Food for thought - Hiring Practices

Mrs. C. reminded me the other day about the hiring practice at one local elementary school. The job would be posted on School Spring as per state law and all of the respondents would be vetted for license requirements and the usual administrative checkboxes. Those who passed this first round would be asked to come to school and take the final exams for eighth-grade math and English. Those who passed both would be considered for the job and interviewed.

You'd figure that this would be relatively easy to accomplish, wouldn't you?


The job listing for third grade teacher brought in the usual flood of SchoolSpring applicants since the button is so damned easy to push.  The list included the usual "I'm still in school and I have 2 years to go" and the "I have experience running a drill press, can I teach 3rd grade" as well as teachers from around the country and around the state.  The initial credential search narrowed down the list to 15 who were certified to teach in any state (we have reciprocity) or who could get certified by the start of school.

Every single candidate failed the 8th grade final exams. The school had to re-advertise.

Yeah, that was my reaction, too. Now clean up your keyboard.

Teaching Teachers - A Cautionary Tale

Teaching is a great field to be in. Like every job, there are positives and negatives, trials and tribulations, difficulties and successes. Teaching has its stars and its plodders, champions and minions just like every other business. Find the good ones and try to avoid the bad ones.

I just wish so many teachers weren't so damned frustrating.

The tagline for one particular blog is "Burn The Textbooks, Shred The Worksheets, Teach Math," which is a sentiment I can follow, albeit cautiously. There is certainly nothing sacred about a textbook if you are replacing it with superior material, ideas and learning. Some things seemed childish, as if they were geared towards a young audience, but that's all right. I like to see what elementary students are learning, to get a sense of the state of the art in the lower grades, so I kept looking.

This guy, though, strikes me at first glance as a pretentious moron and I find myself wondering how I got to this one in the first place ... whose blogroll contained him? He seems to always be pitching his lesson plans for sale and that rubs me the wrong way. I can forgive if the quality is there, but then he posts this kind of thing (Learning the Number System with Maps) and you wonder ...

Anyway, I threw his blog into Google reader a week or so ago and I think he just earned his way into the joke folder.

My college students were offered extra credit for producing a hands on math project on one of the following themes. 1) The Real Number System 2) The Commutative, Associative or Distributive Properties

And then I looked at the pictures posted with it.

1.	2.	3.
4.	5.

As a project for college students, they are poorly thought out and suffice only as examples of their own math illiteracy. As extra credit, I'd consider them as negative value work in that I'd actually reduce grades for trying to pass this off as worthy of a child's time. If these people are supposed to become teachers, I shudder at the implications for their prospective schools. Do they truly know so little? Is this their best work or merely a toss-off handout meant to glean a couple of points from a gullible and not-too-attentive professor? Does the professor not know the problems?

Now, I understand that I may have misunderstood the purpose of the assignment and that these students may have intentionally written incorrect examples, confusing or obfuscated instructions, or created Venn diagrams and graphic organizers that intentionally make incorrect mathematical points.

Nothing in the post or in the pictures above, however, makes that clear or explains why such dreck is worthy of extra credit, a concept with which I rarely agree.

On its face, extra credit is a silly idea.  Doing something unrelated to fractions in order to improve a grade on fractions seems antithetical to the idea of a grade being a numerical representation of a student's understanding and knowledge. Show me later that you understand this work better than you did the first time and I'll increase your grade on it. Doing something like washing teachers' cars for extra credit is outright bribery -- ethically, it's equivalent to accepting cash.

If anyone reading this is a teacher prospect and is wondering what I find so problematic about the above images, let me be clear that I am making these comments without knowing any more than the post and the images.

1. The butterfly graphic organizer bothers me. Before creating this, the teacher must be clear in his mind exactly what color, shape, represents what type of number and know the definitions of each. If a rational number, $\sqrt{100}$ is placed in a green region as are the irrationals like $\sqrt{19}$, students will assume that irrationality is exclusively determined by a square root. Does the teacher candidate not realize that 10 is rational.  Secondly, if there are no irrationals without radicals, will the viewer understand the nature of π or φ? If the teacher does not know himself ...

