View 779 Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Sixty-Three Years Ago Today

http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=36390

"On 25 June 1950 – at dawn – forces of the Korean People’s Army attacked South Korea. There had been skirmishes along the 38th parallel previously. However, this time the North Korean forces pushed south in an attempt to conquer South Korea and forcibly unify the peninsula under communist rule.

Hostilities were to last 3 years, 1 month, and 3 days. The war would claim between 500,000 and 950,000 total KIA (both sides); in excess of 1,200,000 individuals would be WIA.

The war technically has never ended. The agreement to stop fighting in July 1953 was an armistice, not a permanent settlement. A peace treaty formally ending the war has never been signed."

I worry very much that we’ve utterly failed to learn the lessons of this war, and have already spent far too much time wondering if I’ll know, if I trained, soldiers who will be in the next Task Force Smith.

The Supreme Court said yesterday that in order to achieve racial diversity in a public university, race can be considered in affirmative action. This wasn’t new, but now it’s only as a last resort.

The implications of this seem to have been overlooked. They admit the possibility that some races are so inferior that the only way to get – ANY – member of that race into the University of Texas is through racial preference. While I am sure that no one on the Supreme Court believes this, it sure looks like a logical inference.

Theodore R. Johnson: A Missed Opportunity on Racial Preferences

By THEODORE R. JOHNSON

‘You probably got it because you’re black."

I heard those words two years ago when I had the honor of being selected as a White House Fellow. It wasn’t the first time that at a moment of proud accomplishment I had heard skeptical comments. It happened when I was promoted a year ahead of my military peers. Earning a graduate degree from Harvard University prompted a dismissive remark about admission quotas. Most troubling of all was that, each time, I wondered: "What if it’s true?"

This is the ugly side of racial preferences that gets little attention. No matter what one may think of the policy, the truth is that with it comes an undercurrent of implied inferiority. Even in instances when a black or Hispanic is the best qualified and well-matched for a particular career or academic opportunity, the perception of unfair favoritism follows the person, hovering in the ether. The same suspicion often follows women who succeed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578519324168805746.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

I had a similar situation in the 60’s when I was the pre-law advisor to the undergraduates at Pepperdine. I had fairly good relations with the admissions people at UCLA. One of my black students wanted to go there. He was the kind of student that every professor encounters: a B+ student who works so hard that he consistently gets A grades. The “B+” label is the professor’s internal evaluation, of course, and my not be correct. This chap had the misfortune to be classmates with Bill Allen, the kind of student whose blue book essays you read last so you won’t be disappointed in your other A students.

In any event when it came time for recommendations I sent him over to UCLA with a recommendation that he be admitted to their law school. He came back with an odd look: he had been admitted, but in a “minorities program” as affirmative action. I told him he should go back and tell them he didn’t need any damned minorities program. He wasn’t going to be top of his class, but he would be in the top half because he was thorough, and he had every right to a normal appointment, not some affirmative action program. I don’t think he did that, but I wish he had.

I sometimes think we need a constitutional amendment demanding equal protection of the laws to every person regardless of race, with the addendum that “This time we really mean it.”

I have mixed emotions about the Snowden affair, but only just.

A long time ago, during the Goldwater election of 1964, candidate Goldwater in a new interview proposed bombing the Ho Chi Minh “trail”, a system of roads and supply depots running through Laos that supported North Viet Nam regulars in their invasion of South Viet Nam. President Johnson responded that this was one of the most trigger happy suggestions he had ever heard, and that the very suggestion showed why Goldwater was unfit to be President of the United States. I heard that on the radio as I was looking a strike photos of USAF interdiction of the “trail” in Laos. We were evaluating the effectiveness of some new aerial bombardment systems using large caliber guns and a new computer aiming system.

I suppose I felt a momentary impulse to “blow the whistle” (the term wasn’t used in 1964 or as least I don’t recall that it was) but that would certainly have been a violation of the secrecay laws and the end of any career I might have in operations research. I was a bit non-plussed: just who were we keeping the secret from? Surely the North Vietnamese forces being killed knew we were bombing them, and they certainly told their Russian advisors. Or bomber and gunship crews certainly knew. The only people who didn’t know were the American people and some of the Congress.

