http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/30reading.html?_r=1&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
JONESBORO, Ga. — For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee classic that many Americans regard as a literary rite of passage.
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Future of Reading
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This is the fourth in a series of articles that look at how reading — and learning to read — is changing.
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Room for Debate: The Crush of Summer Homework
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But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.
Among their choices: James Patterson‘s adrenaline-fueled “Maximum Ride” books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the “Captain Underpants” series of comic-book-style novels.
But then there were students like Jennae Arnold, a soft-spoken eighth grader who picked challenging titles like “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, of which she wrote, partly in text-message speak: “I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own.”
The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on.
In New York City many public and private elementary schools and some middle schools already employ versions of reading workshop. Starting this fall, the school district in Chappaqua, N.Y., is setting aside 40 minutes every other day for all sixth, seventh and eighth graders to read books of their own choosing.
In September students in Seattle’s public middle schools will also begin choosing most of their own books. And in Chicago the public school district has had a pilot program in place since 2006 in 31 of its 483 elementary schools to give students in grades 6, 7 and 8 more control over what they read. Chicago officials will consider whether to expand the program once they review its results.
None of those places, however, are going as far as Ms. McNeill.
In the method familiar to generations of students, an entire class reads a novel — often a classic — together to draw out the themes and study literary craft. That tradition, proponents say, builds a shared literary culture among students, exposes all readers to works of quality and complexity and is the best way to prepare students for standardized tests.
But fans of the reading workshop say that assigning books leaves many children bored or unable to understand the texts. Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading.
“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” Ms. McNeill said, several months into her experiment. “Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,” I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”
Critics of the approach say that reading as a group generally leads to more meaningful insights, and they question whether teachers can really keep up with a roomful of children reading different books. Even more important, they say, is the loss of a common body of knowledge based on the literary classics — often difficult books that children are unlikely to choose for themselves.
“What child is going to pick up ‘Moby-Dick’?” said Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University who was assistant education secretary under President George H. W. Bush. “Kids will pick things that are trendy and popular. But that’s what you should do in your free time.”
Indeed, some school districts are moving in the opposite direction. Boston is developing a core curriculum that will designate specific books for sixth grade and is considering assigned texts for each grade through the 12th.
Joan Dabrowski, director of literacy for Boston’s public schools, said teachers would still be urged to give students some choices. Many schools in fact take that combination approach, dictating some titles while letting students select others.
Even some previously staunch advocates of a rigid core curriculum have moderated their views. “I actually used to be a real hard-line, great-books, high-culture kind of person who would want to stick to Dickens,” said Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and the author of “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” But now, in the age of Game Boys and Facebook, “I think if they read a lot of Conan novels or Hardy Boys or Harry Potter or whatever, that’s good,” he said. “We just need to preserve book habits among the kids as much as we possibly can.”
In Search of a Better Way
As a teenager growing up just a few miles from Jonesboro, Ms. McNeill loved the novels of Judy Blume and Danielle Steel. But in school she was forced to read the classics. She remembers vividly disliking “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Still, she went on to teach it to her own students.
In 1999 she moved to Jonesboro Middle School, where more than 80 percent of the students are eligible for free lunches. Teachers there stuck to a curriculum prescribed by the county. Working with students designated as gifted, Ms. McNeill began teaching familiar novels like “Lord of the Flies” and “Mockingbird.” But she said, “I just never felt that they were as excited about reading as I wanted them to be.”
Ms. McNeill, an amateur poet whose favorite authors include Barbara Kingsolver and Nick Hornby, wondered if forcing some students through a book had dampened their interest in reading altogether. She tried “literature circles,” in which a smaller group chose a book to read together, and had some success. Then, in early 2008, she attended a professional seminar in Atlanta led by Nancie Atwell, the author of “In the Middle” and “The Reading Zone,” popular guidebooks for teachers that promote giving students widespread choice. “In the Middle” has sold nearly half a million copies since it was first published in 1987.
An Eye-Opening Experience
Over the last two decades, Ms. Atwell, along with Lucy M. Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has emerged as a guru of the reading workshop approach. Ms. Atwell brings 45 teachers a year to her base of operations, the Center for Teaching and Learning, a small private school she founded in Edgecomb, Me., an hour north of Portland. Last September Ms. McNeill spent a week there with four other English teachers, each of whom had paid $800, observing Ms. Atwell’s work.
That first cool fall morning, 17 seventh- and eighth-grade students assembled for their reading and writing class in a large room overlooking a grove of birch and maple trees. Shelves of books ringed the room. The students flopped in forest green beanbag chairs set in a circle on the carpeted floor. At the front Ms. Atwell sat in a rocking chair, a small stack of volumes beside her.
Ms. McNeill watched closely, taking notes. After a session in which the students edited poems they had been writing, Ms. Atwell ceded the rocking chair to students, who gave short talks recommending books to their classmates.
One eighth grader presented “Getting the Girl” by Markus Zusak, the author of “The Book Thief,” a best-selling young-adult novel about the Holocaust that had been one of the boy’s favorites. He highlighted the book’s unusual line breaks and one-word sentences, concluding, “It’s a fun, good read.”
When Ms. Atwell resumed her seat in the rocking chair, she pitched several titles she had read over the weekend. She held up “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,” the novel by David Wroblewski that had been anointed by Oprah Winfrey.
“It is just incredible,” she said, leaning forward. “It is about signing, dog-breeding, muteness, adolescence, the beauty of the American Midwest.” Before she could even lay it back on the floor, Maura Anderson, an eighth grader, asked if she could take it to start reading that afternoon.
In a 30-minute reading period that followed, each student hunkered low in a beanbag chair. Ms. Atwell moved quietly among them, coming in close for whispered conferences and noting page numbers to make sure each student had read at least 20 pages the night before.
One girl had “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult, while a boy a few seats away read Khaled Hosseini‘s novel “The Kite Runner.” Another boy was absorbed in “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” by Tim O’Brien.
Throughout the week the teachers observed Ms. Atwell open each class with a mini-lesson about a poem as well as one in which she talked about research on how the brain learns to read fluidly.
Despite the student freedom, Ms. Atwell constantly fed suggestions to the children. She was strict about not letting them read what she considered junk: no “Gossip Girl” or novels based on video games. But she acknowledged that certain children needed to be nudged into books by allowing them to read popular titles like the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer.
At the end of the first day the teachers discussed the demands of standardized testing and how some had faced resistance from administrators. Ms. McNeill said her students had so little freedom that they even had to be escorted to the bathrooms.
Suddenly she was overcome with emotion as she contrasted that environment with the student-led atmosphere in Ms. Atwell’s class. “It makes me sad that my students can’t have this every day,” she said, wiping away tears. “These children are so fortunate.”
Ms. Atwell reminded the teachers that she had once taught in a public school and faced strict requirements. “There is nothing that we are doing here that can’t be done in any public school,” she said. “The question is, how do you tweak these hidebound traditions of the institutions?”
Choice as a Motivator
Literacy specialists say that giving children a say in what they read can help motivate them. “If your goal is simply to get them to read more, choice is the way to go,” said Elizabeth Birr Moje, a literacy professor at the University of Michigan. Ms. Moje added that choices should be limited and that teachers should guide students toward high-quality literature.
Though research on the academic effects of choice has been limited, some studies have shown that giving students modest options can enhance educational results. In 11 studies conducted with third, fourth and fifth graders over the past 10 years, John T. Guthrie, now a retired professor of literacy at the University of Maryland, found that giving children limited choices from a classroom collection of books on a topic helped improve performance on standardized reading comprehension tests.
“The main thing is feeling in charge,” he said. Most experts say that teachers do not have to choose between one approach or the other and that they can incorporate the best of both methods: reading some novels as a group while also giving students opportunities to select their own books.
But literacy specialists also say that instilling a habit is as important as creating a shared canon. “If what we’re trying to get to is, everybody has read ‘Ethan Frome’ and Henry James and Shakespeare, then the challenge for the teacher is how do you make that stuff accessible and interesting enough that kids will stick with it,” said Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. “But if the goal is, how do you make kids lifelong readers, then it seems to me that there’s a lot to be said for the choice approach. As adults, as good readers, we don’t all read the same thing, and we revel in our idiosyncrasies as adult readers, so kids should have some of the same freedom.”
Ms. McNeill returned to Jonesboro determined to apply what she had observed. She knew she was luckier than some of the other teachers in the Edgecomb program, who were saddled with large classes and short periods. She had no more than 20 students in any class, for 100 minutes every day.
Trying to emulate the relaxed atmosphere of Ms. Atwell’s classroom, Ms. McNeill pushed the desks out of their rows and against the white cinderblock walls. She placed a circle of carpet swatches on the tile floor and put a small wooden rocking chair at the front.
Her principal, Freda Givens, was supportive, persuaded by Ms. McNeill’s enthusiasm. But Ms. McNeill warned her: “I am not sure how it’s going to pan out on the standardized tests.”
Ms. McNeill started to build her classroom library. All told, she spent about $1,000 of her own money buying books, many of which were titles she had seen in Ms. Atwell’s classroom, including “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle”; “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy; and several novels by the young-adult favorites Walter Dean Myers and Sarah Dessen.
Modeling herself after Ms. Atwell, she began conducting sales pitches for books in her warm drawl and invited her students to do so, too. Every day Ms. McNeill allotted 30 minutes for the students to read on their own. Chatty, but firm if she detected that someone was not reading, she scooted from student to student on a lime-green stool, noting page numbers on a clipboard chart. She asked questions about the books and suggested new ones.
Many students began the year choosing books she regarded as too simple, and she prodded them to a higher level. After Khristian Howard, an earnest seventh grader, read “Chaka! Through the Fire,” a memoir by the R&B star Chaka Khan, Ms. McNeill suggested that she try Maya Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
Khristian, who found the book tough at first, ended up writing an enthusiastic six-page entry in her journal. Ms. McNeill went on to suggest “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith, a book, Khristian wrote, that she “really didn’t want to come to an end.“
To help teach concepts like allegory or foreshadowing, Ms. McNeill began virtually every session by dissecting a poem that the class then discussed. One morning this spring Jabari Denson, an eighth grader, read aloud “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes. The class spent 15 minutes teasing out the metaphorical meaning of a line about “places with no carpet on the floor.”
She required that the students record their impressions of each book, citing specific passages and analyzing themes. Jennae often wrote four or five pages in her tightly packed print. A year earlier she had been bored by reading and had little to say about books.
But now new worlds were opening. In January she read “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” a novel by Ned Vizzini about a depressed teenager who ends up in a psychiatric ward. “After reading this book, I have decided that I want to be a psychologist,” Jennae wrote in the spiral-bound notebook where she kept her journal. The book, she continued, had changed how she viewed mental illness.
“I think people that are labeled ‘crazy’ aren’t crazy at all; they just see the world differently than others,” she wrote. “They don’t really know how to express it correctly so nobody else knows how to accept it so they lock them away in a psych ward.”
Ms. McNeill did hit some snags. In January two of her students failed a state writing assessment. Over dinner one night with her husband, Dan McNeill, she confessed her fear that Ms. Givens, the principal, might not let her continue with her radical approach. But Ms. Givens did not interfere.
Ms. McNeill knew that students who were now being asked to write much more frequently about their reading might be tempted to copy the work of others. In March one of her most reluctant seventh graders plagiarized a journal entry about “Tomorrow, When the War Began,” a novel by John Marsden about children coping with an invasion of Australia. The boy did not even bother to remove the words “The Horn Book, starred review,” from the printout he pasted into his notebook.
She admonished the boy and asked him to redo his entry. She was discouraged to see that he wrote only one paragraph that amounted to not much more than a plot summary, concluding, “I highly recommend this book to young teens who like this kind of stuff.”
To Ms. McNeill’s chagrin, several students, most of them boys, stubbornly refused to read more challenging fare. One afternoon this spring she pulled her stool next to Masai, an eighth grader who wore a sparkling stud in one ear, as he stared at a laptop screen on which he was supposed to be composing a book review. Beside him sat the second volume in the “Maximum Ride” series, which chronicles the adventures of genetically mutated children who are part human, part bird. He was struggling to find anything to write.
“I keep trying to get you to read things other than James Patterson,” Ms. Atwell said, tapping the book’s cover. “But if you are going to write a book review of substance, you are going to have to find substance in the book.”
In staff meetings with fellow English teachers, Ms. McNeill showed them her students’ journals and explained her new teaching methods. A few were curious, but none were ready to give up their textbooks or class novels.
