Algebra II Revisited

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Algebra II Revisited

There’s a new (May, 2013) and, I think, very important report out from the National Center on Education and the Economy entitled “What does it really mean to be college and work ready?”  The organization and been around since 1988, and reports its work as “…researching the world’s best performing education systems to unlock their secrets.”  I strongly recommend you read it.  Here’s a video commentary on the report by their president, Marc Tucker, video commentary from http://www.ncee.org/college-and-work-ready/  Insert

I wrote about Algebra II and the Common Core in this previous blog, and NCEE’s research offers another commentary on the value of Algebra II as an indicator of being college and career ready.  I’ll offer some quotes from the report to expand my prior argument against Algebra II for all.

National Center for Education and the Economy Math Findings

NCEE opens their report, which actually covers both ELA and Mathematics college and work ready issues, by noting that 45% of students entering higher education for college degrees or for career preparation enroll in community colleges.  Hence, NCEE argues, looking deeply at the requirements for success in community colleagues is a practical and a real world indicator of what it means to be college and work ready.  About half of community college students go on to four year programs, further supporting their rationale for looking at community colleges.  The rest who graduate are taking a training program that leads to a career option.  The study examined “the most popular and diverse programs….” (p. 2) in randomly selected community colleges in seven states:  Accounting, Automotive Technology, Biotech/Electrical Technology, Business, Criminal Justice, Early Childhood Education, Information Technology/Computer Programming, and Nursing, plus the General Track.  For math, they looked at the math actually taught in the “initial credit bearing courses” in the programs (p. 2).  They looked at the textbooks, graded student assignments, tests and exams to “analyze the reading and writing skills that are required…” in both math and English Composition.

The findings were surprising.  Only one program required first year students to know Algebra II.  NCEE notes that Algebra II content is required for students who will take calculus or use calculus in their work, but citing a 2011 study from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown, NCEE notes that only about five percent of the working population needs to understand calculus.   “Indeed, community college first year programs of study typically assume that students have not mastered Algebra I.  The most advanced mathematics content used in the vast majority of the first-year college programs we analyzed can reasonably be characterized as the mathematics associated with Algebra 1.25, that is some, but not all, of the topics usually associated with Algebra I, plus a few other topics, mostly related to geometry or statistics (p. 3).”  They continue by noting that the math that ‘most enables” student success is middle school math, ‘especially arithmetic, ration, proportion, expressions and simple equations (p. 3).”

They observe that most high school grads don’t actually have good command of middle school fundamentals, and that competency in math that is rarely taught at any level — “schematics, geometric visualization and complex applications of measurement (p.3)” are also competencies that would lead to college success.

Algebra II is not a college and career prerequisite

Their conclusions on pages 4-6 make this clear statement about Algebra II:  “Mastery of Algebra II is widely thought to be a prerequisite for success in college and careers.  Our research shows that that is not so. The most demanding mathematics courses typically required of community college students are those required by the mathematics department,…but the content of the first year mathematics courses offered by the …. mathematics department is typically… Algebra I, some Algebra II and a few topics in geometry…. Based on our data one cannot make the case that high school graduates must be proficient in Algebra Ii to be ready for college and careers.”

They further conclude that rushing students into Algebra I early misses the opportunity to emphasize the very strong level of content mastery that should be obtained at the middle school level before moving on to higher math.  They suggest that understanding basic concepts at higher levels than now expected would permit students ‘to learn whatever mathematics they need for the path they subsequently want to pursue more quickly and easily than they can now( p. 4).”

More high school math options needed

Another noteworthy conclusion (p. 5) is “American high schools should consider abandoning the requirement that all high school students study a program of mathematics leading to calculus and instead offer that mathematics program as one among a number of options available for high school students … with other options available (e.g., statistics, data analysis and applied geometry) that include the mathematics needed by workers in other clusters of occupations.  By doing so high schools will almost certainly expand opportunity to many students who now find success in college closed off by a one-size-fit-all sequence of mathematics topics that actually fits the requirements only for a very narrow range of occupations.”

These are powerful words that fly in the face of Common Core standards.  But if the CCSS are expected to prepare students for college and careers, who determined the specifics of these standards?  When one considers the folks who wrote the math standards, one sees individuals highly vested in core math content who seem to have taken highly competitive college admissions criteria as their basic and their only competency target.  They ignored the career level requirements of most workers in the nation, despite clear research about what career mathematics competency standards should be.