On the other hand, it wasn’t likely to affect the national election. I also had on my desk an article signed by 26 certified psychiatrists proving that Goldwater was unfit to be president, and the TV ads were running a countdown to the certain nuclear doom the US faced if Goldwater were elected. And I had signed my agreements when I received clearances and when I signed out classified documents. I wasn’t tempted for long, and I did nothing , nor did any of the other pro-Goldwater people at Norton Air Force base.

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who spilled U.S. surveillance secrets to the world, is a "free man" biding his time in a Moscow airport, Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters Tuesday in Finland.

Putin said that Snowden, who flew to Moscow from Hong Kong on Sunday, remains in the "transit area" of Sheremetyevo International Airport — the zone between arrival gates and Russia’s passport control checkpoints. And while he said Russia won’t hand Snowden over to the United States, he seemed eager to have the focus of international intrigue off his hands.

"The sooner he selects his final destination point, the better both for us and for himself," Putin said of Snowden, who is wanted by U.S. officials on espionage charges for disclosing classified details of U.S. surveillance programs.

Putin’s confirmation ends, for now at least, the international pastime of "Where’s Snowden?" and speculation that the former CIA worker and National Security Agency contractor had perhaps duped the world into thinking he was in Moscow to throw pursuers off his trail as he seeks a safe haven from U.S. prosecution.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/25/politics/nsa-leak/index.html

Mr. Snowden exposed the extent of US surveillance over US citizens. He threatens to expose more. The US and Russia are in a complex dance, and it is clear that the US is not prepared to go to the wall over this. Snowden will eventually leave the Russian airport for some place of refuges.It is unlikely to be Russia. If it turns out to be Cuba, it serves him right: survival in Cuba after all this blows over is not likely to be very pleasant but it will be tolerable, and Snowden will be more free than most Cubans. Perhaps he will repay Cuba’s generosity with some exposure of Cuba’s repressions.

I heard somewhere that he wanted refuge in Iceland.

It is well for the American people to know what most of us have suspected for a decade: nothing you say or do on the Web is secret. If you have visited a porn site, someone has a record of that, and if there is any reason for the authorities to turn their attention to you, someone will find it. If you have made an unwise comment on a political site, or sent an unfortunate email in a fit of pique, it exists out there and spins about on a server somewhere. Which, of course, means that anything can be fabricated, too. It’s as easy to manufacture a condemnatory email as to discover one – easier if that email never existed. I don’t think we have any fool proof way of certifying the provenance of electronic activities. But that’s a subject for another essay.

Much of the subject matter for a proper education is available free on line. For $300 you can acquire most of the course material and reading books you will ever need for bright kids from Art Robinson http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/?gclid=CM23wrCLgLgCFQE6Qgod32EAyQ although I’d recommend that you start young children with my wife’s reading program because Robinson’s curriculum includes good literature as well as adventure stories using a large vocabulary, and children without a background in systematic phonics may have needless problems. See Ms. Pournelle’s reading program, The Literacy Connection.

And for higher education – although the Robinson program goes pretty high – nearly everything is available on line. The Kahn Academy, Richard Feynman’s Freshman Physics lectures (which even the brightest kids will need to listen to more than once, but that’s the beauty of on line lectures) and dozens of other courses from beginner to advanced, they’re all out there and more are being added all the time.

The problem then becomes one of certification and credentialing, and you may be sure that The Blob – the education establishment – will fight desperately to keep their monopoly on granting ‘credentials’ and ‘degrees’ even though we all know that in some institutions those credentials certify nothing about the education of those who hold them: only that they showed up for the ‘workshops’ and had an above dismal attendance record.

I’ll return to the education theme later. It’s lunch time.

View 779 Sunday, June 23, 2013

Super Moon tonight.

In 1983 Nobel laureate Glen T. Seaborg chaired a national commission on education which reported that “If a foreign nation had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.”

This triggered several rounds of debate, with the result that the central government “reformed” American education with policies that insisted that all the states employ ‘credentialed’ teachers. In effect it gave a monopoly on teacher employment to the teacher education industry across the United States. Even private schools are now required to insist on credentials even from their best teachers; I have a friend who is a Catholic school principal, and they are now insisting that all teachers get credentials, even though some of the best teachers in the school have long records of highly effective service.

Last week a new study came out. It reported on the institutions which hold a monopoly on teacher credentials. Obtaining these credentials is often very expensive, resulting in years of indebtedness for teachers, so it is reasonable to examine just what this industry does. The commission to study teacher education programs reported last week.

