why do we need another new scheme? Why not do more to promote what we already have, and talk about phasing out payroll taxes? Oops, I forgot, that's not politically feasible...

Evolution Litigation

2005-02-02T19:09:00.000-06:00

Some people are so afraid of competing ideas that they find it necessary to petition the courts to have them supressed. So it is with supporters of Darwinism, whose constant refrain "Evolution is a Fact and all who oppose it are uninformed, superstitious religious nuts (heretics)" is just about as convincing as the Flat-Earthers' claims. If the facts are on your side, why are you afraid of competing ideas? Go ahead and discuss them, oppose them, and disprove them, if you can. If you can't, well, maybe there's a reason for it. What about academic freedom, free speach, the free exchange of ideas? The schools are apparently no place for such things.

The ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice) is tackling the case, as David Limbaugh reports on his blog, with a link to the ACLJ site here.

Intel Science Competition & Foreign Born Students

2005-02-02T14:49:00.000-06:00

From The New York Sun, 1/31/05, p. 11, by Andrew Wolf

"It appears to me that there are a disproportionate number of foreign-born students among the finalists and semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search competition. Moreover, many of these students appear to have received their early education in their country of origin, not here in America. Is there a lesson here?I think there is. Education practices in America are designed to "level off" all students into the vast middle ground lest we damage the self-esteem of those performing at lower levels. "

We teach math at the lowest common denominator, eh?

Once upon a time, there were teachers with "less" education than today's teachers, who nevertheless produced students who could do math. Today's teachers are "educated" in all kinds of "methods" for teaching math, like discovery learning, cooperative learning, etc., but in the end they aren't getting results. Reading journals of Math education gives the idea that if we could just find the right combination of activities or the right order to teach topics in or the right explanation for those difficult concepts, our students would learn better. Folks, we've been trying this approach for 50 years and gone nowhere but down. People used to know how to teach math effectively. But don't expect the Academic establishment to admit that they've been spinning their wheels for 50 years or so!

There's nothing more important than mastery of skills and concepts. It simply has to be done. There are many methods to achieve that goal, and a good teacher can use discovery learning, cooperative groups, and many other methods at her disposal to see that the job gets done. Drill and competative games are also valuable activities. But as long as educators think that going through the motions (following a particular stlye of instruction or lesson plan) is more important than insuring students learn (master) concepts and skills in a thorough and permanent manner, we are going to fail at the education game.

"No Teacher Left Behind"

2005-02-01T13:44:00.000-06:00

(From NATIONAL ALLIANCE OF STATE SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS COALITIONS
News Brief #2919 Category: Opinion/Editorials )

Quote:
Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues that teachers' unions routinely put their job-related interests above the educational interests of children. The unions stand in the way of real school reform, he says. If they won't voluntarily give up their power, he continues, "then it has to be taken away from them - through new laws that...drastically limit (or prohibit) collective bargaining..., link teachers' pay to their performance, make it easy to get rid of mediocre teachers," and give administrators more control over teacher assignments.
SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, 13 January 2005 (p. A12)
WEBSITE: http://www.wsj.com (subscribers only)

Future Elementary Teachers

2005-01-31T14:38:00.000-06:00

AP, 1/19/2005, Nashville TN: "State report paints unflattering picture of math education"
Quote:
Teacher preparation is one of the main problems, the Nashville School of the Arts instructor said, illustrated by a college class he took on teaching math."The (college) students in the class could not work the problems in the fourth-grade math book," he said. "The teacher told me, after we had our first test, that he was actually going to have to teach them the math."
End quote.

How true, and not only in TN. I taught "Math for Elementary Teachers" several times to Junior and Senior education students. Among the topics that caused major difficulty were:
Problems on Areas and Volumes
Metric and English units conversions
Simple Geometric Proofs
They demanded practice tests and complained bitterly when they didn't get A's. Many elementary teachers simply haven't got the math skills needed to do the math they are supposed to be teaching. They need to be able to think about the topics at a high enough level to plan for questions, come up with alternative explanations, etc. Unfortunately, many elementary education teachers (over half, I think) cannot operate at this level when they graduate from college.

A few good links on NCLB

2005-01-30T16:44:00.000-06:00

Teacher Shortages in North Dakota and No Child Left Behind Christian Science Monitor, November 18, 2003
More Children Left Behind by Phyllis Schlafley
No Dollar Left Behind by Tim Carney
Leave the Slogans Behind by Michelle Malkin

A Science Fair Project Suggestion?

2005-01-30T14:52:00.000-06:00

An article titled "Man peed way out of avalanche" recounts how a Slovak man melted snow with urine to get out of an avalanche. He drank 60 bottles of beer he had in the car, which was buried in the snow, to accomplish this feat. Hmmm. I wonder if the urine was more effective at melting snow than pouring the beer (which some might recognize contains alcohol, a good melting agent) directly on it would have been. Would anyone like to tackle this experiment? (From Drudge by way of Byrd Droppings)

How Students Learn ... Math ...

2005-01-30T14:34:00.000-06:00

"The National Research Council has released an extensive report on principles of learning in the areas of mathematics, science and history. " (NASSMC News Briefs, referring to Education Week, 12 January 2005 (p. 11)) The report may be read in its entirety on line: www.nap.edu/books/0309074339/html/ This is worth studying. I have scanned some of the early chapters and hope to have more comments later.

Bush Calls for More Testing under NCLB

2005-01-30T14:06:00.000-06:00

At a Virginia School, Bush called for extending testing to grade 11 under No Child Left Behind. Rather than a smaller Federal government, which Republicans traditionally support, the president continues to advocate expanded involvement of the Fed in the business that rightfully belongs to parents (or at most, states). The refrain for more government control continues unabated. Yes, schools are in trouble. No, more government is not the answer.