Wednesday, February 22, 2006

MATHEMATICS SHOWS UP THE DUMMIES

Math is a killer. There's no way around it. If anything can torpedo the hopes of the 120 high school students in Ernest Davenport's 11-week ACT/SAT prep class, it's the math on those college entrance exams. It's hard, and it's nearly impossible without taking the classes in high school to prepare you. Yet most of the teens sitting in Davenport's free class, nearly all students of color from the Twin Cities, will take the exams in April without having finished advanced algebra or geometry. It's an incredible handicap, like putting a novice on skis, shoving him down a double-diamond run, and then wondering why he keeps falling.

Minnesota needs more students of color to succeed in college. Minority high school student numbers will jump in the next decade while the number of white graduates falls, so the state's future depends increasingly on their success. High-level math is key. National research shows a student who finishes a course beyond Algebra II more than doubles the odds she'll earn a bachelor's degree. But many high school students never get to Algebra II.

Davenport has a few weeks to try to prepare the students, but all that math can't be learned over a few Saturdays. The practice tests that students took on the first day of the prep class in mid-January reflect that. Davenport makes his tests a little harder than the real ACT. Still, most of the prep-class students could correctly answer only three of 15 questions during a timed exam.

Why didn't they take algebra sooner? Did they worry about doing poorly? Was it because their friends wouldn't be there or they didn't get a push from family or counselors? Were the classes available? The questions linger with no single answer. These are highly motivated, capable students who perhaps didn't get the right guidance about what courses to take or advice on how hard they needed to push.....

Preparation is a huge issue, one that students of color realize perhaps more than the public. Last week, the nonpartisan group Public Agenda released national surveys showing minority high school students were more likely than whites to call math and science "absolutely essential" for real-world success but also were more likely than white students (31 percent vs. 20 percent) to say that not being taught enough math and science is a "serious problem" at their school.

Minnesota's average ACT scores always look great. Yet the state ranks low in the total number of high school students who take any math, let alone advanced math. "If you were a kid in a college-bound program and you came from a family that had the means and wherewithal to have high expectations for you, you were probably going to come out OK," said Bill Linder-Scholer former director of SciMathMN, a public-private group that encourages more math and science in Minnesota schools. "If you weren't in that situation, there were lower education expectations. Whether that was family, schools, teachers, certainly the system had lower expectations. "All the college-bound kids took three, four years of math and science. If you didn't know what you wanted to do, the expectations were clearly much lower," he said. "It's difficult to talk about without getting into very difficult social issues and even race issues."

When the Minnesota Office of Higher Education analyzed data on those who took the ACT last year, it found only 16 percent of black students, 29 percent of American Indian teens, 35 percent of Latino and 40 percent of Asian students were ready for college algebra based on their math scores, compared with 55 percent for whites.

The reality is that the seeds of these differences are sown before high school. The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation's report card, found some of the nation's worst test score gaps in Minnesota when it came to eighth-graders and math. Right now less than 5 percent of students of color earn a bachelor's degree from a Minnesota college within 10 years of their freshman year in high school, a recent Citizens League report noted. Many won't graduate from high school at all....

More here








The British Left has retained its remarkable powers of self-delusion

Mick Hume on the Left's hatred of selective schools

In normal circumstances I would agree that few politicians are more deserving of being booed to the rafters than Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary. However, the Labour activists who booed Ms Kelly during their spring party conference, in protest at the Government's refusal to abolish the last grammar schools, are the ones who need egging off. For many in the Labour Party, it seems, schools that still select using the 11-plus have become the new foxhunters. It is quite an achievement, but their crusade against the grammars makes even less sense than the one to ban hunting.

I am an ex-grammar school boy, yet still consider myself on the Left (not something I learnt at my 1970s Surrey boys' grammar). If we were designing an education system from scratch, I probably would not propose including 164 English grammar schools. But who is supposed to benefit from getting rid of these few academically successful schools now? How exactly is abolishing a relative handful of good schools supposed to improve the bad ones?