‘An Industry of Mediocrity’: Study Criticizes Teacher-Education Programs

By Dan Berrett

Colleges of education are "an industry of mediocrity" that churns out unprepared teachers to work in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools, according to a highly anticipated report.

The report, "Teacher Prep Review," describes the findings of a controversial effort to rate the quality of programs at 1,130 institutions nationwide that prepare about 99 percent of the nation’s traditionally trained teachers. Released on Tuesday, the report is the product of a partnership between the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report.

http://chronicle.com/article/An-Industry-of-Mediocrity-/139887/

In other words we require anyone who wants to be a school teacher to spend a lot of money obtaining ‘credentials’ from schools that don’t do well at teaching how to teach. They tend to be operated by professors of education who do not themselves have classroom experience but have impressive credentials and degrees: indeed, getting all those credentials and degrees makes it difficult to spend much time actually teaching.

In theory apprentice teachers must take part in supervised teaching classes, where they will learn proper techniques.

The study’s authors also relied on what they describe as expert consensus, strong research, the practices of states or nations that have high-performing teacher-training programs, and "occasionally just common sense."

For example, student-teaching programs are often described as an important part of traditional training programs, and one that distinguishes those programs from alternative training programs. But the council found that just 7 percent of the programs it studied took what it described as basic measures to help teachers-in-training to succeed, such as ensuring that high-quality teachers were their mentors.

"Instead," said Ms. Walsh of the attitude toward recruiting mentors, "they’ll take anyone as long as they’ve been there for three years."

There’s a great deal more. Now note that while in the past private school programs could hire anyone they thought effective, now the pressure is on to hire only those with credentials; which means that the industry of mediocrity is taking over everywhere. This means that the public school system which for decades has been operating in a way indistinguishable from an act of war against the United States is now expanding to eradicate any competition with its methods.

Philosophical Difference

Another reason for the poor ratings nationwide, said Ms. Walsh, is a fundamental difference in philosophy between the council and many of the programs it surveyed. Teacher-training programs have come to see their students as their clients, Ms. Walsh said. The council believes the programs serve the schools in which their graduates will eventually teach.

As a result, she said, colleges of education focus on the feelings of their students, and encourage them to shed biases or prejudices about the pupils they will eventually teach. The future teachers are also taught to develop a personal approach to teaching, one that does not pay sufficient attention, said Ms. Walsh, to what the available research might suggest.

While a course on teaching methods once taught students tools they would use in the classroom, she said, most such courses now focus on helping a future teacher develop a professional identity.

Another reason for the findings, said Ms. Walsh, is that colleges of education admit too many applicants who perform poorly as undergraduates. About 25 percent of the programs admit students in only the top half of their class. High-performing countries limit entry to the top third, the study found.

"It exhibits such little respect for the profession," Ms. Walsh said, "that we think anyone should be allowed to train."

There’s a lot more. None of it is good news. We have delivered the future into the hands of the professors of education, and when we seek to “improve” the schools we do so by “improving” the teachers – which always means insisting that the teachers accumulate more and more “credentials” from the monopoly which sent them out in lifelong debt but without adequate training. And our remedy to this is to insist that the teachers accumulate even more debt acquiring an ever increasing array of credentials from the people who failed to train them in the first place – and to insist that the private schools accept this madness and impose it on their teachers and students as well.

Report criticizes teacher-training programs

By Philip Elliott

The Associated Press

Published: 12:38 p.m., June 18

WASHINGTON — The nation’s teacher-training programs do not adequately prepare would-be educators for the classroom, even as they produce almost triple the number of graduates needed, according to a survey of more than 1,000 programs released today.

The National Council on Teacher Quality review is a scathing assessment of colleges’ education programs and their admission standards, training and value. The report, which drew immediate criticism, was designed to be provocative and urges leaders at teacher-training programs to rethink what skills would-be educators need to be taught to thrive in the classrooms of today and tomorrow.

“Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms” with an ever-increasing diversity of ethnic and socioeconomic students, the report’s authors wrote.

“A vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars,” the report said.

The report was likely to drive debate about which students are prepared to be teachers in the coming decades and how they are prepared. Once a teacher settles into a classroom, it’s tough to remove him or her involuntarily and opportunities for wholesale retraining are difficult — if nearly impossible — to find.