By my count, 5 of the greens are rational but I may not have found them all. Finding them would make a good lesson but it's one that seems to have been lost on the constructor.

2. This one is just odd. The instructions are unclear: "Do not feed the alligators unless the #'s are the greatest."  Why superlative rather than comparative? Why state this as "Do Not ... Unless"? Are there too many other options to list?

How about "The alligator eats the larger number"?   Maybe "The point is small and the other end is large so it points to the smaller number"?

I have no idea what "Order Property" means or why "Food" is listed on strips.  Where are we going with that? Is the top list greater than the smaller list? Is every element of the first list being compared to those in the second list or is it intended to mean that place in the list matters? If this is truly a lesson for children, then we have to assume that the children are having trouble with the concept - this does nothing to simplify it.

3. First, the picture is of the associative property.

Second, the story is ridiculous and has nothing to do with either mathematical property.

Third, a child who is reading something written in this font style should be focused on the idea of the property without bothering with the name of it.

Fourth, stop pretending that a child wrote this.

4. A nice idea, but flawed in the execution.  Start with the map of the world.  Irrational numbers are Australia and rational numbers are the USA ... that's pretty goddam funny and possibly backwards, but who's making a GOP joke? Me, actually. What's the rest of the world?  If it's not rational, it's irrational by definition. To make this work, the USA would be rational and the rest of the world irrational and I can't stop giggling at that either.

The USA is divided up in a better fashion in that there are vastly more non-integral rational numbers than integers but I doubt that the designer knows that.

The Virginia split? Apparently the whole numbers are just Frederick County meaning the rest of the state is negative integers. Seems unbalanced somehow since, other than zero, there are equally many positive as negative integers, but that's a nitpick.

Speaking of zero, if the Town of Winchester is the Natural numbers and Frederick is the Whole numbers, then what does that say about the rest of the county? Yup, it's the zero.

I know, I know. Area shouldn't matter in a graphic organizer but when you use a visual that explicitly has such a meaning then the reader will make the wrong inferences based on those meanings.

5. What can I say? 75% of the examples are wrong and 75% is less than 100% but that's no reassurance either because 100% wrong is a lesser problem than 75% wrong because the former is a misunderstanding of the notation and easily solved, but the latter shows both a misunderstanding and a mistake based on that misunderstanding.

2 is less than 1? No shit.

Forget the "Feeding Instructions." Could someone please explain what "Please put food of the lower number into its mouth" is supposed to mean, because my English skills are lacking and my mathematical side seems to remember it the other way around. The only correct problem listed, 5 < 6, along with the improper instructions, gives me the distinct impression that the last example was actually a double negative.

Oh well, the South won the Civil War, too.
God Bless Virginia.

Algebra in the Third Grade?

I got the NASCO 2011 catalog in my mailbox this morning. If you haven't dealt with them, they are a pretty typical school supply catalog - prices are double what you can find if you search diligently or ten times the scrounger's price. What it is really good for is as a wish list, a source for ideas. "How does that toy work? I could do that in the garage for $2 in materials."

My problem with them is that sometimes they really miss the mark. Here's the cover:

Really? Third grade and up? I rail all the time about my students arriving in 9th grade without a clear grasp of fractions and clueless about operations with fractions (sans calculator), limited fluency with percents and decimals, and an unsteady grasp of their multiplication tables and other basic stuff. I had usually blamed the 3rd through 6th grade teachers for not really understanding arithmetic and passing on any math phobias, but this seems like a major problem right here.

If the expectation is that this kind of thing is possible for 3rd grade and up, maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that fractions and arithmetic aren't getting as much attention.

My questions:

• Is this typical? Do third grade teachers really do this?
• Is it just a stupid cover by a catalog desperate to sell overpriced AlgeBlocks to a gullible school system?
• Shouldn't we be solidifying knowledge to the point of automaticity instead of spreading algebraic materials ever lower?
• I'm pretty sure that a few third graders could get this but is it appropriate for that level? 
• Is it possible without manipulatives at this age?

 Then, there's the other debate:

• Are manipulatives appropriate? 
• Does the use of something tangible and obviously fixed in size get in the way of learning an abstract idea about a variable?