Some colleagues suggested that Ms. McNeill was only able to teach this way because of who was in her class. “Ms. McNeill has the freedom to do that because she teaches gifted students,” said Linda White, an eighth-grade teacher.
But in May Ms. McNeill felt vindicated when she received the results of her students’ performance on standardized state reading tests.
Of her 18 eighth graders, 15 exceeded requirements, scoring in the highest bracket. When the same students had been in her seventh-grade class, only 4 had reached that level. Of her 13 current seventh graders, 8 scored at the top.
In the final week of school Helen Arnold, Jennae’s mother, sent Ms. McNeill an e-mail message thanking her. “She never really just read herself for enjoyment until she took your class,” Ms. Arnold wrote.
Ms. McNeill knew she had not succeeded in persuading all of her students to read deeply or widely. But she was optimistic that she would capture a few more in the coming school year.
A week after her students left for the summer, Ms. McNeill boxed up the class sets of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” along with “Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, keeping just three copies of each for her collection. She carted the rest to the English department storeroom.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Stars Aligning on School Lunches
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/dining/19school.html?emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
Damon Winter/The New York Times
A meal from the cafeteria at P.S. 89 in Manhattan does not contain processed food.
Imagine Ms. Cooper’s surprise when she was invited to the association’s upcoming conference to discuss the Lunch Box, a system she developed to help school districts wean themselves from packaged, heavily processed food and begin cooking mostly local food from scratch.
“All of a sudden I am not the fringe idiot trying to get everyone to serve peas and carrots that don’t come out of a can, like that’s the most radical idea they have ever heard of,” she said.
The invitation is a small sign of larger changes happening in public school cafeterias. For the first time since a new wave of school food reform efforts began a decade ago, once-warring camps are sharing strategies to improve what kids eat. The Department of Agriculture is welcoming ideas from community groups and more money than ever is about to flow into school cafeterias, from Washington and from private providers.
“The window’s open,” said Kathleen Merrigan, the deputy secretary of agriculture. “We are in the zone when a whole lot of exciting ideas are being put on the table. I have been working in the field of sustainable agriculture and nutrition all my professional life, and I really have never seen such opportunity before.”
Congress, which will take up the Child Nutrition Act as soon as October, has much to do with this year’s focus on school food. The act, which is reauthorized every five years, provides $12 billion to pay for lunch and breakfast for 31 million schoolchildren.
That the nutritional state of America’s children is a priority for President Obama doesn’t hurt, either. Mr. Obama put an extra $1 billion for child nutrition programs, including school food, in his 2010 budget proposal.
Michelle Obama has made better nutrition for schoolchildren part of her agenda, too, using the White House garden to promote healthier eating and often speaking about the importance of good diets for children, her own included.
Rochelle Davis, who founded the Healthy Schools Campaign in Chicago almost eight years ago, said having support from the White House has made her work easier.
“This is not a nice little niche issue anymore,” she said. “When I talk to people at U.S.D.A., they talk about what the president and first lady want. It matters.”
The Department of Agriculture is expected to upgrade school food nutrition standards this year, many of which haven’t been changed for nearly 15 years. And because many Obama U.S.D.A. appointees are focusing on improving student health through better food, the department has started an aggressive effort to study reform efforts big and small. These include the national farm-to-school program, which is in nearly 9,000 schools, and Food Options for Children in Urban Schools, a nonprofit based in New York that helps the nation’s largest districts change how they buy and prepare food.
Congress seems likely to spend more on school food this year, but just how much is uncertain. Under newly released reimbursement rates for the coming school year, most districts receive $2.68 for each free lunch served to a child who is poor enough to qualify. The rates vary depending on poverty level and region.
That money is the core of most school food budgets. But it does not cover the cost of the lunch, nutrition directors say, so they cannot afford to serve higher-quality food.
As a result, districts rely on processed commodity food from the Department of Agriculture and on extra income from the sale of popular foods like chips, pizza and burritos in what are commonly called à la carte programs.
The first step toward healthier school food is to increase that free-lunch subsidy by at least 70 cents, said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York. Others want more and say it should be spent largely on fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains. But some observers argue that even 70 cents is unrealistically high, given other pressures on the federal budget.
“After bank bailouts and health reform, I worry about there being money left over for child nutrition,” said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who has helped write some of the legislation Congress will be considering. Still, the burdens of obesity and diabetes on the health care system make it easier to argue that schools should serve less processed food, advocates argue.
“If you feed a kid chicken nuggets and canned peas and Doritos and canned fruit as a school lunch or you feed him grilled chicken, steamed broccoli and fresh fruits and a whole grain roll, the difference is night and day,” Senator Gillibrand said.
As part of this year’s work on the Child Nutrition Act, Senator Gillibrand is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban trans fat in cafeteria kitchens and give the Department of Agriculture more power to set tougher federal nutrition requirements for the lightly regulated à la carte program in schools.
If Congress approves the changes, the agency would be empowered to change rules it set in the 1970s, when nutritionists worried more about dental decay and nutrient deficiencies than obesity. Cavity-causing jelly beans and Popsicles were banned, but not calorie-rich food like Snickers and ice cream bars.
But the federal government needs to address other issues, said Katie Wilson, the recent president of the School Nutrition Association and a Wisconsin food service director with 30 years of experience.
School nutrition directors should have to meet national standards to qualify for the job, she said. Complex nutritional regulations need to be streamlined. And kitchens need to be re-equipped so workers can actually cook healthier food. A recent School Nutrition Association study showed that over 80 percent of schools cook fewer than half of their entrees from scratch.
“If they don’t give me a steamer, I can’t steam a vegetable,” she said. “I have to deep fry it.”
Others say reform will require deeper surgery, arguing that the U.S.D.A. has a conflict of interest it must resolve: One part of the agency is charged with feeding children nutritious food and another helps large agricultural companies sell surplus food like beef and chicken that is usually processed into packaged products like taco meat or nuggets.
Ms. Merrigan said the federal government was adding more fruits and vegetables to the commodity foods list, but said that districts and parents needed to keep pushing to make meals healthier.
To that end, raising money for school food projects is in vogue this fall. Slow Food USA introduced Time for Lunch to lobby Congress for more school food funding, a new priority for an organization once focused solely on artisanal, not institutional, food. The effort will culminate in hundreds of Labor Day fund-raisers called “eat ins.”
This month, Whole Foods began a national “school food revolution” campaign starring Ms. Cooper, who will offer tips for better school lunches in store publications, on-line videos and a series of public appearances. The company is also asking shoppers to donate at the register to pay for Ms. Cooper’s work.
And the W. K. Kellogg Foundation recently narrowed its mission to pay for programs that help children eat better and exercise more. Over the next three years, the foundation will give out $32 million, about a third of which will go to school food programs. Ricardo Salvador, the program director, thinks that at last, momentum is building toward a better school lunch.
“If you can’t get this transformation going with all that lined up, then you’re never going to get it going,” he said.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
A meal from the cafeteria at P.S. 89 in Manhattan does not contain processed food.
Imagine Ms. Cooper’s surprise when she was invited to the association’s upcoming conference to discuss the Lunch Box, a system she developed to help school districts wean themselves from packaged, heavily processed food and begin cooking mostly local food from scratch.
“All of a sudden I am not the fringe idiot trying to get everyone to serve peas and carrots that don’t come out of a can, like that’s the most radical idea they have ever heard of,” she said.
The invitation is a small sign of larger changes happening in public school cafeterias. For the first time since a new wave of school food reform efforts began a decade ago, once-warring camps are sharing strategies to improve what kids eat. The Department of Agriculture is welcoming ideas from community groups and more money than ever is about to flow into school cafeterias, from Washington and from private providers.
“The window’s open,” said Kathleen Merrigan, the deputy secretary of agriculture. “We are in the zone when a whole lot of exciting ideas are being put on the table. I have been working in the field of sustainable agriculture and nutrition all my professional life, and I really have never seen such opportunity before.”
Congress, which will take up the Child Nutrition Act as soon as October, has much to do with this year’s focus on school food. The act, which is reauthorized every five years, provides $12 billion to pay for lunch and breakfast for 31 million schoolchildren.
That the nutritional state of America’s children is a priority for President Obama doesn’t hurt, either. Mr. Obama put an extra $1 billion for child nutrition programs, including school food, in his 2010 budget proposal.
Michelle Obama has made better nutrition for schoolchildren part of her agenda, too, using the White House garden to promote healthier eating and often speaking about the importance of good diets for children, her own included.
Rochelle Davis, who founded the Healthy Schools Campaign in Chicago almost eight years ago, said having support from the White House has made her work easier.
“This is not a nice little niche issue anymore,” she said. “When I talk to people at U.S.D.A., they talk about what the president and first lady want. It matters.”
The Department of Agriculture is expected to upgrade school food nutrition standards this year, many of which haven’t been changed for nearly 15 years. And because many Obama U.S.D.A. appointees are focusing on improving student health through better food, the department has started an aggressive effort to study reform efforts big and small. These include the national farm-to-school program, which is in nearly 9,000 schools, and Food Options for Children in Urban Schools, a nonprofit based in New York that helps the nation’s largest districts change how they buy and prepare food.
Congress seems likely to spend more on school food this year, but just how much is uncertain. Under newly released reimbursement rates for the coming school year, most districts receive $2.68 for each free lunch served to a child who is poor enough to qualify. The rates vary depending on poverty level and region.
That money is the core of most school food budgets. But it does not cover the cost of the lunch, nutrition directors say, so they cannot afford to serve higher-quality food.
As a result, districts rely on processed commodity food from the Department of Agriculture and on extra income from the sale of popular foods like chips, pizza and burritos in what are commonly called à la carte programs.
The first step toward healthier school food is to increase that free-lunch subsidy by at least 70 cents, said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York. Others want more and say it should be spent largely on fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains. But some observers argue that even 70 cents is unrealistically high, given other pressures on the federal budget.
“After bank bailouts and health reform, I worry about there being money left over for child nutrition,” said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who has helped write some of the legislation Congress will be considering. Still, the burdens of obesity and diabetes on the health care system make it easier to argue that schools should serve less processed food, advocates argue.
“If you feed a kid chicken nuggets and canned peas and Doritos and canned fruit as a school lunch or you feed him grilled chicken, steamed broccoli and fresh fruits and a whole grain roll, the difference is night and day,” Senator Gillibrand said.
As part of this year’s work on the Child Nutrition Act, Senator Gillibrand is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban trans fat in cafeteria kitchens and give the Department of Agriculture more power to set tougher federal nutrition requirements for the lightly regulated à la carte program in schools.
If Congress approves the changes, the agency would be empowered to change rules it set in the 1970s, when nutritionists worried more about dental decay and nutrient deficiencies than obesity. Cavity-causing jelly beans and Popsicles were banned, but not calorie-rich food like Snickers and ice cream bars.
But the federal government needs to address other issues, said Katie Wilson, the recent president of the School Nutrition Association and a Wisconsin food service director with 30 years of experience.
School nutrition directors should have to meet national standards to qualify for the job, she said. Complex nutritional regulations need to be streamlined. And kitchens need to be re-equipped so workers can actually cook healthier food. A recent School Nutrition Association study showed that over 80 percent of schools cook fewer than half of their entrees from scratch.
“If they don’t give me a steamer, I can’t steam a vegetable,” she said. “I have to deep fry it.”
Others say reform will require deeper surgery, arguing that the U.S.D.A. has a conflict of interest it must resolve: One part of the agency is charged with feeding children nutritious food and another helps large agricultural companies sell surplus food like beef and chicken that is usually processed into packaged products like taco meat or nuggets.
Ms. Merrigan said the federal government was adding more fruits and vegetables to the commodity foods list, but said that districts and parents needed to keep pushing to make meals healthier.
To that end, raising money for school food projects is in vogue this fall. Slow Food USA introduced Time for Lunch to lobby Congress for more school food funding, a new priority for an organization once focused solely on artisanal, not institutional, food. The effort will culminate in hundreds of Labor Day fund-raisers called “eat ins.”
This month, Whole Foods began a national “school food revolution” campaign starring Ms. Cooper, who will offer tips for better school lunches in store publications, on-line videos and a series of public appearances. The company is also asking shoppers to donate at the register to pay for Ms. Cooper’s work.