The answer, the council and its allies argue, is to make it more difficult for students to get into teacher preparation programs in the first place. And once there, they should be taught the most effective methods to help students.

http://www.registerguard.com/rg/news/30040676-76/programs-teacher-teachers-council-students.html.csp

Of course there is dissent from the professors of education:

Controversial Report Criticizes UCSB Teacher Education Program

But Many Say Its Findings Are Incomplete and Inaccurate

California’s teacher education programs — including UCSB’s — are woefully inadequate, according to a report released by the controversial National Council on Teacher Quality. Tine Sloan, director of UCSB’s Teacher Education Program, compiled a list of methodological issues with the study, stating that she concurred, “the widely held view of this report is that it is based on partial and inaccurate data that fails to capture valid and reliable indicators of teacher performance.”

http://www.independent.com/news/2013/jun/21/controversial-report-criticizes-ucsb-teacher-educa/

You may expect to see a great many more reports from education departments defending their monopoly on granting education credentials only to those who make proper obeisance to them – and go into debt to pay them. Being an effective teacher is not a credential: credentials are bits of paper issued by professors of education, many of whom have no actual classroom experience, but are steeped in education theory.

Training for common core standards comes amid national report criticizing teacher-training

By LUCAS L. JOHNSON II  Associated Press June 18, 2013 – 4:30 pm EDT

NASHVILLE, Tennessee — As Tennessee education officials begin training teachers on how to implement a new set of common core benchmarks for math and reading, they acknowledge more work is needed following the release of a national education report Tuesday that heavily criticizes teacher-training programs.

More than 30,000 teachers from across the state have signed up to be trained over the next six weeks, according to Education Department spokeswoman Kelli Gauthier. Sessions began Tuesday in 17 districts statewide.

The common core standards, which 45 states and the District of Columbia are adopting, are described as a set of higher expectations in math and English that include more critical thinking and problem solving to help better prepare students for global competition.

The report by the National Council on Teacher Quality said the nation’s teacher-training programs do not adequately prepare would-be educators for the classroom.

In particular, "fewer than one in nine elementary programs and just over one-third of high school programs are preparing candidates in content at the level necessary to teach the new common core state standards," the report said.

Gauthier said the report is not surprising and acknowledged there’s "more work to do in terms of preparing teachers to be in front of the classroom."

Of course nothing in the report should be surprising to those who have gone through the credentialing process. As my long time teacher friend said at breakfast this morning, she learned very little from her education courses she took long ago. She has been a very effective teacher, then administrator, in the public schools and now having retired from the public school system  is an effective principal in a Catholic school; but aside from learning the laws and regulations, there was little in her teacher training long ago or more resent administrative training that was of much use.

And indeed this is true all across the country. There are effective teachers in this nation, but generally they are so despite, not because of, the education department courses they have taken. The teacher training system in this nation is broken; and the response of the education establishment is to insist that they be given even more control over a system they invented, installed, maintained, and used to put themselves into a monopoly situation, and to insist that the cure for our problems is to give them even more control.

There is a simple remedy to all this. Just as the California Smog Control laws insist that the test stations that determine whether or not your car passes the smog test cannot be the ones that “fix” the cars, there should be an independent way to determine who is “credentialed” to teach. Why should a retired USAF Technical Sergeant who has taught mathematics to USAF recruits headed for the weather prediction organizations be required, on retirement, to get a teaching credential before he can teach high school math? Yet it is the law. Why should a professor of history be required to get a teaching credential before she is allowed to teach history to high school students? Yet is it so.

Understand I am not insisting that all USAF math instructors are good teachers – although all the ones I have encountered have been because their supervisors would have moved them into other work if they didn’t do the job – or that history professors are necessarily good high school teachers. What I am saying that their teaching credentials are irrelevant to the jobs, and the principals should have the option of choosing them rather than a new Ed School grad who has never taught and doesn’t know the subject matter, but who has a credential.

But that is all for another discussion. The point I want to make here is that the system is broken, and that it has been broken for a long long time, and it is time and past time to stop forcing our teachers to pay tribute to the credential machine which delivers less and less at higher and higher costs.

For those who want to think deeper about the problems of education, I can think of no better place to start than by reading Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America, a book published in the 1940’s and very relevant today.