A call for parental input.

Not from me, actually. I'm not that enamored of the idea of "massive" parental input. If you're not a teacher, you don't have much that you can base your judgment on.

I can't remember all the times I've heard a parent tell me I should "use flash cards" or "not give homework" or "don't use flash cards" or "give more homework." Parents haven't been teaching high school for years and can't generally discern the good teaching from the bad, too often basing their judgments on fleeting or non-germane criteria.

"Is he passionate about teaching classes"? "Is the flow of his class natural"? "Does he maintain discipline at all times?" "Does he have a complete knowledge of his subject area?"

How is a student (with no actual classroom experience except for sitting in the back trying to see that girl's boobs without being noticed) supposed to answer these questions? How is the parent supposed to do any better?

Parental input should only go so far. For a parent to have "massive and sustained input" is simply a bad idea.

The Athens Banner Herald editorial, however, seems to like this idea a lot:
Frankly, what's missing in the tug of war between legislators and teachers over school funding versus classroom accountability, except for a passing mention in Senate Bill 521, are the voices of the people who are most qualified to speak out on the quality, or lack thereof, of the state's public schools and teachers. Any meaningful assessment of schools and teachers must include massive and sustained input from parents. (emphasis mine)

What those first three years do for you.

Spencer has this list of things that all good teachers should be able to do without. He heads it with "How to Get Rid of Bad Teachers" but I think that needs to be qualified.

Some time ago, in his TED talk, Bill Gates opined that teachers don't improve after the first three years. He was saying, in effect, that test scores were the only thing that mattered and that brand-spanking new teachers improved their students' scores for three years only.

Okay, so Bill was wrong. (Is that sentence redundant?) What I think happens is that teachers grow into their jobs for the first three years. They start out by knowing very little and by making a ton of mistakes, teaching badly and inefficiently, and using methodologies that were just learned in education school - methodologies that don't work with actual students or anyone who isn't an education school guinea pig. Whew!

It takes about three years for them to figure out some truth. Some snippets are picked up from trade magazines, some from the kids or parents, but most are from the more experienced faculty once the newbie has gotten over his misconceptions about the "Old Guy" and the OG's total rejection of Shiny New Pedagogical Thought. "Old Guy doesn't use learning styles!?! WTF!?!"

That's when he learns what education really is and what it entails.

Excepting with respect to the newbies, I'd like to comment on Spencer's list:

Take away the Teacher's Guides and if they claim that they are unable to teach, they are right. They can't. As long as you're at it, take away the standards and the curriculum maps. Any decent teacher should be able to know what is vital in his or her content area.

Teacher's Guides/answer books are a convenience, not a crutch. Real handy for the repetitive and annoying work of producing paperwork that your building requires. There is probably a set of lesson plans tailored to the standards - photocopy them for your anal-retentive principal to get him off your back. Then go teach the class. Copy the curriculum map and hand it in. Then consult it once a month to stay roughly where you want to be. Taking away the standards entirely seems good in theory but not so much in practice. There needs to be some kind of plan, some kind of guidelines so the teachers don't go off in random directions.  Some of the best programs in the country have been fairly tightly controlled - Escalante's, for example.

Take away the computers. Tell them that there's no electricity. Even if it's a computer class, there's still a lesson to be learned. If they can't teach without the gadgets, then they aren't teachers. They're technicians and they have no business in a classroom.

To make a point, yes. Everyone should be able to "wing it." A blackboard is a whiteboard is a smartboard. But to say that ALL classes could do this for more than a couple of days is denying the use of available tools. Saying "you COULD walk to school, it's only 4 miles" is different from making it a common occurrence. There are topics that make no sense without tech and topics that have been phased out because tech took over.  Like it or not, some things are gone.

Take away the School Discipline Program and have the administrators leave for a day. If they can't lead a class without the intervention of an administrator, they probably need to leave.

Maybe. Maybe not. It seems that all teachers have the need for capable administration at various times although I've never seen one who required help every day.In that rare case, this is a valid point.