And the W. K. Kellogg Foundation recently narrowed its mission to pay for programs that help children eat better and exercise more. Over the next three years, the foundation will give out $32 million, about a third of which will go to school food programs. Ricardo Salvador, the program director, thinks that at last, momentum is building toward a better school lunch.
“If you can’t get this transformation going with all that lined up, then you’re never going to get it going,” he said.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Left Behind
The New York Times
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June 14, 2009
Left Behind
A City Team’s Struggle Shows Disparity in Girls’ Sports
By KATIE THOMAS
The Cougars of Middle School 61 had a basketball game in the Bronx, but a half-hour before tipoff, six girls and Coach Bryan Mariner were still inching through traffic in Brooklyn.
A cellphone rang. It belonged to forward Tiffany Fields-Binning, who passed the phone to Mr. Mariner.
“You don’t want her to go?” he said. He peered up at a street sign. “We’re on Atlantic and Flatbush.” He paused. “O.K. O.K. We’ll wait here.”
Mr. Mariner turned off the ignition. “Tiff-a-ny.” He said her name slowly, like a sigh. “You didn’t set this straight with your pop?”
Tiffany stared out a window.
Mr. Mariner turned and assessed the situation: “We’ve got five.”
Five players. No substitutes.
With this team, it’s always something. In the suburbs, girls’ participation in sports is so commonplace that in many communities, the conversation has shifted from concerns over equal access to worries that some girls are playing too much. But the revolution in girls’ sports has largely bypassed the nation’s cities, where public school districts short on money often view sports as a luxury rather than an entitlement.
Coaches and organizers of youth sports in cities say that while many immigrant and lower-income parents see the benefit of sports for sons, they often lean on daughters to fill needs in their own hectic lives, like tending to siblings or cleaning the house.
Others, like Tiffany’s father, Gavin Binning, are worried for their daughter’s safety, another roadblock to playing.
“Tiffany’s my baby,” he said. “They weren’t going around the corner, they were going to the Bronx. And for me not knowing that, it drove me crazy.”
Since the passage of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX in 1972, girls’ participation in sports has soared. In the 1971-72 school year, girls accounted for 7 percent of all participants in high school sports. By the 2006-7 school year, their share had grown to 41 percent, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
In the suburbs, girls play sports at rates roughly equal to boys. A 2007 survey by Harris Interactive of more than 2,000 schoolchildren nationwide showed that 54 percent of boys and 50 percent of girls in the suburbs described themselves as “moderately involved” athletes.
Urban areas revealed a much greater discrepancy. Only 36 percent of city girls in the survey described themselves as moderately involved athletes, compared with 56 percent of city boys.
Girls in cities from Los Angeles to New York “are the left-behinds of the youth sport movement in the United States,” said Don Sabo, a professor of health policy at D’Youville College in Buffalo, who conducted the study, which was commissioned by the Women’s Sports Foundation, a private advocacy group.
The Cougars have few of the basics that suburban public school girls have come to expect, including free transportation, uniforms and full seasons of regularly scheduled games. At M.S. 61 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, each road game is a logistical puzzle for Mr. Mariner, 46, who is dean of students and coach of the school’s girls’ and boys’ basketball teams. Even when the Cougars arrive ready to play, games are sometimes canceled because the opponents — facing the same obstacles — cannot field a team. Parents rarely show up to watch.
Closer to Home
As he waited, Mr. Mariner glanced at the dashboard clock. He had worked hard to ensure that his players would get to the game. He talked his nephew into letting them borrow his Ford Expedition. He pulled the girls out of class 15 minutes early. He even slipped $2 to the cousin of one of his best players, Soledad Pierre, to take over her baby-sitting duties that afternoon.
Now, it was nearly game time. “I can’t just leave you,” he told Tiffany.
Another player, Nia Miller, tried to lighten the mood. She told Mr. Mariner, “Her father might change his mind if he sees your bad self.”
Just then, Mr. Binning pulled up behind them. The men stood between the cars and talked. Tiffany got out, too, and stared at her sneakers. Moments later, the men shook hands. Tiffany and Mr. Mariner climbed back into the car.
“Your pop is all right,” Mr. Mariner said.
Tiffany’s father had reason to be suspicious, Mr. Mariner said later, because she had previously used basketball as a cover when she wanted to leave the house. Mr. Binning said he relented that day because “the coach showed me she’s in good hands.”
Parents rarely question their sons’ whereabouts, Mr. Mariner said.
“I could take my boys to another state, and I wouldn’t get these calls,” he said. “They’d probably say, ‘Oh, you’re back so soon?’ ”
For most of his two decades at M.S. 61, formally known as Dr. Gladstone H. Atwell Middle School, Mr. Mariner has not been paid to coach. In New York City, public school principals must make difficult choices about distributing resources. M.S. 61’s budget for after-school programs is limited to those tied to academics, the principal, Sandra Taylor, said.
“There is very little,” she said. “We make do.”
Along with teaching basketball skills, Mr. Mariner also mops the court before games, persuades reluctant parents to let their daughters play and, above all, tries to ease the way from girlhood to adolescence. Middle school is a crucial time for young athletes, when habits crystallize and they decide whether to continue playing.
“We have so many kids trying to grow up too fast,” he said. “My thing is to try and keep them busy for as long as possible.”
Mr. Mariner asked each player to contribute $80 a year for uniforms, equipment, transportation and other expenses. That is a lot for most of the students. About half the girls paid Mr. Mariner in full. Some gave $1 or $2 at a time.
The Have-Nots
New York City education officials say they are making efforts to involve more girls, but they acknowledge that the system is recovering from decades of neglect. Physical education was nearly eliminated from public schools during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and did not resurface as a priority until 2004, when the Department of Education created an Office of Fitness and Health Education. Among other initiatives, the office has set up spinning classes and invited nonprofit organizations like the New York Road Runners to work with students. City high schools have added golf, lacrosse and double Dutch as varsity girls’ sports.
Another program in more than 200 middle schools is aimed at encouraging students to be physically active, said Lori Rose Benson, the office’s director. Of nearly 500 schools with seventh and eighth graders, 62 fielded girls’ basketball teams this year in a citywide tournament that attracted 107 boys’ teams. For about two months, the students had a taste of what suburbs routinely offer: paid coaches and referees, scheduled games and free uniforms. This spring, the Cougars won one playoff game before losing to a team from Queens. Mr. Mariner was paid about $2,500 for coaching in the tournament, and the girls received MetroCards after every game.
Yet city programs do not come close to matching what the suburban schools provide. On Long Island, most middle schools have a menu of sports and pay for all expenses. So many children try out that schools often field separate seventh- and eighth-grade teams, said Ed Cinelli, the executive director of Section XI of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, which covers Suffolk County. Large middle-school teams also play extra quarters in sports like basketball to give everyone a chance to compete, he said.
In Huntington, the middle school offers 11 teams for girls and 13 for boys, across four seasons, said Georgia McCarthy, the district’s athletic director. Coaches are paid $3,500 to $5,000 a season, and there is no cost to players. “That’s a given,” she said.
Although boys in the city also have fewer opportunities in sports, other factors work in their favor. Lean athletic budgets leave a gap that is filled by a blend of volunteers and private groups that have traditionally served more boys than girls.
“The needs of boys just have always been, and to a large extent remain, the unspoken, often unrecognized priority,” Mr. Sabo, the professor, said.
Other Responsibilities
One cold afternoon in March, the Cougars trickled into the gym for practice. But Soledad did not join them. Her grandmother had left her to care for her younger cousins.
As her teammates ran half-court sprints, Soledad crouched in the basement of a day-care center, rummaging through the cubby that belonged to her 3-year-old cousin Gardyne. She extracted a pink hooded sweatshirt and, with practiced motions, guided Gardyne’s hands through the tiny sleeves. Her 8-year-old cousin Brianna was waiting at the top of the stairs. The girls walked home, three backpacks bobbing in unison down New York Avenue.
Soledad is not the type of girl most basketball coaches recruit. She is 5 feet 5 inches, can be painfully shy and is sometimes ill prepared. One day this winter, Soledad arrived for a game in her uniform and snow boots. She played in Mr. Mariner’s size-9 sneakers.
Yet Soledad loves basketball. In her seventh-grade English class, she composed a poem.
“I am Soledad Pierre,” she wrote. “I am a Haitian girl. I am a basketball player. I am a gift of God.”
Soledad’s after-school routine is different from that of her cousin Karl Pierre, a freshman at Paul Robeson High School, who plays basketball nearly every day after school and says he dreams of earning a college basketball scholarship.
Karl lives in an apartment with Soledad, her father, their grandmother and other relatives. But boys in the family are not asked to baby-sit.
“It’s not fair,” said Soledad, who also hopes to play college basketball. But if she were to complain, she said, “They’d just make me stay home for a week.”
At first, Soledad’s family, especially her grandmother and uncle, resisted the idea of her playing.
“They thought it was strange for a female,” said her aunt Johane Pierre, 26, who was a fencer and volleyball player in high school. “But they all got used to it because she really likes it.”
And yet her adult relatives make few accommodations for Soledad to participate. Because most of them work long hours, household chores and baby-sitting always take precedence. No one in Soledad’s family has seen her play.
Ms. Pierre, a phlebotomist in a health clinic, said the family relied more on Soledad than Karl to care for their cousins, explaining that Soledad’s school was closer to home than his. Besides, Ms. Pierre said, “she’s better with the kids — giving them a bath, feeding them.”
Soledad’s frequent absences present a challenge to Mr. Mariner, who leads the team with intensity and joy. He buries his head in his hands when the girls dribble in the wrong direction, and throws himself to the floor when they miss layups. At a recent game, Soledad’s jump shot arced toward the basket but bounced off the rim. He shouted, “I’ll take that all day long, Soley!”
In March, Soledad missed a Saturday game against a friendly rival, Intermediate School 285, and the Cougars lost. For a time, Mr. Mariner considered pulling her from the starting lineup.
“I’m not going to start someone I can’t count on,” he said.
A Mother’s Doubts
Of all the Cougars, the eighth grader Olivia Colbert would seem to have the best chance to become one Mr. Mariner’s success stories — players he has guided into better public and private high schools. But her mother may prove to be her greatest obstacle.
Olivia, 14, takes the court like a star but is still learning the game: she trips over her dribble, fouls often and sometimes bursts into tears when she makes a mistake. But at 5-9, she towers over opponents and is the team’s top scorer. Last winter, high school coaches showed up more often than her mother to watch her play.
Olivia has enthusiasm. She shows up to nearly every practice and game, and was the only member of the team to accept Mr. Mariner’s invitation to watch two of his former players compete this spring in a citywide girls’ tournament at Hunter College. They sat in the bleachers with Mr. Mariner’s 10-year-old son, Bryan Jr.
In March, Olivia was accepted by Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, a private school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She had applied at the suggestion of Rocco Romano, the girls’ basketball coach, who knows Olivia because he also coaches at I.S. 285.
It is still not clear that Olivia will be able to attend in the fall because the school is offering only up to $1,400 in aid toward the $7,000 tuition. Mr. Romano is trying to find private sponsors. If that does not work, she will probably attend and play for South Shore, a public high school in Brooklyn.
Olivia’s mother, Bertha Colbert, is open to the idea of private school and visited Bishop Loughlin with Olivia in the spring. A single mother, she works as a school crossing guard and says she would be satisfied if Olivia winds up in public school. Olivia’s father died before she was born.
“I told her and told her, there’s more to life than basketball,” Ms. Colbert said. “But she doesn’t see it.”
Though proud of Olivia, she is wary of dreaming too big.
“What did she tell me she wanted to do?” Ms. Colbert said of Olivia. “A lawyer or something. I said no, no, no, no. I’m not going through all that school. You’re going to have to work for yourself.”
No Game Today
The opening buzzer reverberated through the Cougars’ gym.
But on this afternoon the girls were not on the court; their game had been canceled because their opponent, Public School 161, did not have enough players. Instead, most of the Cougars sat watching Mr. Mariner coach the boys’ team.
Nia volunteered to operate the scoreboard, while a teammate kept statistics. Soledad pulled up a chair.
During halftime, an eight-girl dance team from P.S. 161 took the court, clapping their hands, stamping their feet and slapping their thighs to a complicated beat. They wore tight shirts and blue jeans with sparkles.
“Boring, boring, boring,” Soledad said.
Nia added, “They could have taken some girls from over there.”
Sidelined, Nia registered each basket and free throw in the boys’ 51-24 victory. She recalled the last time her team faced P.S. 161.