View 778 Friday, June 21, 2013

SUMMER SOLSTICE

The longest Day of the Year

Actually for Californians the moment of solstice was last night. Tonight will be the brightest Full Moon of the year. Go have a look. I don’t think it matters to werewolves. Though. Full moon is full moon…

I have been gathering information for my education reform piece, but the deeper I get into the miasma that education has become, the more I realize that before there can be actual reform there needs to be some recognition of the problem – and that we are due to lose a lot of children to this monster before anything can be done. I’ve also been working on suggestions as to what parents can do to save their kids.

As Charles Murray observed in his Coming Apart (http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-America-1960-2010-ebook/dp/B00540PAXS/ref=tmm_kin_title_0 and see also Murray’s talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBxqDTA0hc4 ) in many places it is not so apparent that we are in an educational mess. The ruling classes mostly live in their own small worlds, and they don’t see the problems. Fairfax County Virginia may notice that the schools aren’t quite as good as they used to be – at least those who have lived there a while will. There are problems, but they aren’t so acute as they are for the rest of the world. On the other hand, the disastrous No Child Left Behind – which meant No Child Will Ever Get Ahead – policies imposed on most of America have had and are having terrible effects. Other ‘reforms’ have been equally ineffective.

Of course all this thrashing about is a misguided attempt to pay attention to the 1983 Commission on education headed by Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, which famously concluded that “If a foreign country had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.” This produced a flurry of top down actions dictated across the nation, most of which, by the time the bureaucrats and unions had got through with them, made things worse.

The Golden Age of American education came back when the question of “Federal Aid to Education” was an actual political topic, and there was no massive Federal Aid to education. American schools were run by mostly local school boards, and the school boards were elected by the local taxpayers who paid for the schools. The result was a mixture, of course, with some schools being starved of funds while others had plenty of money but it was not well spent, but overall it worked quite well. In a few places like Los Angeles where the schools were consolidated into enormous districts of hundreds of schools the system was so large that the only controls were bureaucratic, and the school boards were professional politicians, but by and large local communities got the schools they wanted and deserved.

But meanwhile the experts and bureaucrats were growing more powerful. The Cold War presumably showed our schools inferior to the Communist schools of Russia and the Captive Nations. A cry went up for Federal Aid to the schools, and the long and successful tradition of resistance to Federal and even State control of the local schools was defeated. Money came in, and with the money came bureaucratic control, and that mean ‘credentials’. It was no longer possible for a local school board to hire a teacher because the board considered a retired military officer qualified to teach high school history, or a local educated housewife facing an empty nest to become the fifth grade teacher. Everyone had to have credentials, and the credentials could only be granted by increasingly expensive colleges of education, and the disasters became worse.

Everyone knows that standards at colleges of education are not high compared to the other departments on campus. Getting credentials requires a lot of effort and even some work, but what it learned in an education department course on teaching a subject is small compared to what would have been learned has the prospective teacher taken a course on the same subject from the English, or mathematics, or history department at the same university. If you don’t know this, go to any nearby college and ask the first twenty people you meet which is the least difficult department.

So the prospective teacher graduates as an indentured servant, owing a debt that will take years to repay and possibly will never be paid, and which cannot be avoided even by bankruptcy. It reminds me of the Soviet Union, which had “free” education, but anyone who had partaken of it was refused permission to emigrate because they owed the state for that education.

I am rambling because I really hadn’t intended to write an essay but rather explain some of what I am doing just now. I haven’t been terribly active this week and there’s a reason.

If you are happy with the schools we have then what I am working on will not be of much use; but for those who see just where our school system is taking us, it might be important.

But before we analyze the school system and try to see what can be done to save it, we first need to identify the really critical groups at risk.

First and foremost are the bright children in a hopeless school from which there is no escape. There are a lot of them.

The second group in the most danger are children of normal intelligence, who are going to be sent to college because they learn nothing useful in high school, and will graduate from college with huge debts and few to zero marketable skills. These are the kids who ought to grow up to be the middle class that governs America: as Aristotle noted, the best government is government by the middle class, the middle class being defined as those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation. Note that this group includes what used to be called skilled workers.

All of which bring us to a controversial point: I am assuming that most of my readers understand that equal education for everyone is expensive, counterproductive, and impossible. The attempt to do it inevitably bring on bad results

This objective truth conflicts with the American ideal of treating everyone equally, and of course has been used as an excuse for arbitrary discrimination, and might be so used again. The fact remains that not everyone will benefit from a university education. Not everyone can benefit from a college education. When we get down to community college – what used to be called junior college – level the question is different: of those who should not go to college or university, how many must go to junior college only because the high schools are so awful? Will more benefit from expanding the junior colleges, or reforming the high schools?