Take away the grades and get rid of the homework. Toss out the token reward system and the points and the gold stars. If they claim that they can't motivate a class without these things then they're missing a big part of what it means to motivate.

Homework and grades aren't for motivation. They're for practice and measurement, respectively. The token reward system is often effective, especially for the younger grades. Just because I don't use gold stars doesn't mean it's bad practice.

Take away the classroom for a day and have the teacher lead a group of ten kids. Meet outside. I don't care where. A lake, a river, a mountain, a busy intersection of the city. If the teacher can't see how the subject connects to life and struggles to get a point across without a Word Wall or a chalkboard or a set of worksheets, then the teacher is missing the point of education.

Whatever. I was never big on "class outside" and I fail to see where this ability is all that important.  Many things don't translate outside real well.  To say that the teacher is missing the point of education if they can't move into some random mountain meadow and teach algebra ...

YMMV

Those who can ...

Yeah, I know.  I hate that old saw, too.  But dammit, why do we have to have so many people confirming it?  The Mrs. reminded me of a time last year when she went to a conference. Another teacher stood and spoke of their "adventures" hiring a third-grade teacher. The school required the applicants (13 of them? Number was implied, not specified) to write an essay and take the 8th-grade end-of-course math test.

None passed.

The school had to reopen the application process.

Jargon means something

It's been said before and it bears repeating. Jargon ("the language, esp. the vocabulary, peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group") is used to make communication simpler and more precise.

Except in education.

Education "experts" use jargon to make simple things sound complicated, to change the inherent meaning of words and to appear (I guess) smarter than the speaker actually is. Education experts further abuse the English language by changing the meanings of simple words to either "be cute" or to obfuscate.

In what other field would a person who was speaking to a room full of professionals, requesting that thoughts and questions be "captured" (written down on sticky notes) and that the sticky notes be then attached to the "Parking Lot" at the back of the room (a large piece of paper decorated with an elementary school cartoon of a car and the words "Parking Lot" in large, multi-colored letters.

Teachers will never be taken seriously as professionals until we cease to find this clever, cute, or anything but demeaning and puerile.

Highly Qualified or Effective?

Mike Petrilli on Education Gadfly writes about HQT and how terrible it is:

Everyone knows it’s a meaningless designation. Nobody will defend its focus on paper credentials. The conversation has moved on to teacher “effectiveness” as measured by student learning and other meaningful indicators. Yet in the real world of real schools, HQT is still the law of the land, wreaking havoc every day. It continues to make teachers jump through unnecessary hoops. It continues to tie the hands of charter schools that have to demonstrate that their teachers have requisite “subject matter knowledge”—never mind the autonomy charters are supposed to receive. And now it’s causing material harm to Teach For America, one of the best things our education system has going.

Awesome. and Stupid. and Inconsistent.

HQT makes teachers hop or skip through low-lying hoops, like certification and demonstrating that you actually know what you are trying to teach. The praxis test is required. Not much more. The checkboxes for HQT are so incredibly easy to tick off that 93.8% of Vermont teachers are HQT. The obvious response is "You want to be a teacher. Teachers have paperwork. This is easy. Get over yourself."

Mike wants "teacher 'effectiveness' measured by student learning and other meaningful indicators." So, if I understand this, he wants the teachers' effectiveness measured by students taking a meaningless high-stakes test instead of the teachers taking a meaningful one. That's silly. The teachers should take the tests. After all, if they fail, it'll be their college professors' fault.

TFA Studies Shouldn't Lie or Obfuscate

Joanne has a short piece on ‘Study laundering’ on TFA and I'll quote a few things here. The gist is that Studies on TFA are cherry-picking data to promote a predetermined viewpoint ... ya think?

I'm no fan of TFA in that I don't like the overall attitude of "I'm so incredible because I went to HA-VAAD and therefore everyone at one of those poor, low class schools - public schools, mind you - should welcome me in my magnificence and install me in a classroom of my choosing. The five-week summer training session is all I need to become a teacher, whether math or science or social studies - it doesn't matter because I'm so wonderful. I can even change from a math teacher to a social studies teacher at will."