“We beat the girls just like this,” Nia said. “Just like this.”
Griffin Palmer contributed reporting.
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June 14, 2009
Left Behind
A City Team’s Struggle Shows Disparity in Girls’ Sports
By KATIE THOMAS
The Cougars of Middle School 61 had a basketball game in the Bronx, but a half-hour before tipoff, six girls and Coach Bryan Mariner were still inching through traffic in Brooklyn.
A cellphone rang. It belonged to forward Tiffany Fields-Binning, who passed the phone to Mr. Mariner.
“You don’t want her to go?” he said. He peered up at a street sign. “We’re on Atlantic and Flatbush.” He paused. “O.K. O.K. We’ll wait here.”
Mr. Mariner turned off the ignition. “Tiff-a-ny.” He said her name slowly, like a sigh. “You didn’t set this straight with your pop?”
Tiffany stared out a window.
Mr. Mariner turned and assessed the situation: “We’ve got five.”
Five players. No substitutes.
With this team, it’s always something. In the suburbs, girls’ participation in sports is so commonplace that in many communities, the conversation has shifted from concerns over equal access to worries that some girls are playing too much. But the revolution in girls’ sports has largely bypassed the nation’s cities, where public school districts short on money often view sports as a luxury rather than an entitlement.
Coaches and organizers of youth sports in cities say that while many immigrant and lower-income parents see the benefit of sports for sons, they often lean on daughters to fill needs in their own hectic lives, like tending to siblings or cleaning the house.
Others, like Tiffany’s father, Gavin Binning, are worried for their daughter’s safety, another roadblock to playing.
“Tiffany’s my baby,” he said. “They weren’t going around the corner, they were going to the Bronx. And for me not knowing that, it drove me crazy.”
Since the passage of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX in 1972, girls’ participation in sports has soared. In the 1971-72 school year, girls accounted for 7 percent of all participants in high school sports. By the 2006-7 school year, their share had grown to 41 percent, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
In the suburbs, girls play sports at rates roughly equal to boys. A 2007 survey by Harris Interactive of more than 2,000 schoolchildren nationwide showed that 54 percent of boys and 50 percent of girls in the suburbs described themselves as “moderately involved” athletes.
Urban areas revealed a much greater discrepancy. Only 36 percent of city girls in the survey described themselves as moderately involved athletes, compared with 56 percent of city boys.
Girls in cities from Los Angeles to New York “are the left-behinds of the youth sport movement in the United States,” said Don Sabo, a professor of health policy at D’Youville College in Buffalo, who conducted the study, which was commissioned by the Women’s Sports Foundation, a private advocacy group.
The Cougars have few of the basics that suburban public school girls have come to expect, including free transportation, uniforms and full seasons of regularly scheduled games. At M.S. 61 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, each road game is a logistical puzzle for Mr. Mariner, 46, who is dean of students and coach of the school’s girls’ and boys’ basketball teams. Even when the Cougars arrive ready to play, games are sometimes canceled because the opponents — facing the same obstacles — cannot field a team. Parents rarely show up to watch.
Closer to Home
As he waited, Mr. Mariner glanced at the dashboard clock. He had worked hard to ensure that his players would get to the game. He talked his nephew into letting them borrow his Ford Expedition. He pulled the girls out of class 15 minutes early. He even slipped $2 to the cousin of one of his best players, Soledad Pierre, to take over her baby-sitting duties that afternoon.
Now, it was nearly game time. “I can’t just leave you,” he told Tiffany.
Another player, Nia Miller, tried to lighten the mood. She told Mr. Mariner, “Her father might change his mind if he sees your bad self.”
Just then, Mr. Binning pulled up behind them. The men stood between the cars and talked. Tiffany got out, too, and stared at her sneakers. Moments later, the men shook hands. Tiffany and Mr. Mariner climbed back into the car.
“Your pop is all right,” Mr. Mariner said.
Tiffany’s father had reason to be suspicious, Mr. Mariner said later, because she had previously used basketball as a cover when she wanted to leave the house. Mr. Binning said he relented that day because “the coach showed me she’s in good hands.”
Parents rarely question their sons’ whereabouts, Mr. Mariner said.
“I could take my boys to another state, and I wouldn’t get these calls,” he said. “They’d probably say, ‘Oh, you’re back so soon?’ ”
For most of his two decades at M.S. 61, formally known as Dr. Gladstone H. Atwell Middle School, Mr. Mariner has not been paid to coach. In New York City, public school principals must make difficult choices about distributing resources. M.S. 61’s budget for after-school programs is limited to those tied to academics, the principal, Sandra Taylor, said.
“There is very little,” she said. “We make do.”
Along with teaching basketball skills, Mr. Mariner also mops the court before games, persuades reluctant parents to let their daughters play and, above all, tries to ease the way from girlhood to adolescence. Middle school is a crucial time for young athletes, when habits crystallize and they decide whether to continue playing.
“We have so many kids trying to grow up too fast,” he said. “My thing is to try and keep them busy for as long as possible.”
Mr. Mariner asked each player to contribute $80 a year for uniforms, equipment, transportation and other expenses. That is a lot for most of the students. About half the girls paid Mr. Mariner in full. Some gave $1 or $2 at a time.
The Have-Nots
New York City education officials say they are making efforts to involve more girls, but they acknowledge that the system is recovering from decades of neglect. Physical education was nearly eliminated from public schools during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and did not resurface as a priority until 2004, when the Department of Education created an Office of Fitness and Health Education. Among other initiatives, the office has set up spinning classes and invited nonprofit organizations like the New York Road Runners to work with students. City high schools have added golf, lacrosse and double Dutch as varsity girls’ sports.
Another program in more than 200 middle schools is aimed at encouraging students to be physically active, said Lori Rose Benson, the office’s director. Of nearly 500 schools with seventh and eighth graders, 62 fielded girls’ basketball teams this year in a citywide tournament that attracted 107 boys’ teams. For about two months, the students had a taste of what suburbs routinely offer: paid coaches and referees, scheduled games and free uniforms. This spring, the Cougars won one playoff game before losing to a team from Queens. Mr. Mariner was paid about $2,500 for coaching in the tournament, and the girls received MetroCards after every game.
Yet city programs do not come close to matching what the suburban schools provide. On Long Island, most middle schools have a menu of sports and pay for all expenses. So many children try out that schools often field separate seventh- and eighth-grade teams, said Ed Cinelli, the executive director of Section XI of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, which covers Suffolk County. Large middle-school teams also play extra quarters in sports like basketball to give everyone a chance to compete, he said.
In Huntington, the middle school offers 11 teams for girls and 13 for boys, across four seasons, said Georgia McCarthy, the district’s athletic director. Coaches are paid $3,500 to $5,000 a season, and there is no cost to players. “That’s a given,” she said.
Although boys in the city also have fewer opportunities in sports, other factors work in their favor. Lean athletic budgets leave a gap that is filled by a blend of volunteers and private groups that have traditionally served more boys than girls.
“The needs of boys just have always been, and to a large extent remain, the unspoken, often unrecognized priority,” Mr. Sabo, the professor, said.
Other Responsibilities
One cold afternoon in March, the Cougars trickled into the gym for practice. But Soledad did not join them. Her grandmother had left her to care for her younger cousins.
As her teammates ran half-court sprints, Soledad crouched in the basement of a day-care center, rummaging through the cubby that belonged to her 3-year-old cousin Gardyne. She extracted a pink hooded sweatshirt and, with practiced motions, guided Gardyne’s hands through the tiny sleeves. Her 8-year-old cousin Brianna was waiting at the top of the stairs. The girls walked home, three backpacks bobbing in unison down New York Avenue.
Soledad is not the type of girl most basketball coaches recruit. She is 5 feet 5 inches, can be painfully shy and is sometimes ill prepared. One day this winter, Soledad arrived for a game in her uniform and snow boots. She played in Mr. Mariner’s size-9 sneakers.
Yet Soledad loves basketball. In her seventh-grade English class, she composed a poem.
“I am Soledad Pierre,” she wrote. “I am a Haitian girl. I am a basketball player. I am a gift of God.”
Soledad’s after-school routine is different from that of her cousin Karl Pierre, a freshman at Paul Robeson High School, who plays basketball nearly every day after school and says he dreams of earning a college basketball scholarship.
Karl lives in an apartment with Soledad, her father, their grandmother and other relatives. But boys in the family are not asked to baby-sit.
“It’s not fair,” said Soledad, who also hopes to play college basketball. But if she were to complain, she said, “They’d just make me stay home for a week.”
At first, Soledad’s family, especially her grandmother and uncle, resisted the idea of her playing.
“They thought it was strange for a female,” said her aunt Johane Pierre, 26, who was a fencer and volleyball player in high school. “But they all got used to it because she really likes it.”
And yet her adult relatives make few accommodations for Soledad to participate. Because most of them work long hours, household chores and baby-sitting always take precedence. No one in Soledad’s family has seen her play.
Ms. Pierre, a phlebotomist in a health clinic, said the family relied more on Soledad than Karl to care for their cousins, explaining that Soledad’s school was closer to home than his. Besides, Ms. Pierre said, “she’s better with the kids — giving them a bath, feeding them.”
Soledad’s frequent absences present a challenge to Mr. Mariner, who leads the team with intensity and joy. He buries his head in his hands when the girls dribble in the wrong direction, and throws himself to the floor when they miss layups. At a recent game, Soledad’s jump shot arced toward the basket but bounced off the rim. He shouted, “I’ll take that all day long, Soley!”
In March, Soledad missed a Saturday game against a friendly rival, Intermediate School 285, and the Cougars lost. For a time, Mr. Mariner considered pulling her from the starting lineup.
“I’m not going to start someone I can’t count on,” he said.
A Mother’s Doubts
Of all the Cougars, the eighth grader Olivia Colbert would seem to have the best chance to become one Mr. Mariner’s success stories — players he has guided into better public and private high schools. But her mother may prove to be her greatest obstacle.
Olivia, 14, takes the court like a star but is still learning the game: she trips over her dribble, fouls often and sometimes bursts into tears when she makes a mistake. But at 5-9, she towers over opponents and is the team’s top scorer. Last winter, high school coaches showed up more often than her mother to watch her play.
Olivia has enthusiasm. She shows up to nearly every practice and game, and was the only member of the team to accept Mr. Mariner’s invitation to watch two of his former players compete this spring in a citywide girls’ tournament at Hunter College. They sat in the bleachers with Mr. Mariner’s 10-year-old son, Bryan Jr.
In March, Olivia was accepted by Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, a private school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She had applied at the suggestion of Rocco Romano, the girls’ basketball coach, who knows Olivia because he also coaches at I.S. 285.
It is still not clear that Olivia will be able to attend in the fall because the school is offering only up to $1,400 in aid toward the $7,000 tuition. Mr. Romano is trying to find private sponsors. If that does not work, she will probably attend and play for South Shore, a public high school in Brooklyn.
Olivia’s mother, Bertha Colbert, is open to the idea of private school and visited Bishop Loughlin with Olivia in the spring. A single mother, she works as a school crossing guard and says she would be satisfied if Olivia winds up in public school. Olivia’s father died before she was born.
“I told her and told her, there’s more to life than basketball,” Ms. Colbert said. “But she doesn’t see it.”
Though proud of Olivia, she is wary of dreaming too big.
“What did she tell me she wanted to do?” Ms. Colbert said of Olivia. “A lawyer or something. I said no, no, no, no. I’m not going through all that school. You’re going to have to work for yourself.”
No Game Today
The opening buzzer reverberated through the Cougars’ gym.
But on this afternoon the girls were not on the court; their game had been canceled because their opponent, Public School 161, did not have enough players. Instead, most of the Cougars sat watching Mr. Mariner coach the boys’ team.
Nia volunteered to operate the scoreboard, while a teammate kept statistics. Soledad pulled up a chair.
During halftime, an eight-girl dance team from P.S. 161 took the court, clapping their hands, stamping their feet and slapping their thighs to a complicated beat. They wore tight shirts and blue jeans with sparkles.
“Boring, boring, boring,” Soledad said.
Nia added, “They could have taken some girls from over there.”
Sidelined, Nia registered each basket and free throw in the boys’ 51-24 victory. She recalled the last time her team faced P.S. 161.
“We beat the girls just like this,” Nia said. “Just like this.”
Griffin Palmer contributed reporting.
No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils
June 15, 2009
No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils
By WINNIE HU
STAMFORD, Conn. — Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years.
But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.