Let’s have a look at job requirements.  I’ve read elsewhere (See Andrew Hacker’s New York Times 2012 opinion piece or this commentary from Get Schooled, by Maureen Downey.  This comment excerpt from penguin mom on the Get Schooled piece reproduces my argument rather well:

I was a math/computer science major in college. I did use what I learned in my Algebra 2, Trig, and Calculus high school classes… in college. Once I got out of college, I did Not use that information again even when working in the computer field. You do not need to know logs or rational equations or trig to write a cash register program or pretty much any program besides an engineering one. I didn’t pick Algebra 2 back up until I entered the teaching arena and started teaching the concepts again. Besides the general logic skills learned from solving the problems, I really don’t know of a lot in Algebra 2 that will translate into real world usage for the vast majority of the students. Graphed a line or parabola recently anyone? Used the quadratic formula? Solved a Trig equation? I think it would be Much better to require strong Economic, Personal Finance, Business Accounting and (usable) Statistics courses for every student. That information would be used in just about any field. Figuring interest or profit. Understanding (at least somewhat) what poll numbers actually mean. Keeping a budget and balancing a checkbook. Those are all useful skills.

Get this NCEE report, read the math section, and if you are a generalist, read the English Literature findings as well.  These are a topic for another time.

Poverty and Educational Attainment, Part II

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Poverty and Educational Attainment, Part II

In Part II, I’ll continue my commentary on poverty as the elephant in the educational reform movement.  Read my first post, Part I, here.  Once again, I am reading from the May issue of Educational Leadership.  Susan B Neuman, an education professor from the University of Michigan, reports on a 10-year study she and colleagues conducted which compared two neighborhoods in Philadelphia.  One, Kensington, is 90 percent poor, multiethnic, with a 29 percent unemployment rate.  Chestnut Hill, on the other hand, is gentrified, 80 percent white and 20 percent black, with parents who tend to be educated professionals, surrounded by parks “and … somewhat geographically isolated from the rest of the city.”

Over the 10 years of the study, the researchers examined how these disparities contributed to reading and ‘the development of information capital.  They noted three important differences they suggest are related to the economic disparities of the neighborhoods, the families, the community resources, and the schools.  These differences are print resources, adult supports, and independent reading.

In Chestnut Hill, there are multiple sources available to parents selecting a book for their children, with thousands of books, magazines and comic book titles.  Kensington, in contrast, had a small fraction of that number.  Neuman reports 13 titles per child on one hand, and just 1 per child on the other.  Tellingly, schools in Chestnut Hill had a wide assortment for children while Kensington has a limited and “merely adequate” selection.  The libraries in the former had twice the titles as the libraries in the latter.

The adult supports were also noticeable different.  Observing differences among the public libraries of the two communities, the researchers noted that in Chestnut Hill, children were read to by adults for 4 minutes of every hour observed, with adults recommending and guiding book selection.  In Kensington, “not one adult entered the preschool area…”  The observers estimated hat Chestnut Hill children “heard 14 times the number of words read in print per library visit as” their counterparts across town.  As background to this analysis, Neuman cites the research of Annett Lareau (2003), in Unequal Childhoods, (Berkeley: University of California Press).  This work describes differences in parenting styles between working class and middle class families.

In describing the differences in independent reading, the researchers focused on children ages 10-13.  Once again, they recorded what students were reading at the library, the grade level of the text, and whether it as informational or entertainment.  They also examined similar elements of student computer use at the libraries.  They found that only 58 percent of Kensington students were reading at grade level, and frequently the texts were designed for younger children.  In Chestnut Hill, 93 percent of students read at grade level and 7 percent were reading at higher levels.  Differences in time spent were also notable, and Kensington children also spent the majority of time reading for entertainment.  The same patterns were observed on the computers.  “In fact, {Chestnut Hill] students spent about 12 times the amount of time on informational reading materials in print and about 5 times more on informational websites than they spent on entertainment content…”

What are the consequences of these differences?  One significant difference is the well-known vocabulary differences that are found when comparing low-income children with middle and upper class children at virtually any grade level.  These late affect the accumulation of academic content–when children do not have the vocabulary to delve into grade level or increasingly complex text, they will remain at a significant advantage their entire school careers.  No amount of good teaching, by itself, can overcome these kinds of class-based disadvantages on a consistent, scalable basis.