I'm sure that there are some good teachers in the making at TFA. But many don't want to be teachers in the long run. They just want a temporary job and to feel good about themselves for a while before they take a real job in their chosen profession. What's not good about that is that an experienced veteran who is planning on staying, or someone who wants to be a teacher long-term, is moved aside for the temp. That's not good for the long-term health of a system.

Anyway, back to the study.

“Weaponized” education research and “study laundering” are illustrated by a Great Lakes Center study knocking Teach for America for high turnover and “mixed” performance, writes Eduwonk. Half of TFA teachers leave after two years and 80 percent leave after three, the study says. However, the researchers use data from studies that conflate TFA teachers who leave their original school placement after two years with those who leave the teaching profession, Eduwonk charges. A 2008 Harvard study (pdf), found that 61 percent of TFA teachers stay in teaching beyond the two-year commitment.

Definitions of terms are so important, aren't they? That conflation might be appropriate if the study noted it. Of course, TFA itself says: "These teachers, called corps members, commit to teach for two years in one of 39 urban and rural regions across the country." It's not like the study hasn't taken TFA at its word but it should have been more specific.

Teach For America surveys its alumni regularly and the most recent survey found that 65 percent of Teacher For America’s 20,000 alumni remain in education, with 32 percent continuing as teachers. And remember, that’s a survey of alums going back almost two decades now so that one in three figure should be viewed in that context as well as the larger context of TFA’s mission.

So 65 percent remain in teaching after two years but only half of those as teachers? Sounds like the original press release had the information correct and TFA is blustering its own spin. This is not a point in their favor.

Teacher churn is bad for a school, despite the supposed "wonderfulness of a TFA teacher." Teachers don't "Go bad" in the last few minutes of the school year. Those 70 percent of TFA people who didn't continue after 2 years were probably very clear about their desires soon after starting year 2 and the students knew it. This is a bad situation all around as the TFA are just filling out their time - I've never seen a lame duck teacher who was successful.

Then we look at the 32% - how long did they last? According to the study, a third of this later group left after the third year - who are these? Maybe only those TFAs who were unable to get a real job and just hung on for another year - bad news. I can't think those schools are well served by these long-term subs. It takes at least two years to get your feet under you and get your classes "right."

On the performance issue, studies that use rigorous methodology find that “Teach For America teachers perform as well or better than other teachers, not only emergency certified teachers but traditionally trained ones and veterans,” Eduwonk writes, including lots of link to research studies. The results are not mixed.

Debatable. I'd want to delve more deeply before I took a different set of studies as gospel. Wouldn't you? Which performance measures are they talking about? The ones that nobody can find any merit for? Probably just a test score comparison between a temp teacher or unlicensed one and the TFA. Hardly telling.

How about this little graphic. Talk about playing with statistics and implied information. Is it 10% of the 4510 are Black (450) and therefore 12% of the group is Asian, or is it that Blacks are 10% of the 33% (150)? Is a small percentage of blacks a problem because TFA is staffing black schools?  I figure it's written this way so that we infer that 33% are people of color and then add 10% Black and 8.5% Latino to get 52% minority?  Who's fudging the definitions now?

Merit Pay and Testing

Campbell's Law: “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
h/t: Jim Horn

Tough Times for Unemployed Teachers - or not.

According to the NYTimes: Teachers Facing Weakest Market in Years, it's tough to get a job because of all the other teachers out looking. Of course, this IS Westchester County, Long Island so it's not surprising that there are 3000 applicants for 8 jobs.

With all these teachers available, I wonder about the other complaint floating around the blogosphere: that of unavailable people to fit into charter school jobs. Charter schools were complaining to the Wall Street Journal about the oh-so-onerous restrictions on hiring non-teachers that I wrote about the other day. Either they can't find SchoolSpring.com or are simply offering too little money for too much work. Gotta keep up the salaries of the administration - inexperienced teaching at any cost.