So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.
The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)
More than 300 Stamford parents have signed a petition opposing the shift, and some say they are now considering moving or switching their children to private schools. “I think this is a terrible system for our community,” said Nicole Zussman, a mother of two.
Ms. Zussman and others contend that Stamford’s diversity, with poor urban neighborhoods and wealthy suburban enclaves, demands multiple academic tracks, and suggest that the district could make the system fairer and more flexible by testing students more frequently for movement among the levels.
But Joshua P. Starr, the Stamford superintendent, said the tracking system has failed to prepare children in the lower levels for high school and college. “There are certainly people who want to maintain the status quo because some people have benefited from the status quo,” he said. “I know that we cannot afford that anymore. It’s not fair to too many kids.”
Educators have debated for decades how to best divide students into classes. Some school districts focus on providing extra instruction to low achievers or developing so-called gifted programs for the brightest students, but few maintain tracking like Stamford’s middle schools (tracking is less comprehensive and rigid at the town’s elementary and high schools).
Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes. “We see improvements in student behavior, academic performance and teaching, and all that positively affects school culture,” she said.
Daria Hall, a director with Education Trust, an advocacy group, said that tracking has worsened the situation by funneling poor and minority students into “low-level and watered-down courses.” “If all we expect of students is for them to watch movies and fill out worksheets, then that’s what they will give us,” she said.
In Stamford, black and Hispanic student performance on state tests has lagged significantly behind that of Asians and whites. In 2008, 98 percent of Asian students and 92 percent of white students in grades three to eight passed math, and 93 percent and 88 percent reading, respectively. Among black students, 63 percent passed math, and 56 percent reading; among Hispanic students, 74 percent passed math and 60 percent reading.
The district plans to keep a top honors level, but put the majority of students in mixed-ability classes, expanding the new system from sixth grade to seventh and eighth over three years. While the old system tracked students for all subjects based on math and English scores, the new one will allow students to be designated for honors in one subject but not necessarily another, making more students overall eligible for the upper track.
The staff of Cloonan Middle School decided to experiment with mixed-ability classes for the last eight weeks of this school year.
David Rudolph, Cloonan’s principal, said that parents have long complained that the tracking numbers assigned to students dictate not only their classes but also their friends and cafeteria cliques. Every summer, at least a dozen parents lobby Mr. Rudolph to move their children to the top track. “The zero group is all about status,” he said.
Jamiya Richardson, who is 11 and in the twos’ group, said that students all know their own numbers as well as those of their classmates. “I don’t like being classified because it makes you feel like you’re not smart,” she said.
The other day in Jamiya’s newly mixed social studies class, students debated who was to blame in an ancient Roman legal case in which a barber shaving a slave in a public square was hit by a ball and cut the slave’s throat. At one point, Jamiya was the only one in the class of 25 to argue that it was the slave’s fault because he sat there at his own risk — which the teacher said was the right answer.
Cloonan teachers say they had not changed the curriculum or slowed the pace for the mixed-ability classrooms, but tried to do more collaborative projects and discussions in hopes that students would learn from one another. But Joel Castle, who is 12 and a zero, said that he did not work as hard now. “My grades are going up, and that’s not really surprising because the standards have been lowered,” he said.
In a recent social studies class, the top students stood out as they presented elaborate homemade projects about Roman culture — mosaics, dresses, weaponry — while several of their classmates showed up empty-handed. One offered the excuse that his catapult had disappeared overnight from his bedside.
“A catapult thief?” questioned the teacher, Mimi Nichols, in disbelief before directing him to find his project by the next day.
Afterward, Ms. Nichols said that the less-motivated students had still learned from their classmates’ example. “That in itself is valuable,” she said. “For children to see what is possible.”
Ho
No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils
By WINNIE HU
STAMFORD, Conn. — Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years.
But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.
So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.
The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)
More than 300 Stamford parents have signed a petition opposing the shift, and some say they are now considering moving or switching their children to private schools. “I think this is a terrible system for our community,” said Nicole Zussman, a mother of two.
Ms. Zussman and others contend that Stamford’s diversity, with poor urban neighborhoods and wealthy suburban enclaves, demands multiple academic tracks, and suggest that the district could make the system fairer and more flexible by testing students more frequently for movement among the levels.
But Joshua P. Starr, the Stamford superintendent, said the tracking system has failed to prepare children in the lower levels for high school and college. “There are certainly people who want to maintain the status quo because some people have benefited from the status quo,” he said. “I know that we cannot afford that anymore. It’s not fair to too many kids.”
Educators have debated for decades how to best divide students into classes. Some school districts focus on providing extra instruction to low achievers or developing so-called gifted programs for the brightest students, but few maintain tracking like Stamford’s middle schools (tracking is less comprehensive and rigid at the town’s elementary and high schools).
Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes. “We see improvements in student behavior, academic performance and teaching, and all that positively affects school culture,” she said.
Daria Hall, a director with Education Trust, an advocacy group, said that tracking has worsened the situation by funneling poor and minority students into “low-level and watered-down courses.” “If all we expect of students is for them to watch movies and fill out worksheets, then that’s what they will give us,” she said.
In Stamford, black and Hispanic student performance on state tests has lagged significantly behind that of Asians and whites. In 2008, 98 percent of Asian students and 92 percent of white students in grades three to eight passed math, and 93 percent and 88 percent reading, respectively. Among black students, 63 percent passed math, and 56 percent reading; among Hispanic students, 74 percent passed math and 60 percent reading.
The district plans to keep a top honors level, but put the majority of students in mixed-ability classes, expanding the new system from sixth grade to seventh and eighth over three years. While the old system tracked students for all subjects based on math and English scores, the new one will allow students to be designated for honors in one subject but not necessarily another, making more students overall eligible for the upper track.
The staff of Cloonan Middle School decided to experiment with mixed-ability classes for the last eight weeks of this school year.
David Rudolph, Cloonan’s principal, said that parents have long complained that the tracking numbers assigned to students dictate not only their classes but also their friends and cafeteria cliques. Every summer, at least a dozen parents lobby Mr. Rudolph to move their children to the top track. “The zero group is all about status,” he said.
Jamiya Richardson, who is 11 and in the twos’ group, said that students all know their own numbers as well as those of their classmates. “I don’t like being classified because it makes you feel like you’re not smart,” she said.
The other day in Jamiya’s newly mixed social studies class, students debated who was to blame in an ancient Roman legal case in which a barber shaving a slave in a public square was hit by a ball and cut the slave’s throat. At one point, Jamiya was the only one in the class of 25 to argue that it was the slave’s fault because he sat there at his own risk — which the teacher said was the right answer.
Cloonan teachers say they had not changed the curriculum or slowed the pace for the mixed-ability classrooms, but tried to do more collaborative projects and discussions in hopes that students would learn from one another. But Joel Castle, who is 12 and a zero, said that he did not work as hard now. “My grades are going up, and that’s not really surprising because the standards have been lowered,” he said.
In a recent social studies class, the top students stood out as they presented elaborate homemade projects about Roman culture — mosaics, dresses, weaponry — while several of their classmates showed up empty-handed. One offered the excuse that his catapult had disappeared overnight from his bedside.
“A catapult thief?” questioned the teacher, Mimi Nichols, in disbelief before directing him to find his project by the next day.
Afterward, Ms. Nichols said that the less-motivated students had still learned from their classmates’ example. “That in itself is valuable,” she said. “For children to see what is possible.”
Ho
Friday, May 22, 2009
Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud
May 16, 2009
Editorial Observer
Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Sometimes the best way to understand the present is to look at it from the past. Consider audio books. An enormous number of Americans read by listening these days — listening aloud, I call it. The technology for doing so is diverse and widespread, and so are the places people listen to audio books. But from the perspective of a reader in, say, the early 19th century, about the time of Jane Austen, there is something peculiar about it, even lonely.
In those days, literate families and friends read aloud to each other as a matter of habit. Books were still relatively scarce and expensive, and the routine electronic diversions we take for granted were, of course, nonexistent. If you had grown up listening to adults reading to each other regularly, the thought of all of those solitary 21st-century individuals hearkening to earbuds and car radios would seem isolating. It would also seem as though they were being trained only to listen to books and not to read aloud from them.
It’s part of a pattern. Instead of making music at home, we listen to recordings of professional musicians. When people talk about the books they’ve heard, they’re often talking about the quality of the readers, who are usually professional. The way we listen to books has been de-socialized, stripped of context, which has the solitary virtue of being extremely convenient.
But listening aloud, valuable as it is, isn’t the same as reading aloud. Both require a great deal of attention. Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language. But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words — and the pattern of the words — the reader really sees.
Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.
No one understood this better than Jane Austen. One of the late turning points in “Mansfield Park” comes when Henry Crawford picks up a volume of Shakespeare, “which had the air of being very recently closed,” and begins to read aloud to the young Bertrams and their cousin, Fanny Price. Fanny discovers in Crawford’s reading “a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with.” And yet his ability to do every part “with equal beauty” is a clear sign to us, if not entirely to Fanny, of his superficiality.
I read aloud to my writing students, and when students read aloud to me I notice something odd. They are smart and literate, and most of them had parents who read to them as children. But when students read aloud at first, I notice that they are trying to read the meaning of the words. If the work is their own, they are usually trying to read the intention of the writer.
It’s as though they’re reading what the words represent rather than the words themselves. What gets lost is the inner voice of the prose, the life of the language. This is reflected in their writing, too, at first.
In one realm — poetry — reading aloud has never really died out. Take Robert Pinsky’s new book, “Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud.” But I suspect there is no going back. You can easily make the argument that reading silently is an economic artifact, a sign of a new prosperity beginning in the early 19th century and a new cheapness in books. The same argument applies to listening to books on your iPhone. But what I would suggest is that our idea of reading is incomplete, impoverished, unless we are also taking the time to read aloud.
Editorial Observer
Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Sometimes the best way to understand the present is to look at it from the past. Consider audio books. An enormous number of Americans read by listening these days — listening aloud, I call it. The technology for doing so is diverse and widespread, and so are the places people listen to audio books. But from the perspective of a reader in, say, the early 19th century, about the time of Jane Austen, there is something peculiar about it, even lonely.
In those days, literate families and friends read aloud to each other as a matter of habit. Books were still relatively scarce and expensive, and the routine electronic diversions we take for granted were, of course, nonexistent. If you had grown up listening to adults reading to each other regularly, the thought of all of those solitary 21st-century individuals hearkening to earbuds and car radios would seem isolating. It would also seem as though they were being trained only to listen to books and not to read aloud from them.
It’s part of a pattern. Instead of making music at home, we listen to recordings of professional musicians. When people talk about the books they’ve heard, they’re often talking about the quality of the readers, who are usually professional. The way we listen to books has been de-socialized, stripped of context, which has the solitary virtue of being extremely convenient.
But listening aloud, valuable as it is, isn’t the same as reading aloud. Both require a great deal of attention. Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language. But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words — and the pattern of the words — the reader really sees.
Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.
No one understood this better than Jane Austen. One of the late turning points in “Mansfield Park” comes when Henry Crawford picks up a volume of Shakespeare, “which had the air of being very recently closed,” and begins to read aloud to the young Bertrams and their cousin, Fanny Price. Fanny discovers in Crawford’s reading “a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with.” And yet his ability to do every part “with equal beauty” is a clear sign to us, if not entirely to Fanny, of his superficiality.
I read aloud to my writing students, and when students read aloud to me I notice something odd. They are smart and literate, and most of them had parents who read to them as children. But when students read aloud at first, I notice that they are trying to read the meaning of the words. If the work is their own, they are usually trying to read the intention of the writer.
It’s as though they’re reading what the words represent rather than the words themselves. What gets lost is the inner voice of the prose, the life of the language. This is reflected in their writing, too, at first.
In one realm — poetry — reading aloud has never really died out. Take Robert Pinsky’s new book, “Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud.” But I suspect there is no going back. You can easily make the argument that reading silently is an economic artifact, a sign of a new prosperity beginning in the early 19th century and a new cheapness in books. The same argument applies to listening to books on your iPhone. But what I would suggest is that our idea of reading is incomplete, impoverished, unless we are also taking the time to read aloud.
One Step Ahead of the Train Wreck
Barry Garelick - May 15, 2009
Columnist EducationNews.org
The first math tutoring session with my daughter and her friend Laura had ended. I sat in the dining room, slumped in my chair. "You look sick," my wife said.
"I am," I said.