Neuman offers four suggestions.  First, un-level the playing field by providing educations resources in low income schools that match those available in middle-class communities.  This is a major task–it really means extra funding for resources and for additional adult services in poor schools, going well beyond Title I.  Second, she notes that strengthening parent involvement by providing programs to help parents by teaching them about “skills and strategies children will need to be successful in school.”  Such programs are often suggested but simply are too rare so far to make a real difference.  Third, she suggests “people underestimate the capabilities of students who live in poor neighborhoods.”  This isn’t at all controversial, and is the basis for the notion that simply by staffing schools with brilliant and highly successful teachers, the problems of urban poverty and educational low performance will disappear.  Fourth, and likely far to idealistic, she suggests economically integrating schools, and cites research suggesting that such efforts can help to equalize the resources, improve school stability, decrease discipline problems and increase volunteer support in schools.

If these notions pique your interest, read the next article by Eric Jensen, entitled “How Poverty Affects Classroom Engagement.”  Eric is the author of two ASCD books:  Engagement with Poverty in Mind, 2013, and Teaching with Poverty in Mind, 2009.  He offers seven ways in which children of poverty struggle with engagement:  Health and nutrition; vocabulary; effort; hope and the growth mind-set; cognition; relationships; and distress.  He has multiple citations to the research suggesting these seven concerns, with suggestions on what a teacher can do.

When we hear President Obama supporting universal preschool, it’s an encouraging to think that at least a few politicians are thinking about how to address obvious gaps between the haves and the rest of American society.  The American Dream and upward mobility are hitting a wall of unequal opportunity that has grown higher and higher for the last 40 years.  Without breaking down this wall, or building steps by which the poor can climb the wall, the Dream will fade to dark.  And the major movers of education reform are simply paying no attention to such realities

Do get a copy of the May 2013 Educational Leadership.  It’s the best issue I’ve read in several years, and poverty is the most important and most neglected issue in American education today.

Poverty and Educational Attainment, Part I

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In recent week, several excellent publications have crossed my desk or shown up on the Internet resources I read regularly. In this first of several postings on poverty and it’s effect on educational attainment, I’ll continue to build on one of my regular themes in this blog–that the effects of poverty on children are the elephant in the education reform movement. Everyone knows poverty impedes learning, but the well-know reform leaders, ostrich-like, refuse to confront the realities that researchers have elucidated again and again.

The Income-Achievement Gap

The theme of the May issue of Educational Leadership is “Faces of Poverty.” I think this issue is among the best I’ve ever read, and is particularly important to those of us who are concerned that this fundamental impediment to educational progress is being overlooked or intentionally ignored.  If you don’t subscribe already, you can purchase this issue for $7.00 on the ASCD website.  The first article is entitled “The Widening Income-Achievement Gap,” from Sean Reardon. Sean has looked at 50 years of data on the relationship between achievement and family income, using data from 12 national studies in which the achievement measures were standardized reading or math tests.

The Income Achievement Gap is Growing

Reardon points out that in the 60’s the income achievement gap between the 90th and 10th income percentiles was 0.9 standard deviations on standardized test scores. Today it’s 1.25 standard deviations. Over the same period, the black-white achievement gap has gone in the opposite direction–from nearly 1.25 SDs to about 0.6 SDs. This, he suggests, represents considerable success within schools in addressing racial equality, but highlights the problems that increasing economic stratification has created. The income achievement gap is growing across all racial populations is now at an all-time high in American life.

Furthermore, these income gaps are showing up in other measures of educational attainment such as college completion rates, enrollment at selective colleges, and participation in ‘soft skills’ like sports, clubs, and participation in extracurricular activities and community life.

The Gap Starts Early and Continues Through School

Gaps are observable in early childhood and kindergarten programs, and as students progress into higher grades, the gap continues. It grows slowly, but not significantly, and Reardon suggests this demonstrates that the cause of the gap is not unequal school quality (emphasis Reardon). Further analysis of the data suggests the gap actually closes during the school year and widens in the summer.

Increased Economic Stratification

Several changes in American society are suggested as causes of the gap. In the 50’s, families at the 90th percentile of income earned 5 time that of families at the 10th percentile. Today that gap is 11 times. Upward social mobility has also decreased as middle class jobs have disappeared. Today, upward mobility in the US is lower than in almost every other developed country of the world.

High income families usually have two parent caregivers supporting their children and providing resources for their success. Low income families are far more likely to be headed by single women with low educational attainment.

At the extremes of family income, between 1977 and 2007, the income of families at the 90th percentile increased 90 percent, while families in the bottom 20th percentile saw increases of only 7 percent, falling farther and farther behind every year. (Duncan and Murnane, (Eds.), 2011, Whither Opportunity?, New York, Russell Sage Foundation.)