Read More:
Back to the NYT and that glut of talent ... I wanted to know how many of these applications were from qualified people? Certified in some state? Certified in NY? Certified by Teach for America? Certified by the Online University of Wheaties Box? Reading further in the article reveals that there seemed to be qualified applicants; 200 were winnowed out of that 3000 and asked for interviews. Then they were given a timed writing test to further demonstrate ability, which shows the school's confidence in their resumes. There are probably 50 qualified people in that pile. Now at about 6 per job, how many would really fit the position and enjoy working with the kids?

Applying is not like it used to be. It's easy to apply for multiple positions on SchoolSpring.com - click a button and done. No fuss, no expense, no effort. Click on one, click on fifty. No Problem.

Any mention of a position really brings out the flakes, whackjobs and mouthbreathers. Some aren't qualified to drive to the school, never mind teach. Others are frantically clicking "Apply" without even reading whether they've got any training for the particular courses. I guess the thought is "I can click, why not apply?" The answer, for those not catching the sarcasm, is "because you're applying to teach math and you got Cs and Ds throughout college and never once took a class higher than Algebra for Non-College Bound Students."

What's tough is for truly qualified teachers who are suddenly laid off is to get through that enormous crowd and make it into the final stages. Once there, they have a great chance because quality is so rare these days.

PELHAM, N.Y. — In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.

Teacher Quality Study

Via Joanne Jacobs, via Reuters, from Science comes a twin study on teacher effectiveness.

I’d be interested in the criteria for “strong” teacher and “weak” teacher. If the “strong” one is defined (as the linked article seems to imply) as someone whose 20 students did well on a single reading test, then perhaps it isn’t surprising that one of those students did better on a test.

At least this study seems to be comparing teachers within the same building, using twins. That’ll help control for income and such. I’m not as convinced that a single measure of just one skill is a particularly good way to differentiate, however, though my expertise is certainly not at the k-3 level. Assuming that you can even separate the discipline at this level I have to wonder: if one teacher is better at science or math while the first is only good at teaching the reading skills needed for that one test, the differences could be enough to label one or the other as “deficient” and that’s not a good way to do this.

I’d also like to know how the kids were placed in the various classes. If it’s random, then this study has more credibility, but if the placements are done for reasons of ability or behavior, then that test is measuring too many variables to definitively say one teacher is better than the other.

I'm sure the researchers tried to control for this, but schools do tend to separate kids on purpose and that will skew the study. If a weaker student is intentionally placed with teacher #1, then it shouldn't be surprising if the teachers show a difference.

All in all, a good study. Hopefully it's not taken directly to the Congress as the article suggests - it's way too early for that and the Congress would probably try to apply its lessons to high or middle schools and it's way to specific for that.

BTW, the photo that accompanied the article showed a child using an abacus during a national math test in India. If one of our teachers used an abacus during teaching and the other used a calculator, that would definitely change the results.

Article below the jump

Poor teachers may hamper good students: U.S. study
Thu Apr 22, 2010 4:45pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An unusual genetic study supports the argument that good teachers make a difference and shows that poor teachers may do damage, even to gifted students, researchers said on Thursday.
The study, published in the journal Science, showed that effective teachers help kids with the best genes read better, while poor teachers brought down all the children in a classroom to the same mediocre level.
The findings by behavioral geneticist Jeanette Taylor at Florida State University and colleagues could influence the debate in Congress, the White House and school districts across the United States about measuring the quality in schools.
"In circumstances where the teachers are all excellent, the variability in student reading achievement may appear to be largely due to genetics. However, poor teaching impedes the ability of children to reach their potential," Taylor and colleagues concluded.
To tease out the effects of genes and environment, the researchers turned to the time-tested model of twins. Identical twins share all their DNA, while fraternal twins share about half, or as much as any brother or sister.
Their theory: if one identical twin does better than his or her sibling in a different classroom, much of the difference must be due to the teacher.
They studied 280 identical twin pairs and 526 fraternal twin pairs in the first and second grades from a diverse selection of Florida schools.
To determine teacher quality, they used Oral Reading Fluency test scored for the entire classroom of each twin.
"(It's) a timed measure of how many words children can read in a passage," Taylor said in a Science podcast.
They checked to see how many more words children could read at the end of the year compared to the beginning.
"We felt that was a reasonable estimate of teacher effectiveness," Taylor said.
When teachers were good, the genes really mattered. If one identical twin excelled with a good teacher, the other did too. But if one twin had a strong teacher and the other twin had a weak teacher, twins with strong genetic potential did just so-so in the poor teacher's class.
"Better teachers provide an environment that allows children to reach their potential," Taylor said.
"As state and national policy increasingly focuses on teacher quality, the effect that teachers have on the strong documented genetic foundation of reading is an important question," the researchers wrote.
While great teachers do not guarantee success, they said, policymakers need to realize that good teaching is important, even for gifted children.
One weakness of the study -- the researchers threw out data from identical twins who happened to be in the same classroom who scored differently from one another on the reading test. Taylor said she did not know how many such cases there were.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Stacey Joyce)