My daughter—subjected to the vagaries of Everyday Mathematics[1][1][1], a math program her school had selected and put in effect when she was in the third grade—was having difficulty with key concepts and computations. She was now in 6th grade, and with fractional division, percentages and decimals on the agenda, I wanted to make sure she mastered these things. So, near the beginning of 6th grade, I decided to start tutoring her using the textbooks used in Singapore’s schools. I was familiar with the books to know they are effective.[2][2][2] To make the prospect more palatable, I suggested tutoring her friend at the same time, since Laura’s mother had mentioned to me that her daughter was also having problems in math.
I figured I would start with the fourth grade unit on fractions which was all about adding and subtracting fractions, which they had already done, and then move rapidly into fifth grade, and start on the rudiments of multiplication. "This'll be easy," I thought. "They've had all this before in 4th and 5th grades.”
We only made it into two pages of text in the fourth grade book. I came to find out that despite their being in 6th grade, the concept of equivalent fractions (1/2 = 2/4 = 3/6 and so on) was new to them. This was the beginning of my attempt to teach my daughter what she needed to know about fractions while trying to stay one step ahead of the train wreck of Everyday Math (EM).
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Train Wreck Defined
To understand why I refer to Everyday Math as a train wreck, I need to provide some context. First of all, some information about me: I majored in mathematics and have been working in the field of environmental protection for 36 years. I not only use mathematics myself, but I work with engineers and scientists which requires a fairly good proficiency in it.
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[1][1] Everyday Mathematics was developed at the University of Chicago through a grant from the Education and Human Resources Division of the National Science Foundation in the early 90’s. It has been implemented in many public schools in the U.S. Parents have often protested its adoption and in some cases have prevented it from being used, or succeeded in getting the program halted. For example, after a local parent group put pressure on the Bridgewater-Raritan Schools in New Jersey, a very comprehensive program evaluation was conducted (http://www.brrsd.k12.nj.us/files/filesystem/Math%20Evaluation%20Report.pdf) which resulted in a 9-0 school Board vote to replace Everyday Mathematics with a more balanced and traditional program, HSP Math by Harcourt School Publishers. In other cases (such as in Palo Alto, California most recently), it has been adopted despite protests from parents.
[2][2] The Singapore math texts are part of the Primary Mathematics curriculum, developed in 1981 by Curriculum Planning & Development Institute of Singapore. Singapore’s math texts have been distributed in the U.S. by a private venture in Oregon, singaporemath.com, formed after the results of the international test TIMSS spurred the curiosity of homeschoolers and prominent mathematicians alike.
As I mentioned, my daughter’s school in Fairfax County, Virginia started using the program when she was in third grade. By fourth grade, I was seeing some of the confusion caused by EM’s alternative algorithms. This aspect of EM has been written about extensively so I won’t dwell on it here[i][i],[ii][ii],[iii][iii] except to say I wanted to make sure my daughter understood the standard algorithms for two-digit multiplication and for long division. Her teacher insisted they use the alternative algorithms offered by EM; she did not teach the standard algorithm for long division. Some of the teachers at her school offered tutoring services, so we hired one of them to teach her the standard algorithms.
The teacher/tutor did as we instructed and after four sessions, my daughter was excited to show me how she could do long division. She wrote out a long division problem but got stuck along the way when she didn’t know the answer to 28 divided by 7. Long division is predicated on students knowing their multiplication facts. My daughter was not alone in this; many of the students in her class did not know them. Perhaps her tutor had discussed what to do in such instances. It was apparent that whatever she told her was not to brush up on her facts, but rather go back to first principles, since my daughter was now drawing 28 little lines on the sheet of paper and grouping them by 7’s. I decided to inquire.
“WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING?” I asked. My daughter began to cry.
I felt bad about yelling. Later, my wife, daughter and I sat down and reached an
agreement. It was too expensive to keep on having her tutored-- I had spent $200 so far on tutoring and really could not afford any more. We would therefore halt her tutoring and I would take over provided that I would not yell.
I helped her on an ad hoc basis. If she needed help, I would step in. The problem is that when she needed help, it was generally too late, and I would end up having to do damage control. One problem I was having was that EM does not use a textbook. Students do worksheets every day from their “math journal” a paperbound book that they bring home. Without a textbook, however, it is not always apparent what was taught—particularly when the student doesn’t remember. Any explanation that a student has received about how to solve such problems is done in class. The technique is contained in the Teacher’s Manual, but that is something neither students nor parents have. There is a student’s reference manual, a hardbound book containing topics in alphabetical order and which can provide some guidance, but does not necessarily cover what was said in class. Thus, there is no textbook a student (or parent) can refer to go over a worked example of the type of problem being worked. Worse, sometimes problems are given for which students have no prior knowledge or preparation. They appear to be reasonable problems—it is just not evident to the parent who steps in to help the struggling child that they have had little or no preparation for such problems. Then there is the issue of sequencing, or lack thereof—which I will discuss later.
By the time my daughter was in fifth grade, she would get a problem like 8÷0.3. They had not had fractional division, and limited work with decimals—certainly nothing like this problem before. A typical dialogue would then proceed as follows:
Me: What did the teacher say about how to solve this?
Daughter: I don’t know.
Me: Whattya mean you don’t know? You were there weren’t you?
Daughter: I don’t know what he said; he just said do the problems.
Me: Well, how do they expect you to do this? You’ve never had anything like this before. SO OF COURSE THEY GIVE YOU SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN’T DO AND YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FIGURE IT OUT?
Wife: (offstage) what’s the yelling about?
Daughter: It’s OK, he’s not yelling at me.
Me: I’m not yelling at her.
Wife: (offstage) I heard yelling. Are you getting mad at her?
Daughter: He’s not getting mad at me; he’s mad at the book.
My daughter’s fifth grade teacher shared my disdain for EM and supplemented it heavily with photocopies of pages from an older textbook. I told him once in an email that I was not happy with EM and asked him his opinion. I’ve asked other teachers this question and they usually chose not to answer—perhaps out of fear for their jobs. I was surprised therefore when he responded: “I totally agree with you on everything you said about Everyday Math. It has been very difficult for me to use the book.”
Despite his knowledge and good teaching, there was still lack of a textbook and he was still consigned to the pacing and sequence of EM. I believe these factors contributed to the lack of knowledge about fractions exhibited by my daughter and Laura.
The Long March to Fractional Division
Knowing that in 6th grade, they would learn fractional division, as well as decimals and percents, I feared a train wreck if I didn’t get to my daughter first. Given how little they knew about fractions during the first lesson, I felt that my fears were justified.
Fortunately, things progressed nicely with the two girls after that first lesson. But I only had about four weeks before they hit fractional division—not a lot of time. Therefore, I decided to teach each chapter on fraction in the Singapore Math, from 4th grade to 6th grade textbooks in a concentrated burst. Although I really should have started all this back in 4th grade, doing it this way had an unexpected benefit: they saw almost immediately the connections between multiplication and division of fractions. This was no coincidence—the curriculum is very carefully sequenced. And while fractional division isn’t presented formally until the 6th grade, students are working on aspects of fraction division long before they reach the 6th grade. By the time students reach the 6th grade unit on fraction division, they have done hundreds of these problems leading to an understanding of the meaning of and connection between fraction multiplication and division.
The heavy lifting with Singapore worked well; when they got to EM, it was a review. It was almost anticlimactic. It was a one page worksheet asking questions such as “How many ¾ inch segments are there in 3 inches?” After four such questions, the text presented a formula in a box in the middle of the page, titled “Division of Fractions Algorithm”. The algorithm was stated as a/b÷ c/d = a/b * d/c. Unlike in Singapore Math, there was nothing to connect any invert and multiply relationships to previous material. In fact there was nothing that appeared to lead up to this—just a rule to be memorized despite EM’s pledge to teach “deep understanding”. As I and many other parents I’ve spoken with have found, EM lacks the sequencing to pull it off; and that is the crux of the train wrecks that were to come.
The Spiraling Train Wreck
Numbers with Points in Them
Despite the victory with fractional division, the following week’s tutoring session left me slouched in my chair with my hand over my eyes.
“You look sick,” my wife said.
“I am,” I said. “Just when you think everything is going great, it isn’t.”
I had planned to focus on word problems in fractional division to cement in the concept, but apparently the day’s math lesson at school had confused Laura, and before my lesson could begin, she asked me the following question:
"I'm confused about something," she said. "How do you get from a number on top and number on the bottom of a line into a number that has a point in it?"
I had her repeat the question a few times before I understood she was asking how you convert a fraction to a decimal. Now, Laura was bright and she knew what a numerator and denominator were, and what a fraction was, but apparently the EM lesson they were working on sprung this on them without warning
I wasn’t planning on teaching decimals that day, but seeing that the train wreck of conversion of fraction to decimal was upon us, I took this as a cue. Singapore presents conversions for the first time in the 4th grade text[iv][iv], showing 6 dimes divided into 3 groups yielding 2 dimes per group, which is expressed first as 6 “tenths” divided by 3 is 2 “tenths”. They then take it to the next step: 0.6÷3 = 0.2. After a few more similar problems, Singapore then introduces 2÷ 4 and shows a boy thinking "2 is 20 tenths."
At the end of the unit they are solving problems like 2.4÷ 6, 3 ÷ 5 and 4.2 ÷7 as well as non-terminating decimals such as 7 divided by 3. What is striking about this lesson is that while its focus is decimal division, the lesson implicitly teaches how to convert fractions into decimal form by virtue of students having learned earlier that fractions are the same as division. That is, they have learned earlier that 1÷ 4 is the same as ¼. The lesson on dividing decimals was situated in the context of fractions—and treating fractions (i.e., tenths) as units—a unifying theme that extends throughout the Singapore series.
I’ve thought about why Laura could not understand the lesson at school, to the extent she could no longer recognize what a fraction was. I believe it is because while Singapore situates decimals in the context of fractions, EM situates decimals in the context of the unfamiliar. The EM program is predicated on the theory known as the “spiral approach”:
“The Everyday Mathematics curriculum incorporates the belief that people rarely learn new concepts or skills the first time they experience them, but fully understand them only after repeated exposures. Students in the program study important concepts over consecutive years; each grade level builds on and extends conceptual understanding.” [v][v]
This does in fact make sense considering that for most people a particular concept or task starts to make more sense after they have moved on to the next level. But this phenomenon occurs when there is mastery at each previous level. For example, I became fairly good at arithmetic and developed a deeper understanding of it after I took algebra; I fully understood analytic geometry after calculus and so on. Each previous bit of learning seems that much more apparent at the next level of understanding.
In EM, however, students are exposed to topics repeatedly, but mastery does not necessarily occur. Topics jump around from day to day. Singapore Math’s very strong and effective sequencing of topics is missing in Everyday Math. While Singapore develops decimals by building on previous knowledge of fractions, in Everyday Math, students are presented with fractions and decimals at the same time. The topic of conversion of fractions to decimals occurs in the fourth grade in the context of equivalent fractions, and is called “renaming a fraction as a decimal”. The “Student Reference Manual presents fractions that can easily be expressed as an equivalent fraction with a denominator of a power of 10 such as ½, or ¾. For fractions that cannot be directly expressed with power of 10 in the denominator, the Student Reference Manual provides the following instruction: “Another way to rename a fraction as a decimal is to divide the numerator by the denominator. You can use a calculator for this division. … For 5/8 key in: 5 ÷ 8; “enter”; Answer: 0.625.” [vi][vi]
It is not surprising then that Laura would fail to see what was going on. Without knowing what the connection was between fractions and decimals, the fraction ceased being a fraction in her mind and was just a number on top and a number on the bottom with a line in between. And somehow that strange looking number got transformed into a number with a point in it.
What the Casual Observer Doesn’t Know
A casual glance at Everyday Math’s workbook pages does not reveal that there is anything amiss. The problems seem reasonable, and in some cases they are exactly the same type given in Singapore Math. What the casual observer doesn’t know is what sequencing has preceded that particular lesson, nor how that lesson is conducted in class. What is supposed to happen is that students are given a series of problems to work (in small groups). The Teacher’s Manual advises teachers to monitor students as they work through the worksheet and look to see if students can answer certain key questions. If a student cannot, it is an indication that the student needs more help. This means “reteaching”. Reteaching amounts to having students read about the particular topic of concern in the Student Reference Manual.