College and Career Ready as the Measure of Achievement

Today, we are laboring under increasing pressure to get children ‘college and career’ ready, with educational programs that claim to be designed to prepare kids to continue in higher education after high school completion. One can question whether new standards appropriately reflect career readiness, unless the career required academic training–we do an abysmal job of meeting the needs of young adults who want to learn a trade. Much of society has gone along with the notion that success in life requires an advanced college program of some kind, of 2 years or more.

With the decline of formerly middle class jobs, overall generic data suggests that many of the employment sectors that are expanding, and that pay middle class wages, require higher educational levels, thus justifying the push toward college standards. This ignores the kinds of jobs that keep the backbone of the nation running. The national infrastructure continues to erode, and the vast majority of construction jobs don’t require college level training. So too, many manufacturing jobs–assembly lines in the auto industry have a few highly skilled tasks, but most are not. In general, the construction trades are not technical jobs either. And we rely on low-skill jobs for our day to day operations–retail sales, care of the elderly, clerical work, … the list goes on and on.

As a nation, we are very close to defining college ready as the only measure that counts. This is short-sighted, and indirectly suggests that certain employment opportunities will increasing be filled only by the children of the bottom 20%, who simply, overall, do not have the resources to thrive in a society with an ever-increasing income opportunity gap.

Teacher Devotion

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As I listened to the accounts of survivors and rescuers talking about the actions of teachers in two school buildings in Oklahoma during the May 20th 2-mile wide tornado, I was overwhelmed by the contrasts between the selfless acts of these devoted teachers and the endless attacks on the profession coming from those who endlessly attack teachers and want to hold them responsible for the problems in education today.

From the May 21 New York Times ‘Crews Search for Survivors in Oklahoma’ comes a report of the actions of teachers at the AgapeLand Learning Center, a day care program, the staff “hustled some 15 children into two bathrooms, draping them with a protective covering and singing songs with them to keep them calm.  As the wind ripped the roof off one of the bathroom, and debris rained down on the children, they remained calm singing “you are my sunshine…  Though the day care center was almost entirely destroyed, the children were unharmed.”

Teachers in other buildings were reported to have covered children with their own bodies–one teacher covering three and another covering five, risking and suffering injuries themselves but keeping their charges safe.

In Newtown, CT, the principal and classroom teachers stood between the gunman that threatened kids in the building, and were gunned down.  In buildings across the nation, teachers are trained in emergency procedures to follow during school crises, but putting one’s own body between kids and the danger is not part of the training.  it is, however, what teachers everywhere would do.  In eduction, we take care of our charges–regularly, again and again, and without remorse.  It is part of our dedication to those children entrusted to our care.  In emergencies, we lead by example.

At Columbine, as the shooters fired on students in the cafeteria, a teacher and two other school employees helped students escape throughout the firing.  Later, that teacher fell victim to the shooters in a hallway, and died despite being dragged into a classroom by another teacher and students who attempted to save him as the shootings continued.

I recall a colleague in New York, Charles Deahl, and his automatic response that likely saved a student at Woodlands High School, where I was an Assistant Principal.  Charles was a quiet English teacher and senior adviser who could step into any movie roll as Mark Twain, without makeup or voice coaching, and probably without a script.  As he walked to his classroom after lunch, he observed a panicked group of students around a girl bent over the corner of a stairway handrail, trying to push her own abdomen onto the rail.  He calmly walked behind her, performed a heimlich maneuver, pushed the obstruction out of her windpipe, checked to see that she was OK, sent her to the nurse with friends to be sure, sought no credit, and went on to teach his  class.  Most of the building heard nothing about his performance until observers made a point of highlighting his life-saving behavior.

This isn’t comparable to stepping between a gunman and a classroom of kids, but I know 60 of the 80 staff members, and perhaps all 80 of them in that building, would have stepped up in a similar emergency.  The other 20 would have been leading and herding students to safety through hallways and stairways, following rehearsed evacuation routes and leading students to alternate routes if the nearest hallway was blocked.  Teachers and administrators all over the country, without hesitation, act in crises to help their students first, and they do it all day and every day.  We all know it’s a part of both our moral and our professional responsibility.

On the website Stop the Shootings you’ll find 387 school shootings in the US since 1992, and about half of the victims are adults.  Reviewing the brief descriptions of each event will show that many were school administrators, teachers, or staff attempting to protect others or stop the shooter.  This is what school people do.

I’m not surprised that educators and some parents, teacher unions, and a few administrative unions and professional associations are beginning to push back at the incessant droning on about “The Manufactured Crisis,” as David Berliner and Bruce Billed wrote about back in 1995.  The mythology about America’s crisis continues to be parroted by pundits and profiteers today.

When will these folks thank their teachers for the selflessness displayed where and when devoted teachers are most needed?