Is it too much to expect?

I was floating around the Teacher College website, specifically "Curriculum and Teaching", when I came across a true gem of an article in a group of articles about the program (I guess).
For starters, I reproduce the list of articles:

Program News
* Does Science Proves Some Things Taught Were False? (2006)
* T.C. Takes Second in U.S. News Rankings (2006)
* Quiet Students Can Speak Volumes Through Actions (2005)
* Cathy Benedict (Obit from 2005)
* Enrichment Program Plagued By Flaws (2004)
(Parenthetical additions mine)

Yeah, it jumped out at me, too. Aren't you impressed by this Teachers College Program? How about that first article?

"Does Science Proves Some Things Taught Were False?
Published: 10/21/2006

"When I try to help my son with his homework I see a lot of things that are different from when I was in school," said Marietta parent Matt Reed, 39. "Math is so different I can't even help him most of the time." Whether it's facts that have been disproved or courses that have simply gone out of style, there are a plethora of things that used to be part of any student's curriculum and are no longer taught in schools.

Some boards of education, including the Texas State Board of Education have recommended replacing textbooks with laptop computers and say a nationwide move in that direction is only a few keystrokes away.

"I think conventional textbooks -'" they're pretty much dead," Peter Cookson, director of educational outreach at Columbia University's Teachers College told the Associated Press. "Not this year, but in the next decade."

This article appeared in the October 21, 2006 edition of the Marietta Times.
http://www.mariettatimes.com/news/story/new55_1021200615356.asp.

To be fair, this article told me a great deal about the Curriculum and Teaching Program at Teachers' College.

• It told me that nothing good has been written about them in over 3 years.
  
• It told me that the College can't be bothered to check the grammar on its website.
• It told me that an article that it considered important and relevant was disjointed and bizarre -- is it discussing science proving things false as the title would indicate, curricula changes confusing parents as the first paragraph has it, or the "fact" that textbooks are dead because Texas thinks they should replace them with Laptops?
• It told me that its Director is an idiot and it made it clear why TC should be regarded as the last refuge of the Incompetents.

By the way, that Texas thing about laptops? That fad was sooooo three years ago. We're doing 21st Century Skills now. You know, technology and communication skills.

Teacher Magnet School is Bad

h/t to Darren,

Students at the Teacher Training Magnet School don't understand math, or English for that matter?

Crenshaw Senior High 5010 11th Ave., Los Angeles, 90043
» Schoolwide Performance California Standards Test (STAR)
Students scoring proficient or above: English 18.9% Math 2.3%
# Students in advanced math: 15%

No Child Left Behind (AYP)
Fail: Missed 16 of 23 federal targets for 2009
Fail: Missed 25 of 25 federal targets for 2008
Fail: Missed 16 of 22 federal targets for 2007

SAT Reasoning Test Composite Average 1098
Math: 363 Verbal: 367 Writing: 368
Source: state data reported for 238 participants

How is this possible? An average of 363 means that some were higher and some were lower. The standard deviation for the SAT is about 100 points. Think about that. Then consider that these folks are in the teacher training program.

This is Crenshaw Teacher Training Magnet School.