Forty years ago the drive to replace academic selection with comprehensive education was motivated by a genuine, if idealistic, belief that all children might experience the quality schooling then enjoyed by a few. By contrast, the grudge campaign against the remaining grammars seems infused with a mean spirit of levelling down. Neither the existence of these grammar schools nor their abolition will make the world more equal. We should stop investing our hopes in education as a panacea for society's ills. But we should want to make an updated version of the non-vocational, mind-broadening education some of us received at grammar school available to all children - not as a tool for social mobility or social inclusion, but as a desirable end in itself.

Instead, despite the boos, the Government supports the anti-grammar activists in spirit. Indeed, until recently it supported them in public, dangling the prospect of abolition before the disaffected Left just as it did with the hunting ban. The only difference now, as Tony Blair makes clear, is that new Labour does not want "a war" over grammars with parents who have voted against abolition at every opportunity. However, the Government's other reforms will continue the drift away from academic education towards using schools as instruments of social engineering and control.

Those last few grammars are talked about as symbols of educational malaise. For me, a more telling symbol is what happened to Woking County Grammar School for Boys after we left: they turned the old stone building into a shiny police fortress.

SO WHAT can it mean to be left wing now? The question occurred to this old libertarian Marxist more than once this week: when the petty, illiberal ban on smoking in public was hailed as a victory for progressive forces (Liberte, Egalite - defense de fumer?), and when Gordon Brown made his big pre-prime ministerial speech.

Whatever else it has lost over the years, the British Left has retained its unsurpassed powers of self-delusion. The last illusion it clung to was that, once in power, Mr Brown would throw off the mask and emerge as the true face of "Real Labour". Now the Chancellor has spelt out not only that he would govern with the penny-pinching mindset of a Presbyterian accountant, but also that when it came to ruling via the politics of fear and turning every government department into "a department of security" he would be - wait for it - worse than Mr Blair. If Labour's 1983 manifesto, written at the Left's peak, was "the longest suicide note in history", Mr Brown's address sounded like a 9,000-word living will for the terminally ill Labour Left.






Dumb university teachers

This example from Australia

A university graduate student abandoned the institution in frustration after a marking fiasco during which a lecturer told him to produce "more smarter writing". Former Queensland University of Technology Master of Business Marketing student Rohan Duggan, 38, said his nine-month ordeal included seven meetings and hundreds of pages of correspondence, some farcical. The original marking of a 2000-word paper included a comment from lecturer Edwina Luck advising Mr Duggan to present "more smarter writing".

After Ms Luck graded the paper at 65 per cent, Mr Duggan questioned the grade and Ms Luck passed it to another staffer, Dr Yunus Ali, who downgraded it to 35 per cent. In re-marking, Dr Ali questioned the use of the terms "Yin" and "Yang", a Chinese concept of balance, and said they should have been listed as references in the bibliography (a list of the books used as reference material). Yesterday, Dr Ali admitted he had "no idea" what the terms meant and thought they were references to people's names. "We don't go into the deeper meaning," he said.

In response to further queries, Ms Luck sent Mr Duggan a short e-mail which, because her "s" key was not functioning, read as: "I knew you would be di appointed, o what I have done i taken the middle ground. I am uppo ed to take the econd mark, but I did not want to kill you that much. I do hope that you have learned from thi . Not the point of a king for explanation, but that we a lecturer are not totally illy!! Academic writing i difficult. I hope all our comment can be helpful in the future. Edwina."

Mr Duggan then took his complaint to higher authorities and his original mark was restored. Mr Duggan said the restored mark helped him achieve a distinction in the subject, although when he learned that Dr Ali would have been teaching him in second year he decided to go elsewhere and has now completed a Master of Marketing Managing degree at Griffith University.

QUT registrar Dr Carol Dickenson and Business Dean Professor Peter Little said that both Ms Luck and Dr Ali had been reprimanded and made to attend a seminar on Learning and Teaching Issues. They agreed their conduct was "obviously unacceptable". Professor Little said if due process had been applied, Ms Luck would have given the assignment to her (Luck's) head of department who would have selected a staff member himself to do the re-marking. He insisted Dr Ali was "very well qualified academically". [No evidence to the contrary is allowed, obviously]

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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