If the lack of proper sequencing, lack of direct instruction, lack of textbook and lack of mastery of foundational material prevents a student from making the necessary discoveries, he or she can be “pulled aside” and given material to read. So teachers are left with a three ring circus of kids getting it, kids not getting it, and are expected to “adjust the activity” as needed.
By the time EM gets to 6th grade, the workbooks are loaded with Math Boxes—the term for worksheet review sessions that come in the midst of a particular unit and consist of a mixture of problems from past years in the hope that the kids will finally master the material. Students get ever increasing amounts of Math Boxes. The expectation is that the nth time through the spiral is the charm. With EM, every day is a new train wreck of repeated partial learning.
Connecting Home with School
The danger of an “after schooling” program such as I was conducting is a tendency for the students to think of the math learned at home to be different or unconnected with the math learned at school. My goal of staying one step ahead of train wrecks worked to get to the topics first, so that by the time they got to it in school, they had seen it before. This was difficult since I was held hostage to EM’s topsy turvy sequencing and occasionally was forced to tackle things like geometry that came out of nowhere. All in all, the crash course that I cobbled together on fractions provided the proper framework to then work with Singapore Math’s lessons on percents, ratios, proportions and rates. The rest of the semester came without undue problems and both girls got A’s in the class I’m happy to say.
I’ve told this story to many people since it happened—mostly people who have asked me what to do when their school has a problematic math program. My last retelling was to my wife; it’s a recurrent theme in our house. We were reminiscing about when I had our daughter’s toy blackboard set up in the dining room, and I was teaching her and Laura the math they weren’t learning at school.
There was no need for me to finish the conversation, because the conclusion is always the same: Poorly structured math programs are not fair to students, parents or teachers. It is unfair to students because they are essentially attending another class after a fully day in addition to finishing their homework for school. It is unfair to parents who have to either teach their kids or hire tutors—and are held hostage to the school’s math program whether they like it or not. And it is not fair to teachers who are expected to teach students based on an ineffective and ill-structured program. Through no fault of the teachers, math taught via EM is math taught poorly. It is by no means easy to teach math correctly. But it is even harder to undo the damage by math taught poorly.
Many teachers do not realize that they have been given an unenviable and impossible task. In fact, I have spoken with new teachers who speak of EM and other poorly conceived programs in glowing terms, speaking of them as leading to “deeper understandings of math.” Some have said “I never understood math until I had this program.” But it is their adult insight and experience that is talking and creating the illusion that the math is deep. Children cannot make the connections the adults are making who already have the experience and knowledge of mathematics.
Through my experience teaching my daughter and her friend, I have come to believe that an essential requirement of textbooks is that they teach the teachers. This may happen to some degree with EM, but based on my experience with the program, not much gets transferred to the students. With Singapore Math or any well structured and authentic mathematics program, both teachers and students greatly benefit.
Shortly after this experience, I began taking evening classes at a local university to obtain certification to teach math when I retire. I have no illusions—I’m told that it isn’t easy. I’m not out to save the world—just to educate one child at a time. That said, I will remain forever grateful to my daughter and Laura for having taught me so much about fractions.
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[i][i] Braams, B. (2003). The many ways of arithmetic in UCSMP Everyday Mathematics. NYC HOLD website. February. http://www.nychold.com/em-arith.html
[ii][ii] Braams, B. (2003). Spiraling through UCSMP Everyday Mathematics. NYC HOLD website, March. http://www.nychold.com/em-spiral.html
[iii][iii] Clavel, M. (2003). How not to teach math. City Journal, March 7. http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_3_7_03mc.html
[iv][iv] Singapore Math 4A
[v][v] Everyday math; Education Development Center; Newton MA; 2001. Available at http://www2.edc.org/mcc/PDF/perspeverydaymath.pdf
[vi][vi] University of Chicago School Mathematics Project; 2004. Everyday mathematics. Student reference book. 2002. SRA/McGraw-Hill; Chicago (p. 59)
Columnist EducationNews.org
The first math tutoring session with my daughter and her friend Laura had ended. I sat in the dining room, slumped in my chair. "You look sick," my wife said.
"I am," I said.
My daughter—subjected to the vagaries of Everyday Mathematics[1][1][1], a math program her school had selected and put in effect when she was in the third grade—was having difficulty with key concepts and computations. She was now in 6th grade, and with fractional division, percentages and decimals on the agenda, I wanted to make sure she mastered these things. So, near the beginning of 6th grade, I decided to start tutoring her using the textbooks used in Singapore’s schools. I was familiar with the books to know they are effective.[2][2][2] To make the prospect more palatable, I suggested tutoring her friend at the same time, since Laura’s mother had mentioned to me that her daughter was also having problems in math.
I figured I would start with the fourth grade unit on fractions which was all about adding and subtracting fractions, which they had already done, and then move rapidly into fifth grade, and start on the rudiments of multiplication. "This'll be easy," I thought. "They've had all this before in 4th and 5th grades.”
We only made it into two pages of text in the fourth grade book. I came to find out that despite their being in 6th grade, the concept of equivalent fractions (1/2 = 2/4 = 3/6 and so on) was new to them. This was the beginning of my attempt to teach my daughter what she needed to know about fractions while trying to stay one step ahead of the train wreck of Everyday Math (EM).
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Train Wreck Defined
To understand why I refer to Everyday Math as a train wreck, I need to provide some context. First of all, some information about me: I majored in mathematics and have been working in the field of environmental protection for 36 years. I not only use mathematics myself, but I work with engineers and scientists which requires a fairly good proficiency in it.
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[1][1] Everyday Mathematics was developed at the University of Chicago through a grant from the Education and Human Resources Division of the National Science Foundation in the early 90’s. It has been implemented in many public schools in the U.S. Parents have often protested its adoption and in some cases have prevented it from being used, or succeeded in getting the program halted. For example, after a local parent group put pressure on the Bridgewater-Raritan Schools in New Jersey, a very comprehensive program evaluation was conducted (http://www.brrsd.k12.nj.us/files/filesystem/Math%20Evaluation%20Report.pdf) which resulted in a 9-0 school Board vote to replace Everyday Mathematics with a more balanced and traditional program, HSP Math by Harcourt School Publishers. In other cases (such as in Palo Alto, California most recently), it has been adopted despite protests from parents.
[2][2] The Singapore math texts are part of the Primary Mathematics curriculum, developed in 1981 by Curriculum Planning & Development Institute of Singapore. Singapore’s math texts have been distributed in the U.S. by a private venture in Oregon, singaporemath.com, formed after the results of the international test TIMSS spurred the curiosity of homeschoolers and prominent mathematicians alike.
As I mentioned, my daughter’s school in Fairfax County, Virginia started using the program when she was in third grade. By fourth grade, I was seeing some of the confusion caused by EM’s alternative algorithms. This aspect of EM has been written about extensively so I won’t dwell on it here[i][i],[ii][ii],[iii][iii] except to say I wanted to make sure my daughter understood the standard algorithms for two-digit multiplication and for long division. Her teacher insisted they use the alternative algorithms offered by EM; she did not teach the standard algorithm for long division. Some of the teachers at her school offered tutoring services, so we hired one of them to teach her the standard algorithms.
The teacher/tutor did as we instructed and after four sessions, my daughter was excited to show me how she could do long division. She wrote out a long division problem but got stuck along the way when she didn’t know the answer to 28 divided by 7. Long division is predicated on students knowing their multiplication facts. My daughter was not alone in this; many of the students in her class did not know them. Perhaps her tutor had discussed what to do in such instances. It was apparent that whatever she told her was not to brush up on her facts, but rather go back to first principles, since my daughter was now drawing 28 little lines on the sheet of paper and grouping them by 7’s. I decided to inquire.
“WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING?” I asked. My daughter began to cry.
I felt bad about yelling. Later, my wife, daughter and I sat down and reached an
agreement. It was too expensive to keep on having her tutored-- I had spent $200 so far on tutoring and really could not afford any more. We would therefore halt her tutoring and I would take over provided that I would not yell.
I helped her on an ad hoc basis. If she needed help, I would step in. The problem is that when she needed help, it was generally too late, and I would end up having to do damage control. One problem I was having was that EM does not use a textbook. Students do worksheets every day from their “math journal” a paperbound book that they bring home. Without a textbook, however, it is not always apparent what was taught—particularly when the student doesn’t remember. Any explanation that a student has received about how to solve such problems is done in class. The technique is contained in the Teacher’s Manual, but that is something neither students nor parents have. There is a student’s reference manual, a hardbound book containing topics in alphabetical order and which can provide some guidance, but does not necessarily cover what was said in class. Thus, there is no textbook a student (or parent) can refer to go over a worked example of the type of problem being worked. Worse, sometimes problems are given for which students have no prior knowledge or preparation. They appear to be reasonable problems—it is just not evident to the parent who steps in to help the struggling child that they have had little or no preparation for such problems. Then there is the issue of sequencing, or lack thereof—which I will discuss later.
By the time my daughter was in fifth grade, she would get a problem like 8÷0.3. They had not had fractional division, and limited work with decimals—certainly nothing like this problem before. A typical dialogue would then proceed as follows:
Me: What did the teacher say about how to solve this?
Daughter: I don’t know.
Me: Whattya mean you don’t know? You were there weren’t you?
Daughter: I don’t know what he said; he just said do the problems.
Me: Well, how do they expect you to do this? You’ve never had anything like this before. SO OF COURSE THEY GIVE YOU SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN’T DO AND YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FIGURE IT OUT?
Wife: (offstage) what’s the yelling about?
Daughter: It’s OK, he’s not yelling at me.
Me: I’m not yelling at her.
Wife: (offstage) I heard yelling. Are you getting mad at her?
Daughter: He’s not getting mad at me; he’s mad at the book.
My daughter’s fifth grade teacher shared my disdain for EM and supplemented it heavily with photocopies of pages from an older textbook. I told him once in an email that I was not happy with EM and asked him his opinion. I’ve asked other teachers this question and they usually chose not to answer—perhaps out of fear for their jobs. I was surprised therefore when he responded: “I totally agree with you on everything you said about Everyday Math. It has been very difficult for me to use the book.”
Despite his knowledge and good teaching, there was still lack of a textbook and he was still consigned to the pacing and sequence of EM. I believe these factors contributed to the lack of knowledge about fractions exhibited by my daughter and Laura.
The Long March to Fractional Division
Knowing that in 6th grade, they would learn fractional division, as well as decimals and percents, I feared a train wreck if I didn’t get to my daughter first. Given how little they knew about fractions during the first lesson, I felt that my fears were justified.
Fortunately, things progressed nicely with the two girls after that first lesson. But I only had about four weeks before they hit fractional division—not a lot of time. Therefore, I decided to teach each chapter on fraction in the Singapore Math, from 4th grade to 6th grade textbooks in a concentrated burst. Although I really should have started all this back in 4th grade, doing it this way had an unexpected benefit: they saw almost immediately the connections between multiplication and division of fractions. This was no coincidence—the curriculum is very carefully sequenced. And while fractional division isn’t presented formally until the 6th grade, students are working on aspects of fraction division long before they reach the 6th grade. By the time students reach the 6th grade unit on fraction division, they have done hundreds of these problems leading to an understanding of the meaning of and connection between fraction multiplication and division.
The heavy lifting with Singapore worked well; when they got to EM, it was a review. It was almost anticlimactic. It was a one page worksheet asking questions such as “How many ¾ inch segments are there in 3 inches?” After four such questions, the text presented a formula in a box in the middle of the page, titled “Division of Fractions Algorithm”. The algorithm was stated as a/b÷ c/d = a/b * d/c. Unlike in Singapore Math, there was nothing to connect any invert and multiply relationships to previous material. In fact there was nothing that appeared to lead up to this—just a rule to be memorized despite EM’s pledge to teach “deep understanding”. As I and many other parents I’ve spoken with have found, EM lacks the sequencing to pull it off; and that is the crux of the train wrecks that were to come.
The Spiraling Train Wreck
Numbers with Points in Them
Despite the victory with fractional division, the following week’s tutoring session left me slouched in my chair with my hand over my eyes.
“You look sick,” my wife said.
“I am,” I said. “Just when you think everything is going great, it isn’t.”
I had planned to focus on word problems in fractional division to cement in the concept, but apparently the day’s math lesson at school had confused Laura, and before my lesson could begin, she asked me the following question:
"I'm confused about something," she said. "How do you get from a number on top and number on the bottom of a line into a number that has a point in it?"