These are the questions to address as citizens.

There is also the question of what to do now? If you are the parent of children in need of an education, what must you do? Clearly they can’t be neglected while waiting for this system, so bad that had it been imposed on us by a foreign power we would rightly consider it an act of war, is dismantled and rebuilt?

I invite comments.

View 778 Tuesday, June 18, 2013

I had several possible leads today but this mail really got my interest.

I came across this blog today on math education, it is not behind a paywall:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/

I don’t any formal experience with evaluating ideas, but this makes sense to me. For instance, back in the 8 bit world when I was teaching myself programming, I could flounder around and figure out a routine for myself, that took a lot of lines, took a lot of processing time, and kind of did want I wanted, a friend of mine, who was from the magnetic drum era, knocked it out in 3 lines. He then gave me a book on algorithms which both saved me a huge amount of time and made me a much better programmer.

tonyb

The article by Alice Crary and W. Stephen Wilson is very much worth your attention. My children are long out of school, and while I have been following the repeated disasters in public education as education theory takes over from experience to produce teachers with credentials who can’t teach I hadn’t seen this one.

At stake in the math wars is the value of a “reform” strategy for teaching math that, over the past 25 years, has taken American schools by storm. Today the emphasis of most math instruction is on — to use the new lingo — numerical reasoning. This is in contrast with a more traditional focus on understanding and mastery of the most efficient mathematical algorithms.
A mathematical algorithm is a procedure for performing a computation. At the heart of the discipline of mathematics is a set of the most efficient — and most elegant and powerful — algorithms for specific operations. The most efficient algorithm for addition, for instance, involves stacking numbers to be added with their place values aligned, successively adding single digits beginning with the ones place column, and “carrying” any extra place values leftward.

What is striking about reform math is that the standard algorithms are either de-emphasized to students or withheld from them entirely. In one widely used and very representative math program — TERC Investigations — second grade students are repeatedly given specific addition problems and asked to explore a variety of procedures for arriving at a solution. The standard algorithm is absent from the procedures they are offered. Students in this program don’t encounter the standard algorithm until fourth grade, and even then they are not asked to regard it as a privileged method.

The battle over math education is often conceived as a referendum on progressive ideals, with those on the reform side as the clear winners. This is reflected, for instance, in the terms that reformists employ in defending their preferred programs. The staunchest supporters of reform math are math teachers and faculty at schools of education. While some of these individuals maintain that the standard algorithms are simply too hard for many students, most take the following, more plausible tack. They insist that the point of math classes should be to get children to reason independently, and in their own styles, about numbers and numerical concepts. The standard algorithms should be avoided because, reformists claim, mastering them is a merely mechanical exercise that threatens individual growth. The idea is that competence with algorithms can be substituted for by the use of calculators, and reformists often call for training students in the use of calculators as early as first or second grade.

Reform math has some serious detractors. It comes under fierce attack from college teachers of mathematics, for instance, who argue that it fails to prepare students for studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. These professors maintain that college-level work requires ready and effortless competence with the standard algorithms and that the student who needs to ponder fractions — or is dependent on a calculator — is simply not prepared for college math. They express outrage and bafflement that so much American math education policy is set by people with no special knowledge of the discipline.

There is considerably more, and all worth your time.

The problem is that we no longer know what the public schools are for, and we no longer recognize that a good public school system would make high school the normal education for citizens, with junior colleges to teach skills not so easily learned in apprenticeships, colleges as the place for those who want more education or need some credentials to make a living (teachers, accountants) and universities for those who are seriously going into professions needing high levels of technical competence. Liberal arts colleges we will leave for another discussion – there are many publications on that.

But the essential point is that public education can’t give everyone the same education. We need not go to the extremes they have in Japan and other places where early examination scores determine the course of your education and your life from then on; but we do need to recognize that not everyone needs to know algebra and calculus, and trying to bestow that as a right is to doom the ones who should know it to being forced to learn at the pace of those who never will learn them.