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LA's 141 Magnet Schools, Ranked in Ascending Order.
(percentages are percent proficient in Math, English

Dorsey Police Academy Magnet 0.0% 16.3%
Washington Communication Arts Magnet 0.0% 29.8%
Crenshaw Teacher Training Magnet 1.1% 28.6%
Washington Music Academy Magnet 1.2% 45.5%
Washington Math/Science/Technology Magnet 2.1% 36.5%
Fremont Math/Science/Technology Magnet 3.7% 39.8%
Dorsey Math/Science/Technology Magnet 4.4% 38.3%
Jordan Math/Science/Technology Magnet 4.9% 45.1%
Wilson Police Academy Magnet 5.0% 25.0%
Dorsey Law/Public Service Magnet 5.6% 36.6%
Manual Arts College Prep Magnet 7.0% 30.9%
Wilson Administrative Law Magnet 7.5% 44.9%
...

Teacher Training Magnet is one of the worst. Couldn't see that coming.

The first step is admitting you have a problem ...

and if you don't admit it, then you have a problem. But if you admit it falsely in order to get a teaching license, you are confessing to a problem and that's a problem.

I can understand it when an alcoholic is forced to admit his alcoholism in order to begin healing. Denial of said problem by someone who is obviously an alcoholic is a clear indicator that the person is not on a road to healing alcoholism. It is NOT, however, a sign of alcoholism.

A person can deny alcoholism and be right.
A person can deny alcoholism and be in denial.
Let's please try to remember that.

Substitute "racism", "bigotry" or "misogyny" for "alcoholism" and you have this:

Reposted here because it'll disappear from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Katherine Kersten: At U, future teachers may be reeducated

They must denounce exclusionary biases and embrace the vision. (Or else.)
By KATHERINE KERSTEN, Star Tribune
Last update: November 22, 2009 - 6:57 PM

Do you believe in the American dream -- the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools -- at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U's College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of "the American Dream" in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace -- and be prepared to teach our state's kids -- the task force's own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.

The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U's flagship campus. The initiative is premised, in part, on the conviction that Minnesota teachers' lack of "cultural competence" contributes to the poor academic performance of the state's minority students. Last spring, it charged the task group with coming up with recommendations to change this. In January, planners will review the recommendations and decide how to proceed.

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the "overarching framework" for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

The first step toward "cultural competence," says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize -- and confess -- their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an "autoethnography" report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their "cultural" motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a "cultural intelligence" assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other "isms." They "earn points" for "demonstrating the ability to be self-critical."

The task group opens its report with a model for officially approved confessional statements: "As an Anglo teacher, I struggle to quiet voices from my own farm family, echoing as always from some unstated standard. ... How can we untangle our own deeply entrenched assumptions?"

The goal of these exercises, in the task group's words, is to ensure that "future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."

Future teachers must also recognize and denounce the fundamental injustices at the heart of American society, says the task group. From a historical perspective, they must "understand that ... many groups are typically not included" within America's "celebrated cultural identity," and that "such exclusion is frequently a result of dissimilarities in power and influence." In particular, aspiring teachers must be able "to explain how institutional racism works in schools."

After indoctrination of this kind, who wouldn't conclude that the American Dream of equality for all is a cruel hoax? But just to make sure, the task force recommends requiring "our future teachers" to "articulate a sophisticated and nuanced critical analysis" of this view of the American promise. In the process, they must incorporate the "myth of meritocracy in the United States," the "history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values, [and] history of white racism, with special focus on current colorblind ideology."

What if some aspiring teachers resist this effort at thought control and object to parroting back an ideological line as a condition of future employment? The task group has Orwellian plans for such rebels: The U, it says, must "develop clear steps and procedures for working with non-performing students, including a remediation plan."

And what if students' ideological purity is tainted once they begin to do practice teaching in the public schools? The task group frames the danger this way: "How can we be sure that teaching supervisors are themselves developed and equipped in cultural competence outcomes in order to supervise beginning teachers around issues of race, class, culture, and gender?"

Its answer? "Requir[e] training/workshop for all supervisors. Perhaps a training session disguised as a thank you/recognition ceremony/reception at the beginning of the year?"

When teacher training requires a "disguise," you know something sinister is going on.

Katherine Kersten is a Twin Cities writer and speaker. Reach her at kakersten@gmail.com.