I had her repeat the question a few times before I understood she was asking how you convert a fraction to a decimal. Now, Laura was bright and she knew what a numerator and denominator were, and what a fraction was, but apparently the EM lesson they were working on sprung this on them without warning
I wasn’t planning on teaching decimals that day, but seeing that the train wreck of conversion of fraction to decimal was upon us, I took this as a cue. Singapore presents conversions for the first time in the 4th grade text[iv][iv], showing 6 dimes divided into 3 groups yielding 2 dimes per group, which is expressed first as 6 “tenths” divided by 3 is 2 “tenths”. They then take it to the next step: 0.6÷3 = 0.2. After a few more similar problems, Singapore then introduces 2÷ 4 and shows a boy thinking "2 is 20 tenths."
At the end of the unit they are solving problems like 2.4÷ 6, 3 ÷ 5 and 4.2 ÷7 as well as non-terminating decimals such as 7 divided by 3. What is striking about this lesson is that while its focus is decimal division, the lesson implicitly teaches how to convert fractions into decimal form by virtue of students having learned earlier that fractions are the same as division. That is, they have learned earlier that 1÷ 4 is the same as ¼. The lesson on dividing decimals was situated in the context of fractions—and treating fractions (i.e., tenths) as units—a unifying theme that extends throughout the Singapore series.
I’ve thought about why Laura could not understand the lesson at school, to the extent she could no longer recognize what a fraction was. I believe it is because while Singapore situates decimals in the context of fractions, EM situates decimals in the context of the unfamiliar. The EM program is predicated on the theory known as the “spiral approach”:
“The Everyday Mathematics curriculum incorporates the belief that people rarely learn new concepts or skills the first time they experience them, but fully understand them only after repeated exposures. Students in the program study important concepts over consecutive years; each grade level builds on and extends conceptual understanding.” [v][v]
This does in fact make sense considering that for most people a particular concept or task starts to make more sense after they have moved on to the next level. But this phenomenon occurs when there is mastery at each previous level. For example, I became fairly good at arithmetic and developed a deeper understanding of it after I took algebra; I fully understood analytic geometry after calculus and so on. Each previous bit of learning seems that much more apparent at the next level of understanding.
In EM, however, students are exposed to topics repeatedly, but mastery does not necessarily occur. Topics jump around from day to day. Singapore Math’s very strong and effective sequencing of topics is missing in Everyday Math. While Singapore develops decimals by building on previous knowledge of fractions, in Everyday Math, students are presented with fractions and decimals at the same time. The topic of conversion of fractions to decimals occurs in the fourth grade in the context of equivalent fractions, and is called “renaming a fraction as a decimal”. The “Student Reference Manual presents fractions that can easily be expressed as an equivalent fraction with a denominator of a power of 10 such as ½, or ¾. For fractions that cannot be directly expressed with power of 10 in the denominator, the Student Reference Manual provides the following instruction: “Another way to rename a fraction as a decimal is to divide the numerator by the denominator. You can use a calculator for this division. … For 5/8 key in: 5 ÷ 8; “enter”; Answer: 0.625.” [vi][vi]
It is not surprising then that Laura would fail to see what was going on. Without knowing what the connection was between fractions and decimals, the fraction ceased being a fraction in her mind and was just a number on top and a number on the bottom with a line in between. And somehow that strange looking number got transformed into a number with a point in it.
What the Casual Observer Doesn’t Know
A casual glance at Everyday Math’s workbook pages does not reveal that there is anything amiss. The problems seem reasonable, and in some cases they are exactly the same type given in Singapore Math. What the casual observer doesn’t know is what sequencing has preceded that particular lesson, nor how that lesson is conducted in class. What is supposed to happen is that students are given a series of problems to work (in small groups). The Teacher’s Manual advises teachers to monitor students as they work through the worksheet and look to see if students can answer certain key questions. If a student cannot, it is an indication that the student needs more help. This means “reteaching”. Reteaching amounts to having students read about the particular topic of concern in the Student Reference Manual.
If the lack of proper sequencing, lack of direct instruction, lack of textbook and lack of mastery of foundational material prevents a student from making the necessary discoveries, he or she can be “pulled aside” and given material to read. So teachers are left with a three ring circus of kids getting it, kids not getting it, and are expected to “adjust the activity” as needed.
By the time EM gets to 6th grade, the workbooks are loaded with Math Boxes—the term for worksheet review sessions that come in the midst of a particular unit and consist of a mixture of problems from past years in the hope that the kids will finally master the material. Students get ever increasing amounts of Math Boxes. The expectation is that the nth time through the spiral is the charm. With EM, every day is a new train wreck of repeated partial learning.
Connecting Home with School
The danger of an “after schooling” program such as I was conducting is a tendency for the students to think of the math learned at home to be different or unconnected with the math learned at school. My goal of staying one step ahead of train wrecks worked to get to the topics first, so that by the time they got to it in school, they had seen it before. This was difficult since I was held hostage to EM’s topsy turvy sequencing and occasionally was forced to tackle things like geometry that came out of nowhere. All in all, the crash course that I cobbled together on fractions provided the proper framework to then work with Singapore Math’s lessons on percents, ratios, proportions and rates. The rest of the semester came without undue problems and both girls got A’s in the class I’m happy to say.
I’ve told this story to many people since it happened—mostly people who have asked me what to do when their school has a problematic math program. My last retelling was to my wife; it’s a recurrent theme in our house. We were reminiscing about when I had our daughter’s toy blackboard set up in the dining room, and I was teaching her and Laura the math they weren’t learning at school.
There was no need for me to finish the conversation, because the conclusion is always the same: Poorly structured math programs are not fair to students, parents or teachers. It is unfair to students because they are essentially attending another class after a fully day in addition to finishing their homework for school. It is unfair to parents who have to either teach their kids or hire tutors—and are held hostage to the school’s math program whether they like it or not. And it is not fair to teachers who are expected to teach students based on an ineffective and ill-structured program. Through no fault of the teachers, math taught via EM is math taught poorly. It is by no means easy to teach math correctly. But it is even harder to undo the damage by math taught poorly.
Many teachers do not realize that they have been given an unenviable and impossible task. In fact, I have spoken with new teachers who speak of EM and other poorly conceived programs in glowing terms, speaking of them as leading to “deeper understandings of math.” Some have said “I never understood math until I had this program.” But it is their adult insight and experience that is talking and creating the illusion that the math is deep. Children cannot make the connections the adults are making who already have the experience and knowledge of mathematics.
Through my experience teaching my daughter and her friend, I have come to believe that an essential requirement of textbooks is that they teach the teachers. This may happen to some degree with EM, but based on my experience with the program, not much gets transferred to the students. With Singapore Math or any well structured and authentic mathematics program, both teachers and students greatly benefit.
Shortly after this experience, I began taking evening classes at a local university to obtain certification to teach math when I retire. I have no illusions—I’m told that it isn’t easy. I’m not out to save the world—just to educate one child at a time. That said, I will remain forever grateful to my daughter and Laura for having taught me so much about fractions.
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[i][i] Braams, B. (2003). The many ways of arithmetic in UCSMP Everyday Mathematics. NYC HOLD website. February. http://www.nychold.com/em-arith.html
[ii][ii] Braams, B. (2003). Spiraling through UCSMP Everyday Mathematics. NYC HOLD website, March. http://www.nychold.com/em-spiral.html
[iii][iii] Clavel, M. (2003). How not to teach math. City Journal, March 7. http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_3_7_03mc.html
[iv][iv] Singapore Math 4A
[v][v] Everyday math; Education Development Center; Newton MA; 2001. Available at http://www2.edc.org/mcc/PDF/perspeverydaymath.pdf
[vi][vi] University of Chicago School Mathematics Project; 2004. Everyday mathematics. Student reference book. 2002. SRA/McGraw-Hill; Chicago (p. 59)
School reform begins at home
Article Here.
Published: May 19, 2009 02:00 AM Modified: May 18, 2009 02:48 PM
School reform begins at home
BY JOHN ROSEMOND, McClatchy Newspapers
Public school reformers are like a fellow who scoops a bucket of water from one end of a swimming pool, carries it to the other end, dumps it back in, and then repeats the sequence endlessly, convinced he is making the latter end deeper.
Our reformer is obviously suffering from some learning disability, because despite the fact he's been at this for years, he seems incapable of understanding that he is accomplishing noth.
Nonetheless, he can be heard constantly complaining that he needs more money with which to increase the pool's water level and improve the quality of the water.
The bankruptcy of the reformer's argument, as well as his myopia, is easily exposed. One of his objectives is to reduce the student-to-teacher ratio. He maintains that smaller class size improves learning.
Oh, really? In the 1950s, when class size was much larger than it is today, and the student/teacher ratio was larger still, children at all socioeconomic levels achieved at much higher levels than their contemporary counterparts. And many of those kids -- including yours truly -- came to first grade not even knowing their ABCs.
Since the 1960s, reformers have succeeded in bringing about significant reductions in class size and the student-to-teacher ratio. Their efforts have coincided with dramatic declines in student achievement.
Yet they continue to carry water from one end of the pool to the other.
The reason 1950s kids could be successfully taught in crowded classrooms is because they had been and were being properly disciplined in the home. They were not the center of parental attention in their homes; rather, they were expected to pay attention to their parents.
They were not the object of great doing on their parents' parts; rather, they were expected to do, to carry their share of the weight. They were expected to do at school what they had been trained to do at home -- pay attention and do what they were told. This training obviously paid off. The good news is that this training will pay the same dividends today.
The problem, of course, is that few parents realize that the solution to American's education woes lies in their hands. They have been persuaded that the reformers, given enough money, will solve the problems. When the reformers' efforts fail, the parents demand that they carry water faster, to which the reformers respond with demands for even more money. And the beat goes on.
The problems in American education will be solved through home reform, not school reform.
When parents wake up to the misleading they have endured for the past 40 years and re-embrace a traditional point of view and restore traditional practice (the emphasis of which is not on spanking, but on leadership); when they once again back teachers when it comes to discipline; when they once again send children to school who have been properly prepared at home; then and only then will American schools be restored to their former glory.
Family psychologist John Rosemond answers parents' questions at www.rosemond.com.
Published: May 19, 2009 02:00 AM Modified: May 18, 2009 02:48 PM
School reform begins at home
BY JOHN ROSEMOND, McClatchy Newspapers
Public school reformers are like a fellow who scoops a bucket of water from one end of a swimming pool, carries it to the other end, dumps it back in, and then repeats the sequence endlessly, convinced he is making the latter end deeper.
Our reformer is obviously suffering from some learning disability, because despite the fact he's been at this for years, he seems incapable of understanding that he is accomplishing noth.
Nonetheless, he can be heard constantly complaining that he needs more money with which to increase the pool's water level and improve the quality of the water.
The bankruptcy of the reformer's argument, as well as his myopia, is easily exposed. One of his objectives is to reduce the student-to-teacher ratio. He maintains that smaller class size improves learning.
Oh, really? In the 1950s, when class size was much larger than it is today, and the student/teacher ratio was larger still, children at all socioeconomic levels achieved at much higher levels than their contemporary counterparts. And many of those kids -- including yours truly -- came to first grade not even knowing their ABCs.
Since the 1960s, reformers have succeeded in bringing about significant reductions in class size and the student-to-teacher ratio. Their efforts have coincided with dramatic declines in student achievement.
Yet they continue to carry water from one end of the pool to the other.
The reason 1950s kids could be successfully taught in crowded classrooms is because they had been and were being properly disciplined in the home. They were not the center of parental attention in their homes; rather, they were expected to pay attention to their parents.
They were not the object of great doing on their parents' parts; rather, they were expected to do, to carry their share of the weight. They were expected to do at school what they had been trained to do at home -- pay attention and do what they were told. This training obviously paid off. The good news is that this training will pay the same dividends today.
The problem, of course, is that few parents realize that the solution to American's education woes lies in their hands. They have been persuaded that the reformers, given enough money, will solve the problems. When the reformers' efforts fail, the parents demand that they carry water faster, to which the reformers respond with demands for even more money. And the beat goes on.
The problems in American education will be solved through home reform, not school reform.
When parents wake up to the misleading they have endured for the past 40 years and re-embrace a traditional point of view and restore traditional practice (the emphasis of which is not on spanking, but on leadership); when they once again back teachers when it comes to discipline; when they once again send children to school who have been properly prepared at home; then and only then will American schools be restored to their former glory.
Family psychologist John Rosemond answers parents' questions at www.rosemond.com.
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