Jacques Barzun dealt with much of this a very long time ago in his Teacher in America, and anyone who hasn’t read that has both a treat and an epiphany in store. http://www.amazon.com/Teacher-America-Jacques-Barzun/dp/0913966797 alas not in Kindle, at least as yet.

I have errands but I recommend the Crary and Wilson essay to everyone and strongly urge it on all those with children in grade school.

I will also point out that many elementary schools no longer require learning the plus and times – addition and multiplication – tables by heart in first grade (an age at which it’s easy to learn such things by heart). Not knowing the plus and times tables by heart is a great handicap for the rest of one’s life. Like being able to read from an early age on, knowing those algorithms – I recommend learning them to 20 rather than the traditional 10, largely because if you know them to 20 you will inevitably notice some patterns that will make learning some other things about number easier – is a great gift. It saves time in everything from counting change to calculating the tip in a restaurant, and a hundred other things you do daily.

If you are involved with elementary education, either as a teacher or a parent, read the Crary and Wilson essay – and go read Barzun. And if you have read Barzun it won’t hurt to read him again.

"Playing balance of power games, subsidizing one enemy to fight another, is a game of high risk and high skill."

Does anyone really think the current administration possesses the talents to manage this?

s/f

Couv

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

I have no evidence to suggest that we have those skills at the cabinet level in the United States, nor have we politicians who understand their own limits at such matters of state.  This has always been a defect of a republic: it has to go to war to develop long term professionals in such matters.  We are at a war without such development, and the result is that it appears to be war without end.  We do not have a Richelieu or a Metternich, nor indeed a Pitt or a Palmerston. We have people capable of such finesse but they are not likely to be put in power, nor left there if they get there. 

It was not from lack of understanding of political history that many of our Framers concluded that America’s best course was to be the city on a hill, a shining example of the fruits of liberty.  We are the friends of liberty everywhere but we are guardians only of our own.

Thor

Hi,

A friend sent me a link. I’ve seen THOR referenced in a couple of science fiction books, sure, but in a comic about 20-somethings working in a coffee shop?

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2468

Ed

Ed Hahn

Complete with tungsten.  Well, my original papers were never classified.  The proposals that were generated by them were, but I suspect that even they have long been declassified.

Subject: Educating Educators Lost

A new study rates almost all U.S. college programs that try to prepare persons to be teachers at mediocre or below.

One quote, "We don’t know how to prepare teachers"

I guess, at one time, we did know how to prepare teachers. We must have forgotten along the way.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/university-programs-that-train-us-teachers-get-mediocre-marks-in-first-ever-ratings/2013/06/17/ab99d64a-d75b-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html?hpid=z2

—

Dwayne Phillips

Go to any college campus and ask the first 20 people you meet which department is toughest and which is easiest.  Ask the next 20 if they have any Mickey Mouse majors.

Teaching is part knowledge and part skill.  The knowledge should come from the same place that other students get it. To teach math one ought to know some math. Etc.  The Ed Dept. courses in math and science are generally taught by education theorists, so the result are expected.  Of course there are exceptions.  There are some good education schools.

When the Rev. Moon bought Bridgeport University they asked me as one of a list of consultants what they ought to do with it.  I suggested starting a University Grammar School that took in neighborhood kids – it is not in a university district so there would be plenty of diversity – and had the classes taught by teachers who actually could teach, and who were the advisory council for the department of education and had full control of it. A different picture.  I pointed out that we could get a number of people involved in this including Barzun and Annette Kirk who was one of the principal authors of the 1983 National Commission on Education “Seybold Report”.  We could probably get Seybold himself – he had just attended one of Moon’s International Society for the Unification of the Sciences meetings in Seoul and I had actually discusses this with him.  We could in other words get things started well and use the actual school results as the criteria, and perhaps change the world.

Alas it didn’t happen, in part due to opposition of the Bridgeport faculty who were afraid of Moon and his interference:  I tried to point out that not a single one of the consultants he had brought in to try to organize this was a member of the Unification Church.  Some were Catholic, some were Protestant, some were Jews, and at least one public atheist.  Ah well. It would have been a lot of work for me, and for my wife who would have had to organize the reading instruction program for first and second grade and probably would have worked directly with the first teacher class. 

It didn’t happen but it still could, somewhere.  We used to do that sort of thing. Look what I learned in Capleville with 2 grades to the classroom in the Depression.  It can be done but we have to want to do it, and the progressives  — well, we’ve been through all this before.;